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Labyrinth: the Rulebook without Game
An ergodic Flash text exploring video game culture through the lens of playable manuals.
How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.
Mark Marino - 28.03.2011 - 16:12
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Accounts of the Glass Sky
In this Flash hypertext, Coverley weaves a tapestry of text, image, and sound, telling a California story that many readers can relate to. In this piece, the sky itself is the center of a meditation on memory and loss across decades of human experience. The same "blue sky" that often refers to people's wildest dreams now comes to represent boundaries and fears.
(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 11:07
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All Roads
Venice. The tight winding alleys and long dirty canals. Easy to become lost here, where every street emerges somewhere unexpected. In the central square a scaffold has been erected for your neck, and if only you can escape for long enough you might survive, but in this city all roads lead back to Piazza San Marco and the Hanging Clock.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 12:53
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Storyland
Storyland (version 2) is a randomly created narrative which plays with social stereotypes and elements of popular culture. Each sentence is constructed from a pool of possibilities, allowing each reader a unique story. The reader presses the "new story" button, and a story is created for that moment in time. It is unlikely that any two stories will be identical. Storyland exposes its narrative formula thus mirroring aspects of contemporary cultural production: sampling, appropriation, hybrids, stock content, design templates. It risks discontinuity and the ridiculous while providing opportunities for contemplation beyond the entertainment factor.
The computer-generated combinatorial story is one of the oldest forms of digital writing. Storyland, with its simple circus frame, plays with this tradition by performing recombination of the sort seen in cut-up and in Oulipian work. The system repeatedly plots amusingly repetitive stories, inviting the reader to consider, to read its scheme for composition.
(Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One).
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 14:57
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Ad Verbum
Ad Verbum is a Oulipo-inspired wordplay-based game.
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 12:00
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Clues
Clues explores the nature of communication, knowledge, and identity through the language and postures of mystery fiction. It's a metaphysical whodunit that invites you to solve the mystery by uncovering clues linked to images throughout the work. The search becomes a game that leads you down wooded trails, back alleys, and empty hallways. Which characters should you pursue? Which objects should you investigate? To win the game, you must separate all the clues from the red herrings. Your final score determines the outcome of the text. But is the mystery really soluble? Is winning actually better than losing? Are the answers or the questions more revealing?
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 16.06.2012 - 11:45
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Trilogy
My work with visual narrative has included installation form, book works, diptychs and billboard presentations. Using the web has allowed me to continue to expand my preoccupations with constructing rules for reading, methods of pacing and continue to explore image/text relationships. I am interested in the space between language and image.
Trilogy is comprised of 3 image/text narratives whose themes are concerned with survival. Locale and characters are suggested by cropped fragments from mass media imagery as well as map fragments. While the images may allude to time period by photographic style or content, their function (protagonist, action, location) is directed by the text.
Trilogy is a collaboration with Los Angeles fiction writers Rod Moore and Katherine Haake, both of whom have allowed me to reconfigure their texts.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 21:10
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Imaginary Year
Imaginary Year is a serialized work of electronic fiction, updated twice a week. As it grows, it follows the extended interconnected narratives of a group of fictional characters. By documenting their experiences in present-day Chicago, Imaginary Year examines the complex network of relationships between human experience and mediated urban space.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
Note: serialized web fiction that was published from 2000-2005.
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 22:04
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Bare Bones
Fairy tales have been hijacked throughout history for various uses. Emigrating from one distribution method to another, they have been duplicated, mistranslated, and subverted. It could be that Cinderella is the world's most-told tale. There are thousands of versions, each one colored by the details of local culture, the needs of its audience and the desires of its teller. Buried among the world's heap of Cinder tales, is the Russian version, in its multiple incarnations. Bare Bones is a retelling of this story about a girl and her encounter with the fearsome hag, Baba Yaga.
We identify with this tale through our own experiences of loss, humiliation and enslavement. By reshaping its text, imagery and format, I try to build a bridge for the fairy tale audience between traditional media and digital media. Bare Bones is just one piece of The Vas(i)lisa Project which is more visually and texually complex.
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 14.01.2013 - 00:24
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The Nothings
A modular novel for the net, named for the first decade of the 21st century, and designed to allow random or linear access and reader assembly.
Scott Rettberg - 17.01.2013 - 12:50
