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Narrative Theory after Electronic Literature
Over the last thirty years, we have spoken about electronic literature in terms of its newness. Scholars have emphasized new ways of reading, challenges to closure, and entirely new models for composition. From the earliest books in the 1980s through recent scholarship in this maturing field, critics have sought out the unique features of the electronic medium. Ludologists, in particular, have challenged attempts to reduce electronic literature to a variation on older print forms.
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:22
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Narrative, Affect and Materialist Aesthetics in Post-Digital Technotexts
After much excitement about hypertext fiction in the 1990s, many digital-literary-arts practitioners moved away from narrative. There seemed to be a recognition that the hyper-reading digital environments promote was not conducive to long-form narratives. Lev Manovich’s influential The Language of New Media (2002) declared that databases dominated over narrative; narrative was now a residual, if not yet obsolete, epistemological form. But born-digital authors have not entirely abandoned narrative; rather, the narrativity inherent to their artifacts has been diffused, redistributed across non-linguistic modalities. New production technologies make it easier to integrate images, animations, music, sounds, and other modalities into cybertextual artifacts often more akin to video games than novels. In multimodal environments, where textual output is more variable, narrative qualities can appear elusive or ephemeral. Nonetheless, narrativity, like other indicators of literariness, persists in new media writing.
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:26
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Literary Spamming in Games: Cold Dust in Lord of the Rings Online and Endgame in Counter-Strike
Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.
In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:31
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Jokes, Prompts and Models: Engaging Player Collaboration in Netprov
How can we best invite everyday writers to collaborate and play in electronic literature projects? For the past few years I have being doing projects in a format I call netprov. Netprov (networked improv narrative) organizes the creation of collaborative stories in real time using multiple available digital media. Working with Mark C. Marino and others we have developed a set of working guidelines and suggestions about how to best engage players’ imaginations and extend invitations that will encourage their creativity. I will discuss our methods, our “Rules of the Game” for several netprovs, and describe the degrees of player participation, from Featured Players who adopt ongoing characters to Casual Players who may only contribute a line or an image.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:35
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A Workbench for Analyzing Electronic Literature
Scholars of electronic literature explore complex multimodal works. However, when they go to report their research, they face the confines of print-style documents that force them to reduce their discussion materials to written descriptions and select still images. ACLS Workbench is a new online tool developed for the analysis of electronic literature and other digital objects. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the tool was created by Jeremy Douglass, Jessica Pressman, and Mark Marino in collaboration with Lucas Miller, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer, built upon the ANVC Scalar platform.
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:39
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Imagination, Eventhood, and the Literary Absolute
The three papers in this panel seek to move beyond primarily formalistic discussions of electronic literature as well as approaches primarily concerned with drawing definitional boundaries for it. Instead, they propose to explore various works of electronic literature in terms of the potential dialogue they may open with concepts that are often locatable outside or beyond the current critical boundaries of electronic literature.
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:53
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A Stitch in Twine: Platform Studies and Porting Patchwork Girl
This presentation asks what we can learn about a foundational work of electronic literature – Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – by porting it to a new platform. More than this, it asks what we can learn about the source and target platforms of such a porting exercise.
Hannah Ackermans - 13.11.2015 - 13:23
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Can We Define Electronic Literature Such as Authoring Tool Literature?
In this presentation, we will see how the authoring tool impacts on the thinking of electronic literature. If we consider that electronic literature cannot exist without digital tools, and digital writing requires tool, software and technologies, we can easily imagine how huge the role of the authoring tool is for the authors and how their imaginary can be challenged. Tools propose and impose choices and directions that ask the creative act in electronic literature.
Then, in our research, we define the concept of the “rhetoric for creative authoring” that will be focusing on power relations between the authoring tool and the author. And what does it mean in electronic literature to use such a tool? Is electronic literature producing works depending on the software the author uses? It means that the software tool, as the edge of the electronic work itself, could be considered as part of the electronic work. In other hands, this approach could help to define electronic literature.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:00
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Beneath the Surface: System Representation and Reader Reception in Electronic Literature
One challenge authors face when creating electronic literature is to balance immersion in the story with awareness of the underlying computational system (Wardrip-Fruin, 2010, 2013). This paper presents a preliminary investigation of the ways in which the representation of the underlying computational system in the user interface influences the readeräs focus on either the story or the underlying system. To begin exploring this question, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with seven participants. Each participant interacted with variations of a procedural hypertext story that represented the underlying system state either numerically or in natural language, and displayed the underlying system state either non-diegetically or diegetically. Observations suggest that although numerical representations make it easier for the reader to grasp the procedural nature of the system, they can also lead to a focus on playing the system, rather than on reading the story. Interestingly, participants reported that the natural language representation was harder to interpret, but that this difficulty actually enhanced their engagement with the storyworld.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:06
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The Interactive Character as a Black Box
How can a convincing interactive character, with apparent psychological depth, be modelled in a playable narrative that adapts to a reader’s choice? This is the central question of my practice-based research that I address through the authoring (in both natural language and computer code) of an interactive text-based psychological thriller Stitched Up.
Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:10
