Search
The search found 175 results in 0.011 seconds.
Search results
-
Art of the Pan-Opt-in-a-Con: FarmVille and the Gamification of the Digital Landscape [Original: The Tyranny of Completion; Or, How Electronic Art Can Engage the Firehose]
Toward the end of 2020, one of the most culturally impactful web games of all time shut down—at least, the original, Flash-based version did. FarmVille, by social game studio Zynga, was not outstanding for its gameplay mechanics nor for its imaginative qualities. In fact, social games like Farmville are defined by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost as “games you don’t have to play.” Rather, FarmVille was special because it tapped into 2009-era Facebook’s lax user-generated notification system, and its developers succeeded in creating a user-operated spam cannon disguised as a game. What made FarmVille a cultural phenomenon is best represented by the metanarrative about how it manufactured and sold compulsive behavior to a new audience. By targeting ludic luddites with its folksy facade and “freemium” business model, FarmVille ushered in a new era of games that encouraged users to exchange money for in-game effects.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:20
-
American Utopia - Analyzing the Far-Right politics of BioShock: Infinite and Trump's America
Video games are mirrors to our contemporary reality that reflect our society's philosophies, rhetoric, and more. Published in 2013, BioShock: Infinite offered a glimpse into the reality of a Utopian America ruled by conservative far-right identity politics. In 2016, Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States brought to the forefront of America what is often ignored. In this essay, I argue what Utopia is to the far-right by analyzing the society of Columbia, the use of media in the state, and more. Overall, I argue that politics and ideas of Utopia can be simulated into video games to understand far-right narratives of Trumpian politics better.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:24
-
The Generated Word: Metonymic, Generic and Operationalist
The formal patterns of the codex book remain evident in literary forms no longer bound by the material efficiencies of the paper platform. For some works, like Judd Nelson's "The Jew's Daughter" or Jason Nelson's "Evidence of Everything Exploding," the printed page becomes a platform for the mutability of the screen, while others like Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's _Between Page and Screen_ or Steve Tomosula's _VAS: An Opera in Flatland_ explore the tension between the printed and the projected word.
Still other electronic works embrace the physical material of a bound, published book as their final form,, and in this paper, I propose a framework for considering the differences among computer-generated books relative to their characteristics and apparent purposes. By articulating three broad genres, I attempt to draw in more diverse networks of influence that bear on the present moment.Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:27
-
Digital Narrative and Temporality
We sometimes hear it said that our relationship with time has been altered. In companies and administrations, the adoption of New Management strategies means that employees feel themselves subjected to ever increasing urgency and stress. The “FOMO Syndrome,” the anxiety generated by our fear of missing out on something in a world in which we are exposed to a constant flow of information and access to other people’s narratives (or at least to their stories), is a phenomenon inherently linked to the digital environment. The Covid-19 crisis has no doubt accentuated this tendency, with its injunction to stay increasingly connected (particularly to social media and video conferencing platforms), and to immediately respond to digital notifications and sollicitations on a 24/7 basis.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:32
-
Transformative Reading and Writing Synthetic Archives with Language Models
This paper reflects on Electronic Literature projects I created between 2017 and 2020 through interrogating how each project collaborates with an increasingly complex non-human component. Riffing off of Donna Haraway's concept of "significant otherness" and making kin, I speculate on the differences in the significance of the otherness that is engaged with in projects using methods based on combinatorics/chance, statistical models, and vector semantics (contemporary neural-network based language models like GPT-2). While recognizing that each approach involves a reduction in human agency, this reflective paper focuses on the increasing complexity to which this agency is relinquished and how to deal with presenting this relationship between human and non-human actors. Culminating in a series of projects using OpenAI's GPT-2, the need for a self-reflexive "transformative reading interface" is introduced as a concrete instantiation of Katherine Hayles' concept of a "technotext." A transformative reading interface links a corpus of text to text generated by a language model based on that corpus.
Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:37
-
A narrative approach to ambient literature: embodied spoken monologue and enhanced interactional metalepsis
This paper will focus on “ambient literature” (Abba, Dovey, Pullinger 2020) as a kind of tradition-inspired literature of the future. Thus I will propose to look critically at traditional theoretical concepts and devices and analyse how apply them to characterise and realise such reading experiences. My starting point will be enhancing the concept of interactional metalepsis (Bell 2016 or Bell, Ensslin and Rustad 2014), then I will go for proposing the concept of “embedded dramatic monologue”, a form of narration built upon tradition and useful in creating immersive ambient reading experiences.
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:04
-
Distributed Memories: CompuServe’s Gamer’s Forum and the Halcyon Days of the Adventure Game Toolkit
This paper shares the story of the rise and fall of The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), a Pascal-based design system written in 1987 by David Malmberg, based on Mark J. Welch's 1985 Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). It was the leading platform for parser-based interactive fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with Text Adventure Development System (TADS) as its upstart competitor. The use of these early (pre-Graham Nelson’s Inform 6) parser-based interactive fiction platforms was supported by an annual AGT contest, and a design community that stayed in touch through BBS-communities, the largest of which was Compuserve’s Gamer’s Forum. Malmberg ceased to support AGT in 1992, (the final release was AGT 1.7) but the contest continued until 1994. The competition was rebranded under new management, and with an expanded community and continued on as the Interactive Fiction Competition, (which has been run since 2016 by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation).
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:22
-
Platforming Inclusivity: Blaseball and an inclusive vision of browser games
Blaseball, a fantasy baseball simulator developed by The Game Band, took 2020 by storm, quickly developing from a niche web game to an legitimate cultural phenomenon, including a whole catalogue of fan-created merchandise, more than a dozen albums of music, including a musical, and a dedicated following of players from around the world. Much of the attraction of the game comes from the passionate involvement of the fans and the openness The Game Band have shown to players making the game their own.
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:36
-
Lab-yrinthe: an online laboratory to observe children’s e-lit and support digital literacy
Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:
- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;
- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;
- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:46
-
Lyric Recollection and the Preservation of Ephemeral and Social Elit
Though not an ideal solution, lyric reflection can be a significant method of preserving electronic literature. Having lost Flash, one solution is mimetic: a technical project resulting in a faithful copy of the original work, allowing the work to be experienced in all its particularity and interactivity. Failing that, footage, screenshots, and thorough, plainly descriptive writing can make a long-term accessible record so that at least that space in the genre’s history can be seen and understood by future generations. What happens, however, when a work a work features elements of ephemerality? On a computational level, this can happen to a far greater degree than with a traditional print book. Outside of rare tragedies, we can retrieve an old text from the archives, but we cannot retrieve the experience of, for instance, Multi-User Dungeons in the late 1990s. Lyric recollection, however, provides a literary model for securing something very close to the experience of the work.
Lene Tøftestuen - 25.05.2021 - 16:56
