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1. Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction

   There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project.

 At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09

2. New Plots for Hypertext?: Towards a Poetics of the Hypertext Node

   While the significance of hypertext links for the new ways of telling stories has been widely discussed, there has been not many debates about the very elements that are being connected: hypertext nodes. Apart from few exceptions, poetics of the link overshadows poetics of the node. My goal is to re-focus on a single node, or lexia, by introducing the concept of contextual regulation as the major force that shapes hypertext narrative units. Because many lexias must be capable of occurring in different contexts and at different stages of the unfolding story, several compromises have to be made on the level of language, style, plot and discourse. Each node, depending on its position and importance, has a varying level of connectivity and autonomy, which affects the global coherence of text.

   Scott Rettberg - 26.05.2013 - 14:25

3. The End of Books--Or Books Without End: Reading Interactive Narratives

   J. Yellowlees Douglas looks at the new light that interactive narratives may shed on theories of reading and interpretation and the possibilities for hypertext novels, World Wide Web-based short stories, and cinematic, interactive narratives on CD-ROM. She confronts questions that are at the center of the current debate: Does an interactive story demand too much from readers? Does the concept of readerly choice destroy the author's vision? Does interactivity turn reading fiction from "play" into "work" - too much work? Will hypertext fiction overtake the novel as a form of art or entertainment? And what might future interactive books look like?

   (Source: Book jacket)

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 07.06.2013 - 11:03

4. Constructs of the Interactive Documentary Image in Inside/Outside, The Unknown Territories Project, and Estuary

   This paper introduces three original works that use features of interactive documentary arts to explore social constructions of places and their attending narratives. The three interactive projects that are introduced are Inside/Outside, The Unknown Territories Project, and Estuary. The paper asks how tools of layering, compositing and navigation through documentary imagery in photography and film contribute to an understanding of the connection between social relationships and a sense of space.

   Scott Rettberg - 24.06.2013 - 16:32

5. Netprov: Elements of an Emerging Form

   While improvisational theater has a well-documented history, the role of improvisation on the Internet has been only the topic of passing speculation (Laurel; Murray), either applied metaphorically to the user interface or in speculation on the nature of computer-mediated textual exchange particularly in the context of identity formation (Turkle). While improvisation is deeply connected to the authorial practices of players of MMORPGs and their MOO precursors (LaFarge) and to players of story-generation games such as Jason Rohrer’s “Sleep is Death” and to participants in ARGs, we are specifically interested in text-centered improvisation that has as its goal the creation of a narrative or narrative world, rather than primarily the development of a game experience.

   Scott Rettberg - 25.06.2013 - 14:30

6. Textopia: Experiments with Locative Literature

   textopia is a design experiment situated in humanist media studies, and based on a simple idea: Making it possible for someone who is walking through the city with a mobile phone to listen to literary texts which talk about whichever place she is walking by. The aim of this exercise has been to explore the relationship between places and literary texts – not just what the relationship is and has been, but what it can be in the new medium. Inspired by the ideas embedded in hermeneutics, open source philosophy and agile software development, I have outlined a methodological approach that I call "agile media design". In the course of the practical process I have ialso dentified three key principles for locative media design, summed up in the "G-P-S" model: Granularity, Particiation and Serendipity. Together they describe the unique characteristics of designs like textopia – a category I call "annotative, locative media".

   Scott Rettberg - 26.06.2013 - 13:19

7. Blogging

   Thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of Blogging provides an accessible study of a now everyday phenomenon and places it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context. The second edition takes into account the most recent research and developments and provides current analyses of new tools for microblogging and visual blogging. Jill Walker Rettberg discusses the ways blogs are integrated into today’s mainstream social media ecology, where comments and links from Twitter and Facebook may be more important than the network between blogs that was significant five years ago, and questions the shift towards increased commercialization and corporate control of blogs. The new edition also analyses how smart phones with cameras and social media have led a shift towards more visual emphasis in blogs, with photographs and graphics increasingly foregrounded. Authored by a scholar-blogger, this engaging book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 14:35

8. Tangibles and Storytelling

   Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) are systems with the goal of giving a physical aspect to accessing information from a digital medium. Combining physical interactions with digital information in order to evoke a sense of interactivity and control over a system. Coupled with storytelling, these user interfaces become potent information relays, as well as being effective edutainment tools for younger audiences. This is because of physical interactions are extremely significant in providing stimuli for the memory, thus facilitating learning.

   In this paper, we discuss and evaluate several different research papers about various different tangible user interfaces designed to facilitate interactive narratives and storytelling. These systems provide insight to the dynamics of interactive storytelling, and how these tangibles can be used to deliver non-linear storylines and detach the users from the role of a passive observer to an active role in the stories.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 16:08

9. Towards a Theory of Narrative in Interactive Fiction

   The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current
   paradigm to include classes of worlds such as these. To achieve this, we survey cinema technique and develop a theory of narrative and roughly sketch a system architecture to support enriched interactive fiction based on analogy with film techniques. This work is significant because it brings us closer to our goal of making interactivefictioninto a rich, high
   quality artistic medium.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 22:31

10. Justin Hall and the Birth of the 'Blogs

    Wittig describes his experience of Justin Hall's links.net and considers the weblog as a serial narrative form.

    Scott Rettberg - 05.07.2013 - 14:07

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