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Letters That Matter: The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1

John Zuern considers the significance of the first volume of ELO’s Electronic Literature Collection for the future of electronic arts. “What are letters?” Nell, the young heroine of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, poses this question to her older brother Harv in response to his explanation that the letters “MC” are an abbreviation for “Matter Compiler,” a household device that in the novel’s nanotech-saturated world assembles consumer goods on demand from their molecular components. The children are examining the MC’s interface, made up primarily of a scrollable menu of animated icons, “mediaglyphics,” that represent the available products. It is only […]
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Electronic Literature circa WWW (and Before)

The Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 is essentially the first major anthology of contemporary digital writing, and there are few things not to appreciate about it. Sixty varied and highly refined works are included, produced by artists who have been practitioners for many years. A viewer who is not open to participating in explorative, often abstract works, may not like or be able to appreciate the content, and surely there are high-quality works that are not included (as in any literary anthology), but the material gathered here could hardly be more representative of what is happening in various digital genres […]

How to Think (with) Thinkertoys: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1

Adalaide Morris considers ‘tutor texts’ in the Electronic Literature Collection and, in doing so, articulates a poetics for the emerging field of e-lit. Instead of fulfilling Ted Nelson’s dream of ‘computer lib,’ the most compelling entries in the Collection emphasize the continuing necessity of writing under constraint. When the revolution turns out to be, not a liberation from a culture of control but its transformation, practices long familiar to experimental poets in print become generalized throughout new media and their panoply of ‘thinkertoys.’ “Our greatest problems,” Ted Nelson declared in his 1974 back-to-back double tract Computer Lib / Dream Machines, […]
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The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan’s Idea of Form

In a reading of Christopher Nolan’s films (with and against texts by Poe, Wittgenstein, Searle, and Derrida), Walter Benn Michaels examines the autonomy of the work of art. 1 accidentally on purpose Christopher Nolan’s movie Insomnia is a remake of a Norwegian movie (directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg) and, although the two movies are very much alike (as Nolan says, they have “almost the exact same plot and situations” [Prestigiacomo]), they differ in at least one important way. Both involve a senior detective and his junior partner being sent far north (from Sweden to Northern Norway in the original, from L.A. […]
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The Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of Strickland’s V

Reading Stephanie Strickland’s V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse, Jaishree Odin explores the implications of the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity for our understanding of reading, writing and living. The uniqueness of a new-media work is the mobility of its elements, present as binary code in computer, yet capable of being mobilized into action through user interaction or through programming. Many new media works make full use of multiple functionalities of current software applications, bringing to light in unique ways the effect a well-designed interface can have on the meaning-making process. How do we read these digital texts that mutate with the […]
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Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design

1. Introduction Every role-playing game takes place in a fictional world – a setting. In a session of play, players typically generate more information about the setting than they find in the canonical game materials. They may also create new rules or change canonical rules and setting elements to suit their tastes. Even if they use the game material without modifications, they choose how to assign importance to the various rules and setting elements. Players often extrapolate connections between small details in the provided world. This creates content that they consider implicit to the canonical game. Other groups may possess […]
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Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship

1. Introduction The essence of the computer as a representational medium is procedurality – the ability of the computer to engage in arbitrary mechanical processes to which observers can ascribe meaning. Computers do, of course, participate in the production of imagery, support communication between people via the mediation of long-distance signals, control electromechanical devices, and support the storage and interlinking of large quantities of human-readable data. Many tools are available that allow users to engage these various capacities of the computer, such as image manipulation or Web page authoring, without requiring users to think procedurally. But it is precisely the […]
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Editors’ Introduction to “Computational Fictions”

Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce the essays of the “Computational Fictions” section of Second Person, focusing on the conversion of human ludic interaction into computational processes – a necessary condition for computer games. Editors’ Introduction to “Computational Fictions” What makes computer games different from other games? What makes Pong different from tennis, video poker different from traditional poker, or one of EA’s Lord of the Rings computer role-playing games different from Dungeons & Dragons? Of course, the differences are many, when considering particular games – for example, whether referees are employed, cards are used, or hard cover rulebooks […]
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Pax, Writing, and Change

1. These brief notes are offered in place of something longer and more fully considered, for which there will probably never be time. These days, reflection is a luxury in most working lives, and it comes particularly dear for those who work in cybertext, which can claim neither the high-cultural entitlements of literature nor the market appeal of video games, but subsists on the margins of those worlds, among others. Most who move in this edgy space are amateurs, obsessives, and/or academics, people driven by, if not to, distraction. We are always “of two minds,” as Michael Joyce (1975) put […]

On Soft Cinema: Mission to Earth

Cinema and Software The twentieth-century cinema “machine” was born at the intersection of the two key technologies of the industrial era: the engine that drives movement and the electricity that powers it. While an engine moves film inside the projector at uniform speed, the electric bulb makes possible the projection of the film image on the screen. The use of an engine makes the cinema machine similar to an industrial factory organized around an assembly line. A factory produces identical objects that are coming from the assembly line at regular intervals. Similarly, a film projector spits out images, all the […]

Middle Spaces: Media and the Ethics of Infinitely Demanding

The novel has long been associated with ethics. This link goes back to F.R. Leavis, but Andrew Gibson has shown that this tradition is alive and well today not only in the work of humanist critics like Wayne Booth, but among postmodernists like Richard Rorty and J. Hillis Miller. One way to interrogate Simon Critchley’s theory of ethics and political resistance in Infinitely Demanding is to set it alongside of contemporary novels and to ask how they respond differently to the same cultural moment. It isn’t hard to see Critchley’s book as a response to the bleak political moment in […]
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The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming

When gamers interact with their environments . . . probing often takes the form of seeking out the limits of the situation, the points at which the illusion of reality breaks down, and you can sense that it’s all just a bunch of algorithms behind the curtain. – Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You Puppet master: An individual working “behind the curtain” to control the game. – Sean Stacey, “The Unfiction Glossary” In early August 2004, the alternate reality game I Love Bees gave its online players, over 600,000 in number, their first real-world mission. On a Web […]
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On A Measure for Marriage

In the summer of 2004, I was approached by my friend Greg Moccia with a unique task: to design a live-action role-playing event at which he could propose to his girlfriend. The resulting game was A Measure for Marriage, a one-session LARP in which players took the roles of nobles and attendants as they attempted to find romance, thwart villainy, and restore true love in an improvised Shakespearean comedy. Of course, designing a LARP about romance that must end with a real proposal is a daunting task, and the success of A Measure for Marriage was a result of careful […]

Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game

On December 16, 2003, popular Web magazine Slate published an article by journalist and author Steven Johnson (2003). Reviewing simulation games that engage problems of social organization, Johnson posed a question: “The [2004] U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it’s still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004?” Upon reading this article, we smiled at its perfect timing: at that very moment we were developing The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first official video game ever commissioned in the history of U.S. Presidential elections. Former Vermont […]
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Eliza Redux

Eliza Redux Then The first manifestation of Eliza Redux The title for this film has now been changed to The Veils of Transference to differentiate it from the online Eliza Redux. was a pre-scripted film produced in 2001 depicting a twenty-minute psychoanalytic session between a robot and a human, during which the robot and human switch back and forth in their roles as analyst and analysand; and in the end, it is the robot, in its role as a patient, that has a “baring of the soul” cathartic experience. The robot-actor in this case was essentially a puppet; its locomotion, […]

Tape for the Turn of the Year: Conversations with and about Daniel Wenk

This essay-narrative originally appeared in a catalogue published by Eastwick Art Gallery in Chicago, and it was also included in ebr 11. FRIDAY EVENING, January 1999 Gold Star, 10:30. Two draft beers, DAB ($7.00 with tip). Daniel agrees that an interview would be better than an essay. He wants a text that will be unlike all the other catalogue texts. During the past few days, he’s been reading my copy of Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Could we do something along the lines of a metalogue? Daniel asks if I know whether, on the Internet, he might […]
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On an Unhuman Earth

“Why shouldn’t Wordsworth be read through Whitehead? Why shouldn’t the canon of Romantic poetry be read alongside the inscription technologies of cartography or tour guides?” Eugene Thacker’s challenge to the recent compartmentalization of academic literary studies is inspired by a reading of Ron Broglio’s book, Technologies of the Picturesque. For Thacker, as for Broglio, literary Romanticism and phenomenological reflection are not the only unifying forces against the dissolution of the technological subject. It is often said that humanities departments in the States – and especially English literature departments – have turned away from theoretical reflection towards historical, sociological, and even […]

Locating the Literary in New Media

Only in North American academia would the first three titles listed above have appeared before the fourth. Only here would “culture” be the first thing literary scholars think of writing about when confronted with a transformation in the material media of our own practice. Works of literature are cited in these first three books, occasionally as participants in the transformation but more often as casualties or, at best, as well-crafted, all-too-human expressions of what it feels like to live through the transformation. Race in Thomas Foster and Martin Kevorkian, gender in N. Katherine Hayles, and class in all three are […]

A Language of the Ordinary, or the eLEET?

“If every link is a next, every memory is a was.” – Michael Joyce, Othermindedness Michael Joyce tends to avoid overstatement or overemphasis, and nowhere is this more true than in his characterizations of the World Wide Web. The Web – which he refers to as something that “our culture has slipped on … like a lonely guy slips on a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe” (Othermindedness 52) – underwhelms him. A more expansive collection of these characterizations, many taken – in the true spirit of surfing and sampling – out of context, would include the WWW as something […]

Intensifying Affect

For Nick Spencer, January 28, 1966 – July 18, 2008 – In Friendship 1. Discussions of the history of 20th- and 21st-century critical thought often proceed by delineating an itinerary of schools (new criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, new historicism, new materialism, neo-formalism, etc.) and ‘turns’: the linguistic turn, the religious turn, the ethical turn, the ontological turn, the spatial turn, the rhetorical turn, the medial turn, and of late the so-called ‘affective turn’.Of these phrases, perhaps the one that caught on the least is that of the ‘medial turn’. See, however, Joseph Tabbi’s essay “The Medial Turn” for a lucid exposition. […]