narrative

What binds literature, electronic literature and games is "the shaping and networking of the imagination." Drawing on the ideas of Damasio, Walton and Sartre, Gordon Calleja looks at the synthesizing role of the imagination in narrative indie games.

In an attempt to re-materialize postmodernism, Damien Gibson provides, by drawing on material ecocriticism and on the concept of “narrative agency,” a critical posthumanist reading of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.

Katherine Hayles uses Steve Tomasula's multimodal TOC for a significant engagement with the temporal processuality of complex technical beings. Drawing on Bergon's "duration" and its elaboration in recent theories of technicity and consciousness, Hayles explores the complex temporal enfoldings of living and technical beings, showing that Tomasula's new media novel narrates and materially embodies such assemblages.

This formulation by Joseph Tabbi is being reprinted with permission from the University of Minnesota Press's remixthebook. The original online version can be found here.

In response to Perlin, Victoria Vesna reiterates the unique realism of games.

The man behind The Sims, Will Wright, places narrative controls back in the hands of gamers.

Eric Dean Rasmussen explores Lynne Tillman's "cognitive aesthetic," suggesting that her work is powered by the generative disconnect between asignifying affect and signifying emotion. He argues that her 1998 novel, No Lease on Life, examines the role of affectively sustained universal values in responding politically to the neoliberal city.

Secret agency is at issue in Frasca's response, which denies the application of Aristotle to the open-ended interactivity of gaming.

The importance of consequences plots Brenda Laurel's response to Michael Mateas.