[…]Children’s Literature, Collaboration, combinatorial, conceptual, constraint-based, procedural, critical/political/philosophical, database, documentary, essay/creative nonfiction, fiction, flash, games, generative, hacktivist, html/dhtml, hypertext, inform, installation, interactive fiction, java, javascript, locative, memoir, multilingual or non-english, music, network forms, non-interactive, parody/satire, performance/performative, place, poetry, processing, quicktime, shockwave, squeak, storyspace, stretchtext, TADS, textual instrument, text movie, 3D, time-based, translation, viral, visual poetry or narrative, vrml, women authors, wordtoy. All of the major types of digital writing (automatically generated works, visually-oriented works, hypertexts, sound, and many hybrid forms) are represented. Because digital literature has for more than three decades resisted, as if by definition, the need to embody […]
[…]when, say, you’re being tickled. In one respect, of course, they’re the same. You could do studies of what proportion of the population laughs in response to being tickled in a certain spot and, of course, you could also do studies of what proportion of the population laughs at which jokes. Hence the question of whether a joke is funny is in the end either a statistical question, answerable by the number of people who laugh, or a personal question answerable only in the form of “it made me laugh.” The question of whether a joke is good or bad, […]
[…]described in the book, but also indicative of the hybridizing work Kac performs. The notion of networking humans and rabbits, for example, refers to Kac’s best known piece, “GFP Bunny,” yet most description and criticism of this piece focus not on networking humans and rabbits but on the story of the rabbit, and render the humans invisible. We are all familiar with the travails of Alba the transgenic bunny bred with green florescent protein. The human component of the network – the scientists, Kac’s intervention, the history of human-rabbit interaction – are taken for granted while at the same time […]
[…]in a fairly undefined order does not necessarily weaken the possibilities for a more Dramatist group. After all, the adventure begins with the players going to the house and most climaxes will involve a battle with the haunt. (I suspect few groups will explore the rest of the house after dealing with the haunt, just to have a look.) However, that there is no defined shape to the story between these points does make it harder to adapt the scenario for the less-gamist group. The haunted house is there to be investigated and exorcised, it is not there to be […]
[…]dimension. Perhaps the disinclination that players have to experiment with “variant character groups or settings,” or to adopt a “‘Raid on Innsmouth’-style multiple-character” model stems from the lack of interest in switching from one cipher to another. In a game where revelation of the forbidden knowledge is paramount, player character traits – cherished and nurtured in other RPGs – hold little long-term attraction beyond what they contribute to discovering the forbidden knowledge. I admit that this point is debatable since players have individual reasons for playing an RPG, but if all Investigators exhibit an ability to ascertain the Mythos there […]
[…]on faults in its organization or its limits (Vollmann’s self-limitations, one could also say). Critical writing, or academic writing, works to explain how Poor People (and Expelled from Eden) doesn’t work, or does work, or how Vollmann tries and succeeds at getting this or that right, falls down here and there, and so forth. These purposes have value at all times, but they are not the only values. Critical writing will rarely get anyone excited about a work, or be taken up by it, except, possibly, philosophically or as a text to be treated with theories. The excitement will be […]
[…]35, otherwise known as “The Harem”): Table2 The NPC design documents are written in “pseudo-code” – less precise than actual computer code, less poetic than a screenplay – for the AI programmer, who will use it as a sort of blueprint to write the actual code that will make the characters move and speak in the game. Looking Back Overall, I’m delighted with the way POP turned out and the various ways we succeeded in weaving the story into the gameplay. I’m particularly happy with the voice-over narration and story-within-a-story; they offer a special satisfaction and reward for those who […]
It’s official: the field of game studies is obsessed with storytelling. One can’t argue with Costikyan’s summary of the Game Developers Conference. This year’s GDC included literally dozens of panels, presentations, and roundtables in which everyone from career developers and academics to players and fans discussed the role of stories in games, including some very familiar arguments. Is there a place for storytelling in game development? Which is more important, narrative or game design? Can you have good stories and good gameplay at the same time? At one point, during a particularly fractious argument between two developers, the person sitting […]
[…]and some puzzles – often quite hard – that needed to be solved to advance the game. I began working on Planetfall in September 1982. At that point, Infocom had released five text adventures. These games were minuscule by today’s standards, driven by the capacity of computer floppy drives; the original release of Planetfall was only 108 kilobytes – about as many bytes as a medium-sized image on a Web page. In those early games, there were numerous NPCs (non-player characters), such as the Wizard and Demon in Zork II or the various suspects in the mystery game Deadline. One […]
[…]of his metaphorical schema: Conservatives know that politics is not just about policy and interest groups and issue-by-issue debate. They have learned that politics is about family and morality, about myth and metaphor and emotional identification. They have, over twenty-five years, managed to forge conceptual links in the voters’ minds between morality and public policy. They have done this by carefully working out their values, comprehending their myths, and designing a language to fit those values and myths so that they can evoke them with powerful slogans, repeated over and over again, that reinforce those family-morality-policy links, until the connections […]