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First Person
The relationship between story and game, and related questions of electronic writing and play, examined through a series of discussions among new media creators and theorists.
Realizing Ineffable Tragedy in Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden
Twenty years after Stuart Moulthrop created Victory Garden Michael Gray revisits the now-classic hyperfiction to explore not just why the work earns the moniker "academic," but also what such a dismissive label overlooks in the reading experience. Moulthrop's hyperlinked, web-like plot badgers his readers with indecision, envelops them in a fog of information, and ultimately requires them to one, give up; or two, avoid the brutal cost of war by choosing a well-hidden but cheerful Hollywood ending; or three, sacrifice the protagonist in a tragedy-confirming gesture of realism. Moulthrop's labyrinthine plot entangles his readers in a postmodern test case: as readers, we see, as per parallax, the First Gulf War through the eyes of a U.S. college town, emails sent to and from U.S. troops, and night vision enhanced, network TV coverage. Causality is not a feature of Victory Garden's simulacra. Gray locates Moulthrop's greatest success in the moment when readers succumb to the pressures of aporia, suspend their search, and assume Emily has died. This decision, suggests Gray, reflects Moulthrop's real intention and effectively shifts the burden of tragedy from Scud missile to reader.
Twining
Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book's chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine's technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making. "While there have certainly been attempts to study Twine historically and theoretically... no single publication has provided such a detailed account of it. And no publication has even attempted to situate Twine amongst its many different conversations and traditions, something this book does masterfully." --James Brown, Rutgers University, Camden
Hypermedia and Literary Studies
The essays in Hypermedia and Literary Studies discuss the theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges posed by the convergence of hypermedia systems and traditional written texts.Consider a work from Shakespeare. Imagine, as you read it, being able to call up instantly the Elizabethan usage of a particular word, variant texts for any part of the work, critical commentary, historically relevant facts, or oral interpretations by different sets of actors. This is the sort of richly interconnected, immediately accessible literary universe that can be created by hypertext (electronically linked texts) and hypermedia (the extension of linkages to visual and aural material). The essays i...
Traversals
An exercise in reclaiming electronic literary works on inaccessible platforms, examining four works as both artifacts and operations. Many pioneering works of electronic literature are now largely inaccessible because of changes in hardware, software, and platforms. The virtual disappearance of these works—created on floppy disks, in Apple's defunct HyperCard, and on other early systems and platforms—not only puts important electronic literary work out of reach but also signals the fragility of most works of culture in the digital age. In response, Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop have been working to document and preserve electronic literature, work that has culminated in the Pathfinder...
Borges 2.0
Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds analyzes Jorge Luis Borges's «The Library of Babel», «The Garden of Forking Paths», and «The Intruder» from a tripartite perspective that encompasses literature, science, and technology. This book underscores developments in chaos theory during the 1980s and their intricate connections with Borges's works and the digital world. Without losing sight of this critical framework, this study also takes into account Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome theory and Umberto Eco's theory on labyrinths. Borges 2.0 is unique in its analysis of how Borgesian texts relate to science and technology at the same time that science and the virtual world illuminate Borges's texts to provide a new reading of his work.
Digital Poetics
In Digital Poetics, Loss Glazier argues that the increase in computer technology and accessibility, specifically the World Wide Web, has created a new and viable place for the writing and dissemination of poetry. Glazier's work not only introduces the reader to the current state of electronic writing but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium. Glazier examines three principal forms of electronic textuality: hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable media. He considers avantgarde poetics and its relationship to the on-line age, the relationship between web pages and book technology, and the way in which certain kinds of web constructions are in and of themselves a type of writing. With convincing alacrity, Glazier argues that the materiality of electronic writing has changed the idea of writing itself. He concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate space of poesis. Digital Poetics will attract a readership of scholars and students interested in contemporary creative writing and the po
Memory Bytes
Digital culture is often characterized as radically breaking with past technologies, practices, and ideologies rather than as reflecting or incorporating them. Memory Bytes seeks to counter such ahistoricism, arguing for the need to understand digital culture—and its social, political, and ethical ramifications—in historical and philosophical context. Looking at a broad range of technologies, including photography, print and digital media, heat engines, stereographs, and medical imaging, the contributors present a number of different perspectives from which to reflect on the nature of media change. While foregrounding the challenges of drawing comparisons across varied media and eras, Me...
The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction
Reading lists, course syllabi, and prizes include the phrase '21st-century American literature,' but no critical consensus exists regarding when the period began, which works typify it, how to conceptualize its aesthetic priorities, and where its geographical boundaries lie. Considerable criticism has been published on this extraordinary era, but little programmatic analysis has assessed comprehensively the literary and critical/theoretical output to help readers navigate the labyrinth of critical pathways. In addition to ensuring broad coverage of many essential texts, The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction offers state-of-the field analyses of contemporary narrative studies that set the terms of current and future research and teaching. Individual chapters illuminate critical engagements with emergent genres and concepts, including flash fiction, speculative fiction, digital fiction, alternative temporalities, Afro-futurism, ecocriticism, transgender/queer studies, anti-carceral fiction, precarity, and post-9/11 fiction.
How Pac-Man Eats
How the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean; with examples ranging from Papers, Please to Dys4ia. In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two questions: What are the fundamental ways that games work? And how can games be about something? Wardrip-Fruin argues that the two issues are related. Bridging formalist and culturally engaged approaches, he shows how the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean. Wardrip-Fruin proposes that games work at a fundamental level on which their mechanics depend: operational logics. Games are about things because they use play to address topics; they do this through pl...
