DigitalLiterature

Chapter 4 explores the connection between video games and electronic literature. To function, video games require mechanics that would classify it as electronic literature. Several genres of interactive fiction are even derived from the earliest “text adventure” games created in the 1980s. In most works of interactive fiction games, the player is working towards a definable goal through completing a series of puzzles. Common elements in interactive fiction, particularly the reader's interaction with text parser to advance the plot, could also be described to be the user interacting with objects in a game. The purpose of a game of interaction fiction is "to find a solution, to achieve the satisfaction of a successful session of deductive reasoning" (Rettberg 89). With time, fans of the genre learn a specific way to interact with an interactive fiction system, develop strategies for various games, and identify recurring tropes in interactive fiction.  For my bring it to the...

  Chapter 4 stresses the shared history that electronic literature and computer games share. While computer games didn’t come until after generative poetry was well established, “text adventure” games like Zork were some of the first of their kind to be able to be played on a personal computer. With the demand for games with graphics increasing drastically, text adventure games gave way to what we know as IF, or interactive fiction games. These games involve the interactor, or the person playing the game, solving puzzles or overcoming a set of obstacles seen on the screen to achieve a desired outcome, like leveling up or defeating a boss. The IF community has persisted in becoming one of the largest and most well-loved gaming communities today and has been known to outperform TV shows and movies from time to time.   While playing Zork, I was very confused about how to get started at first. When I clicked on several different areas on the screen to see if anything would ha...

Interactive fiction, including games, are e-literature because they are capable of having narrative and other literary qualities. Early example like Adventure or Zork had narratives that were driven by the player's input. I really liked how the author from The Conversation described video games as literature. Ultimately, video games and other narrative media are the same, the only difference is that video games give the illusion that you as the player are driving the narrative forward, when really, it is already pre-determined and lined up. In this sense, video games are not so different from novels. However, it is important to note that games can differ in the amount of narrative they have. Some forms of interactive fiction are more focused on the actual solving of puzzles while others are meant to be experienced. For example, Photopia is a game where the player interacts with characters to progress a storyline. In addition to the main story line, there are side stories labeled wi...

In Chapter Three of Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature , the similarities between interactive fiction, a genre of electronic literature, and video games were explained. In fact, interactive fiction itself was created due to the way that some of the earliest video games were written. As Scott Rettberg describes in the fourth chapter of  Electronic Literature,  "...interactive fiction (IF), is directly derived from some of the earliest games made for personal computers - the "text adventure" games of the 1980s. Games such as those of the Zork series (first version developed at MIT in 1978-79) were very popular as personal computers began to enter American homes and schools during the 1980s. These games had no graphics but described a scene textually" (Rettberg 87). One of the most crucial components of IF is the ability to describe a story and the instructions for guiding through the body of work with textual descriptions, as opposed to drawn-out graphics, o...

Due to the large amounts of games that were released during the 1970’s, large amounts of progress in digital literature were able to be made. This created a great deal of advancements in interactive games, where they began to contain complex dialog and descriptions that people couldn’t stay away from. This chapter discussed the differences and similarities between hypertext and video games, as well as the origins of them. As the book describes, hypertexts are based in text, but you’re still making decisions and playing them interactively like a video game, but video games take place in an interactive world. In video games, graphics are more important than the links and text element, unlike hypertext. In the books words, “the principal challenge to the reader of interactive fiction, and its central pleasure, is to find a solution, to achieve the satisfaction of a successful session of deductive reasoning,” (Rettberg 238), when describing the major differences between the two forms of ...

I didn’t realize how embedded interactive fiction is with electronic literature. I never saw video games in this light. Computer games allow electronic literature to expand to different crowds. These interactive games allow for the author to connect with the player through its text. These text phrases help direct the player and helps them visualize the game. I liked that in Electronic Literature , Scott described video games as puzzles “…many games are valued because they are hard and therefore deliver a challenge to the gamer as competitor- and narrative engagement.” (Rettberg 99). While I was playing Zork I found out that there were many words that the program didn’t know. The game was quiet restricting on what you could do, but I enjoyed playing it. I know that the game went through many revisions, and I’m impressed how these students came together to make this game.   One of the video games that intrigued me from the chapter was Galatea, by Emily Short . This video game is a s...

     I agree with James O’Sullivan’s observations in his article “Good literature can come in digital forms – just look to the world of video games.” A lot of games that my brother plays – Valorant or Overwatch , for instance – seem to have a specific world and narrative behind the immediate gameplay that might be more traditionally associated with literature. At the same time, while electronic literature and games may share several elements, I do think that there is a difference between the two. The difference between these games and interactive fiction is, at least for me, that in the latter you are able to directly interact with a text that may have more of an active role in the piece, as opposed to just “lore.” In Chapter 4 of Scott Rettberg’s Electronic Literature , for instance, the author describes what appears to be the key element in interactive fiction: parser. Rettberg even uses this element to distinguish between interactive fiction and works from Twine, whic...

 I had no idea that computer games could be considered a form of E-lit. Early IF games were text based and did not have visuals. The player was given instructions to follow to get through the game. This typer of E-lit was made primarily outside of formal/academic environments. Instead, it is developed by the people making it interacting and sharing within the community. IF products are considered games since the player is working toward a goal of winning or solving a certain puzzle. However, some are more story driven and the puzzles are there to enhance the user Experience instead of it being the focal point. There may be some limits to the storytelling since the text can have a limited vocabulary. The creator may also choose to take on and interact with real world political issues in their games. Through the reading I learned how big Twine is to the IF community. We have briefly touched on it in class but I did not know how widely used it was for the development of IF and hyperte...

      Playing Zork was so incredibly frustrating. I was trying to hard to orient myself and figure out what I was looking at and what objects I could pick up or use, but it was so difficult to keep track of it all. I could definitely see how people would love this game and become obsessed with it, there are so many layers and spaces within this form of  digital literature. It was interesting to read more about Zork in this week's chapter, as well. I found it cool that Zork was one of the first "computer games" to truly blow up in the 80s and 90s. It's so simplistic but also has incredible depth and was ahead of its time. The computer games that I played when I was younger involved lots of designing clothes, dressing up characters and styling their hair, but digital games have come such a far way from their start in the 70s. My brother and I used to play all sorts of things during the early and late 2000s, and the detail of thes...

It's interesting thinking about video games from an academic perspective. Although IF was created outside of an academic context, it's amazing to read how it's developed and matured into a more e-literature platform. I liked how Retteberg explains how much of the early works of IF were riddle and puzzle ridden, which is "a reasonable challenge" where "all the information necessary to solve a riddle is included in the text provided" (89). Furthermore, looking at NPCs was an entertaining section. Games can be very inconsistent in the sense that some interactions with NPC are captivating, meaningful, and hold depth while others are like "conversing via telegraph with a precocious chimpanzee who has worked out a compass and the possession of objects" (90). What determines the complexity of an NPC is ultimately the amount of vocabulary it's given. I love the type of games that can be sarcastic and witty when an irrelevant or unknown sentence is ...

Interactive fiction is a genre of electronic literature derived from some of the earliest games made for personal computers. Electronic literature can be thought of as situated between a number of related practices and cultures, including print literary culture, arts practice, computer science, and performance. Computer games provided electronic literature with yet another broader genre. The interactive fiction community developed largely independently of academic environments compared to other forms of electronic literature. As a genre, interactive fiction can be identified by certain common elements and conventions. Most works of Interactive fiction are games in the sense that the interactor is working towards a definable outcome – the majority of these works can be “won” or “solved”. The interactor or reader is usually positioned and addressed in the second person and is therefore positioned as a player character in the text. The first work of interactive fiction was Colossal Cave A...

  I found the question proposed in this chapter to be really interesting because I had the same question while I was doing previous readings and finding examples for hypertext poetry and other bring-it-to-the-table assignments. So many of my examples, the ones I immediately thought of, were games. By reading this chapter, I would like to quote what Jim Andrews says, “It is a question of velocity, density, and other concerns of visual (even multimedia) rhetoric, of emphasis and intent”. The emphasis on the text or the game is what distinguishes the work as a game or as literature. But I believe as games become more interactive, as game developers continue to give more life to each character in their game and each aspect of game playing, the two distinct categories will merge into one, maybe called playable literature.  The best examples I can think of are games created by Telltale, a game company that creates really detailed stories within their games, and how players interact ...

     While trying to play Zork, I got increasingly frustrated. Almost everything I said returned the answer, “You can’t see any such thing.” Maybe I was playing it wrong, but I felt like there was nothing I could do other than read the leaflet and steal the rubber mat. The idea of it was fascinating to me though, and I feel like it must have been an extremely exciting invention for its time. I love how beautifully descriptive and strange the words are, you don’t even need images to construct a complete picture, the words do more than enough.       I really liked this quote from the article by James O’Sullivan, “These titles involve little more than travelling from one point to another, sometimes interacting with the occasional object while leisurely taking in the surrounds.” I’m not big on video games, but the idea of walking simulators does catch my attention as something I might like.      I really related to this quote from chapter 4 ...

     The idea of video games being considered a sector in literature might have seemed novel in the late 20th century. However, thanks to the development of interactive fiction, there is now an entire genre of gaming combined with literature. Originating in 1975, the field was developed by the work of Will Crowther's game, Colossal Cave Adventure, which combined problem solving skills with 'textual geocaching'. Within the next several decades, advancements in digital lit continued, such the MIT designed program Zork. Zork, created in 1977, had a large impact on the interactive literature field, and continues to remembered today. Unlike Adventure, Zork involved more complex language and descriptions, rather than basic sentences and simple directions. Following this design, Infocom games were developed, featuring literary works as settings. For instance, readers could try playing 'Sherlock' and navigate through the material. As the genre evolved, more details and laye...

Hypertext fiction was a poignant cultural and experimental addition to the world of the internet and computers, arriving at a time when post-modernism movements reached their highest points of discussion and levels of interest. Though the book takes into consideration that hypertext was not the first aspect of digital literature to breach the technological landscape, it was a trailblazer that grew to be widely discussed and popular, but also served as a catalyst for other forms of digital literature to be born and remnants of them can still be found in these other forms in our modern day. When reading the Cyborg Manifesto, I was pleasantly surprised to have my definition of “cyborg” not only be somewhat accurate, but also expanded upon by Haraway in an eloquent, comprehensive manner, especially where she draws comparisons on page 70, where she explicates, “One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, ideal...

Hypertext spans a wide realm of different materials. It includes various mediums on different topics. An example of this style of digital literature would include Shelley Jackson’s "My Body: A Wunderkummer." In a series of interactive text sections, Jackson focuses on different subjects while tying them together in an overall narrative. Jackson’s approach allows readers to focus on certain sections, by providing options to select what they want to read. The project was fairly simple in terms of digital content, but it was easy to navigate and explore.  Meanwhile, Entre Ville analyzed a village through the perspective of a narrator. While it was a bit confusing regarding the layout, it was an interesting glimpse into a different place. Personally, I liked how there were various videos and sound bites to keep things interesting. It made it easier to become absorbed in the story and what was going on. I also thought that the poem itself was very vivid and detailed, and definitel...

I've really been enjoying what we've been looking at and reading these past few weeks, especially Afternoon, the love letters, and Entre Ville. Making the love letters was super fun and definitely my favorite thing we've done so far. The concept of hypertext within generative poetry was really fun to play with (and very comical). Afternoon was quite interesting, and I found that this piece of hypertext was a little more elusive and sort of confusing compared to some of the other works we've seen. The storyline was incredibly skewed and hard to keep up with, but regardless, it was intriguing and kept me engaged while reading. I also enjoyed looking at Entre Ville, J.R. Carpenter's hypertext creation. I loved that each door and window on the house had something new behind it, as well as their videos accompanying them. The extended poem on the left page was also interesting to read. One of my favorite stanzas was --  "We surrender to Thailande's chill interior...

When trying to read "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" by Donna Haraway, I found the body of work to be quite convoluted and intricate. My favorite description of the Cyborg is Haraway describing it as a reconstructed being of "post-modern collective and personal self.” One of the most interesting parts of the essay was reading about Haraway tackles the concept of the Cyborg as being able to break the barrier of human gender and identity, rendering itself being its own existent being. Reading the perspective of someone writing about hypertext from a socialist-feminist perspective was quite intriguing, and I definitely have not read an essay about a facet of literature quite like this one. I feel the reason why the essay slowly became less convoluted was the helpful footnotes on each page, and scanning them as I proceeded through the piece added additional insight that made the points Haraway was making feel more succinct. ...

     While reading Chapter three, I was really intrigued by Judy Malloy’s project, Uncle Roger . It was published not on the World Wide Web but on WELL (the Whole Earth ‘Lectric Link) and is miraculously still available to click through via a simple google search. The story is nonlinear but separated into three sections: The party in the Woodside, the blue notebook, and terminals. What I did not expect to find as I flipped through the files was that individual options, like Jenny or individual pictures meant to give the audience some authority or power in the narrative, change depending on when you click them. For example, the same photo clicked twice in the blue notebook can often reveal two different entries, even if the images themselves are pretty similar, if not the same. I tried to maneuver around and find the same photo/entry but only occasionally did.      I found Entre Ville to be a really interesting take on hypertext because videos have not been ...

     The hypertext My Body a Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson is a piece that I have admired since I first became introduced to her work. The vivid descriptions that create a flow of clear pictures in the readers mind as she describes every piece of herself catches my attention beyond what most art can do. One of my favorite lines in her piece writes, “when I get a tan, mottled with tiny white dots as with sunlight through leaves,” (Jackson). The image I can form in my mind about both of these things, and her bringing the similarity between the two together is very beautiful, and I love that her work is so eloquent and expressive. The wholesomeness of her words that the reader can relate to, with her thoughts about herself and her appearance that are easily related to. I always enjoy going back to this hypertext and once again clicking threw it, always finding more to love about her work of art. The hypertext Entre Ville by J. R. Carpenter was also very interesting to in...

I found My Body a Wonderkammer be very interesting to navigate through. I am still unsure of the why the algorithm sent me to the places that it did, but I still appreciated it. I found her obsessions with bodies a little bit odd but though provoking. I think her project is a mediation on who we are and what our relationship is to our bodies. As she says in one of her poems: "It is a secret, busy space, and when I imagine myself inside it, I am filled with satisfaction and glee." Our bodies are what we live inside of, but we also don't. We are detached from our bodies in a sense because they are only a means to an end. I thought the use of making the body one big hypertext picture to be explored was very interesting because it showed how each body part is connected to another and how her stories and memories of body parts compel her. I thought her feelings on the fact that she will never know what its like to have the opposite sex organ was interesting, to say the least. ...

 Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” was a confusing but intriguing read. I managed to read the whole thing simply because I thought it would clear up my confusion- I don’t think it did. From my interpretation, her manifesto is about ecocriticism. She uses the image of the cyborg to create a connection between “imagination and material reality”. She urges readers to stretch boundaries and to fuse the dualistic notions of “mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism”. She uses feminism examples and criticism of gender, sex, race, and class to help her argument of embracing the cyborg to form a “disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self”. Her language is very rich and confused me a lot at times. I don’t think I really am entirely understanding her message, other than the message to stretch boundaries. However, I really liked the mixture of elit and feminism and hope to read more in this class! ‘My Body’ by Shelley Jackson was definitely my ...

I really enjoy exploring My Body by Shelley Jackson. I have discussed this before but I feel like every time I read more of it, I find a part I missed before. I found it interesting how she not only explores her relationship with her own body, but she talks about how she viewed other peoples bodies and drawing bodies. She discusses how she would watch and wonder why women's hips sway when they walk and she would draw different parts of the body. I think this also highlights how much the world around us influences our perception of ourselves. Besides that, this piece is always fun to explore. I love the layout and how you can get lost in the story. There are so many links that you never really run out of things to read and find out. That being said, I would love for their to be a button that takes you back to the home page because clicking the back button gets old after a while!  I really liked exploring Entre Ville by J.R. Carpenter. I enjoyed exploring a place through the eyes, ea...

Donna Haraway the author of "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist feminism in the 1980s" wrote a convoluted essay on modernism, nature, science, technology, and women. Haraway imagines a world without gender which is not something that people might want or could ever do. She discusses how modern technology can be genderless. Haraway’s' use of cyborgs is a typical postmodern strategy. For example, on page 66 of the manifesto Haraway discusses the point of the essay in this quote, "The essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" even with this statement I still failed to completely understand the manifesto. It is difficult to understand what her point of view is. Personally, I had a hard time keeping up with the many topics she discussed and determining what her exact end point was.  One of the hypertexts that really stood out to me was the Entre Ville by J. R. Carpenter. It...

  My Body a Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson felt like a very powerful and personal piece that explores the relationship between the human identity and the body. It is more of a memoir style hypertext where you get to select different images of the author's body and read mediations associated with each of her body parts. I previously brought Shelley Jackson's other work Patchwork Girl to the table so it was interesting to get to read another piece of work by her. They both have a similar concept of exploring the body but My Body a Wunderkammer felt more personal and relatable as it is a semi autobiographical piece. I thought this was such a beautiful piece to read and I applaud Jackson for being able to create a piece like this one. I also found Entre Ville to be a very enjoyable and creative piece to read. I loved how J.R Carpenter created an interactive neighborhood combining movie clips, drawings, photographs, and audio to make you feel like you really are in a bustling n...

  Hypertext Week Two: I found J.R. Carpenter’s Entre Ville extremely beautiful and interesting to explore. I love the videos embedded within, especially those accompanied by poetry. I also find the arrows that allow you to scroll down to be very satisfying and they add to the flow of the speech. The writing encapsulates beautiful imagery and diction to draw the reader in and is surrounded by so many other elements. The dog image, which I believe is maybe smoking, is very funny. I like that the page also has a lot of blank space which allows you the focus on each separate thing without being overwhelmed by the whole. The images that come up when you hover over the windows and doors are very aesthetically pleasing and I think this is one of my favorite pieces of hypertext that I have seen. The hypertext work Afternoon was very strange in my opinion. I was very confused while reading it and it also shocked me at many points. It made just enough sense that it had me questioning wh...

     In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Donna Haraway mentions that the cyborg may change the way people view gender. This is particularly interesting because, if you look at current technology, a gender is often given to it. I don’t really disagree with Haraway entirely, but I think that we might have a harder time completely leaving the idea of gender than she assumes. (Then again, I didn’t get to finish the reading, so she might have talked about this more and I missed it.) My reading of Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story was interesting in that I could start to pick up on the plot, however fragmentary it seemed. From what I gather, the story is about a man who saw his ex-wife and son die in a car crash, after having learned that his ex-wife was sleeping with a friend of his. What was most compelling to me was the almost violent nature of this friend, who pretends to hit animals while driving and insinuates that he h...

In a way, electronic literature owes it's foundation to hypertext fiction, as it was the first genre of E-lit to really take flight. Post modernism was also an incredibly influential factor in the birth of hypertext fiction, as humans were truly starting to explore theory and literacy combined. Hypertext fiction was and still is monumental, but it is seldom used today in novel creations. I found it interesting that hypertext fiction has translated heavily into aspects of E-lit in todays society, such as 3D interactive creations and apps we can download on our devices. One concept from this chapter that stood out to me especially was that "hypertext is in the strange situation of being the genre that has been most written about in the field, while simultaneously the genre least actively pursued by writers in recent years" (Rettberg, 86). I found this so surprising, but when I started to think about it, we seldom see hypertext fiction from the most recent decade at all. It ...

  Chapter three focused on the rise of hypertext “during the late 1980s and early 1990s,” (Rettberg, 147) and how it became so substantial in the electronic literature community. As availability to the internet was becoming more widespread, the possibility for hypertext to be created and seen became possible and much more accessible for a larger audience of readers. Due to this, hypertext became a large and very influential part of digital literature itself, and laid out basic methods for other genres to build off of and develop ideas from. It became such an entertaining and while enjoying a storyline that you get to choose. This for of digital literature is also beneficial in gathering a lot of information, which turned hypertext into something more formal over time. Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” was one of the first stories that were used as a basic idea for hypertext. Borges’ short story allowed for alternative endings, depending on the route the reader wan...

 Hypertext fiction is a form of digital literature with its origins in the late 80s and 90s. It has strong influences from modernism and post modernism as its main characteristic is non-linearity and creating meaning through association. Before actual hyper texts were created, the idea behind them was articulated in a story called "The Garden of Forking Paths," written by Jorge Borges in 1941. In his story, a character writes a novel in which all possible outcomes occur simultaneously creating even more possible outcomes. This concept is repeated infinitely. This abandonment of linearity helps define hypertext fiction. In the late 90s, Michael Joyce created afternoon, a story, in which each hypertext link goes to a different place in the story.      Hypertext of the Unknown (unknownhypertext.com) The hypertext fiction I chose was called The Unknown. This is a hypertext novel in which the hypertext itself is a promotional stunt for a novel. The fictional creators of t...

  Hypertext is fundamentally a text technology with an approach to organize, structure, and share information. It is not only producing language for an audience to enjoy, but also creating links between different materials. Theodore Holm Nelson first introduced the term “hypertext” to mean “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” It suggests extensibility – a web of interconnected documents. Many different hypertext systems were born after this including the most important contemporary hypertext system, the World Wide Web. While there are many forms of hypertext nonfiction and poetry, most works are hypertext fiction. Common characteristics of hypertext fiction include link and node structure, fragmented text, associative logic, alternative narrative structures, complications of character development and chronology, spatialized texts, intertextuality, pastiche and collage, and...

In Chapter Three of Scott Rettberg's Electronic Literature , the concept of hypertext fiction was introduced. While combinatory poetry was considered by many scholars to be one of the oldest forms of electronic literature, hypertext fiction is one of the first forms of electronic literature to acquire critical interest during the late '80s into the early '90s. As the genre of hypertext fiction began to come into fruition as a broad concept, writers of this genre were considered to be, "writing stories designed as interlinked fragments of text, with multiple possible reading sequences to be navigated through the reader's selection of links between them" (Rettberg 54). The importance of hypertext fiction is quite immense when examining the field of electronic literature, as the critical interest generated for the genre crafted the study of electronic literature in the way that it has evolved into. Rettberg describes this importance in the chapter, saying, ...