Interactive Fiction

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was one of the most popular home computers in British history, selling over five million units in its 1980s heyday. Amongst the thousands of games released for the Spectrum during its lifetime, the text adventure game was to emerge as one of the most significant genres on the system.
The Spectrum of Adventure chronicles the evolution of the text adventure on the ZX Spectrum, exploring the work of landmark software houses such as Melbourne House Software, Level 9 Computing, Delta 4 Software, the CRL Group, Magnetic Scrolls, and many others besides.
Covering one hundred individual games in all, this book celebrates the Spectrum’s thriving interactive fiction scene of the eighties, chronicling the achievements of major publishers as well as independent developers from the machine’s launch in 1982 until the end of the decade in 1989.

This paper surveys the ontological and aesthetic character of puzzles in worlds with storytelling potential, storiable worlds (potential storyworlds). These puzzles are termed fiction puzzles. The focus is on the fiction puzzles of videogames, which are accommodated to John Dewey’s pragmatist framework of aesthetics to be examined as art products capable of producing aesthetic experiences. This leads to an establishing of analytical criteria for estimating the value of fiction puzzles in the pragmatist framework of aesthetics.

The ability of computers to produce ‘presence’ – the visceral feeling of actually ‘being there’ – is typically associated with the presentation of intensive graphical effects. But studies on presence indicate that what players are able to ‘do’ in fact contributes more to their sense of presence than graphical realism. Keeping this in mind, I explore possibilities for 'performing’ presence in digital narratives, particularly through the non-graphical digital medium of interactive fiction. I draw from critical theorists (Barthes, Iser and especially Gumbrecht) as well as theorists of new media (Aarseth, Ryan, Montfort) to frame an investigation into two major aspects of presence production in interactive fiction, namely: 1) how interactive fiction generates presence through the exclusive use of verbal signifiers rather than graphical images, and 2) how it allows users to generate presence themselves through their own actions. I conclude by examining three works of interactive fiction: Adventure, All Roads and Luminous Horizon (Crowther and Woods 1975–6; Ingold 2006; O’Brian 2004).

Why is it that most fictions present one and only one ending, rather than multiple ones? Fictions presenting multiple endings are possible, because a few exist; but they are very rare, and this calls for an explanation. We argue that such an explanation is likely to shed light on our engagement with fictions, for fictions having one and only one ending seem to be ubiquitous. After dismissing the most obvious explanations for this phenomenon, we compare the scarcity of multiple endings in traditional kinds of fiction to their profusion in the case of interactive fictions. This contrast poses a challenge to accounts of our engagement with fictions in terms of games of make-believe. We conclude that solving this puzzle is likely to improve our philosophical understanding of fictions.

Współcześnie gry komputerowe doczekały się wielu naukowych omówień i stanowią przedmiot licznych akademickich dociekań i studiów – powstała wszak ludologia, odrębna gałąź wiedzy zajmująca się badaniem ich roli i funkcji, jakie spełniają we współczesnej kulturze – jednak mimo tak bogatej literatury przedmiotu same gry zwane „paragrafowymi” nie są częstym tematem humanistycznej refleksji. Artykuły im poświęcone pojawiają się dość rzadko, głównie w języku angielskim , toteż niniejsza praca jest próbą wypełnienia luki, nie pretendującej bynajmniej do ujęcia monograficznego (na co rzecz jasna brak miejsca), lecz koncentrującej się na jednym z istotniejszych aspektów – odrodzeniem zainteresowania tą popularną niegdyś formą rozrywki, na co niewątpliwy wpływ ma dokonujący się współcześnie postęp technologiczny i powszechny dostęp do elektronicznych urządzeń przenośnych typu „smartfon”, „tablet”, czytnik książek elektronicznych czy przenośna konsola do gier.

En el presente artículo se ofrece un acercamiento a varias de las principales manifestaciones ciberliterarias que han florecido en Iberoamérica en los últimos cuarenta años (1976-2016). Se comienza con una aproximación preliminar al concepto de “ciberliteratura” con el propósito de demarcar su significación y denotar sus alcances. Luego, se pasa a discutir el concepto de “género literario,” y las problemáticas asociadas con el empleo de dicho término en un entorno mediático crecientemente convergente y tendiente a facilitar la creación de textualidades y formas híbridas de expresión. Finalmente, se ofrece un panorama y una periodización de los principales géneros ciberliterarios que han emergido desde mediados de los años setenta, deteniéndose a perfilar las características esenciales de cada uno, así como sus impactos y alcances, con un enfoque particular en aquellos autores y obras que se inscriben dentro del contexto latinoamericano y español.

Adventure games emerged as a new form of digital games in the late 1970s, via the release of the first adventure game, Adventure. Originally text-only in representation, and using the parser to guide the player character, adventure games soon adapted graphics and a point-and-click user interface, features that made them more accessible and greatly successful in the 1990s. Before the end of the 20th century, however, adventure games lost their position in the market, becoming a niche genre of digital games. One reason behind people losing interest in adventure games is agreed as the abundance of designer puzzles, where the connection between the puzzles of adventure games and their solutions is left unclear to the player. This problem emerged from the initial success of adventure games, which led to a multiplicity of adventure games of varying quality.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the puzzles of adventure games. Starting with the presumption that puzzles are at the core of adventure games, studying them can provide insight on adventure games as a whole. The research goal of this study is to find out ways in which adventure game puzzles are pleasurable for the player to solve. I approach this goal by analyzing the puzzles of a point-and-click adventure game Day of the Tentacle, using a close reading method. To aid in my close reading, I am going to form an analytical lens out of the theory about the nature of insight thinking, in order to highlight the pleasurable moments of puzzle-solving in Day of the Tentacle.

As a result of my close reading, I present three ways in which adventure game puzzles provide pleasure to the player: 1) puzzles are pleasurable works of art in themselves, 2) solving a puzzle through insight thinking, and 3) progression made in the story of the game by solving puzzles. These three ways emerge from the existing research, and I propose that they are also present in Day of the Tentacle. I suggest that these results can be used as a basis for a criteria to aid in evaluating and designing adventure game puzzles.

"Cybercultural Ecologies examines the interpenetrating relationships between nature, virtuality, and narrative. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on texts (literary, cinematic, and new media) which depict varying conceptions of technology, virtuality, and their effects. Understanding these effects is ecologically crucial, because technovirtual interfaces profoundly alter one’s experience of nature, corporeality, and relationships. Even the most basic sense of what counts as an environment in the first place depends on the interfaces one uses.

The Introduction examines the ambiguities surrounding the terms of its own investigation: cyberculture, ecology, interface, nature, virtuality. Drawing from Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, it responds to the “interface anxiety” evinced by environmental writers and ecocritics by arguing that nostalgia for an “authentic,” supplement-free mode of “contact” is itself a pastoral fiction.

Chapter I examines virtuality’s relationship with nature in both virtual reality and mixed reality paradigms, beginning with nineteenth-century decadence and aestheticism — Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890)—before moving to Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), and Vinge’s Synthetic Serendipity (2004).

Chapter II questions the attempt to evade virtuality and machinery in order to reclaim “unmediated contact” through the “natural” body in Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

Chapter III looks at the liberation offered by the virtual body, as well as its liabilities, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

Chapter IV scrutinizes the authenticity of virtual relationships in Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel (1940) and Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005).

Chapter V inquires into how a virtual sense of place is evoked in Dickens’ mid-nineteenth century railway sketches and in 21st-century digital interactive narratives.

The Conclusion examines the film Avatar (2009) and explores the possibilities (and problems) that arise in attempting to make audiences “see” with ecological vision through the lenses of virtuality."

"This article explores the narrative paradox and how we can design interactive fictions where actions and narrations can contribute for a more meaningful experience within an interactive setting. In this paper we argue that pervasive and alternate reality games (ARGs) and blogs, where participants can cooperate and compete in the real application of tactics and strategies as they play the game online and offline, can contribute to create a more engaging environment where players are able to build their own stories.
Player made content and hyperfiction are useful tools to better
understand alternate reality games and blogs. The analysis of
playable fiction can contribute to recombine action and narration
in digital ecologies and we may consider that implosive stories, in
which everything happens simultaneously, present in digital
spaces allow us to better understand the problem of interactive
environments that use mixed technologies. We consider that
ARGs are inclusive spaces where gamers can learn how to deal
with different media, different communities and different genders.
In this mix media spaces gamers can play with action and
narrative in order to design their own fictions and stories in real
time. In this article we consider some ARGs, I’m Trying to
Believe, I Love Bees, Uncle Roy All Around You, among others, in
order to argue that this persistent games can be useful to better
understand the narrative paradox."

How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? By asking this question, Colin Radford introduced the paradox of fiction, or the problem that we are often emotionally moved by characters and events which we know don’t really exist (1975). A puzzling element of these emotions that always resurfaced within discussions on the paradox is the fact that, although these emotions feel real to the people who have them, their difference from ›real‹ emotions is that they cannot motivate us to perform any actions. The idea that actions towards fictional particulars are impossible still underlies recent work within the philosophy of fiction (cf. Matravers 2014, 26 sqq.; Friend 2017, 220; Stock 2017, 168). In the past decennia, however, the medium of interactive fiction has challenged this crystallized idea. Videogames, especially augmented and virtual reality games, offer us agency in their fictional worlds: players of computer games can interact with fictional objects, save characters that are invented, and kill monsters that are clearly non-existent within worlds that are mere representations on a screen. In a parallel to Radford’s original question, we might ask: how can we be moved to shoot zombies, when we know they aren’t real? The purpose of this article is to examine the new paradox of interactive fiction, which questions how we can be moved to act on objects we know to be fictional, its possible solutions, and its connection to the traditional paradox of fictional emotions.

Videogames differ from traditional fictional media in that they let their appreciators enter their fictional worlds in the guise of a fictional proxy, and grant their players agency within this world. As interactive fictions, videogames reveal new elements of the relationship between fiction, emotions, and actions that have been previously neglected because of the focus on non-interactive fiction such as literature, theatre, and film. They show us that fictional objects can not only cause actions, but can also be the intentional object of these actions. Moreover, they show us that emotions towards fictions can motivate us to act, and that conversely, the possibility of undertaking actions within the fictional world makes a wider array of emotions towards fictional objects possible. Since the player is involved in the fictional world and responsible for his actions therein, self-reflexive emotions such as guilt and shame are common reactions to the interactive fiction experience. As such, videogames point out a very close connection between emotions and actions towards fictions and introduce the paradox of interactive fiction: a paradox of fictional actions.

This paradox of fictional actions that is connected to our experiences of interactive fiction consists of three premises that cannot be true at the same time, as this would result in a contradiction:

1. Players act on videogame objects.

2. Videogame objects are fictional.

3. It is impossible to act on fictional objects.

 
The first premise seems to be obviously true: gamers manipulate game objects when playing. The second one is true for at least some videogame objects we act upon, such as zombies. The third premise is a consequence of the ontological gap between the real world and fictional worlds. So which one needs to be rejected?

Although the paradox of interactive fiction is never discussed as such within videogame philosophy, there seem to be two strategies at hand to solve this paradox, both of which are examined in this article. The first strategy is to deny that the game objects we can act on are fictional at all. Espen Aarseth, for example, argues that they are virtual objects (cf. 2007), while other philosophers argue that players interact with real, computer-generated graphical representations (cf. Juul 2005; Sageng 2012). However, Aarseth’s concept of the virtual seems to be ad hoc and unhelpful, and describing videogame objects and characters as real, computer-generated graphical representations does not account for the emotional way in which we often relate to them. The second solution is based on Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory, and, similar to Walton’s solution to the original paradox of fictional emotions, says that the actions we perform towards fictional game objects are not real actions, but fictional actions. A Waltonian description of fictional actions can explain our paradoxical actions on fictional objects in videogames, although it does raise questions about the validity of Walton’s concept of quasi-emotions. Indeed, the way players’ emotions can motivate them to act in a certain manner seems to be a strong argument against the concept of quasi-emotions, which Walton introduced to explain the alleged non-motivationality of emotions towards fiction (cf. 1990, 201 sq.).

Although both strategies to solve the paradox of interactive fiction might ultimately not be entirely satisfactory, the presentation of these strategies in this paper not only introduces a starting point for discussing this paradox, but also usefully supplements and clarifies existing discussions on the paradoxical emotions we feel towards fictions. I argue that if we wish to solve the paradox of actions towards (interactive) fiction, we should treat it in close conjunction with the traditional paradox of emotional responses to fiction.

Playing Hamlet is different from reading Hamlet. To play Hamlet—whether an interactive book, or any of a host of computer games—is to be promised choice. Yet, as more than thirty years of Hamlet video games demonstrate, such freedom evaporates in practice: players choose among arbitrary moves, shaped by gameplay’s own unpredictable structures of constraint. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that to play Hamlet is to depart from Hamlet, to leave behind plot, character, language, and theme and head south into a murkier territory of adaptation, remediation, and transformation.

Inviting reflection about “play,” these Hamlet games return us to a metaphor that runs throughout both their source text and literary studies generally. In critical use, the word often elides its theatrical sense with broader imaginative pleasures (the “play” of meanings, the imagination, or interpretation). Yet Hamlet’s text puts it under different denotative strain, entwining three ostensibly ludic practices (drama, music, and fencing) in relations of power and control.  The relations that Hamlet considers under the sign of “play”—genre, the ludic, and relations of power—have become central to thinking about how we use Shakespeare and the Shakespeare network, posing questions of the relationship between interpretive freedom and the vast structures of capital, knowledge, and privilege that limit and shape such freedoms.

Contemplating playing Hamlet, this essay imagines a playful criticism that takes flight from both Hamlet games and a larger conversation in game studies about adaptation, freedom, and choice. What might it mean to think of the play of reading and of interpretation not as wholly unconstrained, but rather as akin to other types of play in their tension between freedom and rule? In their very invitation to leave Elsinore, to get lost in paratextual forests and wrestle with nonShakespearean cruces, these games materialize pressing questions shared between game studies and Shakespeare studies.

In his 2008 TV special The System, illusionist Derren Brown performs a trick in which he flips a coin and achieves ten consecutive heads. This astonishing feat conjures various possibilities in the mind of the viewer. Is he palming the coin somehow, changing unwanted tails to heads with sleight of hand? Does he switch out the coin as soon as the trick has begun, substituting it for a double-headed fake? Is he using camera trickery, making multiple attempts look like a single, unedited shot? The multiplicity of possible solutions, and the consideration of said possible solutions, contributes to the viewer’s enjoyment. Like Reader Response theorist Norman Holland, I take the view that “literature is an experience and, further, an experience not discontinuous with other experiences”. (qtd. in Iser 39) Texts in general, and interactive fictions in particular have various parallels with this coin-tossing trick, in that the multitude of virtual outcomes they suggest are actually illusory (cf. Newman NP; Ensslin 81), while the reality is magical in its simplicity.

La identificación entre el jugador y el avatar está en el centro de numerosas reflexiones académicas, especialmente la función de este último como encarnación del primero (Klevjer, 2006). Entre otros, Alfonso Cuadrado (2008) analiza los sujetos de la serie Los Sims (Maxis, The Sims studio, 2000-2018) como juguetes virtuales, Daniel Vella (2015) ha teorizado sobre la diferencia entre «sujeto lúdico» y «yo lúdico» y Fernández-Vara (2008) estudia el juego como una performance basada en la restauración de comportamiento. Este artículo problematiza esta relación a partir de estas aproximaciones analíticas, añadiendo la teoría de la avataridad (Navarro-Remesal, 2016) y de la existencia de un jugador implícito en el diseño de todo juego (Aarseth, 2007), y se centra en casos límite que difuminan la concepción tradicional de avatar.

Una primera aproximación a producciones comerciales muestra que las avataridades límite no son excepcionales. Podemos encontrar juegos en los que el jugador controla a fantasmas sin cuerpo, como Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (Capcom, 2010), otros en los que cada vida se asocia a un individuo dentro de un colectivo, como Aliens: Infestation (WayForward, 2011), Reigns: Her Majesty (Nerial, 2017) o ZombiU (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2012) o en los que el avatar pierde su identidad, como Inside (Playdead, 2016). Recientemente, dos ejemplos han llevado esta avataridad expandida a versiones extremas: mientras que en Everything (David O’Reilly, 2017), el jugador puede tomar el control de todos los componentes del mundo y acceder a sus pensamientos, en Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo EPD, 2017) el jugador puede usar una habilidad nueva de su protagonista para poseer a diferentes sujetos.

La ruptura de la equiparación entre jugador y personaje, ya sea mediante sustracción o adición, crea modelos de encarnación alternativa que nos hacen cuestionar los límites del avatar y contemplar una avataridad que abarca más elementos del mundo y el sistema. Hablamos así de estrategias de uno en muchos (un jugador controla a múltiples personajes), uno en nada (el jugador controla a seres incorpóreos o directamente a ausencias) y uno en todo (el jugador asume el control de elementos del mundo más allá de un avatar concreto), e incluso de giros conceptuales todavía más complejos como el muchos en uno o el nada en todo de los zero-player games. Así, la avataridad se difumina y reparte en todo el mundo videolúdico, haciendo que el jugador se identifique (como operador, espectador, actor y cómplice) con elementos que están más allá del avatar, y que éste no se limite a un único objeto y se revele como una serie de procesos conectados.

En total se presentan en este artículo 20 tipos de estrategias de avataridad expandida, aunque no pretende ser una tipología cerrada de categorías abstractas y normativas sino un repaso a usos prácticos en ejemplos concretos, atendiendo a su aportación a la construcción de significado implícita en el diseño del juego.

This paper establishes a hermeneutic method for interpreting videogames. The method is termed double hermeneutic because of the player’s ability to affect the interpreted information. The double hermeneutic differs between games and game types, forming different double hermeneutic circles (DHCs) that players must access in order to experience games according to their designs. The paper bases its argument on the adventure game and suggests that the traditional point-and-click interface and 2D representation support the adventure game hermeneutic, which functions in synergy with the form’s aesthetic discourse.

This special issue of Reconstruction is one of its largest because the roster was actually put together in the hopes of producing a printed, spin-off volume. That never happened, but we are all better for it since the contributors held firm. As such you'll find all manner of papers (19 of them) on all sorts of games (too many to name). The best thing to do is to list the sub-headings and let readers move from there: a) Evolutions/Migrations, b) Social Bodies, c) Regimes of Spectatorship, d) Ethics, Ideology and Morality.

If, as this book contends, gothic texts tend towards the “mashing up” of elements from previous cultural texts, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe double down on this tendency. In the entry for Poe in The Handbook of the Gothic Benjamin Fisher (2009, p.67) notes that the author’s earliest reviewers decried his fiction as existing in a “passé mode”, suggesting we might consider his work as a pastiche of a mode that already tended towards pastiche. In apparent contradiction to its focus upon “unity of effect”, Marshall Brown (2005, p.20) uses Poe’s 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ to evidence the author’s principal method of creation as being one of blending heterogeneous elements, an approach which he also locates in work by Henry James and Mary Shelley.

Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first “classic novel” to be adapted into hypertext – mashed up with by L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) by Shelley Jackson using Eastgate System’s hypertext creation software ‘Storyspace’ and released as Patchwork Girl in 1995. Hypertext is a form of electronic literature navigated by the reader via links between nodes. As such it possesses a (sometimes limited) degree of interaction and tends towards the non-linear and associative, rather than purely sequential. Poe’s self-reflexivity, use of pastiche, and the lack of closure to many of his stories, make them uniquely suited to the form of hypertext and could, it will be argued, be considered proto-hypertext themselves.

Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe Adventure was submitted to the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in October 2016. This hypertext game, produced with the software Twine, attempted to adapt, truncate and mash together over sixty of Poe’s short stories into a single branching hypertext form. As such, while large portions of the game consist of sections of pastiches written by the present author, Evermore must be considered partially authored by Poe himself, from whose writings the majority of the game was directly adapted.

Michael Joyce (1996) and Astrid Ensslin (2007) take the position that hypertexts like Evermore are only truly authored in the process of their reading. The reader of hypertext is not a full participant in what they read – as per a player of videogames – but neither are they a completely passive reader. Rather, they are closer to a reader-writer, with a hand in shaping the narrative which they explore often intuitively and semi-randomly. Recent tools for authoring hypertext, such as Twine, emphasize the visual structure of hypertext. As such, the experience of making such interactive fiction becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from the experience of consuming it. If the reader of hypertext is a reader-writer, then the creator of hypertext is a writer-reader.

From this critical position, a post-mortem of Evermore’s production elucidates the hypertextual potentialities within Poe’s own work, which exhibits aspects of the mash-up even before being further mashed-up by the writer(s) and reader(s) of the game.

Le lien entre théorie et réalité biologique est parfois négligé dans l’étude de divers phénomènes sociaux. Dans cette optique, nous nous pencherons sur le sujet des fictions interactives et plus particulièrement de l’immersion, terme iconique, sibyllin et polémique s’il en est. Sans prétention, nous tenterons de poser les bases d’une vision de cette immersion en rapport avec ce qu’il peut se passer dans nos cerveaux.

The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.

This paper describes the process and problems that had to be faced during the elaboration of a digital interactive narrative for the Instory project (http://img. di. fct. unl. pt/InStory/) implanted in «Quinta da Regaleira», Sintra, Portugal, and classified as World Heritage by Unesco. It also explores some of the practical and theoretical issues in what regards the literary terminology and strategies involved. Keywords. interactive narrative; mobile devices; cultural heritage; narratology;

What do players of videogames mean when they say they want to shoot zombies? Surely, they know that the zombies are not real, and that they cannot really shoot them, but only control a fictional character who does so. Some philosophers of fiction argue that we need the concept of imaginative desires (or 'i-desires') to explain situations in which people feel desires towards fictional characters or desires that motivate pretend actions. Others claim that we can explain these situations without complicating human psychology with a novel mental state. Within their debates, however, these scholars exclusively focus on non-interactive fictions and children's games of make-believe. In this paper, I argue that our experience of immersive, interactive fictions like videogames gives us cause to reappraise the concept of imaginative desires. Moreover, I describe how i-desires are a useful conceptual tool within videogame development, and can shed new light on apparently immoral in-game actions.

This paper summarizes the novel literary concepts that has risen with technology and outlines the basic principles that construct the core of interactive narratives, cybertexts and hypertexts. It is aimed to determine the factors that dissociates and transmutes printed narratives and interactive narratives into completely different breeds. The mutations in textuality, linearity, temporal orders, anachronism and narrative construction of now-vs-bygones are debated. As a result a reference of comparisons and analogies are formed to elucidate why interactive narratives and printed narratives are pilgrims of their own seperate yet concurrent paths.

In this article, we consider the ways student writers perceive the challenges involved in writing interactive fiction (IF) as creative writing and how they perceive the efficacy of IF as a tool for persuasion. We contend that approaching creative writing through serious IF creates interconnection among creative writing craft, performing research, and working with interface/code. Our students’ experiences demonstrate that engaging with the hypertextual interface enhanced their ability to purposefully redeploy and reflect on creative writing techniques and to engage players through procedural rhetoric.

La presente investigación propone configurar una ficción interactiva bajo el formato de aventura conversacional como videojuego de exploración monousuario, a través del cual replantear los métodos de aproximación al concepto de archivo. Este concepto está vinculado a las imágenes de un territorio y a los testimonios que pueden transmitir la experiencia vivida, identificando La Canyada (Alicante) como caso de estudio y partiendo de un trabajo previo de recopilación y digitalización del material con el que se va a tratar.
A día de hoy existe un vacío respecto a la divulgación de una parte de la memoria visual de algunos municipios. Es imprescindible un trabajo que recopile y actualice este universo de imágenes personales que se desarrollan en el ámbito de la esfera pública, desde la realidad de los individuos y las historias personales, intentando apelar a saberes de lo cotidiano. Espacios de la vida cotidiana referentes a las "artes de hacer" que expone De Certeau en los dos volúmenes de La invención de lo cotidiano (Certeau 2007; Certeau, Pierre, y Giard 2010).
El presente artículo expone la planificación del proyecto en el campo de las estructuras narrativas abiertas en el arte multimedia. Se analizarán referentes contextuales que usen el archivo como paradigma desde la investigación de Aby Warburg sobre el método heurístico Atlas Mnemosyne (1924-1929). Atenderemos a la tesis sobre la "arqueología del saber" formulada por Foucault y revisitada por Didi-Huberman haciendo mención nuevamente al Atlas Mnemosyne como "arqueología de lo visual", prestando especial interés a las nociones de montaje y de distanciamiento. Se introducirán los conceptos de espacio y tiempo en la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze, así como sus disertaciones en el campo de las estructuras rizomáticas cuyo modelo se aplica a muchas de las obras desarrolladas con posterioridad por diferentes artistas visuales.

This paper describes the problems that had to be faced during the elaboration of an interactive narrative for the Instory project (http://img. di. fct. unl. pt/InStory/) directed by Prof. Nuno Correia. The project had the goal of defining and implementing a platform for mobile and cinematic storytelling, information access, and gaming activities, in Quinta da Regaleira (World Heritage) in Sintra, Portugal.

This paper describes the problems that had to be faced during the elaboration of an interactive narrative for the Instory project (http://img. di. fct. unl. pt/InStory/) directed by Prof. Nuno Correia. The project had the goal of defining and implementing a platform for mobile and cinematic storytelling, information access, and gaming activities, in Quinta da Regaleira (World Heritage) in Sintra, Portugal. The system is driven and validated by a set of fictional threads that are centred on the exploration of physical spaces (the real world, in ...

When describing players’ actions in videogame playing, we often use sentences that seem to say that a player performs her action within a fictional world. But it seems to be impossible for a real agent to act in a fictional location. This is puzzling. This paper's goal is to analyze such sentences and solve this ontological puzzle.
There are some possible answers. Immersionism takes the sentences as expressing the players’ experiences of immersion. Virtualism assumes that they refer to players’ actions within not fictional but virtual worlds. Fictionalism claims that they are not true but fictionally true. Realism says that allegedly fictional actions are really real. I show that all of these are far from satisfactory. More sophisticated theories like Grant Tavinor’s interactive fiction theory and John Sageng’s reference shift theory also have some crucial flaws.
My own institutionalism takes a realist position and aims to fill the shortage. My view is this: Actions in videogames are as real as institutional facts. They are specified by graphical symbols, and these symbols are individuated by their fictional contents. Because of this, we use vocabularies originally for fictional contents to describe actions specified by on-screen symbols that represent the fictional contents.

Keywords: gameplay, immersion, interactive fiction, make-believe, philosophy of action

The concept of learning spaces has moved beyond the walls of the classroom and language learning is now, more than ever, in the hands of the learner. Teachers must accept that their role in the learning process has changed, in many situations, becoming that of facilitator. As facilitators, they should promote the use of learning materials that are motivating, engaging, and useable in both the classroom and in autonomous learning contexts. A valid alternative to traditional language learning materials can be found in digital game-based language learning (DGBLL), which offers a means for all four language skills to be practised in a flexible, highly empowering and engaging way. This chapter proposes and evaluates the use of the text-based video game genre of Interactive Fiction (IF) as an authentic learning material in line with the principles of second language acquisition (SLA). Furthermore, it describes how IF, in addition to creating conditions in which reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills may be practised, can be a particularly useful tool for improving reading for fluency and promoting reading for pleasure.

Throughout the 1980s, thousands of British children were lucky enough to discover a Sinclair ZX Spectrum under their Christmas trees and soon found their eyes opened to a virtual world of wonder. But Santa Claus did more than deliver computers — sometimes he appeared on them, too.
From the author of "The Spectrum of Adventure" and "A Righteously Awesome Eighties Christmas", this book delves into the Spectrum’s extraordinary pantheon of seasonal games: the good, the bad, the surprising, the unabashedly surreal and the occasionally rather tenuous.
From the machine’s formative days in the early eighties right through to the latest independent releases, "A Very Spectrum Christmas" takes a look at what makes a truly memorable festive title for the vintage home microcomputer... as well as unearthing a few games that may have become lost in the mists of Christmas past for good reason.
Fully illustrated with colour screenshots of all the games under discussion, "A Very Spectrum Christmas" is a treasure trove of yuletide software experiences — where eighties nostalgia collides with modern day homebrew innovation with frequently unexpected results.

Game environments are being used in multiple fields to study human behavior. Just as experimental studies of human behavior are affected by their methods, games are affected by the authoring platforms and tools used to make them. We examine how the diversity of a cast of characters made available to students of game design and psychology may have influenced the choices they made when designing short, narrative-based, character-based experiments. Games created by undergraduate and graduate students at two universities were analyzed and found to reflect demographic biases (e.g., race and gender). We discuss the findings in the context of inclusive and critical design, and how the decisions of education researchers, technology designers, and game designers can unintentionally reinforce stereotypes.

In this blog entry on the subject of The Warden Game, published during the "Retro Media" theme week, I describe the circumstances and process surrounding the first-person text adventure game's recovery from the Washington Prison History Archive papers, and its reimagining and reissue as a modern-day Twine interactive fiction.

The medium variously known as ‘interactive fiction’ and ‘text adventure games’ has existed since the mid-1970s (see Montfort 2005 [2003]). Throughout most of its history, it has been produced and consumed within a community of enthusiasts that I have argued to be constituted in a similar manner to what Pierre Bourdieu terms the ‘field of restricted production’ (see eg. Bourdieu 1993a [1983]), in that producers work for no reward but one another’s esteem, with important consequences both for the formal structure of works and for the local production of belief in their value (Bourdieu 1993b [1980]).

This paper reports on an extensive multimethodological analysis of the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb). This interactive website bears superficial similarities with the much larger Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which has usefully been employed in the study of the popular reception of commercial entertainment (Dodds 2006). However, the IFDb can be contrasted with the IMDb in that the latter primarily collates reviews by consumers of products of what Bourdieu terms the ‘field of large scale production’ (Bourdieu 1993a), while the former serves as one of the principal fora for interaction within the community of interactive fiction producer-consumers.

In the study reported here, a snapshot of the IFDb was downloaded for investigation through several forms of exploratory quantitative analysis, including social network analysis, automated and manual content analysis, and some highly innovative forms of corpus linguistic analysis. The aim has been to map the production of value within the field of interactive fiction, both in order to provide points of comparison and contrast with the fields of art and literature and in order to contribute to understanding of interactive fiction as a cultural phenomenon in its own right.

References

Bourdieu, P., 1993a. The field of cultural production, or: the economic world reversed. In The field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. Polity Press, pp. 29-73.
Bourdieu, P., 1993b. The production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods. In The field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 261-293.
Dodds, K., 2006. Popular geopolitics and audience dispositions: James Bond and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(2), pp.116-130.
Montfort, N., 2005. Twisty little passages: an approach to interactive fiction, Cambridge (Mass.) / London: MIT Press.

The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.

Forni D., “YA narrations and transmediality: exploring narrative videogames from canonical storytelling to interactive fiction”, in YA Studies Around the World, Online Conference by YA Studies Association, modalità telematica, 2-6 Novembre 2020.

Perhaps one of the most reassuring features of the codex form is its closed unity. There are a finite number of pages bound together in one arrangement. Such a structure belies all the definitions of unity – of being a totality of parts while existing as singular, complete, continuous, and harmoniously arranged. The codex though has always been a part of a larger media scape amongst pamphlets, magazines, bulletins, scrolls, screens, and waves. Its unity has persisted by standing above the others as material substrate par excellence for collecting long form, linear, verbal communication. While the codex form has absorbed a number of genres, incorporating digital content goes beyond the material abilities of paper alone. The persistent presence of digital platforms that have started an extended transition out of a print culture and into a digital culture has drawn attention to the codex as a highly constructed unity, calling to question how media consumers have internalized the codex just as they no longer consider it the dominant paradigm for textual production.

My presentation will consider the image and function of the book as a mise en abîme of the digital mediascape. At base, the mise-en-abîme is to see what was considered a whole as but a part, a constructed representation, within a larger whole (which itself is but a part). Wholeness is not an absolute but a perspective or illusion constructed by limits of a medium. This uncomfortable moment reveals the unity of the single medium as a representational frame – a mise-en-abyme – within a larger space. In this case, I will consider Kevin Gold’s Choice of Robots, an app novel, and exquisite_code, a collaborative writing installation with print codex output performed at the London E:vent Gallery February 2010. Both offer reverse images of codex to code relationships where Choice of Robots caches code, but aims to replicate the closed state of the print codex and exquisite_code adopts the print codex as output that encapsulates a coded process. One puts the book in the code and the other the code in the book. Thus the codex and digital code unveils each medium’s proposed transparency not through comparison to other media but “by burrowing inside its own assumptions until they become visible to the reader-user” (Hayles and Pressman 200).