Author: anon

Throughout my posts, I made an emphasis on connecting ideas from readings to class discussions or other works. This was a good way of exemplifying topics that we would read about. Another common theme in my posts was how creators in electronic literature distinguish themselves using original ideas. These included rearranging previously written text to create a new work (Sea and Spar Between), confusing Google’s ads (TrackMeNot), and telling a story through a text messaging interface (Bury Me, My Love). All of these vary greatly but are successful in their goals.

The nature of two of my posts did change during the course. These two posts were Originality and Authorship in Regenerated Text and Combinatory Poetics and Personal data privacy and it’s vulnerability. Both of these posts were more rhetorical and theoretical than the other posts. For example, in the ‘originality’ post, I theorized that creators of combinatory poetics were more like “creators rather than authors because of the unintended results that can be produced in pieces.” Then in the ‘personal data’ post, I posed questions regarding if personal data should be private to the individual that it belongs to. I thought these posts both did a good job of doing more than just a simple analysis of the topics at hand. I believe the reason that these posts differed from the others was simply because of my interest and understanding of the topics for those posts. The originality question was one that intrigued me during our class discussions and the personal data question had been discussed in a previous class.

Overall, I thought my posts did a solid job of analyzing topics from readings and making connections with other works that highlighted those topics. When my posts were going to be on something I found interesting, I definitely did a better job of exploring the topic and furthering the discussion.

In “Bury Me, My Love”, the developers make use of a familiar text messaging system which contributes to the immersion of the game. The main way that the game does this is by creating a realistic interface and experience.

Immersion is an idea that is heavily discussed in my game development course. Immersion is what makes the player feel most engaged with the game. For this game, the interface is the most important feature in achieving immersion.

The developers create a messaging system that imitates what all humans know as text messaging. This messaging has everything, the “…” when the other person is typing, emojis, reply and send buttons, “read” symbols, and time stamps. The messages even address autocorrect as seen when Nour tries to send a message saying “don’t be so flippant with me” but flippant autocorrects to flip-flop. These are all features that the general audience can relate to because they experience these same features every day. Additionally, the message grammar is closely related to that which the general audience is used to using. For example, texts are informal, short, and longer messages are separated into multiple messages. Also, the overall interface of the messaging app looks just like an android/iOS one. Lastly, giving the player the option to sometimes choose what messages to send to Nour contributes to the immersion of the game.

All of these features of the messaging system make the player feel more engaged and immersed in the game. This is due to how closely related the game’s interface is to what the player is used to. The messages imitating what real-world texts look like makes the experience that much more realistic and keeps the reader engaged because they feel like they are Majd.

The modern internet has created ways of sharing ideas and works for people around the world. Such an effect seems extremely advantageous; however, it can be taken advantage of. When reading Chapter 6 of Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg, I immediately began to think of a documentary that my class watched in Writing 101 last semester. This documentary was The Great Hack and focused on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal that derived from the 2016 election. Basically, Cambridge Analytica gathered large amounts of personal data to target users in a personal manner to affect the US and UK elections. This scandal rose the question about who should have access to and ownership of personal data. Should the data created by users on the Internet be private and not available for sell? Many of the works that Rettberg discusses in Chapter 6 highlight how giant corporations take advantage of personal data for their own personal gain. For example, TrackMeNot by Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum tries to disrupt this tactic by Google by confusing Google’s ad suggestions based on personal data. This is done by sending random search queries which affected what Google would advertise to you. Ads are just one of the ways that corporations and other entities use personal data. It can be used in disinformation campaigns to target social media users who are more susceptible to believe such false narratives. Due to the negatives that can come from personal data being released to entities with bad intentions, more needs to be done to protect one’s personal data rights. The question is how would this be done, through legislation? I ask this because it is doubtful that the corporations taking advantage of the data would enforce such protections without legislation.

My regenerative text is a Harry Potter murder mystery. The reader’s character finds the dead body of a heroic character from the HP universe and find’s clues leading to who committed the murder. They go on a journey to find and confront the murderer.

In Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg, regenerated and mutated existing texts are discussed by Rettberg (Rettberg 49). He highlights Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between. This piece is made up of words exclusively from poems of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Since this piece is created from words that were used in specific texts, it raises the question, is Montfort’s piece completely original. Additionally, are the makers of combinatory poetics considered authors?

The originality question is one I believe is easy to answer. Due to Sea and Spar Between rearranging the words from the previously existing texts into original structures, the piece is original. It is not like the creators of the piece copied long strings of the text together to copy the original texts’ intentions. Thus, the intention of the authors is different than that of the creators of Sea and Spar Between.

Authorship relating to the creation of combinatory poetics is an issue we have discussed in class. I think the authorship question comes down to intention, just like for originality. In combinatory poetics, the resulting pieces usually have so many varying permutations that the creator cannot intend for all of them to be a specific way. This is an issue that occurs with bots. For example, Dr. Sample made one of the bots that were shown in class on Friday. One of the issues with the bot was that it produced unintended outputs such as offensive language. This is not an issue an “author” runs into. Everything an author intends for a piece to be is what is produced in the final product. Pieces that are authored are static whereas combinatory poetics are dynamic. Therefore, I believe people who develop combinatory poetics should be regarded more so as creators rather than authors because of the unintended results that can be produced in pieces.

Twine games are a step above hypertext and interactive fiction we’ve seen so far this semester, in my opinion. There are multiple reasons for this.

The first of which being that Twine games seem to build off the structure and features that are found in hypertext and IF. For example, in 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald’s (Corfman 2016), the user has direct choices that can be made. Unlike in IF, there is not as much failure involved because all of the user’s choices are seen on the screen instead of hidden in the code of the game. Like we discussed in class on Friday, this means there won’t be as much frustration for the user. It also means the learning curve isn’t as great as it is in most IF like Zork (1977). Thus, entry into Twine games is much easier for new users.

In addition to new users who play the games, Twine allows new developers to easily create their own games. Due to this, a writer who has little knowledge in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS can still create hypertext like games without losing out on any features that are found in hypertext.

Furthermore, the stories created in Twine games, at least 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald’s and My Father’s Long, Long Legs (Lutz 2015), flow much better than the complex narrative paths that are found in IF like The Baron (Gijsbers 2006). In The Baron, the narrative can be hard to follow because of the time it takes to find the right path. This relates to the easier entry previously mentioned. Users do not have to be familiar with the literary structure like that found in parsed-based text.

These reasons show that Twine has many benefits and games created with it expand upon previous hypertext and IF.

In Chapter 3 of Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg, he discusses the history of hypertext fiction and the features of it. These features described by Rettberg were multilinearity, metafiction, reflexivity, and fragmentation. Such features are still used in modern electronic literature. When Rettberg was describing the features of hypertext, I immediately made parallels to examples we have discussed in class. Some of those we have discussed are metafiction due to their focus on narrative structure rather than normal literary subjects such as characters, plots, or themes. This is exemplified by Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World. In this piece of electronic literature, because of the limited time to go through it, the main aspect of the piece is the narrative structure. The limited time causes the players to not be able to read what is on each screen, thus making the character names and plot irrelevant to the player and instead, making the player focus on the narrative structure. Fragmentation can be seen in Aaron Reed’s 18 Cadence. Though not formed by the author, the fragmentation is done by the player when they rearrange text in varying years to create their own story. These fragments form a completely unique story and cause the original one to be fragmented. Like metafiction, multilinearity can be seen in a large portion of the electronic literature pieces that we have discussed. For example, chatbots or AI bots allow for a story of many possibilities that depend on the user’s input. In addition to these examples, Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger exemplifies the multilinearity found in the antecedents of hypertext. In this example, depending on the file chosen, the user has a multitude of narrative paths that they can follow. Thus, there is not a single storyline. If the user chooses file 1, A Party in Woodside, they can choose which subject to start with and then repeatedly make decisions on what subjects to explore, such as characters. These aspects that were present in the antecedents of hypertext are still found in modern electronic literature. As a closing question, besides the multilinearity feature, do other features found in electronic literature parallel video games and their stories?