Author: kacowan

The dysfunctionality of Game, Game, Game, and Again Game is interesting because for most intents and purposes the game is functional. At its core, it follows the general structure of a platformer- a game in which a player controls a character and must jump between platforms to reach an endpoint and pass a variety of different levels. The Mario franchise is a notable example of a platformer. It has all the mechanics of a typical platformer: A 2D player character, albeit this one is a bit abstract; enemies that kill you and force you to restart the level; teleportation mechanics; and even a score at the top. There are even collectibles, reminiscent of coins or other gatherable items, although here touching one displays text. Top it off with 13 different levels, and it has all the makings of a solid game. However, despite the functionality of the game itself, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would describe it as such. 

The dysfunctionality, rather, comes from the presentation of the game. The player is inundated with a variety of overlapping and overwritten text, messy graphics, and a cacophony of sounds. The game clearly plays with ludic dysfunctionality, demonstrating an overwhelming extreme of the platformer genre. However, this is not the only form of dysfunctionality at work. One of the things this game was reminiscent of, for me at least, was a manifesto by some overzealous radical. Each level had its own distinct theme and broadly focuses on “belief systems from consumerism to monotheism” (Game, Game, Game, and Game Again about section). This, then, lends the game to fall under the definition of political dysfunctionality. However, the player is so overwhelmed that it is very difficult to read or even focus on the text that appears. Making it largely ineffective in this sense.

While I do believe that both of these dysfunctionalities are at work here, I don’t think the game takes itself too seriously. If you make it to the end of the game, the author has a little note thanking you for playing, but he expresses surprise that you played long enough to finish it. The point of the game, I would argue, then, is not to actually incite any kind of political change or call attention to the platformer genre, but to rather provide an experience. 

In his article, “American Technological Sublime,” David E. Nye discusses the history of the American sublime. One of his more notable points is Kant’s distinction between two kinds of sublime. Nye explains that the mathematical sublime is “the encounter with extreme magnitude or vastness,” and the dynamic sublime is “the contemplation of scenes that arouse terror… seen by a subject who is safe from immediate danger” (Nye, 7). The dynamic sublime would thus include natural disasters such as tempests or volcanic eruptions. The mathematical sublime, however, has more versatility. Nye uses the example of a mountain range or the Grand Canyon. More notable for us is the mathematical sublime paired with technology. It is this type of sublime that makes Every Icon and Sea and Spar Between subliminal works. 

These two works become sublime because of their seemingly infinite possibilities. Every Icon can generate every possible black and white image within a 32×32 grid. Sea and Spar Between takes fragments from Moby Dick and poems by Emily Dickinson and combines them into generated stanzas. The authors, Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, explain that the work has approximately 225 trillion different stanzas. However, it seems that their value as an artistic work comes from their ties to the sublime. Essentially, they are great because they are vast and that vastness is incomprehensible. Does the content itself actually matter? Every Icon will inevitably make interesting images, but mostly it appears as a random pattern of black squares. Similarly, the stanzas in Sea and Spar Between are created the same way as combinatory poetics, with no authorial intention. 

These technological forms of the mathematical sublime are contrasted with natural occurrences. The Grand Canyon is still beautiful even when separated from its sublime qualities. Nye discusses at length that because of expectations, often the feeling of sublime is not fully realized until spending a fair amount of time with the object/scene. People still visit natural wonders without feeling the sublime; however, I would argue that there is little to keep the viewer engaged with Every Icon and Sea and Spar Between for more than a couple minutes. The content is not enough. Should the content itself have artistic value or is the sublimation of the number of outcomes enough for the work to be deemed important on its own?

In Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg asks the reader to consider the form of the procedurally generated poems and love letters that he presents. He is concerned, largely, with the fact that these poems are written with little authorial intervention, yet the reader is still able to parse meaning out of them. Despite many of these works using a type of programming where a predetermined part of speech is slotted into a preexisting structure, the reader can still create meaning from the work. Moreover, these poems are also fleeting.

Many of the poems we looked at only exist for a brief period of time and cannot be remade in the same way. All, except the second implementation of “Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator,” function as an infinite scroll upward where for every new implementation or line a previous one is lost. 

This fleetingness furthers the feeling of uniqueness to the poems. In “House of Dust,” with every new line, one line from a previous stanza is erased. Because you cannot scroll back through the entire log of stanzas generated, even if you have repetition, it is difficult to notice. Similarly, with the first implementation of “Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator,” there are limited options, but each letter feels different because you are only able to see four at a time. Within the limited context, each letter or poem can be interpreted differently based on others around it. Thus, even if you do get an exact repetition, the context in which it is presented is still radically different. 

This final point is perhaps more apparent in “Stochastic Texts” by Theo Lutz. This poem is a single, continuous stanza made from excerpts of Franz Kafka’s writing (Rettberg, 33). Not only does this poem continually scroll, but having the surrounding lines affect how the reader interprets and understands the symbols presented. Because of its form, the reader expects there to be meaning, even if none really exists. Thus, in using surrounding lines, the reader begins to create meaning for the work. While lines can be repeated because of the limited options within the work, the chance of having the entire screen repeated again is very small. Thus, despite the limitations on the variation of language, the continuous scroll function keeps the work from becoming repetitive and stale.

Shade follows a less linear structure compared to other text games we’ve played for class. This is a marked departure from other IF games and text adventures, which often have an ultimate goal and objective. Further, as Jeremy Douglass mentions in his article, “Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade”, rather than a sprawling dungeon or map to explore, Shade entirely takes place in one room (Douglass, 132). The already small space of the apartment is not divided into rooms, only nooks from which the player can still see the rest of the space. The player is actively discouraged from leaving or even looking out the window. The map is big enough initially to promote exploration, but it quickly becomes confining and repetitive to interact with the same objects.

The game also initially appears to have a set of objectives, pointed out in the description through your to-do list. It begins with you looking for the plane tickets which you have misplaced. However, the tasks on the to-do list quickly become unimportant and you are left to your own devices in the apartment. Because of the lack of structure and goals, the game can become frustrating. There are times where the player will become stuck and be unable to forward the story. Only through ransacking the apartment and interacting with every object multiple times can the player progress. Even nonlinear IF games such as Galatea have an objective- learning about the art exhibit Galatea through asking questions. In Shade, there comes a point where there is no objective left to complete.

These unique features of Shade work to create the atmosphere inside the apartment for the player. Being unable to progress mimics the feeling of the character losing their mind, repeating commands ad nauseam. Further, by confining the entire gameplay to a small space and then drastically changing it, the game is able to further the shock that the player and the character feel about realizing they are really in the desert. Both of these mechanics function to parallel the experience of the player and the character.

In the first chapter of his book, Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg discusses the genres of electronic literature. Using arguments from both Tzvetan Todorov and Jaques Derrida, he comes to the conclusion that genre, in the case of traditional literature, is a set of guidelines and norms that identify and classify works. He goes on to argue that electronic literature is difficult to place into these categories because it has “cycles of creation that move at the speed of technological change” (Rettberg, 9). One of the reasons that this genre is so hard to define is because technology has a completely separate set of affordances that the traditional book does.

In her article, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet H. Murray elaborates on these affordances. She largely focuses on discussing hypertext games, specifically Zork, which exemplifies many of these affordances. Zork is an interactive game where players move through a dungeon environment slaying trolls and solving puzzles. Zork demonstrates three of the four affordances that she identifies: digital environments are participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The final affordance being digital environments are procedural. All of these affordances succeed in making Zork, and other forms of digital literature, both interactive and immersive in a different ways from printed literature.

I agree with Rettberg that it is too difficult to try and confine the hybrid, unwieldy body of electronic literature into formalized genres like traditional literature. Because of their complicated, multi-media features, categorizing these works by only one criterion or set of norms is not sufficient. While traditional literature certainly has affordances that make it ideal for certain things, the technology used to create electronic literature is able to create vastly more varied and multi-faceted forms of literature. Further, at the end of her article, Murray discusses how much of today’s electronic literature is a form of experimentation. Much like the refinement of film that she discusses previously, electronic literature is still in the early stages and only through time and experimentation will “narrative art… come into its own expressive form” (Murray, 93). I believe that only once electronic literature is fully established can we begin to label and define its “genres.”