Author: owcorkery

The idea of dysfunctionality is really interesting to me because the artist is intentionally making his or her work really messy and confusing to either create some sort of “aesthetic” or to prove a point. It’s funny to me to think that they are purposely putting in mistakes or errors to get their work to turn out the way they want it. It also makes me think if whether or not they are meticulous with what mistakes or errors they put in their work or if they just somewhat throw a bunch of stuff in there and see how it turns out. For example, in game, game, and again game, there’s just a bunch of scribbles and a bunch of noise like everything is one big mess. But did he think about how he wanted each level to look like or did he just turn his mind off and draw everywhere. It seems lazy like that one level called “some confusing hell made of messy lines” or something like that where it was just a bunch of lines. But I feel like everything has a lot of thought into it.

I personally kind of liked game, game, and again game because it was super weird and just kind of looked really cool to me. It also was really confusing and I did not really understand it but it seemed like I wasn’t supposed to understand it so in a way I feel like I was looking at the work somewhat as it was intended. I think that everything is super messy and hard to understand so it serves as the opposite of most art that is really neat and perfect.

Thinking about the sublime is interesting to me because I can recall many moments in my life that were sublime, where my mind just felt lost and taken aback in a way. The two types of sublime are mathematical and dynamic. Mathematical sublime describes when we encounter or think about something so great in size that we can not wrap our minds around it. We are in awe of how large something is. Dynamic sublime describes those situations where we encounter something dangerous or life-threatening, but we know that we are okay. The idea of the sublime is cool to me because I feel like all my life I’ve had sublime encounters. For example, ever since I was a kid I’ve tried to wrap my head around the size of space. I still can not wrap my head around it and how it just does not end. However, the concept of time always freaked me out as a kid because I could not and still can not wrap my head around the concept of time and how it will continue forever. It still freaks me out how it is never-ending. I’m not sure if the concept of time falls under mathematical sublime, but it seems related to it and it freaks me out in the same way. With the dynamic sublime, I always get those feelings when I’m on a tall building and I look down to see the ground. The fall is obviously deadly but I am safe behind a railing or a window. However, I still get a little spooked. There’s a lot of beauty with the sublime though because something so big in size that can create some feelings of uneasiness, is almost like a wonder to the world, like we will never truly understand it. And there’s not a lot of things that can create those sublime qualities.

The first thing I noticed and I think everyone noticed when first reading through these types of poems was how a new stanza, or line in the poem would appear every couple seconds and that each combination would seem random as if it was generated by some sort of algorithm within the computer. This allows for a seemingly endless amount of possible combinations for the poems. However, this did in turn create a lot of stanzas or lines that just seemed to not make much sense. However, I think that the stanzas or lines that seemed to not make much sense to me, might actually have a meaning to a different reader and vice versa.

The Love Letters would produce a new stanza every few seconds, while Scholastic Texts would produce a new line every few seconds. Personally, I sometimes felt as I did not have enough time to read each line or stanza in order to fully comprehend it. However, with A House of Dust, it would produce a new line every couple seconds and slowly build each stanza to give off the feeling that the reader is actually keeping up and reading along with the computer. I much preferred the experience given by A House of Dust.

It was interesting to me the amount of influence Dadaist poems had on combinatory poems, especially since the instructions on how to make a Dadaist poems with a newspaper is how the algorithm for combinatory poems works. Tzara even said within the instructions, “You will now become ‘an infinitely original writer with a charming sensitivity, although still misunderstood by the common people'”. This line is interesting to me because these were the thoughts I first had when reading through the poems. I noticed how combinatory poems are seemingly endless with original content and that they produce many poems that seem very confusing and dumb to me but might actually have meaning to other readers.

When I attempted to play Shade, I just go increasingly frustrated with the lack of commands and how little you can do in the game. Most of the commands are not understood by the computer, so you just have to keep guessing until you find one that works. The goal of the game is also not apparent in any of the descriptions so you’re not even sure what to do. Every time I managed to get a command that worked, I would get excited and think that I was moving the story forward, but then I would spend five minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. The game takes place in a single room apartment so there is not much to explore and even when I would try to get up and walk around, the game would say that I walked enough the night before.

It is interesting however how the game describes the area around you and you have to take what is being described to you and use that as context for what actions you will make. If you are in the kitchen, you can grab a glass of water. But you have to type every command in order to fill that glass with water. As Douglass talked about in Enlightening Interactive Fiction, it is interesting that the game is focused on making you feel like you are the character, as instead of error messages, it displays messages for why the character can’t do that, such as saying you broke the habit of drinking from the sink when you were eleven. Interactive fiction focuses on making the reader a part of the story and Shade makes up for its lack of graphics to help paint a picture or set the mood by giving vivid descriptions of the mood and setting in order to drive the reader forward with its decisions.

However, the game is really frustrating to play and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to move the game forward.

In Janet Murray’s article, Hamlet on the Holodeck, she talks about the different characteristics of electronic literature and what makes it unique compared to traditional literature. She explains how these four characteristics come together to make the literature both interactive and immersive. She uses Zork as an example as the game allows for the player to enter commands to change where the story is heading through their decisions and how Zork paints a narrative landscape through the descriptions of the area in the game without using any graphics. The point Murray brings up on how immersive electronic literature through it being participatory is very important with what makes electronic literature so appealing. It allows the reader to be a part of the story in a way most books can not, as the reader can make decisions and see how those decisions in turn affect the story. It also allows for the reader to feel like they are the main character of the story, which in turn makes the reader become more immersed in the story and care a lot more about in which direction they take the story. Another interesting point brought up is how the encyclopedic nature of interactive literature distracts us from the sets of rules that guide our decisions in these works. I’ve never really seen it as a problem that interactive literature guides you in a certain direction with your decisions within the work as it makes most sense with how the story is going, but it is interesting to think about how the lack of freedom to go in whatever direction you want with certain simulation games, in particular, is masked by the seemingly endless amount of options presented to you in line with the set story. However, I still do not think the encyclopedic nature of electronic literature is a handicap as Murray suggests, as I think it allows for people to have more content and more possibilities to explore thanks to the encyclopedic nature of electronic literature.