eLit

This year, the ACM Hypertext Conference is offering a Creative Track in an effort to bring in more artists, which I have graciously been asked to Chair. This year's conference theme is "missing link," which is perfect for how we see this exhbition.

When games reference other games, it’s almost always done in a flippant, shallow way, but allusions represent a greater possibility for ambiguity, multivalence, and expressive depth. Games deserve—and are increasingly ready to harness—that depth.

Last Friday I was totally buried and couldn’t make it to the Scholar’s Play stream, so I logged in to watch. For the first time I really understood why people watch other people play games, something I hadn’t even really figured out when we started the stream.

A few weeks ago, IF author Porpentine created a game jam for tiny hypertext games called TwinyJam. The goal was to create a hypertext game in 300 words or less. The results were impressive; 239 games were entered into the jam.

Paperknife is an evocative experimental hypertext game that uses virtual space as a literal interpretation of branching narrative structures. You play as a child psychologist who’s...

Parable of the Polygons is an interactive blog post by Vi Hart and Nicky Case about bias and self-segregation that effectively shows how even a...

In part 1 of this post, I gave a recap of the CAsplit narrative. In this post, I’m going to talk a little more...

A couple of weeks ago for our collaborative narrative week, the class designed a netprov, a collaborative Twitter narrative to be played over a weekend. Netprovs are an interesting blend of improv theater and networked communication—in our case, Twitter. The design challenges are similar to those of designing LARPs, though the tradition of improv theater provides many clues for how to accomplish this task. Still, many interesting question arise: how closely do we want people to stick to a planned narrative? How much freedom should they have? How do we keep them within the bounds of the game without it feeling stifling? And since this is occurring on social media, if the scenario is based on real events, do we signal that this is fiction, and if so how (without breaking the magic circle)?