A Digital Humanities Caucus Roundtable Discussion Friday, November 7, 2014

Scripting the Reader in Electronic Literature

Roundtable Overview1. Leonardo Flores - Introduction & Theoretical Framing

2. Samantha Gorman - “rhythms of attention”

3. A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz - “lusory attitudes” (playfulness)

4. Jeremy Hight - locative & AR works

5. Mauro Carassai - e-lit “language games”

6. Discussion

Key Questions

• How do writers of electronic literature design, control, cast, or otherwise shape their readers’ experience and interaction?

• Is fun used as a mechanism for control in a scripted interaction?

• Do they reward certain choices and punish others? • How do they design virtual environments with a

psychogeography that influences their readers' dérive?

What is Electronic Literature?

• E-lit ≠ e-books.

• E-books are industry-driven representations of the book in digital media.

• E-lit is a set of grassroots experimental practices, that embrace the potential of digital media technologies to create innovative engagements with language.

Terms & Genres

Material Dependencies

Scripting the ReaderEspen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives in Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP. 1997.

• cybertext - a work with feedback loops that incorporates reader input in its functioning.

• “A machine for the production of variety of expression.”

• ergodic works - require “nontrivial effort” to traverse.

Example: traditional novel• Literary form that emerged in the

context of the book as a technology.

• Traversal requires turning pages, parsing the words on the page.

• Traversal ≠ comprehension.

• Reader’s role involves reading, imagining, following their literacy training.

• Interface becomes invisible.

• Goal is immersion in narrative.

Example: videogame

• Cybertexts: require input from the reader via peripheral devices

• Ergodic: traversal has a learning curve, with increasing levels of difficulty.

• Player’s role is scripted, limited, and controlled in games.

• But they allow room for self-expression, discovery, play.

Example: E-Poetry• Aarseth, Cybertext (pgs. 91-92)

• aporia - an impasse, frustration

• epiphany - replaces aporia and satisfies closure.

• Nick Montfort, “Taroko Gorge” (2009)

• The desire for completion, closure, is frustrated (aporia)

• The realization that the work is deliberately endless (epiphany)

Guy Debord “Theory of the Derive” (1958)• “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve

playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.”

• In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop […] all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

• Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

• But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.

Up next1. Samantha Gorman - “rhythms of attention”

2. A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz - “lusory attitudes” (playfulness)

3. Jeremy Hight - locative & AR works

4. Mauro Carassai - e-lit “language games”

5. Discussion