Building Interactive Stories

The integration of interactive stories into digital humanities practice has taken several forms. Interactive stories are certainly an object of study, and the intersection of digital humanities with media and games studies (as well as communities dedicated to making and studying interactive stories, such as the Electronic Literature Organization, which released Electronic Literature Collection 1, 2 and 3, three volumes of interactive narratives) has assisted our understanding of what interactive stories might accomplish. A growing interest in games in the classroom has also focused attention on serious and educational games, which often use interactive storytelling as one means to build an experience. (Significant examples include Jane McGonigal’s Evoke, an alternate reality game encouraging players to collaborate and address world hunger and water shortages, and Play the Past, a non-digital role-playing game system for character-based play in history courses.) By building interactive stories, we can communicate complex ideas that change our relationship to texts and have the potential to serve as textbooks, persuasive works, thought experiments, and personal narratives. In this chapter, I first position and define interactive stories as a medium, placing the form in its contested space in scholarship. Then I survey exemplars, design principles, and platforms for building interactive stories

Reflections on the EURECA Conference and Creatopia day

I’ve recently returned home from my fantastic visit to the American University in Cairo, and I got off the plane to find an email waiting from a recent AUC graduate. This graduate noted that he’d been particularly caught by the idea of merging a passion in games with a career, and he wanted to ask if I had any advice for how to get started. This is one of my favorite questions to answer: it’s been an unexpected journey from growing up playing video games (often to all hours of the night, and without much regard for my actual homework) and reading novels to talking about the creativity games can embody for exploring ideas here at AUC

Twining

Hypertext is now commonplace: links and linking structure nearly all of our experiences online. Yet the literary, as opposed to commercial, potential of hypertext has receded. One of the few tools still focused on hypertext as a means for digital storytelling is Twine, a platform for building choice-driven stories without relying heavily on code. In Twining, Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop lead readers on a journey at once technical, critical, contextual, and personal. The book’s chapters alternate careful, stepwise discussion of adaptable Twine projects, offer commentary on exemplary Twine works, and discuss Twine’s technological and cultural background. Beyond telling the story of Twine and how to make Twine stories, Twining reflects on the ongoing process of making

Twining : Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives

Twining is both a critical consideration of Twine and works made with it during the first decade of the software; and an exploration of concepts and techniques for making things with Twine.https://dc.uwm.edu/english_facbooks/1000/thumbnail.jp

Ugly Bodies, Pretty Bodies Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies and the Inhumanity of Culture

Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies imagines a society where the body is under total control and the universal beauty of the body after dramatic reconstructive surgery at sixteen guarantees that everyone will be “equal.” To the young adult readership, such a world holds understandable appeal: the idea of avoiding the pains of coming to age in one’s own body is a tempting one. The utopian construct of a society where all difference, and thus all conflict, is erased is a popular social fantasy. But Westerfeld offers his audience more than a vision of a status-less utopia: he offers insight into what might come of humanity losing its connection to its own bodies. His world of Pretties is truly one where beauty is only skin-deep, and all the beautiful creations of culture have been abandoned for a new world of instant gratification and meaningless social relationships

But Does Pikachu Love You? Reproductive Labor in Casual and Hardcore Games

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and “core” series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a new set of players with mobile, locative Pokémon hunting. The 2018 release of a hybrid game, Let’s Go, Pikachu! and its sister release Let’s Go, Eevee!, has drawn renewed attention to the casual-hardcore dichotomy, meeting considerable resistance and criticism for its perceived casualization of the franchise. Through analyzing the discourse of the new game’s reception as demonstrated by a dataset of user reviews on Metacritic alongside published game reviews, the gendered nature of the casual-hardcore dichotomy in the Pokémon franchise becomes clear. Key themes coded from the reviewed data include grinding, difficulty, nostalgia, and “cuteness.” Placing this discourse alongside the game’s own internal representations of reproductive labor through Pokémon caretaking and the contested definition of “grinding” demonstrates a fundamental resistance from the so-called hardcore game community to what are viewed as feminized play mechanics. The revealed tension is particularly remarkable given the emotional, reproductive labor of training and loving Pokémon that is front-ended in the franchise’s overarching narrative and core values--a set of values that inherently conflicts with the “hardcore” gamer mentality of play

Crafting is So Hardcore: Masculinized Making in Gaming Representations of Labor

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game's narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as reproductive, feminized labor and therefore devalued. Because of this, crafting systems in games have been designed to more closely resemble masculinized, productive labor in the form of repetitive, manufacturing-like mechanics. These representational choices persist even across games lauded for their crafting systems, as our analysis demonstrates. Through an examination of both user-generated tutorials and game mechanics for three games that frequently appear on “best crafting games” lists, we show that games persist in devaluing the reproductive labor of crafting, reducing creative expression and material mastery to marginal and repetitive tasks while catering to the palates of masculine gamers by emphasizing stats-driven progression rather than creative making

Interactive Narrative

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Anastasia Salter’s syllabus for a course on interactive narrative, published in Syllabus, approaches interactivity both creatively and critically, focusing on narrative structure as well as technological infrastructure. Each unit includes a mini-project created with a different tool—namely, Twine, Scratch, and Inform 7. These units culminate in the creation of a final project, a multimedia interactive narrative, which has clearly articulated goals and outcomes. The use of freeware and easy-to-learn tools makes this a viable approach for those who lack access to expensive production tools and who do not have advanced media skills. Although designed for upper-level classes in game design, the syllabus emphasizes the conceptual aspect of game mechanics and interactivity, making the syllabus customizable as it forms a bridge between analysis and production

Alt-Right: Ctrl+A; Del

Built as a hypertext work of electronic literature, “Alt-Right: Ctrl+A; Del” explores the social media fatigue experienced by a woman operating in online spaces. The work takes place from November 9 2016 to January 20 2017, during the pivotal moments of transition prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration. It is heavily influenced by the ongoing challenges faced by participants in social media discourse who are identifiable (or labeled) as other than white, heterosexual, cisgender men (Marciano, 2014). The fictionalised narrative of the work is presented alongside a day-by-day evolving timeline of tweets drawn from real social media discourse. The reader-player experiences both the mundane and the politically momentous, the true and the “fake” news sensations, while navigating through the daily pressures of life which present their own source of exhaustion and challenges. Ultimately, the reader-player must decide to what extent it is worth engaging with the incendiary discourse, and these decisions shape the reputation of the character’s online persona. The choice to engage in political discourse will inevitably result in eventually catching the attention of a horde of procedurally-generated trolls (Phillips 2015), while refraining from participating will leave the character relatively invisible and disengaged from both the media platform and source of social connection. The reader-player must balance the demands of social media to present an active persona to their followers with the personal needs of a human who must cope with the results of harassment from a faceless flood. This work serves both as fictional response and real collection of social media moments from a pivotal period in US political history, inviting the reader-player to think about the apparent “post-truth” state (Suiter 2016) and the ensuing challenges it presents to would-be participants who occupy activist personas in tense and dangerous networked spaces. As an archive, it attempts to capture something that is inherently ephemeral: the in-the-moment experience of the timeline (Zhao et al. 2013). Drawn from the authors’ own social networks, these juxtapositions are difficult to reconstruct with existing social media tools, as Twitter resists the backwards-seeking gaze directly and requires APIs and directed searches to observe past tweets (Burgess & Bruns 2012). The central mechanic of consequences for speech is directly inspired by targeted harassment campaigns in recent social media history. The misogynist, word-focused hunting of Gamergate, which demonstrated the effectiveness of hashtag-driven mobbing at silencing discourse, is the inspiration for the procedural trolling model encountered as endgame (Chess & Shaw 2015). These tactics have been on display across the political spectrum during the election, as demonstrated by the attacks of “Bernie Bros”, or automated chatbots labeled as such, on Hillary Clinton supporters (Wilz 2016). The game invites both active political participants online and those who refrain to consider their position and motivations, and particularly how the specter of online harassment haunts the decision-making process of constructing a social media persona

Digital Humanities and/as Media Studies

This chapter of The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities addresses how frameworks from intersectional feminist media studies scholarship can be productively applied to address limitations of digital humanities. We argue here that the interconnection between media studies and digital humanities has often existed only on a rhetorical level, and that a deeper engagement with critiques of platforms common to media studies is necessary to continue to expand the scope of scholarship that falls under the term "digital humanities.