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I found myself enjoying a lot of these works, but two that stood out to me were SOFTIEs by David Jhave Johnson and Shy Boy by Tom Swiss.

Johnson’s use of movement in this piece is what made it so intriguing to me. I was immediately drawn in as I viewed the first poem on the page. He describes Stand Under as a “social-synaptic structure emulated in language” which I think perfectly describes it. As I clicked on each image and viewed the animations, I felt a deeper understanding and connection to the text.

“Kinetic poetry by definition deals in time-based poetics: its main distinctive characteristic is that texts change through animation, and that animation itself conducts meaning.”(Rettberg, 119)

I think that SOFTIEs is a prime example of how animation of text conducts its meaning in this type of poetry. While I was experiencing this work, I would read the poem first, then would view the corresponding video. Initially, I found some of the poems to be confusing as a stand alone, however they made more sense to me after viewing the videos. Johnson’s use of movement illustrates the symbolic meaning behind each one of his poems. I thought this work was absolutely beautiful.

The other work that I took a closer look at  was Shy Boy by Tom Swiss. As with SOFTIEs, I also found the movement of the text in this piece offers the user a deeper understanding of the text. The story is about a school boy who can’t bear his current circumstances and longer. The movement of text illustrates the boy’s feelings of hopelessness and desire to vanish. At one point in the story the word ‘vanish’ does just that, it vanishes. The use of animation actually illustrates what the text is trying to communicate. I also found the music that is played in the background played a role in how I experienced the piece. It sets an almost ominous tone that I feel like purposely makes the reader feel a little uneasy. 

I think that both pieces were very effective at using kinetic movement to enhance the experience and help communicate the message.

SOFTIES by David Jhave Johnson is a web-based work, comprised of a series of videos and short poems. Each video contains a phrase related to one of the poems, which are manipulated in a program known as Mr. Softie (hence the title of the work.) However, Jhave’s mesmerizing animations were what caught my attention. By utilizing the Mr. Softie program, Johnson was able to manipulate the phrases through squashing, stretching, twisting, shrinking and expanding the text in ways that communicated the ideas of the corresponding poem. In his poem “Stand under” for instance, the word “under” is placed far above a stack of the repeated word “standing”, which strains and pulls at “under” in an attempt to rise above it. Fittingly, the corresponding poem to this video was one about humility, which would explain the struggle of the words lower down vs. the superiority of the word near the top. In addition to animating the text, Johnson also supplemented his work with music to set the mood of each video. Taking the above factors into account, it could be argued that SOFTIES is a work of concrete poetry—it treats words as tangible, manipulable objects and makes a clear connection to the program it was made with. It is also a multimedial work, as it combines text, sound, and on occasion imagery (in certain poems such as “Unity”, the background layer of the animation is another video.)  

The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot is a web-based hypertext that is composed of web pages rather than traditional “nodes”. A ballad is a song or poem telling a story in short stanzas, which is exactly what this work is mimicking.  A love story about a man named Soot who longs for a woman called Sand, Strickland describes her work as the symbolic relationship between technology and man. She saw the sand as silicon, which can be found in sand as well as in microchips, “and by extension the entire online world.” (Word Circuits Stephanie Strickland). As for Soot, Strickland described him as 

“a man made of carbon, biochemical man, a man of flesh and mood, a person.” (Word Circuits Stephanie Strickland).  

This work seems to follow a more traditional presentation of poetry than SOFTIES by placing text in stanzas, using colorful wording, and presenting ideas as riddles. One of the less traditional aspects of the work was the use of hidden hyperlinks within the stanzas to other parts of the story, adding a new layer of meaning, interactivity, and mystery to the piece. One might argue that The Ballad of Sand and Soot is a visual form of poetry because it is accompanied by images, but these are separated from the text and do little to aid the reader’s understanding of the poem (most of the images are nonspecific pictures of sand.) Thus, simply calling this a multimedial work might seem more appropriate, as it is merging multiple forms of media (images and text) into one.  

Sources: 

Word Circuits Stephanie Strickland 

After looking through all of the works for this week, I chose two that stood out to me. The first piece I picked was “The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans. The digital poem was created from words written to him from a coworker during a roundtable conference. He alphabetized her words and produced a series of short digital poems. The poem’s text moves in different ways on your screen.  The text is responsive to other words and letters, but sometimes the text seems to only have the first letter in common, rather than the first few letters, or patterns of letters inside the word. At certain points of the poem, the movements of the letters match a word.

          E.g. , “the word height expands and grows taller at first,       then shrinks away, while the word “drip” appears as the letter D falls down the screen.” 

I felt excited as I made my way through Brian Kim Stefans work but nothing prepared me for A is for Apple. I watched this a couple of times, and I felt like I needed more. I went to David Clark’s page and started looking through more of his work, and I am thrilled to have discovered this man. All of his work is just beautiful, and I can’t wait to explore all of his stuff. For now, I will discuss A is for Apple. This piece is a Flash-based project that uses the hypertext to investigate the science behind an apple. The piece uses a sequence of links, looking for hidden meanings that come from the apple. 

        “The image of the apple leads to references and ideas borrowing from western metaphysics, popular culture, the history of cryptography, ideas of language, and psychoanalysis.”

A is for Apple was created using the model of a collage. Initially, paper collages were made. Those became the basis of a flash website where David and his associates made the page interactive and animated. One of the best Pieces of art I have ever scene.

I chose to explore the World of Awe, an electronic story that takes place in some sort of weird desert where an unnamed traveler is searching for some sort of unknown treasure. There are three chapters in which the first takes place in 2000, the second in 2002, and the third in 2006. You explore this travelers journey by opening up love letters that he wrote to his loved one but were never sent. Even though he knew she would never read these letters he would write them anyways to keep himself from going insane. Some of them were often amusing as one that I read in the first chapter was talking about how he got captured and escaped but ended the letter in “P.S. still looking for the lost treasure”.

Due to the advance of technology each chapter seems more advanced than previous chapters. The first is just sound and text, the second has some short object animations, and the third has some 3D pictures and designs. I however enjoyed the first chapter the most as I found it more immersive with the audio playing in the background as I would read the letters. The third chapter was the most difficult to me as it seemed like the language was arabic or some other form of Middle Eastern language. This story all around seemed very bizarre and strange but I enjoyed exploring it nonetheless.

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/5189/help-with-making-a-loop-of-click-and-replace

E-Literature

              In looking at the “Those We Love Alive” (TWLA) I am intrigued by its repetition, as well as its descriptive language. The other piece I looked at was “Deviant” which after playing for a while I remember going through last semester. While Deviant was intriguing, I felt like I was running into the same problem that we have discussed in previous classes. Following the general character but not understanding the story or what is going on, due to lack of context. But after reading the authors inspiration of what inspired them to make deviant it makes a lot more sense. Looking at TWLA it was a lot more linear, so it was easier to follow I really enjoyed it. The tone and mood set by the colors and music are eerie but fascinating. I looked quickly at howling dogs and was surprised that they were both done in twine as well as TWLA seams like a more refined and completed piece but that was only my initial thought. E-literature has such a wide spectrum of what it can do that I will just learn and enjoy whatever I can.   

After reading Rettberg’s chapter on Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms, and briefly taking a look at all the works, I decided to take a deeper look at Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive and Nick Monfort’s Ad Verbum. I wanted to select two works that were significantly different from one another in their approach. Porpentine’s piece has a poetic vibe. I would say that the framework of the piece is more of an exploration of literary ideas. It involves the reader by having them make selections from author chosen lists, which Porpentine used as a way to guide the reader through the narrative. As the user, the choices that you make dictate the way the narrative unfolds, however the choices  don’t necessarily change the outcome of the story you end up reading because you are limited to the words given to you by the author. However, IF works like Nick Monfort’s Ad Verbum have a different approach.

As Rettberg mentions in his book, “The reader becomes the player” (89), which I definitely got a sense of while I was interacting with Monfort’s work. Ad Verbum involves the player in finding a solution to a problem presented. While I was going through the piece, I felt like a detective gathering clues and making decisions based on what new information was revealed to me.  I would also say that Ad Verbum sparks your imagination while interacting with the piece.
Through descriptive writing of setting, character, and action, both works encourage the user to use their imagination which enhances the experience and aids in the overall understanding of the message that is trying to be communicated by the narrative. I think that both of these pieces touch on Rettberg’s notion that

“The principal challenge to the reader of interactive fiction, and it’s central pleasure, is to find a solution, to achieve satisfaction of a successful session of deductive reasoning.” (90)

I found myself enjoying both pieces for different reasons. I enjoyed the use of multimedia in Porpentine’s piece. While it was much more like reading a story, being able to interact with the work was enjoyable. Ad Verbum was a little bit of a challenge for me to work through, simply because I had to think more about how I was going to respond as I was going through the piece. I still found it fun to work through.

Sources:
With Those We Love Alive, Porpentine (2014)
Ad Verbum, by Nick Monfort (2001)
Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg

As technology progresses, the toolbox of content creators gains ever more tools. As we saw in Grammatron, Hypertext fiction could be integrated with multimedia, sound and video, to enhance and create unique experiences. Distancing itself from the roots of Hypertext fiction, video games as a form of interactive e-literature can offer yet more tools to be utilized; through the mechanics of the game and the way the game interfaces with the interactor, the game experience add another layer of nuance.

In Game, Game, Game and Again Game, the interactor engages would could be considered, at least in a mechanical aspect, a typical platforming game such as the classic Mario Bros. games. However, while the interactor is probably used to the shiny graphics of professional games, they instead find themselves confronted with intentionally raw and handmade graphics. The interactor moves through levels, named after different world views such as “capitalism” or “fundamentalism,” gathering objects and navigating to the door at the end of the level. Whenever an object is collected, a piece of text or an image appears on the growingly cluttered and chaotic screen.

Rather than clicking on links to progress the text as one did in Hypertext, it is instead by navigating the game environment that the experience is pushed forward. Once all objects in a level are collected, an icon appears that allows the interactor to start a video while the finish the level. Sometimes, arrows appear as one interacts with the game, guiding them towards the end of the level. The levels themselves probably won’t be a challenge for anyone who’s played other games in the fashion, and any difficulties arise more frustration in the interactor than feelings of genuine challenge. Between the old home videos, showing sincere moments of humanity, and the snarky cries of “Come on and meet your maker!” at the sometimes frequent incidences of player death, and the scattered bits of text and level titles that hint a larger philosophical design, the interactor is merely left to wonder, what is the point of the experience? Is it a metaphor for life, the struggle for meaning, to understand truth? Is it a game? An interactive art piece? Is there a difference? At the end, when answers would normally be given in a game, the interactor is left with a bizarre, rambling video that begins “In the beginning, there were five potatoes…” but no answers are found.

To contrast, Howling Dogs is a Twine experience that borrows heavily from Hypertext and Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. The game paints a bleak story of a person living a tedious life, surviving on the bare minimum and spending all their time in digital simulations. Dark, atmospheric, poetic, the interactor has a chance to explore a logical space, unlike the abstract thought-space of Game… and of which Grammatron wove in and out. The narrative branches and allows the interactor to experience a story, character, and places rather than concepts, but the experience is almost entirely done through text, fading in and out on the screen as the player clicks through.

The focus on the words ensures that the interactor doesn’t loose valuable information in the chaotic mash of multimedia, putting complete emphasis on the prose of the creator.

In the end, we have two very different examples of e-literature. Game… explores a synthesis of ideas and mediums to find what emerges in interactive gameplay. Howling Dog tightens its usage of media down to text and links to focus the interactor’s experience on the presentation of a cohesive story. Both are examples of different tools content creators can use.

I chose to play Howling Dogs, and Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw; both of these kept me engaged by allowing me to click on objects or text. I kept clicking to try to find out what was going to happen next. The experience was like playing a video game and trying to get the high score. I must admit, I quit Howling Dogs, because I could not understand the point of the game. The goals of the game were not clear. While playing Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, I clicked until I could not click anymore. I assume I completed the game.

Howling Dogs, is a different animal altogether (pun intended). The game was engaging at the start. As I advance into the game, I felt like I was descending into madness; and then I clicked on the text “food and drink dispenser” to advance into the room with the ceiling fan if I am remembering correctly. This event leads into pulse which changed color every time I ended back at this point in the game. I quit after ending back at the point of the game after 10 times. I did visualize being in what I assume to be an insane person’s head, while playing Howling Dogs. The player character appeared to travel to alternate timelines (or imagine they did). I did enjoy having to visualize characters and setting while playing this game. This experience was like reading a novel. I just wish I new what the game was about.