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2008-01-25

On Mystery of the Abbey

Bruno Faidutti begins with the controversial premise that "[e]very game tells a story," in his description of how he uses literary techniques to enhance gameplay - even in non-RPG systems such as board games, which don't traditionally include a story.

2008-01-22

Creating a Meaning-Machine: The Deck of Stories Called Life in the Garden

Eric Zimmerman describes his interactive paper book as "an inverted exquisite corpse," and although a digital version of the book would be easy to produce, he argues that an electronic edition would not produce as meaningful an experience as the printed volume.

2008-01-20

Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design

Using Exalted as her text, Rebecca Borgstrom begins with the premises that every role-playing game requires a setting, and that to establish a fictional world players work within a mutually agreed upon structure to construct meaning.

2008-01-20

On Life's Lottery

Kim Newman describes various methods of approaching his choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, which can be read or played because, like a role-playing game, "you are at once a reader and the main character."

2007-12-25

Playing with the Mythos

Van Leavenworth, in his response to Hite, delves more deeply into Cthulhu's literariness, in particular the "large adventure book 'footprint'" of the series. He contends that the Lovecraft mythos provides a framework for the generation of narratives that - unlike many RPG stories - hold up beyond the game-play session.

2007-12-20

What Was Postmodernism?

Brian McHale looks back on the movement in "What Was Postmodernism?" He contrasts postmodernism's canonization with critical constructions of modernism, and moves through contemporary painting to reflect on intersections between the violence of recent history and postmodernism, as the postwar world lived "in the ruins of our own civilization, if only in our imaginations."

2008-01-03

Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium

Will Hindmarch contests Greg Costikyan's challenge to the idea that "games have something to do with stories" by contending that "storytelling games reconcile the theoretically antithetical relationship between their two halves - story and game."

2007-10-04

Eshleman's Caves: a review of JUNIPER FUSE

For Jay Murphy, Clayton Eshleman in his JUNIPER FUSE makes a resounding case for lived experience, for the tortuous growth, however partial or fragmented, as rooted in self-suffering as modes of vision and dream.

2007-07-25

On Being Difficult

Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism and
self-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military 'World
Target' that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework for
knowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.

2007-09-21

Plagiarism, Creativity, and the Communal Politics of Renewal

As Christian Moraru argues here that the new is still the objective in contemporary writing. But writers and artists make it by making it anew rather than new ("Get it used," Andrei Codrescu invites us), a new not so much novel as renovated, reframed and reproduced rather than produced, which by the same token redefines and advertises authorship as deliberate plagiarism.

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