afternoon, a story is one of the most widely-discussed works of electronic literature. It is the story of Peter, a technical writer who (in one reading) begins his afternoon with a terrible suspicion that the wrecked car he saw hours earlier might have belonged to his former wife: “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning.” See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
Deadline Extended to: August 15th, 2005
Judges: Annie Finch, Sabina Murray, Alexandra Tolstoy, Talan Memmott, David Hall, and DJ Spooky
Drunken Boat, http://www.drunkenboat.com, international online journal for the arts, announces its First Annual Panliterary Awards in Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Web-Art, Photo/Video, Sound. Submit up to three works, either via email to panlitawards@drunkenboat.com or via physical mail to: Drunken Boat, 119 Main St., Chester, CT 06412. A $15 entry fee must accompany all submissions, either via check or money order, else submitted electronically at: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db7/donate.html. Winners in all categories will be featured in a subsequent issue of Drunken Boat, and will be invited to perform at future multimedia events and performances. All other entries will be considered for publication.
Submissions must be received no later than August 15th, 2005. Awards will be given in the following genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, web art, photo/video and sound.
Short’s all-text simulation lets the interactor converse with a statue that has come to life. Depending on how the conversation affects the mood of Pygmalion’s creation, and where the conversation goes, different secrets will be unfolded and different (sometimes incompatible) backstories will be revealed. Galatea won the 2000 IF Art Show and set the standard for compelling characters in interactive fiction. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
Façade, a finalist 2004 Independent Games Festival, is an interactive drama that is visually rich and dramatically deep. A first-person-shooter interface accepts typed conversational statements and allows the animated characters, Trip and Grace, to speak back to this drama’s “player” as their marriage dissolves.
HyperRhiz, the peer-reviewed new media satellite of Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, seeks web-based multimedia contributions for its first issue. HyperRhiz “affirms and extends the mandate of Rhizomes, which is to publish peer-reviewed works based on or responding to Deleuzian analyses of culture.”
Contributions may include:
–hypertextual presentations/interpretations of critical theory
–interactive web installations
–rich media documentation of electronic projects
–web-based interactive games
–animated/code poetry/fiction
–web-enabled video documentary
Send proposals by July 15, 2005 to submissions at hyperrhiz dot net. Email questions regarding submissions to Helen Burgess.
Jeff Rice’s Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom is reviewed by J.M. King at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. Other books reviewed include Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency and Identity (Lang, 2002); Shaping the Network Society: The New Role of Civil Society in Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2004); and Granny@Work: Aging and New Technology on the Job in America.
In this brief work of interactive fiction, Plotkin (a.k.a. zarf) causes the ordinary actions of looking for a glass of water and searching for plane tickets to turn terrifying, transforming an ordinary setting. Shade is a very unusual entry in the classic “one room game in your apartment” category.
