Electronic Literature Organization

This all-text game improved upon Adventure by better understanding commands, more richly simulating its world, and adding a character, the theif, who appeared throughout to challenge and motivate the player. Zork was originally written for fun by researchers, who developed this interactive fiction collaboratively on a computer at MIT and made the program available for online play. The game was later adapted into successful commercial software, as the Infocom trilogy Zork I-III for home comptuers. Ethan Dicks has made the “original” MIT version of the game available for modern platforms.

In this game of Solitaire the reader has a hand of three cards. Each card holds an image and a text, each portraying a stark moment in a potentially disturbing narrative. Any of the current cards can be played into the story or discarded in favor of another, and patient readers will be dealt joker cards — which allow for the insertion of one’s own text. Taken together, it adds up to a system for constrained composition and play.

Make a contribution to decade,an online writing project being launched this week to celebrate ten years of innovative digital activity at trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University, UK. The completed project will take the shape of a writing ‘quilt’ of many different responses to technology and change.

The introduction to the project notes:

“In the last ten years there has been an explosion of new technology, especially related to computers and the internet, and for some of us it has changed forever the way we live and write. As the trAce Online Writing Centre reaches its tenth anniversary, we invite you to reflect on your own personal decade of living and writing with technology.”

trAce Artistic Director Gaven Stewart invites contributions of brief statements of 100 words to the project about the technology you love, hate or anticipate; and the ways in which technology has changed your life.

ELO Vice President Nick Montfort has just released a large-scale interactive fiction, his first original work of interactive fiction in more than five years and the first since he wrote the book Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003).

Book and Volume simulates a curious near-future city, one that is headquarters to the media division of a large computer company. The main character, a system administrator, can uncover unusual things about this place while attending to tasks and getting ready for a mind-bending demo. Book and Volume is all-text and was written in Inform. It is free, and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and a wide variety of other platforms. Completing Book and Volume should take between six and ten hours.

Download, preview, and read more about Book and Volume: http://nickm.com/if/book_and_volume.html

Screen was created in Brown University’s “Cave,” a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins as a reading and listening experience. Memory texts appear on the Cave’s walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, but peeling increases steadily. Screen is the first work of electronic literature for which novelist Robert Coover is a co-author. See the Directory entries (1, 2) for more information about this piece.