Electronic Literature Organization

The first successful alternate reality game, this project never had an official name or website, but involved writing and work in other media being distributed across the Web on thirty sites; on other Internet servies; via phone, fax, USPS, bathroom walls, and live events; as well as on TV. It never advertised itself as a game and in fact declared “this is not a game.” Microsoft developed this non-game, which centered on the mystery of the death of Evan Chan, to promote the movie A.I. Thousands worked to solve what came to be called “The Beast” — which involved interpreting nearly 4,000 documents (in four languages), constructing a nightmare database, decrypting from the WWII Enigma code, and so on — a feat only possible with many readers cooperating online.

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.

The Glide project encompasses a constructed language, a game played with that language, an online space for communication via the language, and an oracle that delivers its messages via the language. The Glide language is composed of simple curved lines that combine into glyphs that can link and morph, and which are the key to understanding Slattery’s print novel The Maze Game (the first chapter of which is presented, illustrated, on the website).

“The Dazzle as Question,” first published in frAme, traces the conflict between the left and right brain inclinations of an erstwhile “old school” artist as experienced via an encounter with the digital realm. The Dazzle is a lyrical one; its marks and varied rhythmic emphases are indicative of the questions and confusion underlying the relationship between old and new identities and images. Claire Allan Dinsmore is a writer, artist, and the editor and designer of Cauldron & Net: a journal of the arts & new media. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Parsons School of Design/The New School for Social Research. Dinsmore has exhibited worldwide and been published as an artist, critic, essayist, and poet. See this work’s Directory entry for links to more works by this author.

The author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics has invented several new comic forms for the Web. In “The Carl Comics,” McCloud offers an “expandable” comic and a “Choose Your Own Carl” that branches and recombines at numerous points, offering different horizontal and vertical paths. More than a thousand readers offered suggestions, participating in developing this “fully interactive, multiple path, reader-written, death-obsessed comics extravaganza.”