Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game
— a seemingly curious concept— is not truly oxymoronic. It may be that certain literary games, including works of interactive fiction, derive their power from the play between their literary aspects and their nature as games… Nick Montfort —Literary Games (Poems That Go)
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I’ve been slowly working my way through the offerings in this issue of ptg and am especially fond of Jason Lewis’ Nine for its puzzle approach. I find the play between the game and lit synthesis reminiscent of Cortazar’s Continuity of Parks. Bookchin and Co will demand more attention.
I really like how Nick points out that all writing forms are somehow constrained — that sort of deconstructs the argument that genres in which the constraints are foregrounded are less literary. I’ll have to check out Larson.
Thanks for posting this one, Dennis. I’ve always admired the “poems that go” site (and have even tried my hand at a few animated poems myself… http://www.gorelets.com ). I also think that many narrative theorists would agree that reading itself is at root a game of sorts between reader and text, engaged in a play of making anticipations and breaking expectations. Metafiction is all about the “rules of the game,” moreover. It doesn’t have to be techie to be a game. But techie can bring out the “gameness” of narrative. In fact, Deena Larson has argued that most “e-poems” and interactive fiction is inherently metafictive: http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/buzz.html