Electronic Literature Organization

“Terror Nullus” was commissioned for the Venue/AFTRS Short Cuts online narrative exhibition in 1997. This 1 to 3 minute docudrama examines the hunt for an Australian identity — from prosaic places like Jenny’s place or Oscar’s office to unwieldy places like the unseen. This is a byte-sized piece of entertainment, with astonishingly intricate graphics and nuances.

“‘I Know a Man,’ One Letter at a Time” is a tribute to Robert Creeley (1926-2005). It places his poem in an austere, yet funny, “letterist” framework. This non-interactive piece takes Young-Hae Chang’s “phrase at a time” and “word at a time” approach to animated poems to its logical conclusion.

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 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.”

Jordan Mechner is the writer and designer of groundbreaking cinematic games such as Karateka (1984), Prince of Persia (1989), and The Last Express (1997). His most recent, in collaboration with a small team within Ubisoft’s Montreal studio led by producer Yannis Mallat, is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The gameplay is based on acrobatics, spatial puzzle solving, the manipulation of time, and swordplay. This gameplay connects to the story of the Prince through the Dagger of Time, which Mechner characterizes as “at once a weapon, a receptacle, and a MacGuffin.” The story is told in past tense narration — perhaps for the first time in a video game — with a noir flavor. As one progresses through the game the situation of the narrator’s telling is slowly revealed, pointing to influences such as Thief of Baghdad and, further back, to the traditional frame tale of 1001 Nights.