The interactive whodunit doesn’t get any harder-boiled than in Dangerous Curves, a rare and effective follow-up to the style of detective interactive fiction seen in Stu Galley’s The Witness. A classic cast of characters and effective geography, with helpful compass direction information provided in the status line, make this piece more approachable than some others of similar depth and complexity. A Z-Machine interpreter (such as Windows Frotz 2000 or Zoom for Mac) is needed to run Dangerous Curves.
E-FEST 2006 at Brown, March 22-24
E-FEST 2006: A Celebration of New Literary Hypermedia is taking place at Brown University March 22-24. The events include several presentations of new work and panels on “Memory and Real Time,” “Noulipo: Recombinant Poetics,” and “The Game of Fiction.” Participants will include:
- Aya Karpinska
- Braxton Soderman
- Brian Kim Stefans
- Daniel Howe
- Edrex Fontanilla
- Gale Nelson
- George Landow
- Ilya Kreymer
- Jim Carpenter
- Judd Morrissey
- Lutz Hamel
- Michael Stewart
- Mike Magee
- Nick Montfort
- Nick Musurca
- Noah Wardrip-Fruin
- Polly Hall
- Robert Coover
- Robert Kendall
- Scott Rettberg
- Stuart Moulthrop
- Wendy Chun
E-FEST 2006 is sponsored by the Brown Program in Literary Arts, the Creative Arts Council, the Watson Institute for International Studies, and the Salomon Fund.
See The official blog for information about the schedule and for the E-FEST 2006 poster.
Cruising
This short piece offers a simple but very effective interface. “Cruising” is a compelling example of the Flash-based work that has been presented over the past several years at Ankerson & Sapnar’s online magazine Poems that Go. The text is by Ankerson; the design was done collaboratively.
Aisle
This curious interactive fiction “Aisle” provides the player with only one turn in which to do something, offering the slimmest possible bit of choice. But by playing repeatedly, a set of possible worlds – with some consistencies and some contradictions – can be seen from a supermarket shopper’s re-lived instant. A Z-Machine interpreter (such as Windows Frotz 2000 or Zoom for Mac) is needed to run “Aisle.”
The Dazzle as Question
“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.
Full Professorship in Multimedia and Digital Gaming, Ilmenau University of Technology
Ilmenau University of Technology, located in the central German state of Thuringia, seeks applicants for a full professorship in Multimedia and Digital Gaming in its Institute of Media and Communication Science. English-speaking candidates are welcome; some German language skills are required. For complete information on the position and application procedures, visit (here for archival purposes, link dead: “http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/uni/fileadmin/Startseite/USER/cundl/Stellenangebote/uniintern/Ausschreibungstext_Multimediale_Anwendungssysteme.pdf”)–at present, in German only. Direct inquires to Katrin Raschke.
MACHINE Reading Series at Kelly Writers House: Stuart Moulthrop, April 19
On Wednesday, April 19, acclaimed veteran hypertext writer Stuart Moulthrop will read from early and recent works at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. Moulthrop’s appearance, part of the MACHINE reading series co-sponsnored by the ELO, will take place at Kelly Writers House at 5:30 p.m. Map and directions can be found on the Kelly Writers House website.
MITH Digital Dialogue, March 7: Scott Rettberg
On Tuesday March 7, Richard Stockton College Assistant Professor of New Media Studies Scott Rettberg will speak at the University of Maryland’s MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) on the theme, “Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing”. Rettberg will show a variety of works submitted to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection as he discusses the ways that literary expression in digital environments has been changing since its early Storyspace days.
The talk will take place at 12:30 p.m. in the MITH conference room. For more information on this and other upcoming talks at MITH, visit MITH.
A New Interactive Fiction Trio, in Inform 7
As announced on Usenet, three pieces of interactive fiction have just been released. All are written in Inform 7, the soon-to-be-released IF development system from the creator of the original, widely-used Inform.
Leading IF author Emily Short has released two new Inform 7 games, and Graham Nelson, the author who is behind Inform and Inform 7, has provided a new work of interactive fiction, too. Graham Nelson’s piece is entitled The Reliques of Tolti-Aph. Emily Short’s are Damnatio Memoriae (set in the Savoir-Faire universe) and Bronze (a “fractured fairy tale” based on the legend of beauty and the beast). They come with lavish virtual “feelies” – supplementary items – such as illustrated PDF manuals, a map, and a even a walkthrough in one case. Among these materials can be found Emily Short’s very useful introductory text IF Instruction Manual; there are similar instructions in the Bronze manual, too.
A new container format, zblorb, encapsulates the zcode file along with cover art and metadata. Because of this, Mac users who use Zoom as their interpreter will need the very latest version, Zoom 1.0.5 alpha 1.