HTLit

My critique of free web distribution met a lot of resistance, but rather than rehashing the debates of previous decades or arguing for extremes, it might behoove us to stop and take a look around. Literature is not the only form that is struggling to earn money from digital content; movies, television, music, and journalism face the same problem. Everyone wants content to be as cheap as possible for consumers, but we still need to provide artists with incentives to create.

First, there are the models we already have. The pay-per-copy system has been working for a long time and probably isn't going anywhere. Self-publishing will continue to shape the economic landscape and eliminate middle parties (wholesalers, retailers, publishers to some extent) but publishers should not be scorned or counted out. Publishers offer the advantage of polish and promotion, and serve as important purveyors of taste. As more people self-publish, readers--lost in a sea of works--will look for a shortcut to the good stuff. Publishers can help. Of course, self-publishing and distribution can also rely on pay-per-copy and as more people turn to this the role of the publisher may change drastically (perhaps writers will begin to pay publishers more as consultants). Or perhaps we might see publisher subscription models à la Netflix.

Free distribution offers different advantages. A writer might want a larger audience until she establishes a name for herself. Or perhaps her income is coming from a grant or endowment. Free distribution can serve as a gateway or advertisement for other paying work, but the key point is that the writer's funding must come from an external source. Much of eLit is currently being given away, and while that has short-term advantages, it is unsustainable to the industry long-term. However, there are other ways to avoid the pay-per-copy model and still pay writers.

In a fascinating conversation, William Cole pointed out that digital comics are often self-referential and interlinked in a way that suggests we already have popular eLit right under our noses. These have been very commercially successful, largely through the marketing of merchandise. This model requires a very large fanbase, but it's reasonable to think that even if Hunger Games were freely distributed, Suzanne Collins could still make a killing selling mockingjay pins and replica bows and quivers. Applying this model to eLit opens the way for interesting cross-over ideas, like selling an art print from a visually beautiful work, or offering paid copies of the author's notes.

Downloadable content or bonus features, as long as they’re used for good rather than evil, are another option that has already been successful in the games industry. I can imagine a hard-boiled hypertext in which the addition of another character’s point of view, thoughtfully woven into existing content, could add an interesting dimension to the narrative.

Another option is that literature might adopt a model similar to the music industry in that reading and writing might become a more performative act. Works would then serve as an advertisement for paid author talks or readings, similar to how musicians make vastly more money from concerts than album sales.

And of course, there's always the journalism model of ad space, which has also worked for musicians and youtube comedians. This and the related freemium model are possibilities for eLit. Or, heaven forbid, product placement (may it never come to that).

It's important to note that each form seems to be finding its own solutions, and different artists are finding different solutions within the same medium. Jonathan Coulton and Rebecca Black, though both musicians, made their money in very different ways. What works for one person, company, or form may not work for you. But we must assess what readers want and provide them with convenient ways to pay authors.

The MLA recently issued guidelines for evaluating work in digital humanities and digital media.

Institutions and departments should develop written guidelines so that faculty members who create, study, and teach with digital objects; engage in collaborative work; or use technology for pedagogy can be adequately and fairly evaluated and rewarded. The written guidelines should provide clear directions for appointment, reappointment, merit increases, tenure, and promotion and should take into consideration the growing number of resources for evaluating digital scholarship and the creation of born-digital objects.

The fact that this even needs to be stated is ridiculous, but it might be a step in bridging some of the evaluation gaps between the humanities and the sciences (for example, different approaches to co-authorship, conferences vs. journals, etc.) that are used to evaluate scholarship.

Kate Pullinger suggests that we might have things backwards when we talk about the shelf life of digital works and the permanence of print.

In traditional publishing terms, I’m a classic mid-list literary fiction author.  At this stage in my career, I’ve written a lot of books, and many of them are no longer in print.  The exception to this is my most recent novel, The Mistress of Nothing; the fate of this book was transformed when it won the GG in 2009, Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction.  […] But even now, with several translations yet to appear, this book is fading from the market; it will doubtless have greater longevity than anything else I’ve written, because of the prize, but - unless of course the movie gets made - it will have a placid, quiet, life.

[…]

But the opposite is true of several of my digital fictions, and the powerhouse in this field is, as mentioned earlier, Inanimate Alice.  IA has not published any new episodes (there are four existing, out of a projected ten) for several years now, well before The Mistress of Nothing first came out.  However, the audience for this digital fiction, about a girl growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology, continues to grow and grow.

These are interesting points. Pullinger credits Inanimate Alice’s publisher and its popularity as a teaching tool for children. Whatever the reason, we can always use more thoughtful new media — and more criticism.

Over at the New Media Writing Forum, Andy Campbell started a wonderful discussion in response to my recent post on Scott Rettberg’s history of the ELO. Campbell rightly worries that eLit will not “evolve […] without being exposed to an audience outside of academia.” It’s a legitimate concern, and other eLit writers Christine Wilkes and Alan Bigelow have added sound thoughts to the discussion. Bigelow writes

If we have any hope of encouraging our students to read electronic literature outside the classroom, or our young creative writers to try their hand at this kind of "writing," they must see it has a broader audience, with both an aesthetic future and (for the writers) at least some potential for financial gain, either outright or through jobs in related industries. They can not see it primarily as an art practiced, and favored, by those of us in academia: for a new form struggling to gain its larger identity, readership, and practitioners, the academic world, while a necessary part of the overall strategy, is too small.

Academia, though vital for educating and broadening the audience cannot be the whole picture. There’s a lot of work going on out there and a lot of it isn’t getting the “eLit” cred that it should. Still other work is only tangentially related, but really should be part of the discussion. As advanced as we might hope our field is, eLit is still very young and is changing rapidly; we can still learn a lot from other forms. We can and should be looking around to learn from the aesthetics of digital comics or ask what eLit might take away from the publishing practices of the music industry. There is a lot of interesting work going on out there, whether we’re calling it literature or not.

Many people disagreed with my argument that theory is dictating (or replacing) aesthetics. The solution to this debate is simple: it comes down to a lack of writing about craft. We would all like for there to be more eLit works to discuss, but we are desperately lacking good (recent) writing on how to do it. Some writers protest that their work isn’t demonstrating theory; that’s fine! Write about why you chose that strange syntax, that interesting point of view or strange tense.

And we can always use more thoughtful criticism.

One thing is certain: no matter where you stand, these are questions we need to ask and discussions we need to have. Nodding our heads isn’t going to cut it; we need to face the issues head-on and do the work. There is still much real work to be done.

Mark Marino has posted the transcript from his recent Twitter Netprov fiction, “The Last Five Days of Sight and Sound,” written with Rob Wittig. Each day, Marino and Wittig posted a prompt to help keep participants in character and focused on the general arc of the story. The result was impressive.

Some of my favorites:

iTweetErgo_iAm: “@markcmarino @scottrettberg ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA?! What I wouldnt give 2 hear mr blue sky! Alas poor earlobes, I knew them well #l5dosas”

(In response to markcmarino: “ELO's @scottrettberg has joined the play in our netprov! #l5dosas Want to join? Check out http://t.co/OxOXxVjV”)

toritaylorz: “uhhh is it still raining? last thing I remember is LA flooding like it was the end of the world...uhh help...? #l5dosas”

Jerome_F_Salas: “Yanno, if we're gonna be blind but we're hooked into the internet, couldn't they give us a stream of our rooms? #3rdPerson #l5dosas”

scottrettberg: “And I was left in this still point, not quite remember the details of the novel, trying to recall the shade of brown of my sandals #l5dosas”

This fabulous talk by mathematician Richard Hamming reminds us to do good research, ask the right questions, and to work hard and effectively. The talk, from 1986, holds 10 takeaway points that are still valid today across disciplines:

1. Drop your modesty; admit that you want to do first-class work
2. Prepare your mind.
3. Age is important.
4. Brains are not enough; you also need courage
5. Make the best of your working conditions
6. Work hard and effectively
7. Believe and doubt your hypothesis at the same time.
8. Work on important problems in your field.
9. Be committed to your problem.
10. Work with your door open.

Luminaris, a beautifully choreographed short film by Juan Pablo Zaramella, tells a love story through stunningly beautiful stop-motion. The cinematography is incredible, and the work took almost 2 years to create due to unpredictability of weather and natural movement of shadows.

(The short is currently restricted, but Zaramella’s web site offers excerpts and other interesting work.–ed)

Ian Bogost reviews the latest game from art game studio Thatgamecompany, Journey, arguing that the game reveals the maturation of an artist. Though thatgamecompany's previous artistic successes, Flow and Flower, carried the conversation of art games forward, they exhibit a certain immaturity that is not apparent until viewed in hindsight.

Bogost’s review doesn’t even indulge the possibility that games are not art. We no longer need to argue this, but many reviews of “art games” still nod to the debate. Journey is certainly a beautiful work of art, and the review is superbly written like a thoughtful book review. If only more game reviews were like this.

Scott Rettberg recently published a history of the Electronic Literature Organization, highlighting its successes and explaining its shifts in focus.

Interestingly, he views the founding of the ELO to be a reaction to the "Eastgate school" and to Eastgate's model of publishing. Rettberg wanted a better alternative to CD-ROMS for sale; he wanted "free, web-distributed hypertext literature." In his own notes in the wake of a 1999 conference, he writes that

More hypertexts need to be free. People like free stuff. In order to generate a popular following for the new literature, we need to work to make it more accessible to readers (I haven’t read any of the Eastgate hypertexts because I’ve been in graduate school. To my knowledge, they are not available at my university library. That is a problem).

Rettberg thinks that work should be free. More broadly, he wanted to change hypertext’s economic model. Eastgate's approach was based on the economic models of print, and while this might not have been the perfect approach, it did set the precedent for authors to get paid for electronic work just as they had with print work. Mark Bernstein was surely aware of the possibility that web distribution could change the economy of publishing. He also warned of the perils of patronage, the risk of returning control of art to the prince and the priest. For electronic literature, patronage is pretty much exactly what has happened.

Rettberg paints an enthusiastic vision of community building. There was a lot of money and they had fantastic parties, but eventually the literary world lost interest and the organization turned to the patronage of academe. In the process, they lost focus on the writers.

While in its first iteration the ELO may have been envisioned as an organization focused on writers and on popularizing e-lit, it was increasingly becoming an actor in shaping an academic field of practice: moving from something more like the Academy of American Poets to something more like the MLA, or perhaps on a more appropriate scale, the Association of Internet Researchers or Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. This is not to say that ELO was abandoning a focus on bringing electronic literature to audiences and helping e-lit writers to build a community, just that the channels for doing that were increasingly embedded with an academic context.

This transition parallels the overall state of the field: most of the writing is now done as a theoretical demonstration by the scholars who study the writing. Little of today’s eLit is meant to be read by an audience beyond conference reviewers and exhibit curators.

The shift from literary to academic was not the ELO's fault, but it's indicative of a clear shift that has taken place: we're no longer focused on writing. We're focused on theory, and much of the writing is being produced to demonstrate it. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it is not inviting to groups outside of the academy, or successful in promoting eLit to a non-academic audience.

And why would the writers stick around? They're no longer getting paid for their work. There are certainly some very talented writers doing good work, but the proofs of concept dominate our discussions and attention.

It's easy to think of the ELO and Eastgate as two warring distribution models that can't reconcile how to provide authors with incentive to create, but surely there must be some middle ground in which the works can be easily distributed and studied, but can still provide authors incentives beyond a line on their CV. Free Web distribution has not provided us with the vast audiences some thought it would. The remaining question, as we see in eBook markets, is whether the price point is $0.99 or $9.99 or $19.95.

Mark Amerika tweets an interesting trailer for the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics. I was expecting a portfolio of interesting glitch work, but apparently the site is actually a commissioned work itself, a piece in Amerika's series of transmedia narratives that aims to tell the story of a glitch artist. From the Abandon Normal Devices page:

The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA) is the latest work in Mark Amerika's collaborative series of transmedia narratives. MOGA tells the story of The Artist 2.0, an online persona whose personal mythology and body of digital artworks are rapidly being canonised into the annals of art history. The piece traces the life of the artist and his ongoing commitment to a practice of ‘glitch aesthetics’ that leads to the museum of the title. MOGA will feature a wide array of artworks intentionally corrupted by technological processes including net art, digital video art, digitally manipulated still images, game design, stand-up comedy, sound art, and electronic literature. The project will also include a mock museum catalog available in both free e-book and print-on-demand editions.

Glitch deals largely with remix aesthetics, but there's more going on here. Much of JODI seems to deal with anxiety over uncontrollable technology but there is the issue of textuality in code and the conspicuousness of the machine at work. Similarly, generative poetry like John Cayley's or Nick Montfort's work embraces detachment of signifier and highlights the bold line between where the human ends and the machine begins in a way that explores the complexities of human-machine interaction.

Glitches highlight the break in the cyborg mentality, relying on the push and pull of anxiety, departure from the human, and the confrontation of the uncanny. Perhaps this is why so much pleasure is gained through knowledge of the source material and understanding just how it has been changed or corrupted. Perhaps we are quantifying change in a way that will make the remixers and gamers--both fetishizers of power and agency--comfortable in the knowledge that the line between human and machine is clear and controllable.

Joshua Rothman confirms what hardcore gamers have believed for a long time: difficult games are superior.

In the world of video games, difficulty can be a virtue in itself. A game like Angry Birds is just difficult enough to be diverting—and, as a result, only fit for “casual” gamers. Real gamers are like real art lovers. They demand extraordinary difficulty.

Are we talking about cultural sophistication, or are both just a carefully sculpted image for an exclusive club that not everyone is skilled enough to be a part of? I I've written on feminism as a gaming counterculture, and perhaps the rise of the austere, difficult puzzle game is another counterculture to watch. But let's be careful not to confuse difficulty with superiority; there are many other aesthetic merits to consider, and it's easy to substitute "difficulty" for "masculinity" or "heteronormativity" or "privilege."

I've recently discovered the New Media Writing Forum, a "hub for digital writers to share ideas, resources, and discussion." The forum is still young, but the quality of the posts is remarkable (take, for example, this post by Andy Campbell) and everyone there seems to be serious about the medium.

Elit has lacked an online meeting point where writers could come to discuss work, criticism, and theory. I’ve noted a desire for more cohesion as a community, but individuals seem lost on how to find one another beyond the usual cliques.

This endeavor is a good reminder that people want to be talking to each other and are always looking for ways to bring the community together. Perhaps this forum can evolve into that shared space.

The Graduate Center at CUNY has released The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JiTP), which focuses on the philosophy and practice of teaching in the digital age. All materials are open access. JiTP features papers on successful assignments and new learning resources, but the most impressive section is on "teaching fails" to showcase how assignments go wrong when certain variables are not taken into account.

The Love Letter is a simple and fun 5 minute game that reminds us how important uninterrupted reading can be.

Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic worries that with so many analog distractions – people, cats, swimming pools, coffee – we will never be able to sit down and read books. Naturally, the only reprieve from an endless bombardment of distraction comes from reading on a screen.

Can you concentrate on Flaubert when your cute cat is only a few feet away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy when people are swimming in a pool nearby?

People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pretty distracting with all of its opportunities for interacting with people, buying things in stores, and drinking coffee.

It's a brilliantly written article, one that leaves you wondering why nobody has written it before now.

Tim Parks argues for the merits of ebooks, noting that in addition to the fact that you can’t burn an ebook, they bring us closer to the essence of literature.

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that type-face on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

Parks continues by drawing a correlation between the maturity of an audience and its appreciation for ebooks. They free us from the vanity and “fetishistic gratification” of showcasing what we’ve read on a bookshelf. They also eliminate the distraction of the material object, focusing our attention on the text itself.

In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Parks has a point, but he does come off as a little condescending. Ebooks and tree-books both have benefits and drawbacks. They both offer certain comforts of permanence, one through physicality the other through ubiquitous distribution and ease of reproduction. Not to mention that the ebook still has a long way to go in terms of navigational ease, and in many cases even just quality of transcription.

And if the focus on the text is the virtuous, mature endeavor, on which aspects of the text should we focus when studying eLit, when the interface influences our interaction with the text more directly than the ebook’s?

In promoting his latest collection of short stories, For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings, Alex Epstein released the work on Facebook, using text in photos to tell the stories.

I deliberately chose the very low-tech format of a photo album, trying to keep the focus on the stories themselves (but also knowing that Facebook would offer better exposure to a photo than to text). This also made the book readable not only on a computer but also on an iPad or a smartphone, and even by people that don’t have a Facebook profile, without almost any technical effort on my part.

This experiment is interesting, but it led me to wonder what a whole fictional account might look like. Sure, Facebook itself has already showcased one when debuting the Timeline feature, but only to tell a typical life story. What might the steampunk version look like? Or the hard-boiled mystery version? The story could be told over a whole network of Facebook Timelines, and the prominence of visual art, video, and outside links in the piece could make for something like an interlinked digital comic.

Has anyone done this yet?

The internet delivers another round of brilliant remediation in the form of the Ted Nelson Pioneer Pokemon Card. The card was made by Yue on what appears to be a student website. The site also contains posts on Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, and J.C.R. Licklider, and we hope more Pokemon cards will come.

Clint Hocking explores why interactive dialogue is so bad: it’s because we’re holding it to the standards of film.

Functionally, film dialogue must never say anything that is visually apparent. This is what the cinematic axiom ‘show don’t tell’ means. But game dialogue is different. Game dialogue is a form of feedback, and as feedback, its very purpose is to clearly indicate that a game state has changed. In the case of the guard, his line of dialogue is a clear indicator that he has detected a sound, but has not visually acquired the player and that he is about to begin a dangerous search behaviour. No reaction shot required.

So, really, when we say game dialogue is terrible what we’re really saying is that it simply does not sound the way our cultural expectations tell us it should sound. In a sense, it is like saying radio writing is bad writing. Of course radio writing is bad writing… for film.

The funny thing is that I’ve never actually thought that game dialogue was bad (poor translations notwithstanding). Of course, it’s repetitive; that repetition is a signal to the player that she got all of the information that character could offer. Most players will repeatedly speak to the same character until they get to the repetitive part.

Works that experiment with forms of dialogue, like Facade, Alabaster, or Prom Week, are fascinating, but we need to understand the aesthetics we’re striving for—and departing from—in order to get the most out of them.

Ewan Morrison asks whether self-publishing is the next bubble, of the magnitude of the dotcom bubble or the housing bubble, and if so, how does that play out for the publishing market?

Meanwhile the mainstream publishing houses have suffered huge losses and now can only publish authors who seem to offer a guaranteed return. The entire field of publishing has shrunk, beneath what seemed on the surface like an infinite expansion. Publishers have been forced to launch their own epublishing sites in the attempt to join in the bubble and gain kudos, but they are too late and are wasting resources, and further undermine their old status as market leaders. They in fact turn to the new model of the self-epublishing "star" to get them out of the doldrums. This is the point at which self-epublishing becomes a hall of mirrors and speculation runs in circles.

And what has happened to all those new authors who were told they could make money from epublishing? Well, they are working entirely for free (on spec) on the promise of those big 70% royalties on future sales. They write their books, they blog, they net-network and self-promote; they could put in as much as a year's work, all without payment. So much writing-for-free is going on that it upsets the previous paradigm: people start to ask, why should any writers get paid at all? Why should "professional" writers get a wage or advance, when I've had to do all this work on my self-published ebook for free?

A recent Reddit post, which targets women who fake their “nerdiness” for male approval, has launched the internet into polarized opinions on what it means to be a nerd and to have nerd cred. The post features a busty woman saying “I own over 50 X-Men comics! I’m a total geek!” and a male responding with a dismissive, page-long rant.

No—no you’re not.

You’re just a sad girl who at some point let a marketing campaign convince her that “geeky” was vogue and having spent the 10 years since high school graduation desperately scrambling to amalgamate the idiosyncrasies and opinions of others into an ineffectual Franken-avatar to stand guard at the gates to the maddeningly black abyss that should house the unique personality that you never bothered to cultivate, you were more than willing to adopt this paradigm—watered down as it may be—for use as a sort of Cliff’s Notes to the person that you aren’t.

And it goes on, in similarly verbose, self-important prose until it comes to a sexist joke at the end.

As I mentioned in a recent post, nerd culture is not particularly female friendly. But the backlash from the sexist attitudes—the more frequent feminist posts on popular gaming blogs, the increased attention to women in games—shows that women are really getting tired of being told they can’t be in the club.

At Tinderbox Weekend in San Francisco, I met Neil LaChapelle, who is working on an app to engage and foster budding cultural scenes. LaChapelle introduced me to the idea of “scenius,” a term coined by Brian Eno to capture the idea that genius and creation are often surrounded by a culture of freely-flowing ideas. LaChapelle has done research on cultural scenes, and he gave me a brief template for the life-cycle of a scene. It turns out, not surprisingly, that gaming culture (and nerd culture if you view them as two distinct cultures) has followed the model pretty closely, and is now beginning to see a very typical backlash, one that was also experienced by the 80s punk scene, the 90s grunge scene, Harry Potter fandom, and is even reflected in sports fandoms as a team goes through its highs and lows.

The lifecycle of a culture goes something like this:

In the beginning, there is a spark of nebulous cohesion, people bonding over a shared value or idea. Often, this is nothing more than a reaction to a shared problem. As more people join the cause, the group’s goals start to coalesce. The group recognizes common traits or interest as points of shared identity. Eventually, a budding scene comes together around a central figure, place, or event, with those common interests now serving as the focus of “cred” to show that one belongs to that scene.

With the stabilization around a central focus, the scene expands, becomes more public, and more appealing to outsiders. As the scene becomes flooded with new members, many original members cling to the idea of cred and see the increased popularity of the culture with disdain. The culture becoming increasingly “mainstream” is a source for contention between members, and the increasing number of members leads to new ideologies within the group. At this point, the group may disintegrate and disperse, or a section might break off and establish a counter-culture.

Sound familiar?

Gamers I knew were first excited then fiercely angered when popular stores like Hot Topic started selling video game T-shirts, once a very public badge of cred within the community (see also this black shirt with a smarmy sentence in white letters) but now a symbol of “gamer” as mainstream ideal. The casual revolution was a further slap in the face to “hardcore” gamers, who saw the type of male-centric console gaming that they were doing as superior to the moms playing the Wii. Somehow the hardcore scale also coincidentally settled along a corresponding “masculine scale” with highly masculine console games getting the most cred, fantasy/RPGs somewhere in the middle, and casual games at the bottom. And if you aren’t hardcore enough, you can’t call yourself a gamer. Especially if you’re a girl.

Now that attitude is getting resistance in the gaming community, particularly from women who are tired of men assuming they don’t belong. It’s possible that we’re starting to see the rise of a counter-culture that values feminist ideals, challenges the idea of masculinity as the foundation of gaming cred, and rejects stereotypes that seem be getting worse, not better. It’s a counter-culture that I support and hope to help foster into the new age of gaming culture.

After being very impressed with Moonbot's The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, I couldn't resist picking up their adorable follow-up, The Numberlys. The story follows five numberlys (pronounced "number-lees") as they strive to bring letters (and by extension colors and fun in general) to a grey world that names everything with numbers. The numberlys even talk to each other in numbers, a clever audio trick that is translated by the text and voiceover. Sci-fi fans will appreciate homages to Metropolis and Flash Gordon.

The opening cut scenes are long. So long, in fact that the first interactive point came just as I was thinking this was not an interactive piece at all, but a short video, and was considering the possibilities of what that meant for content delivery economic models. Once the interactive cuts start appearing though, they are actually more numerous and more interesting than the ones in Morris Lessmore. The puzzles might be a little difficult for children, as the interaction is not always intuitive, but it's clear that Moonbot is heading in the right direction in terms of how they combine interactivity with storytelling.

My only real complaint with the work is the choice of the German stereotyped accent for the voiceover. It's unfortunate, especially as it describes a dystopian society that views everything with zealous efficiency and reduces its citizens to numbers. It's possible that this was an oversight and the accent was chosen to get in pronunciation jokes (like "Z End"), but either way it was not done in good taste.

Still, the work shows all the polish in appearance and score that we saw in Morris Lessmore, and Moonbot is positioning itself to become the Pixar of the app store.

Since my first encounter with vooks, I’ve been skeptical. Is this as far as the big-budget content developers are willing to push the medium? I’m using the term broadly to cover not just Vooks® but any digital narrative with a shallow, lackluster interpretation of how video and text can combine to tell a story. I’m talking about a platform that bills itself as the future of reading but actually amounts to little more than ebooks with video illustrations.

Then I found Moonbot’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

I admit, with some embarrassment, that the idea of children’s vooks had occurred to me, but only as a passing thought. I had seen the work Angela Chang is doing with the iPad, which still makes vooks seem unambitious and unoriginal. But in truth, there really is nothing wrong with a picture book, especially if it’s beautifully executed.

Morris Lessmore is a very beautiful children’s book with wonderful voiceover, fantastic scoring, and breathtaking video clips. There are a few interaction gimmicks, touch things to make something small happen, but the lack of substance in the interactions is overshadowed by the polish and care that has gone into the work. And not all of the interactions are shallow: one page gives a young reader an opportunity to play the piano, and gives adults a preview of the interactive lessons that might be more thickly interweaved into children’s books in the future.

Eugenio Tisselli at Netartery explains why he has stopped creating e-Lit.

“What the hell am I doing?” Do I even know?

These are my thoughts: I refuse to go on creating works of e-Lit only for the sake of exploring new formats and supports, and I strongly disagree with studying e-Lit exclusively from within the academic field of Literature. By its own definition, electronic literature “lives” within electronic media. But have we, as an academic community, realized what electronic devices are doing to the environment? Do we know where the minerals that are necessary to manufacture computers come from, and under what conditions they are extracted? What about the slave labor involved in the manufacturing process? Have we deeply studied the economic implications of using computers as literary tools, in a time in which all our economic systems are collapsing? In one word, are we being responsible? I have seriously asked these questions to myself.

As of today, I have decided to temporarily stop creating new works of e-Lit. I feel that the issues involved in creating artworks with computers are too important to be ignored. So I call for a truly trans-disciplinary, cross-sector research on electronic literature: one that also involves a profound understanding of its environmental and economic effects. One that doesn’t ignore the social and cultural contexts which are being effectively destroyed for the sake of our technology

Tisselli’s moral considerations raise interesting points about the morality of creating art. All creation comes at a cost; what point does the moral cost outweigh the benefit?

Tisselli makes a connection between the production of eLit and the oppressive living and working conditions that make mobile technologies possible. The correlation might hold more weight if more people were supporting these technologies specifically to enjoy digital art. I suspect that is not the case. As a field, we are only a very small fraction of a much larger problem, while as an artistic medium, we are an excellent platform to raise awareness and make a statement. Silencing ourselves will not help as much as speaking out.

Of course, the decision to make art is deeply personal , but if the choice to abstain from creating art is political. Perhaps that energy could instead be channeled into the art itself. New media can reach staggering audiences, and the offending media can sometimes be the best platform for awareness campaigns. Phone Story is a good example: a phone game that comments on the morality of mobile phone production and gives creators a direct line of communication with the targeted audience.

What if, instead of creating art, Virginia Woolfe had refused to create anything? Or the Harlem Renaissance? The Dadaists? We should channel our political energy into creating moving pieces, and eLit could use more serious political works.

Dame Wendy Hall worries that the shortage of female computer scientists is due to the perception of computers as “geeky.”

Hall, who invented a forerunner to the world wide web, said the problem of a scarcity of girls studying computer science was "getting worse" despite huge efforts from the scientific community to address the issue.

Hall, the dean of the faculty of physical and applied sciences at the University of Southampton, told the Guardian that girls still perceive computing to be "for geeks" and that this has proved to be a "cultural" obstacle, so far impossible to overcome.

Hall is right to worry about the lack of women, and to look toward cultural factors that might be contributing. But the perception of nerd culture is a real problem, and it’s more nuanced than “women don’t want to be geeks.”

Sometime in the last couple of decades, it became cool to be a nerd (which is different from a geek though the two are related). When I was young, my favorite caper films involved some kind of “hacking into a mainframe” that I found fascinating. Young Lex Murphy, the girl in Jurassic Park (who was roughly my age at the time) could hack into things. And then there were video games, which were also really cool. I knew that programmers made those, and I wanted to make them too. So if tech is cool, and women are using just as many gadgets as men (if not more), where is the disconnect?

If you look at the young men in the average computer science department, you will find that most of them self-identify somewhere on the “nerd” spectrum. Keep in mind that they do not see “nerd” as a derogatory point, simply as a cultural identifier and useful shorthand for people with similar interests and personality traits. That said, I would guess that many young people come to computer science with an interest in making computer games, or from a more deeply-entrenched identity within nerd culture, so examining these cultures is a good first step toward understanding the lack of women in computer science.

Neither gaming culture nor nerd culture are particularly welcoming towards women, and many women looking in from the outside—even those that share the same interests as nerd guys—do not want to enter an environment in which (they think) mouth-breathing basement dwellers will view them as a sex object. This stereotype, though not representative of everyone in the culture, is accurate enough that it will probably be confirmed as the woman enters the culture, whether she’s told “there are no girls on the internet” or sexually harassed on a web forum or video game. Many women within the culture have found that men (and even other women) assume they don’t belong or are feigning interest to be more attractive to men (or sell to them). And then there’s the problem of many girls not wanting to be in such a small minority, which in turn compounds and perpetuates the previous assumptions about the environment. The more women there are in the club, the more women looking in feel that it’s safe to be a woman in this environment. It’s not that girls are scared of being unpopular, many just don’t want to interact with what they see as a hostile culture.

So the culture that feeds into computer science classrooms isn’t particularly female-friendly, but surely the atmosphere in the classroom is better? Unfortunately, the lack of female role models means that girls often feel out of place or avoid asking questions for fear of confirming stereotypes.

We need to create an environment where girls feel safe and comfortable, an environment where it’s okay to ask questions, where girls won’t feel judged for their sex. And when we’ve done a reasonable job of that, we need to make sure the larger community knows that computer science is welcoming to women. Hopefully once women see that they won’t be alone to fend for themselves in a classroom full of troglodytes, more women will be willing to join the club.

Michael Breidenbruecker of RJDJ, the studio behind the sound-based augmented reality game Dimensions explains how augmented reality uses real life to create a different immersive gaming experience that he calls “personal gaming.”

This should totally be a companion to your real life," he adds. "Most games are designed so that they need your full attention -- you either interact or you don't, but when you interact, you're in that world. What we tried to do is make it work in parallel to whatever you do, to your life, really. You just put it in your pocket, and everything around you is enhanced.

Games that don’t require the player’s “full attention” aren’t new; interruptibility is the bread and butter of the casual game market. However, the idea that this might actually make the experience more immersive is interesting.

Historically, two schools of gaming (and really, digital narrative as a whole) have emerged: one which embraces immersion (console gaming, board games, CAVE installations, the novel), and one which embraces interruptibility and integration (Words With Friends, Angry Birds, serial fiction, blogs). In the past, the two have seemed to be at odds. Even ARGs, which require real-world interaction, are played through the lens of the game environment, and the very idea of “alternate reality” suggests escapism. They require one’s “full attention” to achieve their immersive effect.

What, then, does it mean to be immersive if the aim is not to be carried into a trance? Is the future of gaming—without venturing into gamification—that I might be immersed in a game while buying milk and stopping by the post office?

In light of a recent MIT experiment on how the brain distinguishes real faces from face-like structures, Yannick LeJacq wonders, “Why do our brains resist the charms of 3D modeling?”

What is it, exactly, that stops us from being completely seduced by the increasingly impressive modeling of virtual faces in videogames? […] The left side, as one researcher put is, “does the initial heavy lifting,” while the right side ultimately makes the call. But with recent improvements in facial modeling (such as L.A. Noire), will game developers ultimately be able to trick the right side of the brain entirely?

Perhaps this kind of research may be the key to traversing the uncanny valley.

Responding to Lori Emerson’s comments on the introduction of the term “electronic literature” by the ELO, Jill Walker Rettberg begins a history of the term’s use, as well as an analysis of how the terms of the field have changed over time.

We’re arguing semantics, but it’s important to recognize the continuity of a field, even if we’re now calling that field something new. A rose by any other name.

Susan Arendt would like to thank L.A. Noire and Rise of Nightmares for failing:

As the year comes to a close, we tend to look back with affection on all the great gaming experiences we had - but I don't want to do that right now. Instead, I'd rather take a look at two big, fat failures: one that will be remembered more for the meltdown of its development team than for its actual gameplay, and one that likely won't be remembered at all. Though neither game did gangbuster sales, they were important for a very specific reason. Any game can fail by simply being boring, or poorly made, or uninspired, but these two games failed trying to be spectacular, fresh, and new.

Anne Mangen explores how haptic responses shape our understanding of text. She’s interested in what we gain from physically touching a book.

Haptic perception is of vital importance to reading, and should be duly acknowledged. The reading process and experience of a digital text are greatly affected by the fact that we click and scroll, in contrast to tactilely richer experience when flipping through the pages of a print book. When reading digital texts, our haptic interaction with the text is experienced as taking place at an indeterminate distance from the actual text, whereas when reading print text we are physically and phenomenologically (and literally) in touch with the material substrate of the text itself.

The problem with this argument is that it makes assumptions about the virtues of haptic feedback, positing that some subconscious phenomenon occurs that shapes the reading experience when we physically touch a book. The physicality of the book does not bring us any “closer” to the materiality of the signified. We can’t rely on the assumption that the ability to touch or feel our content enriches it without an argument for why it does, and many of the current arguments can be explained by bad interfaces or other outside factors. Superficial arguments, like that haptic feedback signals to the reader where she is in a book, ignore the fact that much of this information can be easily mimicked by other technologies: completion percentage or a scrollbar with a “page x of y” display are now familiar substitutes for assessing how far one is in a story. How many of us really physically feel where we are in a story beyond the first and last few pages anyway?

Mangen isn’t just interested in ebooks; she writes of hypertext fiction:

In Narrative as Virtual Reality [Marie-Laure Ryan] concludes that ‘the hypertext format could provide the type of immersivity of the detective novel, as do some computer games, if it were based on a determinate and fully motivated plot’ […] I will argue, however, that when it comes to the (in)compatibility of digital technology with phenomenological immersion, plot is not the whole story. In my view, the incompatibility has at least as much, if not more, to do with the sensory-motor affordances of distinctly different materialities of technology than with plot.

(This explains why early stories like Esther and Ruth, which were designed for the sensory-motor affordances of the scroll, worked so poorly in the form of the codex book that they were soon forgotten. – MB)

I’m skeptical that haptic feedback is really at issue here. One can imagine a work in which tactile sensation is important (“words that yield” takes on a new meaning) but surely haptic feedback is not the only—or even most important—component. Do touch or—more broadly—mimetic sensations encourage more immersive experiences, or are other factors at play? How does agency contribute? It seems plausible that certain physical actions illicit Pavlovian conditioned emotional responses, but is there research to support such claims? Is touching an object, alone, enough to trigger such a response?