Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting is a fantastically written exploration of dramatic writing. I particularly enjoy his advice that all protagonists must be empathetic, if not necessarily sympathetic. He illustrates by examining Macbeth:

Macbeth, for example, viewed objectively is monstrous. He butchers a kindly old King while the man is sleeping, a King who had never done Macbeth any harm—in fact, that very day he’d given Macbeth a royal promotion. Macbeth then murders two servants of the King to blame the deed on them. He kills his best friend. Finally he orders the assassination of the wife and infant children of his enemy. He’s a ruthless killer; yet in Shakespeare’s hands he becomes a tragic, empathetic hero.

The Bard accomplished this feat by giving Macbeth a conscience. As he wanders in soliloquy, wondering, agonizing, “Why am I doing this? What kind of man am I?” the audience listens and thinks, “What kind? Guilt-ridden … just like me. I feel bad when I’m thinking about doing bad things. I feel awful when I do them and afterward there’s no end to the guilt. Macbeth is a human being; he has a conscience just like mine.” […] Macbeth is a breathtaking display of the godlike power of the writer to find an empathetic center in an otherwise contemptible character.

Concept Art World is a fantastic resource for game design concept art. Beautiful digital works from many different aesthetic approaches.

Game publisher Electronic Arts was voted Consumerist’s annual Worst Company in America this year, beating out rival game company Activision and even Bank of America. Consumerist’s analysis of why this happened reveals that gamers are fed up with the publishing and pricing models of game content. Chris Kohler for Wired elaborates:

So it comes down as it often does to the almighty dollar: Consumerist readers, enough of them to massively swing the vote towards EA, think that videogames cost too much money.

“There have even been numerous accusations that EA and its ilk deliberately hold back game content with the sole intent of charging a fee for it at a later date,” Consumerist continued in its awards announcement.

Of late, it’s publisher Capcom that has come under fire over this: Owners of the new fighting game Street Fighter vs. Tekken have found that there are 12 characters already included on the disc that Capcom says it will sell access to at a later date.

To make ends meet, Capcom needs players to pay more than $60 for its games. That much is clear. But a $90 price tag at GameStop would be unthinkable. So it sells the game for $60, then asks gamers to pay more to unlock more content.

This is a warning to publishers of digital content of many kinds: an increase in technology costs will not automatically excuse price raises in the eyes of the consumer. Consumers have accepted that content is valuable, and they have formed expectations of how much content is worth. Games need to find a way to lower costs rather than increasing prices.

Tan Lin is a poet, artist, and filmmaker whose work challenges the idea of what constitutes a “book”, and what it means to have “read” something. Many of his works, particularly HEATH (plagiarism/outsource) and Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, involve multiple platforms including social media, RSS feeds, email, post-it notes, and programming languages.

In a recent interview, Lin takes a Cagean approach to reading, radically departing from the notion of the book as a codex or even self-contained object.

What led you to use so many different forms of technology in the creation and publication of a book? How would you define a book?

People forget that a book or codex is a technology. My interest with HEATH and 7CV was to treat the book as a distinct medial platform through which a lot of ancillary information passes, much like a broadcast medium like TV or a narrow-cast medium like Twitter or Tumblr. Reading is information control, just as a metadata tag is a bibliographic control. So I wanted to highlight the book’s medial and time-based underpinnings.

It’s interesting to see authors challenging the notion of the book, but by the end of the interview, it became clear that Lin was radically confronting the nature of what reading means. Lin argues that reading is an experience that cannot be extracted from extraneous subconscious perceptions (smell, location, etc.) and indirectly compares it to a Zen mood state.

But a Zen meditative state isn’t reading is it?

My print-based and web-based works both tend to operate with the minimum amount of material necessary needed to constitute what we call reading. I’m interested in the forms of non-reading and boredom, which surrounds all reading and aesthetic experience as its customary default. I mean I like it when works are boring. When I go to see a Cage performance or a Merce Cunningham dance, I am bored half the time. There’s nothing wrong with that. 7CV is about skimming material, appropriating other titles (like The Joy of Cooking) and indexes, and extending the book by enlisting 30+ grad students at The University of Pennsylvania to spin off what publishers would call ancillary titles. Can 7CV be made more interesting by individual readers? Absolutely. This is common in academia, a profession defined by writing books about other books, i.e., generating secondary source material. But there’s no reason secondary source material cannot be more interesting than original source material. Do you have to read 7CV to have read it? Not at all. Moreover, there are many ways to not read a book: you can leaf through it, read reviews or synopses of it, or just lie and say you read it when you didn’t. I was at Columbia where I got a Ph.D. in literature, and there were about 250 books on my orals reading lists—books I had to be able to talk about—but I probably only read a third of them. In fact, though, I had read all of them, just in different ways.

I’m not sure I’m convinced by his definition of reading, but the questions he raises are important, and these are things we need to discuss.

Sometimes actually explaining what our field actually is to the uninitiated is difficult. This 90 second talk by Mark Marino is essentially an ad for electronic literature.

A classic video of Bush’s Memex by Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenk of Dynamic Diagrams is available on YouTube. The animation was originally distributed at the ACM SIGIR conference in 1995, and is a great interpretation of the diagrams in “As We May Think.”

Hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson will be teaching a final “bucket” course this winter at UC Santa Cruz that will encompass all of his work on computer technologies and his ideas for future improvements. The course, “CINEMA OF THE MIND: Philosophy and Art of Designing Interaction” promises to be fantastic. HTLit will be sitting in on the class and will report back with details.

Classes begin January 9.

Labrintesto offers a Chronology of Electronic Literature that begins with Bush’s As We May Think. There are some strange omissions (no Ted Nelson until 2007?), but it’s a great starting point and a helpful resource.

Jon Satrom performs interesting glitch pieces. His portfolio consists of videos of his performances, full of color, chaos, and cats. There may be the JODI-esque tendency toward boundary exploration, but with pieces about rainbows and dinos, nobody is taking himself too seriously.

Satrom’s portfolio is fun, but more importantly it presents an interesting perspective of glitch art: its performative quality. I’ve been deeply interested in the aesthetics of glitch work recently, specifically the idea that depending on the glitch process, the “art” might lie in the process—what was removed or changed—in the finished product, in the code, or any combination thereof. How, then, do we showcase the interesting parts?

Satrom does live performances, and his videos certainly capture that performative quality. We see the code. But we also see flashing colors, spinning beachballs, and ghostly almost-there moving images. The art is in how it all comes together.

Alan Kirby declares once and for all that “Postmodernism is Dead.” Philosophers and popular culture—everyone, it seems, but English professors—have moved on. The postmodern canon is all decades old; it's time for academia to stop calling postmodernism "contemporary."

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture.

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity […] Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.