Finally I have figured out what’s wrong with my website account and uploaded my html project into this link. You need to unblock pop-up protection option of your browser in order to view this. If you are using Firefox, you can go to Preferences/Options, Content, and uncheck the box Block pop-up windows.

A few words about the ideas and process leading up to my personal project.

1)
First of all, the work itself: An online HTML file -in other words a website- which seems to be ‘blank’ or in a state of forever uploading when first opened. Upon moving around the cursor on the ‘empty space’ the viewer stumbles upon invisible hotspots which, when the cursor moves over them, reveals popup windows containing individual fragments of a travel narrative describing a swim in the sea at Spanish Banks, Vancouver. The placement of the hotspots on the website space mirrors the thought process that accompanies me during this ‘trip’ and when thinking back to it to document it in writing; a hotspot that would reveal a text about a memory is placed in proximity of the hotspot for a text that describes the experience triggering the memory. Thus, the placement is organic and instinctive, as is the experience of the viewer when navigating through the fragments.

2)
The initial idea when embarking upon a digital narrative as such was using visuals and audio as well as text. Previously I have made non-digital works which depend on the stories that are associated with images, sometimes including actual storytelling, at other times depending on the viewer’s capacity to create a fictional background for the work. There are two reasons that I discarded this idea and decided to use pure text: First of all, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and explore the visual world that pure text can create, in the mind. Relevantly, I didn’t want to impose on the viewer certain visuals that I associate with certain places that are mentioned in the narrative and let him/her create his/her own topography.

I have never considered myself a good writer, nor have I enjoyed the act of writing. At times when I needed to resort to writing as a way to document thoughts and create more in the process, I have tried to find ways which would allow me to get through my inability of organizing diverging fragments into an expressive whole. For my artist statement, I wrote bits and pieces as linear and coherent paragraphs and arranged them non-linearly on a blank document as blocks which were connected to each other with lines. The lines were representative of links between the bits and they were constructed non-methodically because the connections were pivots for content (both fragments talking about installation art, for instance) or author, or time, or be free-associational all the same. This process lifted some constraints on my writing but something still didn’t feel right. The very existence of the links themselves pointed to a fixed establishment of relations between certain bits, working against the fluidity that I was trying to achieve through breaking down of the linear arrangement of paragraphs (One of the reasons why I didn’t actually ‘connect’ the hotspots in my project but let locational proximity do the job). However, the more I think about it, the more I understand that trying to create a total fluidity and ephemerality within language is paradoxical, since language itself is a tool of generalizing and homogenizing, pinning things down and disregarding nuances. Perhaps the stereotype, the middle ground is in some measure necessary for communication. (Would we be able to do with a language similar to the one in the story called The Nna Mmoy Language in Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes? -words with ever-shifting meanings that depend on the meanings of the words before, after, and around, which in turn depend on others- or would that beautiful language necessitate a completely different human nature?) Perhaps we need some fixity, a handle, an anchor, that we can return to after wandering around. This conflict about the language was curiously similar to the conflict about the place (identity) that has been concerning me for a while. Identity politics is eager to define people through the places they are from (and gender, race, etc.) and a somewhat counter side is continually dissatisfied with the ‘handles’ people have about places: two extreme positions. I myself find myself often in conflict; I am disturbed when people ask me how many cigarettes a day I smoke upon learning that I am a Turk, however when someone mentions ‘Hawaii’ to me, for instance, the first mental images sparked are those of a clear blue sea, sandy beach, and palm trees. What makes the first statement ignorant and the second mental image innocent and fantastical? I suspect they come from the same source, of the human need to anchor. I’m not trying to say that we should all just give up and become racists; but perhaps come to terms with the need of exotic fixity, which we allow ourselves to unfix and fix. What we need might be a ‘double vision’, which allows us to assume positions (set anchors) but be able to hop in and out of them, and zoom out.

The project is not an attempt to solve this conflict, but explore it. The texts themselves are linear, however their arrangements are not. The viewer/reader can wander around the topography of the website,  discovering clusters of fragments or fragments that are distinctly far from each other, making mental links between what he/she is reading and what he/she read before and re-contextualizing past fragments, stumbling upon the same fragment more than once, and inevitably, missing some of the fragments. The experience is similar to moving in a dark room with a flashlight, the viewer will always have a partial experience, which is alright, because what I strive for is a partial experience which opens up rather than an experience which claims to be complete (in itself).

Also, I discovered that this way of creating a narrative within a digital medium is surprisingly similar to telling stories orally. Perhaps we made a full circle, or rather a spiral, and returned to a version of the origin. When I had this feeling I decided to write spontaneously, as I was speaking inside my head, with as little editing as possible. Thus the sentences are simple and almost mundane, pointing out things that are intuitively important to me.

3)
Why create a ‘narrative’, whereas text in digital medium can be used to create a lot of other things?
My interest in narrative and storytelling stems from different positions, which I can best explain with several notes:

-”(…) popular views of narrative are ambivalent rather than dismissive. People tend to see narrative as authentic if also deceptive, as normatively potent if also politically unserious. We suspect that these views reflect the symbolic codes of analogy and difference that produce cultural meaning more generally. Just as people know what reason is through its relation to other binary oppositions – reason is to unreason what man is to woman, cognition to emotion, and culture is to nature – storytelling makes sense when ranged along culturally familiar oppositions. insofar as storytelling is understood in terms of oppositions of concrete/abstract, emotional/rational, female/male, personal/public, informanl/formal, and folkloric/scientific, it is denigrated by its association with the negative pole of each opposition.”

“Stories’ creation of an alternate reality makes it possible for audiences to identify with experiences quite unlike their own while still recognizing those experiences as different.”

“(…) audiences accept that they will have to interpret the story to extract its meaning, and, indeed, that the the story’s meaning may not even be obvious to the person telling the story. Here, we draw attention to narrative’s allusive character. Of course, all discursive forms require interpretation; but audiences expect good stories to be interpretable more than they do good reasons or good reports. Conversational analysts have found that when people tell their stories, their listeners often participate in interpreting and even telling the story. The point of the story may be offered by the narrator, then modified or amplified by her interlocutors. Or the narrator’s interlocutors may simply the point of an account that the storyteller presented as ambiguous. People may tell stories in deliberation with just this possibility in mind. (…) Telling personal stories may be helpful, not because they offer a clear moral but because they do not do so. We draw attention once again to the allusive character of storytelling but also to its iterative character. Reasoned argument invites assent or dispute. Telling a story implies an invitation to tell a story in return. “That reminds me of something that happened to me…,’ speakers often say.”

“Proponents have argued that personal storytelling conveys the particularities of people’s experiences in a way that reasons do not. Why, though, would anyone want to submerge themselves in the details of another person’s experience? Because when that experience is structured as a story rather than as an account or description, listeners anticipate that it will make a larger point, one that is relevant to their own lives. To understand the story is to grasp its moral implications.”

“Audiences are prepared from the very beginning of a story to suspend disbelief. Even in ordinary conversation, speakers rely on a variety of linguistic devices to effect a transition to the separate time and place of the study (the equivalent of ‘Once upon a time…’) for example, indications that a story is about to told; an orientation to the time and place of the story; or a shift in verb tense. These devices, which detach the story from the ongoing conversation, encourage listeners to suspend their skepticism about the credibility and relevance of the story and strive to grasp the motivations of the characters and the unfolding logic of events. In other words, when audiences enter the story-world created by the narrator, they know from the beginning that they are making a projective leap.”

(Lee, John, and Francesca Polletta. 2006. Is Telling Stories Good for Democracy? American Sociological Review 71/5: 699-721.)

-“(…)’sex is a social construction,’ ‘race is a social construction,’ ‘the nation is an invention,’ and so forth, the tradition of invention. The brilliance of the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking what’s the next step? What do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable? How come culture appears so natural? If things coarse and subtle are constructed, then surely they can be reconstrued as well? (…)

I think construction deserves more respect; it cannot be name-called out of (or into) existence, ridiculed and shamed into yielding up its powers. And if its very nature seems to prevent us – for are we not also socially constructed? – from peering deeply therein, that very same nature also cries out for something deeper than analysis as this is usually practiced in reports to our Academy. For in construction’s place – what? No more invention, or more invention? and if the latter, as is assuredly the case, why don’t we start inventing? Is it because at this point the critic fumbles the pass and the “literary turn” in the social sciences and historical studies yields naught else but more meta-commentary in place of poses, little by way of making anew?

But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions – what a sociology would that be! – so a devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real. Would that it would, would that it could, come clean, this true real. I so badly want that wink of recognition, that complicity with the nature of nature. But the more I want it, the more I realize it’s not for me. Nor for you either… which leaves us is this silly and often desperate place wanting the impossible so badly that while we believe it’s our rightful destiny and so act as accomplices of the real, we also know in our heart of hearts that the way we picture and talk is bound to a dense set of representational gimmicks which, to coin a phrase, have but an arbitrary relation to the slippery referent erasing its way out of graspable sight.

Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created, and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real and that all around the ground lay firm. That is what the public secret, the facticity of the social fact, being a social being, is all about. No matter how sophisticated we may be as to constructed and arbitrary character of our practices, including our practices of representation, our practice of practices is one of actively forgetting such mischief each time we open our mouths to ask for something or to make a statement. Try to imagine what would happen if we didn’t in daily practice thus conspire to actively forget what Saussure called ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’? Or try the opposite experiment. Try to imagine living in a world whose signs were indeed ‘natural.’

Something nauseating looms here, and we are advised to beat a retreat to the unmentionable world of active forgetting where, pressed into mighty service by society, the mimetic faculty carries out its honest labor suturing nature to artifice and bringing sensuousness to sense by means of what was once called sympathetic magic, granting the copy the character and power of the original, the representation the power of the represented.”

(Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge.)

The ephemerally ‘immersive’ aspect of storytelling exactly plays with this ‘silly if not desperate place between the real and really made-up’, which is a great deal interesting to explore.

-How do macro- and micro- narratives  relate to each other, as they are both filtered through subjective understanding? Why should anyone be interested in my autobiographical stories? The micro-, or autobiographical narrative does not communicate to the reader the exact state I am in, causing him/her to feel and think in exactly the same way as me; nor does it aim to find what is exactly the same in him/her and me. What it might do, however, is that it might cause him to shift from him/herself and move into a new, third position between him/her and me. “What we have in common is that we are different” (Olafur Eliasson).

Some of the individual fragments within my narrative describe private moments whereas some tell stories from a common cultural pool, or experiences that were shared by a group of people. They all tie to each other. In this case, then, the macro-stories are in fact micro-stories as well, or vice versa.

4)
Why make a travel narrative, then? First of all, I am interested in the act of exoticising the mundane to make it fantastically distant (the exotic distance, which might sound like a hostile term, actually represents the natural distance which is necessary for communication and exchange to happen). Perceiving going into the sea as a trip might shift things around and create an osmosis.

The repeated fixing and unfixing of places and our idea of them, as well as the idea of ‘home’ and ‘foreign land’ in travel narratives is similar to the repeated fixing and unfixing of language in digital territories.

I’ve had a variety of ideas for a video games, including:

• An adventure game where you collect words by solving puzzle, and the compiling the poem a puzzle itself to provide narrative/game play progression

My process for coming up with a good/feasible idea was bumpy; I felt unsure what consisted a video game and how I could fit poetry into one. Defining ludology helped, as well as exploring poetry in other digital spaces such as hypertext and code. What really inspired was reading about Lessness by Samuel Becket.

In Literature in the Digital Era, Van Hulle describes Becket’s poem in term of form/content that I felt was very similar to video games.

“Beckett created a rigid framework within which he allowed chance to be a major structuring principle. As Ruby Cohn (2001: 305) and Rosemary Pountney (1987) show, the text’s 120 sentences are in fact 2 times the same 60 sentences, repeated in a different order. Becket wrote each sentence on a piece of paper, mixed them in a container, and picked them out twice in random order. (230)

“Each sentence is conceived as a mobile textual unit or lexia. With a color code, the underlying proto-hypertextual structure can be visualized. (231)

“He infuses his rigid grid of human systematization (12 months of year, 12 hours in a day, 7 days a week, 60 minutes in an hour) with chance, arbitrariness, and randomness. The rigidity of this grid, which human beings tend to impose upon reality, is a comment in itself.” (232)

Lexias, unit can be related to binary code of programming. Furthermore, I feel that lexias can be related to narrative nodes of video games, the moment of split/joint pattern forming. The factor of chance in Lessness, the mobility of the units, and the rigidness of the grid seems as though it can be translated into a video game. It meets the criteria of Jesper Juul:

• Fixed rules=Yes
• Variable outcome=Yes
• Valorization of outcome=If the poet is the player, then yes
• Player effort=If the poet is the player, then yes
• Player attachment to outcome=If the poet is the player, then yes
• Negotiable consequences=Yes

In my interpretation, the player need to be the poet who creates the poem a.k.a plays the game.

Here my concept:

Taking my poem O Bibliotheca (also available on my blog sans formatting) considering Becket’s model and How to write a video game script, develop a flowchart like this, which explains the game.

This is a necessarily iterative process. I need to play many more games to get a better feel for this possible. In theory though, I feel that poetry can exist and thrive in the video game space. A quote that has been in my mind through-out this process is that by Dos Santos, also in Literatures in the Digital Era:

In the trajectories of our decisions and indecisions, in the space between the lines of our movements, we always drag with us the command lines, the choices of programming language, the impositions of the compilers and the restrictions of the machine languages.” ( 109)

Whether we are making split/joint decisions while playing a video game, or writing a poem in a Moleskin notebook, we are marked with the ink of the machine language. Like reading a newspaper, the soot works it’s way under our nails and into our clothes.

“We become what we behold. We make tools and tools make us.”

-Marshall McLuhan

Achievements are interesting because they are designed to intrude on the screen the moment they are unlocked, reminding the player that they are playing a game in a fictional world. This breaking of the fourth wall is unscheduled in many cases and can occur at any time, leading to a sense of fragmentation within the game. In this sense, achievements seem to be designed to break immersion.

Achievements have become a structural trait of games, albeit an unnecessary one, yet they do provide a narrative all on their own. Achievements are displayed in the order in which they are unlocked, essentially telling a silent story of a player’s progress. This, alone is not very interesting but when taken with the fact that they have become a structural trait of games, it shows, once more, that the mechanics and the narrative of a game are incredibly fluid. Game mechanics have a narrative as well.

According to hypertext scholar Landow in Literatures in the Digital Era, “Ludologists prefer real interaction and therefore favour games, in which emergent situations meant hat no playing sequence is pre-fixed. (13) He adds:

“The ludology-narratology wars could be considered as a symptom of the struggle to define a new discipline that is completely removed from the predominant hypertextual or cinematic digital paradigms of the time. The debate actually mirrors some of the deepest theoretical concerns held in the field, such ad the difficult of integrating interactivity with narrativity. Not everything taking place on the Web adjusts to the classic definitions and expectations of hypertext; reader interaction may be kept at an external level, where no real changes to the story can be made. “

I think in order to truly understand ludology, I need to understand was defines a video game. According to Juul in [ Figure 2.10 p.44]:
Game

• Fixed rules
• Variable outcome
• Valorization of outcome
• Player effort
• Player attachment to outcome
• Negotiable consequences

Borderline cases

• Skill-based gaming
• Change-based gambling
  • Prenegotiated consequences
  • No player effort
• Games of pure chance
  • No player effort
• Open-ended simulations
  • No valorization of outcome
• Pen and paper role-playing
  • Flexible rules

Not Games

• Hypertext fiction
  • Fixed outcome
  • No attachment
• Ring-a-ring o’ roses
  • Fixed outcome
  • No attachment
• Storytelling
  • Fixed outcome
  • No player effort
  • no attachment
• Conway’s game of life; watching a fireplace
  • No valorization of outcome
  • No player effort
  • No attachment
• Traffic, Noble War
  • Non-negotiable consequences
• Free-form play
  • Variable rules
  • Pre-negotiated consequences

Defining games in this way gives me a clear basis for evaluating when a digital product/piece is hypertext or game.

Landow describes “Hyper is trans” (7) in Literatures in the Digital Era. He is later quoted by Van Hulle in the same book, saying  “Hypertext (…) denotes text composed of blocks of text-what Barthes terms a lexia-and the electronic links that join them” ( 227). Van Hulle does on reference Daniel Fereer, who argued  hypertext “proves to be a suitable concept for visalizing the writing process in an electronic environment (Ferrer 1995), so that is becomes clear that the avant-texte is indeed a hypertextual structure, a text composed of lexias and the electronic links that join them. These electronic links thus enable the user to follow the author’s mental process, which brought about this constant reshuffling of lexias” (227). Hypertext represents linked words/icons that stand in place of a deeper structure. It makes me think of letters, that stand in place of a phoneme, and even emotion and cultural significance.

A cousin to hypertext is digital text. I’m not sure if it’s truly different. In the same book, De Souza says:  “Digital text, rather than an incremental point in the evolution of text-production techniques, is a water shed in the history of text diffusion (235), adding, “Digital text isn’t just holding. With digital texts, something else is need beyond the producers’ and the receivers’ command of a writing system for processing of the information. Human writers and readers do not process (codify and decodify) the information immediately; the artificial logic programming is need to mediate this task” (De Souza 237). I feel that digital text incorporates hypertext, the end result of artificial logic programming.

In any period, some poetry will discover that which can only be done in and as writing by using new technical means available, while other poetry will bring into the present of writing the forms and motifs of previous technological and historical moments.  Neither approach is invalid just as neither is surefire, but evaluating one approach by the criteria derived from the other is misguided.  (508)

Poets are the artists of language, and artists are those who respond in the current cultural moment. Bernstein adds:

Writing technologies affect poetry in ways that are often hard to explicate but nonetheless become part of their meaning. (510)

Poetry is reacting to hypertext, to programming code, to graphic design, to storyboards, to cinema, to video games. Landow observes:

A poem, a novel and a play are all different kinds of alternative fictional worlds, built up artifically by words. But, like technology, virtualization, from the well-known myth in Plato’s Phaedrus to the present day is often considered to be an artificial process alien to humanity and therefore not only inhuman but dehumanizing” (12)

Poetry is the space between the past and future and between technologies. As Borras aptly writes,

”We find the whole history of poetry illustrates how we human beings have sought new literary expressions in order to feed our imagination and our souls: a history of experiment and exploration” (124)

As part of this experimentation and exploration, artists are processing our materials, our culture, our thoughts. As Marshall MacLuhan puts it, “Today we do not think. We re-mix other people’s thoughts”. Poetry can be the re-mix of hypertext and video games.

Let’s remember that not all poetry is experimental. Some is very rigid and rule bound (think sonets, limericks, elegies) and in a sense, mirror the structure and forms of games. Because of the mix of form and content, Poetry has the capacity to respond immediately and continuously.

• A classic hypertext poem True North by Stephanie Strickland on Eastgate.
• Online sound poetry by Christian Bok.
• A great resource for contemporary poetry, which included hypertext poetry, UbuWeb.
• Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird

Computer Poetry is a related genre to hypertext poetry, which perhaps overlaps with poetry video games. In the article, Computer Poetry Pushes The Genre Envelope,Science Daily reports on the research of Maria Engberg.

The way digital poetry experiments with language raises questions and challenges conceptions of literature that were formed by printed books,” says Maria Engberg, who has examined what this entails for literary scholarship.

She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement, and word and image constructions. The poems were written, or rather created, with the help of computer technology and published on the Internet or CDs, for instance.

Some of the works can be experienced as three-dimensional installations, created in space using so-called vr-cubes and augmented-reality environments. Maria Engberg examines how the forms of the poems construct different reader roles that challenge traditional views of poetry and reading, formed by the visual conventions of the printed page.

“Reading becomes one way to use the poem, and the reader becomes an active co-player. But the poems can also eliminate that possibility, leaving the reader to be a viewer looking at the digital poem, which, like a poetic film, blends words, images, sounds, and movements into a whole,” she explains.

• Street Fighter Poetry

• 94 Video Games in 5 Words…Geek Poetry

Donkey Kong Country: Apes love insane barrel cannons.

• Find Tranquility with Video Game Haiku

Final Fantasy XIII

For Cocoon, or pulse

apocalypse approaches

Um, I don’t get it

• The web’s best videogame poetry

• Stocking Stuffers: Despairing Video Game Poetry

• The Videogame Poetry Show

• Emerging Poetry and Videogames

Today I Die Screenshot

3 Fun Poetry Video Games features Silent Conversation, Passage and TruHangman, “games that express, test, or are poetry” . Another game that is a poetry video game is  Today I Die which involves game play focused on stanza creation. This is probably the most clear example of a poetry video game.

At the 2005 GDC Game Design Challenge, hotshot designers took on Emily Dickinson poems. It was a concept contest that some critics found beyond words. Slashdot article shows screenshots of the concepts.

Adaptation is an important theme of poetry video games. In article From Poetry To Playability: How Visceral Games Reimagined Dante’s Inferno, old literature becomes new media.

Braid (Phil’s main game of interest) bills itself primarily as a puzzle game, and it’s a very good one. It also follows in the footsteps of Portal – last year’s celebrated action-puzzler – by balancing its brevity with a tight structure and sense of purpose, so that when the game is done you feel more like you’ve just experienced a fine work of artistic entertainment, and less like you just pushed over an amusing but rather small collection of puzzles.

Portal was bursting with, begging your pardon, a very nerdy sense of humor, full of dark-jokey irony that echoed the best of Monty Python. It also left players with a basket of souvenirs to take home after the game was over, most notably that catchy Jonathon Coulton end-theme, and some repeatable catchphrases and iconography suitable for wearing as T-shirts or forum avatars. Braid eschews these; after playing, you take home no more than what you would after, say, savoring a short poetry collection, or studying a large oil painting for some time.

Braid is described as poetic and a poem  is equated here with passive art, instead of an interactive experience.  Years after this article was written, Braid and Portal are doing well, showing that poeticness has some economic integrity.