Cyborg Institute

Exploring the Intersections of Contemporary Technology, Culture, and Communities.

The Cyborg Institute is a research cooperative that explores interaction between computer systems and their users, as well as the links between the emergent technological and sociological phenomena.

Our current work centers on digitally-mediated collaboration and cyberculture. In the pursuit of our goal, to develop more effective and empowered methods and habits, we employ a diverse set of tools and critical perspectives.

Our work progresses in the open, primarily on the wiki.

From time to time we may also work directly with individuals and teams to facilitate projects of mutual interest. If you are interested in the kinds of issues and questions we pose or are doing related work, we would very much like to work with you and help support your efforts in whatever way we can. Above all we invite you to participate!

— the Cyborg Institute Team

Multiple participants

Not only are computer-based forms of such fiction becoming widely available in new interactive forms, where the reader can participate actively in shaping the story, but network versions allowing for multiple participants are now emerging.

In terms of their potential for elaboration, and for a much increased payoff in suspense and personal engagement, networked interactive fiction games are a logical evolution both of current popular fiction and of arcade and video games. Their attractions will, of course, remove their participants yet further from the kind of engagement that has generally been considered appropriate for literary texts; as a result, literature, at least in North American culture, may be relegated to a status even more marginal than the one it occupies now.

Thus the revolution in network communications will perhaps bring about changes in the status of literature more radical than anything that we can envisage emanating from literature departments.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

métabole
hypertexte


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Author's job and interactive literature

Choose the future of interactive fiction

Books where you decide what happens sprung from the bedrooms of D&D-playing teenagers, but the form is having something of a revolution

Back in the 1980s, when most proto-geeks could only dream of owning a home computer that would run a primitive text adventure game in which you could PICK UP AXE and ATTACK ORC, the next best thing was, funnily enough, a book. And now they're back.

But it was a very special kind of book, which allowed readers to exercise some semblance of control over the plot through the decisions they took at the end of each segment.
These "choose your own adventures", half work of fiction, half roleplaying game, appear to be enjoying something of a resurgence, perhaps partly due to nostalgia and partly due to a generation weaned on the internet looking for the same interactivity in books.
If you want to explore this argument further, click on "Read More". If you want to take another path, then choose a different blog entry.

The re-emergence of the format has three main strands. Firstly, in what can only be pure nostalgia, the original "Fighting Fantasy" books have all been re-packaged and reissued. The book that started it all off, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, received the 25th anniversary treatment in 2007.

Just like early text-based computer adventure games, these gamebooks used the tools of heroic fantasy - dwarfs, goblins, quests and the like - as they both had their roots in insanely popular roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons which arose in the 1970s. Fighting Fantasy books dispensed with the need for friends that made D&D so unwieldy. An American publisher, Wizard Books, re-released the original series of books and is adding new titles every year.
The second strand is the appropriation of the formula, in a very nudge-nudge wink-wink way, for a tale of thirtysomething angst called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, released in the UK by Virgin Books after success in the States. Bob Powers's book replaced the usual hack-and-slash fantasy stuff with choices such as "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183".

These modern rehashes look like a flash in the pan, with grown-up fans returning to the form in a blaze of nostalgia after an adult life spent getting used to web interactivity. Can a book replace a computer game, when a Nintendo DS is as easy to carry around as a paperback?
The last strand in the development of interactive fiction takes the idea in a different direction: it might be called a true web 2.0 version. In a similar way to how Elizabeth Baines wrote a blog-based novel last year with plot input from her readers, with varying results, new American publisher Underland Press is publishing weekly instalments of what it calls a "wovel" (it's a contraction of "web novel" - I know, I know, but give it a chance. It didn't take us long to get used to "blog", after all). Entitled The Living, it is a riff on the zombie genre and new instalments are posted every Monday. Depending on which way the vote at the end of each chapter swings, author Kealan Patrick Burke apparently writes the next chapter in accordance with the readers' wishes.

Whichever way the public takes it, Underland Press's The Living will eventually be released as a proper volume when the experiment is over. The question is, do readers really want the responsibility of driving the narrative, or is that the author's job? Make your choice now...

David Barnett

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Jay David Bolter and new genres and forms

Roy Christopher: The web has provided an environment for the high-speed spread and exchange of information. Do you think it has evolved in the best possible manner? What could we be doing better on and with the internet’s power?

Jay David Bolter: The World Wide Web is an extraordinary achievement. It isn’t just about the exchange of information, narrowly conceived as bytes of data. It has already spawned a whole set of new media genres and forms: news and information sites, personal home pages, corporate sites for marketing and sales, entertainment sites, gambling and pornography sites, and the sometimes tedious, sometimes amazing webcams. The Web is now suffused with the influence of global capitalism, and for that reason alone it has become an object of critique for many in media studies. The Web has also disappointed the relatively small, but dedicated community of writers who were creating standalone or small networked hypertexts in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of their systems were more sophisticated than the Web in the sense that they offered better linking protocols and more possibilities for author/reader interaction. Nevertheless, the Web succeeded in capturing the imagination of our culture where these earlier systems did not. We could certainly propose a more powerful global hypertext system, but the genius of the Web lay in its (originally) simple link structure and its distributed architecture. Everyone could understand how the Web worked - how you traveled from page to page - and anyone with access to a server could create her own Web pages. As soon as inline graphics were added in 1993, the Web had everything it needed to become a cultural and economic phenomenon.
The Web is changing, developing richer forms of interaction. But as everyone who uses the Web is aware, the most important trend is toward increasing use of multimedia forms. Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived of the Web principally as a textual medium. The development of the Mosaic browser in 1993 gave us the Web as a new space for graphic design—the combination of text and static graphics. Now we see animation, digitized video, and sound playing a greater role. This trend will surely continue, even if we don’t see the ultimate ‘convergence’ of television and the computer that some have predicted.