First review of Literary Gaming published in Leonardo

I'm really excited by the first review of Literary Gaming, published this month in Leonardo. In it Rob Harle describes the book as "a fascinating and detailed scholarly exploration of this fairly new field of academic inquiry...The book is very well written and, considering some of the complex theories (communication, meaning, authorship and so on) discussed, is still accessible to the interested general reader." He expects that "Literary Gaming will become a core text in the academic fields of new media, digital gaming, and literature itself. I cannot recommend the book highly enough to be included in all of the relevant university curricula, as well as being an excellent resource and inspiration for experimental game designers and creative writers." My response to his criticism that there should be an appendix listing all the works discussed in the book is that there is actually a comprehensive list of all primary material mentioned in the manuscript (pp. 173-177 of the Bibliography). But I accept that a list of further primary reading would have been useful too. I've made such a list for my own research and I may put it on this blog as soon as I've had a chance to edit it a little. In the meantime, feel free to contact me if you'd like to see it in its present, raw form.
Anyway, thanks to Rob Harle for this positive evaluation. Hope we'll meet some day in person.

Literary Gaming is out!

My new book, Literary Gaming, is now out with MIT Press! So pleased to see it in print, and the endorsements (thanks to Stuart, Sandy and Noah) are really great too:

Overview

In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology.

After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work’s relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur" game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.

Endorsements

“In this wise and insightful book, Astrid Ensslin makes a good start on a new literary criticism, one that sees beyond the mere facticity of digital mediation, deep into the substance and operations of important works. The book is exemplary, both in its keen grasp of textual theory and, perhaps more crucially, its smart and sensitive engagement with demanding, often baffling texts. Perhaps close reading is no longer possible for works so nontrivial in their configurative requirements. Ensslin offers an intriguing substitute, call it deft reading, a criticism answerable to the great, protean demands of texts relentlessly in play.”
—Stuart Moulthrop, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

“It is easy to say games contain narratives and easy to say that narratives are playful. Saying so does little other than repeat existing rather poor metaphors for games and narratives. Astrid Ensslin does something much harder and more rewarding: she takes on all the works occurring on the spectrum from games to literature (what she calls the L-L spectrum) and provides the first rigorous descriptive vocabulary for reading these works. I was surprised and informed by the diversity and invention found in the works examined. More than this: I was persuaded and even amazed by the rich and fine-tuned readings Ensslin offers. Literary Gaming sets the standard for understanding literary ludicity.”
—Sandy Baldwin, The Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University 

“Literary Gaming moves beyond tired debates as to whether the playful and poetic are compatible, and instead offers detailed readings of specific projects, illustrating a range of ways that compelling artistic experiences combine the ludic and literary.”
—Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Expressive Processing

AHRC Reading Digital Fiction project up and running

Alice Bell and I have been awarded about £243k by the AHRC for a 29-month empirical project looking at Reading Digital Fiction. The project has two core aims. Primarily, as keen readers of digital fiction, we want to introduce more readers to digital fiction. To achieve that aim, we are organising various public events including workshops, exhibitions, and writing competitions to introduce people to this exciting new form of literature. Secondly, as cognitive stylisticians, we are interested in how readers process particular linguistic and multimodal features within digital fiction. We are therefore running several reader-response studies, collecting data from readers in order to understand how digital literary reading works cognitively.

We've now got a website and regularly tweet @ReadDigFic, @AstridEnsslin and @AliceBellTweets #elit. I presented our first poster, on how to test our theories on textual 'you' in digital fiction with actual readers, at Bangor University yesterday. Here it is:

Jen and I will give this poster as a full 20-min presentation at Nottingham University's forthcoming 'The Reader in Stylistics' conference on 24th June.