Astrid Ensslin

A new analytical framework for understanding literary videogames, the literary-ludic spectrum, illustrated by close readings of selected works. 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.

Literary Gaming

Alice Bell

Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing the new concept of “medial reading”, it argues for the centrality of an audience’s interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The book analyses and theorises five generations of digital fiction and their reading including hypertext fiction, hypermedia fiction, narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. It showcases medium- and platform-specific methods of qualitative reader response research across a variety of contexts and settings from screen-based and embodied interaction to gallery installation, and from reading group and individual interview to think-aloud methodologies. The book thus addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction reading by designing and reporting on new empirical studies focusing on hypertextuality, interactivity, immersion, as well as medium-specific forms of textual “you”, ontological ambiguity, reader orientation and empathy. In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands cognitive, transmedial, and empirical narratology and stylistics by placing the reader of these new narratives front and centre. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Narrative, Cognition, Mediality

Reading Digital Fiction

Julia Round

Bronwen Thomas

The Routledge Companion to Literary Media examines the fast-moving present and future of a media ecosystem in which the literary continues to play a vital role. The term ‘literary media’ challenges the tendency to hold the two terms distinct and broadens accepted usage of the literary to include popular cultural forms, emerging technologies and taste cultures, genres, and platforms, as well as traditions and audiences all too often excluded from literary histories and canons. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and practitioners, the Companion provides a comprehensive guide to existing terms and theories that address the alignment of literature and a variety of media forms. It situates the concept in relation to existing theories and histographies; considers emerging genres and forms such as locative narratives and autofiction; and expands discussion beyond the boundaries by which literary authorship is conventionally defined. Contributors also examine specific production and publishing contexts to provide in-depth analysis of the promotion of literary media materials. The volume further considers reading and other aspects of situated audience engagement, such as Indigenous and oral storytelling, prize and review cultures, book clubs, children, and young adults. This authoritative collection is an invaluable resource for scholars and students working at the intersection of literary and media studies.

The Routledge Companion to Literary Media

This innovative text examines videogames and gaming from the point of view of discourse analysis. In particular, it studies two major aspects of videogame-related communication: the ways in which videogames and their makers convey meanings to their audiences, and the ways in which gamers, industry professionals, journalists and other stakeholders talk about games. In doing so, the book offers systematic analyses of games as artefacts and activities, and the discourses surrounding them. Focal areas explored in this book include: • aspects of videogame textuality and how games relate to other texts • the formation of lexical terms and use of metaphor in the language of gaming • gamer slang and 'buddylects' • the construction of game worlds and their rules, of gamer identities and communities • dominant discourse patterns among gamers and how they relate to the nature of gaming • the multimodal language of games and gaming • the ways in which ideologies of race, gender, media effects and language are constructed. Informed by the very latest scholarship and illustrated with topical examples throughout, The Language of Gaming is ideal for students of applied linguistics, videogame studies and media studies who are seeking a wide-ranging introduction to the field.

The Language of Gaming

This Element examines a watershed moment in the recent history of digital publishing through a case study of the pre-web, serious hypertext periodical, the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995). Early hypertext writing relied on standalone, mainframe computers and specialized authoring software. With the Web launching as a mass distribution platform, EQRH faced a fast-evolving technological landscape, paired with an emergent gift and open access economy. Its non-linear writing experiments afford key insights into historical, medium-specific authoring practices. Access constraints have left EQRH under-researched and threatened by obsolescence. To address this challenge, this study offers platform-specific analyses of all the EQRH's cross-media materials, including works that have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. It deploys a form of conceptually oral ethno-historiography: the lore of electronic literature. The Element deepens our understanding of the North American publishing industry's history and contributes to the overdue preservation of early digital writing.

Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature

This innovative monograph focuses on a contemporary form of computer-based literature called 'literary hypertext', a digital, interactive, communicative form of new media writing. Canonizing Hypertext combines theoretical and hermeneutic investigations with empirical research into the motivational and pedagogic possibilities of this form of literature. It focuses on key questions for literary scholars and teachers: How can literature be taught in such a way as to make it relevant for an increasingly hypermedia-oriented readership? How can the rapidly evolving new media be integrated into curricula that still seek to transmit 'traditional' literary competence? How can the notion of literary competence be broadened to take into account these current trends? This study, which argues for hypertext's integration in the literary canon, offers a critical overview of developments in hypertext theory, an exemplary hypertext canon and an evaluation of possible classroom applications.

Explorations and Constructions

Canonizing Hypertext

Sally Johnson

This book examines the ways in which the media represents language-related issues, but also how the media's use of language is central to the construction of what people think language is, could or ought to be like. The chapters examine issues of identity, gender, youth, citizenship, politics and ideology across a range of media, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet. The result is a multilingual survey of the construction of language in and by the media that will be essential reading for students and researchers of sociolinguistics or language and communication.

Representations, Identities, Ideologies

Language in the Media

Refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by looking at digital-born fictions.

Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural

Examining the ways in which the media represents language-related issues and how it shapes and constructs what people think language is, this book offers a multilingual survey of the construction of language in and by the media. Tackling the big issues of identity, gender, youth, citizenship, politics and ideology across a range of mediums including television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet, Language in the Media brings together an international team of experts to examine how the media gives language distinctive forms and values. This is an essential text for students and researchers of sociolinguistics or language and communication. At a time when trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low and world leaders are using new media to deride so called 'fake news', this classic text offers insight and critical analysis into the key issues surrounding the relationship between language, the media and its audience.

Hans Rustad

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Astrid Ensslin

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