Electronic Literature

What is Electronic Literature?

 

When I first heard about the concept of electronic literature I just figured it was like a book on the internet, or reading using a Kindle. But after reading and hearing about the subject I have come to the conclusion that I was wrong, electronic literature is more a type of literature that uses the interactivity which is possible in the digital world as a element of the storytelling. This contrasts to the aformentioned Kindle, or traditional books that have been posted online, where the digital aspect of the literature is often just limited to a button which takes you to the next page.

 

Electronic Literature can be divided into several different genres, some of them being locative narrative, generative text and interactive fiction.

 

Interactive fiction is a type of storytelling where the reader has an effect on the story being told through various inputs. Something like a story where the reader can chose which path to go, kind of like old school adventure books which used the same approach to storytelling.

 

Locative fiction is a type of fiction where the location of the reader is taken into acount. This can be achieved with a mobile phone which displays a text in a specific place based on your location.

 

Generative text is a type of text where the writer isn’t the one writing the text, but rather someone who writes a script that generates text itself based on a set of rules. The text itself is made by a computer but according to rules set by a human.

The video game crash

The video game crash of 1983.

 

Today, the video game market is flourishing, with it being one of the largest sectors in entertainment, but it hasn’t always been this way. Just in 1983, the whole video game market collapsed after it became over saturated with poor quality games and shovelware. In just a few fatal years from 1983 to 1985 the revenue from the video game industry dropped from $3.2 billion dollars to around $100 million. So what caused this enormous decline, and what was the aftermath?

 

Since the video game industry was just in its infancy, there were no clear dominant consoles like we have today with the Wii, Playstation and Xbox. A lot of different companies were jumping on the video game wave, and put out too many consoles. Another reason why the video game industry crashed was the home computer, at the time, many people just bought a computer, which in addition to playing games, could be used for a slew a lot of different applications.

 

Another reason were the games themselves, they were abundant, and in poor quality. A prime example of this is the E.T videogame based on the movie of the same name. The game was produced by Atari, and launched for the video game console Atari 2600. The game was also made by just a single developer, and he had a very strict deadline of just a couple of weeks. Atari bet a lot of money on this game, and reportedly spent upwards of $25 million to secure the rights. When the game was released it got awful reviews, and the game did not sell well at all. In the aftermath of this incident, Atari had so many cartridges lying around that they reportedly buried 728.000 copies of the game in a landfill in some desert. The game was a huge loss for Atari, and many contribute this to a major point in why the video game crash happened in the first place.

 

In the aftermath of the video game crash, a new player in the game wanted to enter the home console market, it was a Japanese toy maker, and that was Nintendo. When Nintendo wanted to release their new console, the NES, in the USA, they had to tell retailers that it wasn’t a video game console, but rather a toy. This was because the scepticism of video games at the time was so large that retailers wouldn’t even stock them on the shelves. Nintendo of course, found great success with the NES, and the video game industry hasn’t experienced such a catastrophe since, Nintendo even released their seventh video game console in 2017, which has sold almost 15 million units as of march 2018.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is awful.

Mia briefly touched upon the travesty that was the launch of EA’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 in the course on Monday, and how the game was heavily criticised for its micro transactions and dubious business practices. How can a game from such a beloved franchise get such universal hate from the gaming community as a whole? And how did this happen?

 

Well, first a bit of backstory, Star Wars Battlefront is a series of video games based loosely upon the lore which exists inside the star wars universe. The original Star Wars battlefront games were released in 2004 and 2005, and the first two games were highly praised at the time for their freedom and huge battles. So when EA announced that they were reviving the franchise of games which many people loved as they were younger, I included, many people were much exited as this was looking to be something grand, like the older games.

 

So why then did people come to hate such a game from such a beloved franchise? Well, because of its micro transactions and broken gameplay which sometimes felt like it was broken up just for the case of making people spend real money to unlock characters and powers in-game.

 

When you play a Star Wars there are certain things you kan kind of expect to be able to do, one of them is being able to play as iconic characters such as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. But, in order to play as Darth Vader you could either play the game for upwards of 40 hours to unlock him, which is a lot, or you could fork over quite a substantial amount of cash. I haven’t been able to figure out how much exactly for one characters, but if you wanted to unlock everything, it would cost upwards of 750 us dollars. That is why people, and understandably so, were so pissed about this game and its micro transactions. The advantage of players who spent real money was just too big.

 

Luckily, in the aftermath of a huge public outcry, EA decided to change the prices of unlocks in game, it now costs 1/4 of what it used to to unlock something. EA has since said that they were wrong in doing what they were initially doing, and that they will put more thought into their micro transactions in the future. Let’s just hope they keep their word, because EA makes some quality games!

 

 

https://www.vg247.com/2017/11/13/it-takes-40-hours-to-unlock-darth-vader-and-other-heroes-in-star-wars-battlefront-2/

Digital Art

This week our lectures were about digital art, and Mia showed us this website https://net-art.org/, which is a page with lots of digital art projects. The website contains a lot of links to digital art projects. One page that caught my attention was http://www.cameronsworld.net/, which I just thought was neat. The project is just a bunch of animated pictures that looks like they were just dragged out of any random webpage in the 90’s, the artist is definetly using a style which is not as prevelant in modern computing, it provides a sort of contrast to today’s sleek designs and is quite remmenicent of a time gone by. I feel a strange kind of nostalgia whilst exploring the project, it reminds me of the point and click video games of the 90’s and early 2000’s. I think the reason why this project stood out to me was that it seemed like the artist just wanted to do something cool with computers and make something interesting to look at, and it definetly is.

 

The artist has definetly spent a lot of time and effort making the site, as you can see in the details. The artist has even changed the scroll bar on the side of the page to something that looks straight out of windows 2000. The music that plays on the site is also reminecent of the days gone by, it is a midi soundtrack, which was commonly used in computer games in the 90’s. Below is a screenshot from the site, and you can clearly see that it is very different from today’s white backgrounds and sleek lines.

 

camerons world

Moonshine and ads

Hello, my name is Frode, and this is the first time I’ve ever written a blogpost, don’t really know what I am supposed to put here, probably something something computers and digital culture. I’m 22 years old, and spend probably upwards of 10 hours each day connected to the web, which is kind of a lot, I think, but i digress, such is life in our modern times.

 

They say we live in a civilized age with fantastic technology, but this day, facebook targeted ads showed me a picture of a moonshine apparatus, which has been illegal in Norway for probably something like a hundred years, yep, definetly going to get me one of those. The title even said “SLUTT å betale for mye penger i butikkene”, which roughly translates to stop paying too much in the stores, which both insinuates that i regularly buy moonshining equipment, and that there is a store in my close proximity that would even stock such an item. Well, also, the fact that the company behind that advertisement shamelessly admits to have dug through my browser history, and therefore came to the conclusion that they should spend money on ad-space to try to sell me a moonshine still. Weird times. Oh, and for the record, I have no interest in buying a still, just a weird observation after spending way too much time on the internet.

Screenshot_2018-01-19-19-19-00

I don’t like it, it feels like I am being watched, they say you shouldn’t care if you have nothing to hide, i don’t buy into that mindset, it feels creepy, big brother is always watching. But hell, it’s the society that us humans have built, and it has become a fact of life, whatever you do, will be tracked, and we kinda have to accept that. The only way to avoid it is to move to a remote cabin in Finmark without electricity, but i sure as shit ain’t doing that, I like my digital life, even though it’s kinda creepy knowing someone, somewhere can probably see everything I’m doing.

 

Cheers