Joseph Tabbi takes issue with this definition, arguing that literature does something that digital art and games do not-it engages the problem of linguistic constraints. She proposes "the literary" to account for "creative artworks that interrogate the histories, context, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper 6". For Hayles, the term "literature" does not provide a large enough container to account for the various works on display in the Electronic Literature Collection. Katherine Hayles’ redefinition of electronic literature in terms of the electronic literary, the link might seem self-evident. It is this procedural system that offers one opening for considering the relationship between digital games and electronic literature.īut what does a game engine have to do with electronic literature? Given N. What Simon created was not merely a series of games but most importantly a game engine, a series of constraints that shaped the various worlds created by Black Arts. While the novel also provides a discussion of other game engines of the 1990s, such as those that powered Doom and Quake, the entire narrative revolves around the complexities of WAFFLE (and a complex Easter egg embedded in it). The engine is even adopted by a group of investors as a financial modeling system. It was called the WAFFLE engine, a witches’ brew of robust world simulation and procedural content generation, the thing that powered Black Arts games first, to critical success, then to profitability, then to becoming a runaway phenomenon 5. Simon’s engine, WAFFLE, is mysterious and complicated, and it sits beneath all of the Black Arts games, from its hugely popular Realms of Gold series to an ill-advised golf game: The genius programmer behind Black Arts games is Simon, the prototypical 1980s hacker who designed the engine that drives a massively successful videogame franchise. While You presents us with these debates about design versus programming, game versus narrative, and immersive environments versus system modeling, the primary driving force of the novel is actually a game engine, and it is this game engine that is most relevant to a discussion of digital games and literature. Regardless of the winners and losers of this debate, it is time to move toward more productive analyses of games and literature, something I aim to do in the present essay. But surely, with the expansion of game studies in recent years, that is no longer necessary and it is time to put the terms of these earlier polemics behind 4. Ludology had valid reasons to resist literary studies when it was still a fledgling field and looking to establish its own legitimacy. But Patrick Jagoda argues convincingly that there is no real need to continually rehearse this debate: Such debates have defined the conversation about digital games and literature, and they have often resulted in contentious debates between ludologists who argue for a focus on procedurality and game mechanics and narratologists who examine games with the traditional tools of literary theory. While Russell and Lisa are talking about what games can do well, their discussion also points to the various discussions about how games should be analyzed and how they differ from other cultural forms. This discussion might be familiar to scholars in both game studies and electronic literature who witnessed the debates between ludology and narratology. Russell admits that some of Black Arts stories might be derivative, but Lisa goes further: "No, it’s not even that the stories we’re doing suck, although they do…What if story itself sucks? Or it sucks for games? 3". Confronted with Russell’s argument that Black Arts should "play to a different market" by building complex narratives, Lisa argues that "story sucks 2". Lisa, one of the Black Arts programmers, sees things differently. For Russell, a game designer for a company called Black Arts, "without a story you’re just jumping around polygons 1". The novel’s protagonist, Russell, is committed to making games that compete with films. Jim Brown Limbo and the Edge of the LiteraryĪustin Grossman’s novel You presents a snapshot of the videogame industry of the late 1990s, but the debates it dramatizes between designers and programmers are helpful when taking up contemporary discussions of digital games and electronic literature.
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