In this first week of my sabbatical project exploring the intersection between creative writing and technology, I have, unsurprisingly, discovered many more questions than I have discovered answers. This intersection includes a range of interesting and innovative types of creative texts: web series, Twitter tales, interactive fiction, games, podcast fiction–and that does not even get into the literary potential of virtual/augmented reality or the internet of things. Right now, I am feeling far less organized than the outline of activities I submitted in my proposal (see the post below) suggested I would be, but things come in from the wonderful people at interlibrary loan when they come in, and nonlinearity is one of the things I am exploring.
Thus far, I have made a dent in a MOOC on Transmedia Storytelling (Online resources I will be reviewing will be found here) and read much on the history of Interactive Fiction (IF) and actually found my 20-year-old copy of Afternoon by Michael Joyce (annotated bibliography of readings here). Since it was formatted to play on Windows 95 “or later” I am not sure if I will get to revisit this “granddaddy of IF” but I put my hands on it, and that’s step 1.
Some of the questions that are arising as I start to dig into my project:
- Is the traditional pedagogy used in creative writing classes appropriate for new media genres?
- Do the genres used in traditional media extend to new media, or does new media require unique genres based on the role of the reader/user?
- Current texts produced for new media often rely on adaptations of classics and or the extensions of storyworlds–is this part of the maturation process (as books that took an epistolary or false-diary form appeared often in the early days of the novels or as early films often adapted from established stories and plays) or does the reliance on the reader for interactive texts make established storylines more of a necessity?
- Can literature created in New Media have a lasting impact without a system of curation to maintain texts through advances in technology–will Chronotrigger always be available? What about Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl or even The Lizzie Bennet Diaries?
In the coming weeks, I hope to have more to say about these questions and assume I will be adding others.