Digital Fiction

Slide 1: Digital Fiction Angela Thomas 2007

Slide 2: Types of Digital Fiction Flash Fiction • Webisodics / Filmic Fiction • Youtube Fiction • Blog Fiction • Flickr Fiction • Mobile Phone Fiction • SMS fiction • Fan Fiction • Distributed Narratives • Cross Media Narratives • Interactive Fiction • Machinima • ARGs • MMORPG role-playing • Twitter micro-fiction • 6 word micro-narratives • Wiki novels • And more… •

Slide 3: Affordances of Digital Fiction 1. Multimodality 2. Multiliteracies 3. Hypertext 4. Spatiality 5. Interactivity 6. Web 2.0 Audience 7. Cross Mediality 8. The Power of Fandom 9. Identity Construction

Slide 5: We’ve seen a shift from a focus on linguistics to a focus on semiotics in new and newly valued forms of literature. Digital fiction integrates the visual, verbal and acoustic semiotic resources to construct meaning.

Slide 6: Multimodality • text • animated text (scrolling) • still image • video • sound effects • music • audio (phone messages, voiceovers, laughter)

Slide 8: Hypertext • Links pass through and over the semantic space

Slide 9: cognitive work required for reading hyperlinks • assemblage of texts or ‘bits’ of text • gaps / a severing of the text • the reader must make inferences to make sense of the link-bridged gap • shifting positions, new ideas, evolving re-orientations, perspectives and directions of thought

Slide 10: Spatiality

Slide 13: Video Podcasts

Slide 14: Mobile Phone Fiction

Slide 15: • Each week ends with a dilemma, inviting the audience to vote on what happens next. The production team then write, shoot and edit the follow-up over the weekend.

Slide 17: -Webcam -Emails -Text messages -Boyfriend -Friends -Teacher -Astronomy notes taken in class -Postcards, photos with captions -Links to science websites -Direct address to reader

Slide 19: Interactivity: the role of the reader views, listens, reads words, clicks • chooses own reading path • • chooses whether or not to click hypertext for additional information • ASSEMBLES the story from its component pieces, filling in gaps

Slide 22: • the nature of the internet allows a new level of interactivity on the part of the reader, from simply navigation and shaping of the text, to participating in the text as a reader/writer/composer/actor

Slide 24: The Wiki Novel

Slide 26: • Commenting feature of social networking applications allows reader interactivity that may in turn shape writer’s response • Writer response theories

Slide 28: After an afternoon of art at the art institute, we headed back to the 'L' station to go home. We passed by the Daley plaza on the way where they were having some sort of outdoor market. This is in front of the famous Chicago Picasso sculpture...

Slide 29: SMS Text Poetry ODE 2 MY BIKE Oh bike so beauTful & pink U transport me all over the cT If only I could Make people C Your spindly metallic beauT

Slide 30: Twitter Micro-Fiction poetic narratives in 140 characters or less Learning to whistle at 8 years old was the first time she realized the possibility of making His dreams were like something beautiful from transparent action nothing but herself. movies, all blazing guns and screaming. The nursing home always looked dimmer when he Half a million refugees woke from one packed into tents. Stories so harrowing he had run out of tears. These people had witnessed humanity's darkest side.

Slide 31: Six words – the miniLegends at secret? ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ a secret. Wh It is tal. hospi , go, to e, , chok p g, sto t. Eatin igh dN The day the world b o lew up! Go n, o rno fte A ts od ats lo Go ,e dog , ing Blue s: rn dollar o M y Fift od o G i like pla ying soc cer on s aturday (Year 3 Glenelg School, Adelaide, South Australia) teacher - Al Upton

Slide 32: Tell a Story in Five Frames – Flickr Fiction What a great story for the summer. I really love the look on the little boys face in the last shot. It's exactly how I feel when I take a bite of a really sweet watermelon.

Slide 33: Machinima: machine cinema

Slide 34: Younger kids are using machinima to create their own experimental digital narratives “I was a teenage machinima maker” Once I discovered machinima, it became so much more exciting for me to create my own characters and stories than to simply play the game within the confines of the designer's original creative vision. Now I am able to mold the game to reflect my own imagination Harrison Heller, in the US magazine Variety on July 23rd, 2006.

Slide 39: Nathan Burns Grade 6, Princes Hill Primary School original poem

Slide 40: Transmediality: A world of versions • Texts are often now occurring across multiple platforms, which we call “cross-media entertainment” or “trans-media intertextuality”

Slide 41: ARGs: Alternate Reality Games • Storytelling as archaeology. • Platformless narrative. • Designing for a hive mind. • A whisper is sometimes louder than a shout. • The \"this is not a game\" (TINAG) aesthetic. • Real life as a medium. • Not a hoax.

Slide 42: LAMP (Lab of advanced media productions) ARGS

Slide 44: Some digital fiction which requires high levels of interactivity also offers opportunities for identity play

Slide 47: • Tiana is my biggest character, as I role-play with her and write with her voice the most, so she's the most like me. • I've kind of fused Tiana into my internet identity completely. Her looks and all that, not to mention personality. • Tiana's a bit more headstrong than I am. She's more willing to jump into things. • However, she's almost other than that completely like me. does/says is what I'd do and say. Tiana: Tiana

Slide 48: The Power of Fandom

Slide 51: “My Alter Egos” Jumphawk

Slide 53: Second Life: role-playing, ARGs, machinima, twittering, blog fiction, fandom, poetry, SLiterary fiction… a space rich for narrative, creativity and collaborative co-construction of texts

Slide 54: Angela A Thomas http://angelaathomas.com a.thomas@edfac.usyd.edu.au