This document outlines a roundtable discussion on electronic literature, focusing on how it differs from e-books and its experimental practices. Key topics include designing reader interaction, the role of fun in engagement, and the influence of virtual environments on the reading experience. The discussion references various theoretical frameworks, including cybertext and psychogeography, to explore these themes.

1. Scripting the Reader
in Electronic Literature
A Digital Humanities Caucus Roundtable Discussion
Friday, November 7, 2014

2. Roundtable Overview
1. Leonardo Flores - Introduction & Theoretical Framing
2. Samantha Gorman - “rhythms of attention”
3. A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz - “lusory
attitudes” (playfulness)
4. Jeremy Hight - locative & AR works
5. Mauro Carassai - e-lit “language games”
6. Discussion

3. Key Questions
• How do writers of electronic literature design, control,
cast, or otherwise shape their readers’ experience
and interaction?
• Is fun used as a mechanism for control in a scripted
interaction?
• Do they reward certain choices and punish others?
• How do they design virtual environments with a
psychogeography that influences their readers'
dérive?

4. What is Electronic
Literature?
• E-lit ≠ e-books.
• E-books are industry-driven representations of the
book in digital media.
• E-lit is a set of grassroots experimental practices,
that embrace the potential of digital media
technologies to create innovative engagements
with language.

5. Terms & Genres

6. Material Dependencies

7. Scripting the Reader
Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives in Ergodic
Literature. Johns Hopkins UP. 1997.
• cybertext - a work with feedback loops that
incorporates reader input in its functioning.
• “A machine for the production of variety of
expression.”
• ergodic works - require “nontrivial effort” to
traverse.

8. Example: traditional novel
• Literary form that emerged in the
context of the book as a
technology.
• Traversal requires turning pages,
parsing the words on the page.
• Traversal ≠ comprehension.
• Reader’s role involves reading,
imagining, following their literacy
training.
• Interface becomes invisible.
• Goal is immersion in narrative.

9. Example: videogame
• Cybertexts: require input from the reader via peripheral devices
• Ergodic: traversal has a learning curve, with increasing levels of difficulty.
• Player’s role is scripted, limited, and controlled in games.
• But they allow room for self-expression, discovery, play.

10. Example: E-Poetry
• Aarseth, Cybertext (pgs. 91-92)
• aporia - an impasse, frustration
• epiphany - replaces aporia and satisfies closure.
• Nick Montfort, “Taroko Gorge” (2009)
• The desire for completion, closure, is frustrated (aporia)
• The realization that the work is deliberately endless
(epiphany)

11. Guy Debord
“Theory of the Derive” (1958)
• “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve
playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects,
and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.”
• In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop […] all their
other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn
by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
• Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a
dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant
currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit
from certain zones.
• But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction:
the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and
calculation of their possibilities.

12. Up next
1. Samantha Gorman - “rhythms of attention”
2. A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz - “lusory
attitudes” (playfulness)
3. Jeremy Hight - locative & AR works
4. Mauro Carassai - e-lit “language games”
5. Discussion