Comments on: Ex Caverna

By: Jill

Jill — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Susana suggested that a few years ago (The Lyrical Quality of Links, short paper, Hypertext ’99) but I’m not sure that the idea’s been followed up much?

I think both the lyrical and the episodic are good modes for new media…

By: nick

nick — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think the idea has only been followed up in a few contexts, as yet. I first knew of it from Robert Pinsky’s “The Muse in The Machine: Or, The Poetics of Zork,” published in The New York Times Book Review on March 19, 1995. (Not online, unfortunately, although a few important points are in the Pinsky speech linked above.) Susana’s idea to apply this to the way links work in hypertexts seems like it could be a fruitful one. Pinsky had some specific suggestions about how poetry’s qualities of speed (moving rapidly between images) and memory (aiding in the recall of words) were related to qualities of the computer.

I find poetry to be an essential figure for understanding interactive fiction in my analysis of that form in Twisty Little Passages. There are still many unexplored connections there, I’m sure, and many questions about how poetry and its qualities relate to other forms: hypertext, spaces that are simulated graphically on 2D screens (such as those seen in first-person shooters), and immersive spaces such as those offered at Brown.

By: Dennis G. Jerz

Dennis G. Jerz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

For those who absolutely must know more about “The Poetics of Zork,” I’ve put a brief summary of it in my bibliography of interactive fiction.

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/bibliography/all.htm#Pinsky_1995

By: nick

nick — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks, Dennis – a good summary which I should have linked to. (I wish the article itself were online…) I actually had to use this as a link because your anchor tag has “#Pinsky_1995″ as a name attribute instead of “Pinsky_1995″, which you may have intended.

By: Dennis G. Jerz

Dennis G. Jerz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Huh… I never noticed that. You’re right… but Win IE6 resolves the URL properly, even though I stupidly put “#” in the tag. I’ll add that to my list of “rainy day” fixes.