Vol 01/Issue 01

Editorial: Building a Home for Advanced Interactive Scholarship

Hartmut Koenitz

It has been quite a journey from the first idea for this journal to the first issue of the Journal of Interactive Narrative, which you are reading now. In 2018, I presented a paper at ICIDS (International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling), reflecting on the status of the study of Interactive Digital Narratives as a discipline (Koenitz, 2018). I concluded that much progress had been made since the first doctoral thesis on the topic (Buckles, 1985), yet a journal dedicated to the topic was a key missing element. ARDIN, the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives (https://ardin.online), had just been founded, and I saw one of the future roles of ARDIN in the publication of a journal. More than five years later, I am overjoyed that this vision has been fulfilled.

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid

Richard Holeton
 
The outline of a pig filled with mechanical parts.
As a combinatorial fiction structured around all the possible arrangements of three characters, three places, and three artifacts, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid is built for fun and exploration. It’s been described as game-like, as “funny, crazy, ultra-postmodern satire” (Mariusz Pisarski) and as riding “a thin edge between the most complex recent critical ideas and the most absurd TV game shows” (Michael Tratner). Originally published by Eastgate Systems on the Storyspace platform in 2001, the novel was technically and functionally reimagined for the web in 2021 in partnership with Washington State University’s Electronic Literature Lab (ELL), under the direction of Dr. Dene Grigar. As a collaborative effort and complete recoding, the result is a new work featuring a unique, dual aesthetic design with two modes that the reader can toggle between—”Contemporary Mode” for modern readers, and “Classic Mode,” which pays homage to the look and feel of the original.

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Published in Collaboration with ETC Press

The Journal of Interactive is printed on-demand by ETC Press, an academic, open-source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Editorial Services provided by Brad King.

Copyright Notice

Journal of Interactive Narrative publications are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Generic License. This means that you are free to share these works as long as you give appropriate credit, do not use them for commercial purposes, and do not create derivative works. Please note that images, videos, audio files, and interactive works featured in articles are owned by their respective copyright holders. They are not included under the Creative Commons license. Accessing or using these works does not grant you any rights to them, and you cannot assume any ownership or rights to commercially use or modify these works. The owners retain all rights to their content. For more details on the copyright rules applicable to authors contributing to the Journal of Interactive Narrative, you can access the full copyright agreement here.

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