Four computers / game engine / hardware / sound / custom code / text/

Mary Flanagan’s interest in virtual environments and interactive writing led to her focus her new work [xyz] on the spatial metaphors inherent within virtual systems and on the grammatical and lexical notions in language itself.

In [xyz], the rules of game playing and the rules for language reside in the same location. Player-readers participate in the dynamic combination of new texts using the fundamental metaphoric system that governs the development of computerized spaces—namely, the 16th Century three dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, with axis lines x, y, and z.

The gallery contains a computer-controlled application for each axis. Each of these directions contains a different section of a larger text. Visitors to the gallery may interact with the words on the screen using the controller located under the screen and collect sets of words as they wish. These words are then sent to the projected image where the player-readers’ choices combine.

A work of electronic literature by Mary Flanagan
Game programming and network design by Jack Bowman
Additional audio by Michelle Earhart

Background to the work [xyz]

There is an ancient desire to expand the expressiveness of poetry by combining literary and visual communication. Shaped poems in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, and Sanskrit all indicate a common human urge to compel language into the form of its meaning. Visual poetry, or concrete poetry, is the term applied in the 1950s, long after early Twentieth Century visual poet Apollinaire manipulated his text to fashion a literary syntheses of space. If Apollinaire and other writers endeavored to mould pictorial strategies onto the demands of poetry, then Flanagan’s contemporary project intends an analogous mapping—that of applying the metaphors and structures of computer games onto – and into— a poetic system.

The artist’s curiosity about the process of writing and rewriting the text led her to examine the ritualistic behaviors constituting conventional game interaction. In [xyz] the player-reader reconstructs the poem by following a visual logic similar to that used by the player of a platform game. Instead of collecting coins or avoiding enemies as in a stereotypical game of this sort, the player-reader collects and avoids text. In the end, the work changes incredibly through reader participation.

[xyz] functions on multiple levels as a concrete poem, a game, and as way to explore the epistemological development of spatial deixis in a game-like system. Often in games, as in interactive literature, player-readers experience the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases is dependent on contextual information. In [xyz] the reader’s experience of the line becomes the point of reference, the center of the spatial understanding of each text and the site for spatial deixis.

Relationships between the line, interaction, behavior, and metaphor are at play as the player-reader traverses the poem space. How does the player choose to construct his or her mental model in this work?