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A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2025) | Viewed by 10433

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Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Stuart Moulthrop

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Guest Editor

Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA
Interests: electronic literature; computer and analog games; digital arts and culture

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Electronic literature and digital games have common origins: Christopher Strachey’s love letter generator (1952) and the Spacewar! game (1962) were both experiments in expressive computing. Yet for years these forms occupied separate cultural spaces, electronic literature treated mainly in the academy while games became mainstream entertainment. That distinction began to erode in the present century, driven by changes in demographics, markets, and platforms that have nurtured independent games and brought sophistication to commercial products. Creators using tools like Twine have begun to realize Anna Anthropy’s dream of a maker-centric culture for games, while auteurs such as Hideo Kojima and Lucas Pope explore the divergent genre that Melissa Kagen calls “wandering games”. On the literary side, academic entities like the U.S.-based Electronic Literature Organization, and in Europe, the Center for Digital Narrative and Association for Research in Digital Narrative, have created structures for sustained research and art practice. Competitions including the Interactive Fiction Competition and the New Media Writing Prize promote academic-commercial crossings.

This special issue invites inquiries into the convergence and ongoing differences between electronic literature and games (digital and otherwise). Submissions might include:

Readings of significant games and texts
Theoretical approaches to interactive narrative
Platform studies of digital tools and
Perspectives on popular and elite culture
Considerations of emerging technologies like XR and generative AI

Prof. Dr. Stuart Moulthrop
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

electronic literature
computer games
narrative
digital culture

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Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 197 KB

Open AccessArticle

Worlds of Possibility: Tabletop Roleplaying Open Gaming Licenses Meet Interactive Fiction

by Trent Hergenrader

Humanities 2026, 15(3), 44; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15030044 - 17 Mar 2026

Viewed by 420

Abstract

This article argues that students inspired by stories set in enormous open-world videogames can use a combination of free interactive fiction (IF) tools and tabletop role-playing game open gaming licenses (OGLs) to simulate stories that allow their players to customize their characters based on their play style preferences, and to face obstacles that require virtual dice rolls where the player may succeed or fail. This provides them with an experience similar to writing for a major videogame franchise and go through the thought processes required when writing interactive narratives. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

14 pages, 243 KB

Open AccessArticle

Media Intertextuality in Digital Fiction and Games: Evolution and Tradition

by Mariusz Pisarski

Humanities 2026, 15(3), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15030043 - 6 Mar 2026

Viewed by 539

Abstract

The goal of the article is to demonstrate the common threads and methods of studying digital storytelling as a unified, second-order aesthetic code. Just as the category of translation, when applied to digital literature, was expanded into a more complex set of methods known as media translation, the article applies similar logic to the notion of intertextuality and proposes an augmented form of “digital“ or “media intertextuality“. Games, interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, story generators, and other born-digital forms are all “texts” that share evolutionary poetics and intertextual strategies extending beyond language into multimodal, procedural, and embodied affordances. Drawing on the concept of structural quotation and semiotic calques, this article suggests that intertextuality should operate across multiple extra-linguistic registers: visual, procedural, and embodied. Neither evolutionary continuity nor broad intertextuality have been sufficiently emphasized in current game studies outside the literary angle. In several examples and case studies—from Zork II to World of Warcraft—this paper demonstrates how repetition with difference, brought about by intertextual links, generates evolutionary continuity and intertextual richness. In this dialogical ecology, AAA blockbusters and experimental works are worth studying together, even if, within the discourse of digital entertainment, they are currently at war. The former push the boundaries of expressive possibility, whereas the latter accrue cultural capital by reworking and critiquing shared codes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

21 pages, 376 KB

Open AccessArticle

Frontiers Forged and Colonized: Feminist Storytelling in Digital Narrative

by R. Lyle Skains

Humanities 2026, 15(2), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15020033 - 17 Feb 2026

Viewed by 496

Abstract

Truly impactful innovations are developed by outsiders out of a sense of need; those that rise to mainstream recognition and acceptance, however, are colonized by dominant hegemonies. This paper traces cycles of innovation and colonization in literature, publishing, and computing as ancestral domains to electronic literature, which has been subject to the same gendered and othered frontier-colonization cycles that dominated its forebears. Elit was a new frontier for writing and publishing, a strong site of marginalized creativity, until it was codified and colonized into publishing and academia by the dominant class: women could create, but men had the actual and cultural capital to create and develop the structures to platform their work into the dominant discourse. This paper analyzes how feminist and marginalized digital writers resist colonization of their innovations and erasure of their innovations by hacking platforms, subverting narrative conventions, and amplifying hidden voices. The paper examines elements of innovation-colonization cycles in elit and adjacent practices (indie games, fanfic), showcases Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s algorithmically-generated epoetry as a site of subversion, and presents fanfic community Archive of Our own as a preliminary model of value-sensitive and inclusive community design. It argues for the development of feminist-first platforms—digital spaces that actively resist the structural colonization of marginalized storytelling. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

17 pages, 1314 KB

Open AccessArticle

Analyzing Distant Play as Parasocial Resistance: Unnatural Temporality, Interpassive Dis-Reading, and Existentialist Angst in The Longing

by Astrid Ensslin, Kübra Aksay and Sebastian R. Richter

Humanities 2026, 15(2), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15020027 - 5 Feb 2026

Viewed by 694

Abstract

This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our central argument is that The Longing deploys antimimetic temporal mechanics, interpassive forms of bookish play, and ideas of existentialist resistance to explore themes of time, agency, and existential longing, thereby offering a reflective space for dealing with neo-liberal, post-pandemic, polycrisis-stricken angst. To come to terms with the multidisciplinary complexities of the game, our paper adopts a triadic analytical methodology interweaving insights from postclassical, medium-specific narratology, platform-comparative literary analysis, and existentialist philosophy. This combined approach transcends existing ludoliterary frameworks and accounts for divergent forms of play. Our first focus is the game’s multiscalar temporal layering and the strategies it requires from players to “ludify” antimimetic frictions between those layers. This is followed by an examination of how the game constructs a bookish player by interweaving ludexical processes of reading, unreading, dis-reading, and writing (in) books and other printed documents. Finally, we turn to the game’s complex interpassive relationships between player, player-character, and game world, highlighting in particular the role of walking, collecting, building, and searching as acts of catharsis and rebellion, and examining failure as a valid ludic alternative to survival and happiness. Ultimately, our analysis renders distant play as a form of parasocial resistance, which in The Longing manifests as an affective and philosophically fine-grained combination of more-than-human relationality, care, and relief vis-a-vis the nothingness of lost hope. The game thus offers a new form of e-literary engagement, placing books and their “unnatural,” transmediated affordances front and center while questioning the capitalist undercurrents of contemporary literary media and critiquing a culture of acceleration. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

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34 pages, 6013 KB

Open AccessArticle

Extending Digital Narrative with AI, Games, Chatbots, and XR: How Experimental Creative Practice Yields Research Insights

by Lina Ruth Harder, David Jhave Johnston, Scott Rettberg, Sérgio Galvão Roxo and Haoyuan Tang

Humanities 2026, 15(1), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15010017 - 16 Jan 2026

Viewed by 1705

Abstract

The Extended Digital Narrative (XDN) research project explores how experimental creative practice with emerging technologies generates critical insights into algorithmic narrativity—the intersection of human narrative understanding and computational data processing. This article presents five case studies demonstrating that direct engagement with AI and Extended Reality platforms is essential for humanities research on new genres of digital storytelling. Lina Harder’s Hedy Lamar Chatbot examines how generative AI chatbots construct historical personas, revealing biases in training data and platform constraints. Scott Rettberg’s Republicans in Love investigates text-to-image generation as a writing environment for political satire, documenting rapid changes in AI aesthetics and content moderation. David Jhave Johnston’s Messages to Humanity demonstrates how Runway’s Act-One enables solo filmmaking, collapsing traditional production hierarchies. Haoyuan Tang’s video game project reframes LLM integration by prioritizing player actions over dialogue, challenging assumptions about AI’s role in interactive narratives. Sérgio Galvão Roxo’s Her Name Was Gisberta employs Virtual Reality for social education against transphobia, utilizing perspective-taking techniques for empathy development. These projects demonstrate that practice-based research is not merely artistic production but a vital methodology for understanding how AI and XR platforms shape—and are shaped by—human narrative capacities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

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16 pages, 232 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Art of the Environment in Interactive Walking Simulation Narratives: How GenAI Might Change the “Game”

by Andrew Klobucar

Humanities 2026, 15(1), 13; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15010013 - 13 Jan 2026

Viewed by 778

Abstract

This article critically examines the growing interest in what most contemporary scholars consider still a new and underdeveloped mode of environmental storytelling in video games. Different models of games that provide strong narrative techniques within highly detailed, environmentally sophisticated land/soundscapes have been released over the last decade by well-known studios like Fullbright Productions, Giant Sparrow and Campo Santo. This new perspective will draw several critical questions formed from prior research in several foundational articles, the area of game studies and several journals directed at the question of how game spaces function as narrative devices. For example, an early 2016 article by John Barber for the Cogent Arts and Humanities, “Digital storytelling: New opportunities for humanities scholarship and pedagogy” was one of the first essays to explore how Fullbright’s well-known game Gone Home utilizes spatial design, object placement, and ambient details to convey stories without explicit narration. Gone Home, according to Barber and many others, continues to emphasize environmental storytelling as a form of semiotic communication—one where the “text” is the game world itself, inviting players to read and interpret more complex layers of literary meaning. Contemporary scholars have built on these more foundational studies to consider how AI and procedural generation further complicate narrative agency and structure in digital spaces, enabling the current study to consider what could be considered a distinctly post-AI theoretical perspective based upon these primary determinants: (a) how game environments may dynamically adapt narratives in response to player interaction and algorithmic input, and (b) the evolving notion of narrative agency in digital spaces where human and machine contributions intertwine in AI systems. The two chief aims of this proposal are thus to reconsider traditional environmental storytelling within new innovative, post-GenAI narrative frameworks and, looking at contemporary insights from leading examples in the field, deepen current academic understandings of narrative spaces in games from new narratological perspectives. Studies in this area seem uniquely valuable, given the rapid development of GenAI tools in creative content production and what appears to be a new epoch in narrative engagement in all interactive media. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

16 pages, 1222 KB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

“If There Isn’t Something I Can *Do* out Here, I’m Going to Lose My Mind”: Confrontational Coziness and Degrowth in Wanderstop

by Melissa Kagen

Humanities 2026, 15(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15010008 - 31 Dec 2025

Viewed by 651

Abstract

In Ivy Road’s new game Wanderstop (March 2025), the player character is so burned out from their lifetime as a workaholic warrior that they find themselves trapped and forced to serve tea in a charming, purgatorial teashop until they finally learn how to rest and recover. This article analyzes the game through its two core verbs—wander and stop—both of which the player first resists and then eventually accepts. With wander, the game forces the player into a jarring experience of presence, using a defamiliarization technique I term ‘confrontational coziness’—an experience of safety, abundance, and softness taken to such an extreme it becomes uncomfortable. With stop, the game uses ideas from the anti-capitalist philosophy of degrowth to engage the player in the challenge of not doing rather than doing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

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15 pages, 440 KB

Open AccessArticle

E-Legitimate Offspring: Tracing Literary and Ludic Convergence

by David Ciccoricco

Humanities 2026, 15(1), 4; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15010004 - 22 Dec 2025

Viewed by 513

Abstract

We can trace the convergence of electronic literature and narrative games through a focus on critical methods and experiential frameworks rather than relying on typologies or ontologies. This article offers examples of digital literary works that we experience across a literary–ludic continuum. The first section traces some historical markers of convergence between electronic literature and narrative games with reference to conference keynotes from the institutional history of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). The next sections will present two case studies. The first, Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer is a narrative game that benefits from a literary-critical method and rewards interpretative insights. The second, This is a COVID-19 Announcement by Peter Wills, is an analysis of a playable simulation that indulges the pleasures of iterative ludic engagement against a backdrop of narrative (yet not plot-centric) comforts. Just as literature enriches games and games enrich literature, the critical methodologies and imaginative experiences they engender can be mutually productive when understood across a continuum of literary and ludic practice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

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14 pages, 242 KB

Open AccessArticle

Split Fiction: Gaming, Authorship, and Corporate Extraction in the Age of AI

by Anastasia Salter and John T. Murray

Humanities 2026, 15(1), 2; https://doi.org/10.3390/h15010002 - 21 Dec 2025

Viewed by 1265

Abstract

This article examines Split Fiction, a cooperative video game that engages with themes of authorship, creativity, and artificial intelligence in the digital age. The game presents aspiring authors whose creative ideas are extracted by a corporate machine—a metaphor for contemporary generative AI systems. Through its mandatory two-player cooperative mechanics and genre-shifting gameplay, Split Fiction explores tensions between human creativity and automated generation, individual authorship and corporate extraction, and procedural rhetoric versus narrative meaning. We analyze how the game’s mechanical variety, intertextual references, and meta-narrative structure comment on the current landscape of AI in creative industries, particularly as director Josef Fares’s ambivalent statements about AI complicate straightforward readings of the work as purely anti-AI critique. The game ultimately offers a nuanced exploration of creative labor futures in an age where the boundaries between human and machine authorship grow increasingly uncertain. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

13 pages, 2815 KB

Open AccessArticle

More than Interactivity: Designing a Critical AI Game Beyond Ludo-Centrism

by Hongwei Zhou, Fandi Meng, Katherine Kosolapova and Noah Wadrip-Fruin

Humanities 2025, 14(4), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040088 - 15 Apr 2025

Viewed by 1851

Abstract

This article presents our work-in-progress game Sea of Paint, aimed at exploring concerns around contemporary machine-learning-based AI technologies. It is a narrative-driven game with dialogues and a custom-made text-to-image system as its core mechanics. We identify our design approach as non-ludo-centric, as in, de-emphasizing the importance of mechanical interactions. We argue that contemporary game design language has largely been ludo-centric, where audiovisual and narrative aspects are framed as having somewhat static and complementary roles to rules and mechanics: as context, content, or smoothening and juicing up interactions. Although we do not believe that game design writ large has been ludo-centric, given the diversities of games in both commercial and experimental spaces, we still argue that the entanglement of design decisions across a game’s different aspects have been under-discussed. By presenting our project, we demonstrate how the interrelations across mechanical, narrative and visual aspects help us communicate our critical AI themes more effectively, and explore their potentials more thoroughly. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Electronic Literature and Game Narratives)

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