AustLit

'We have entered the age of gaming and gamification, and creative writing – as both a cultural practice and a discipline of study – is being drawn into this phase of digital culture. Despite the bookish backlash noted by Adam Hammond in Literature in the digital age (2016), major publishers have begun to experiment with interactive digital narratives. Penguin’s We tell stories (2008) was a first attempt by a major publisher to future-proof its business through a merging of gaming principles and creative writing – an attempt more recently repeated by Hachette’s New star soccer story ‘game book’ (2016). In ‘The shifting author-reader dynamic’, R. Lyle Skains diagnoses such experiments in relation to the consumer reality: ‘The next generation of readers is currently in their teens, spending far more attention, time, and money on digital platforms such as gaming and internet interactions than they do in any other entertainment genre’ (2010: 96). However, while literature is being challenged to adapt in a digital age increasingly dominated by gamers, the traffic is not just one-way. Games are also changing in response to literary or artistic imperatives, as writers are conscripted into development teams in an increasingly competitive games industry, and as scholars focus their attention on games as artefacts of cultural interest. While some early game scholars aggressively opposed the ludic culture of gaming to the readerly culture of literature, and while the agency of players (as opposed to the assumed passivity of readers) often continues to be lauded as the distinguishing virtue of games, hard-and-fast distinctions are being eroded. Astrid Ensslin, for example, while remaining appropriately sensitive to medium specificities, has posited the emergence of the hybrid form of the ‘literary game’ (2014), exemplified by such work as Tale of Tale’s The Path (2009).'  (Introduction)