Astrid Ensslin

In this lecture, I introduce the concept of literary gaming as a way of understanding the hybrid media ecologies between lucidity (playfulness), narrativity and poetic expression in contemporary digital culture. Taking an aesthetic approach, I demonstrate how literary expression in digital-born media exceeds and subverts traditional notions of literature. Looking at examples of digital poetry and fiction, literary-narrative games and virtual reality installations, I showcase how concepts of worlding, multimodality, and procedurality open up entirely new hermeneutic, phenomenological and critical paradigms that require new, transdisciplinary research agendas for analyzing, understanding and co-creating  these complex works, and for exploring how they can help us address real-world questions and challenges.