Involvement, Interruption, and Inevitability: Melancholy as an Aesthetic Principle in Game Narratives

Of all of the possibilities suggested by the nascent genre of electronic writing, the idea that online or electronic media may provide a new way of telling stories has met with the most interest and suspicion. When artists, critics, and program developers debate the potential for electronic media to transcend the narrow appeal of quick-response (“twitch”) video games or the pragmatic search features of a CD-ROM-based encyclopedia, they ask whether our experience of these media can become rich and involved enough to become aesthetic. Such aesthetic hopes for these new media need not, of course, focus on narrative. Some of the most successful uses of electronic media have sought the aesthetic not in narrative but in the lyric possibilities of the word on the screen. Indeed, some of the most robust styles emerging in electronic literature rightly locate themselves in the tradition of concrete poetry and modernist experimentation with the ways that words can be brought into relationship on the page—or, in this case, screen.¹