The paper begins with a confrontation of Borges’s ‘forking universe (narrative)’ and ‘ontological denarration’ (Brian Richardson) that characterizes certain strands of experimental prose (as seen in the texts by the Czech writer Karel Milota, or in the Nouveau Roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon). Extending this comparison to other forms of multilinear and many-worlds narrative (hypertext fiction, split-screen techniques, interactive action-adventure, and open-world videogames), I will examine multilinear fiction through the lens of (1) the forms of an audience’s attention and interest, (2) the technical modes of artefact production, and (3) philosophical and scientific discourses on the multiplicity of worlds. If multilinearity can be understood as a phenomenon that transitions from a state of potentiality to one of actualization (including ever more layered technical implementation), the question is how it collides with the temporal, linear aspect of perception and also the more general and long-term waning of interest in semantic densification and demands on re-reading (cf. John Guillory). What kind of investment does multilinear and many-worlds fiction/world expect from the perceiver across different media forms and how are the differences tied to the scale of perception modes, the different claims to and forms of attention (Karin Kukkonen), and the forms of an audience’s interest (James Phelan, Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin)? The element of contradictory gaps – where events are partly incongruent, prompting the search for the largest common denominator – will be a focus of examination. Do the variant events relate to a single context, or are they mutually exclusive? In what sense are these strategies part of a broader search for the ‘new epic’? How does the development of narrative multiplicity relate to philosophical discourses on possible worlds as well as physicists’ theories of the multiverse (such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics and the cosmological multiverse; e.g. Paul Halpern)? These questions suggest that the basic distinction between simultaneity and sequentality needs to be refined, as if retroactively, across several different modes or layers of the artefact, creating different conditions for (narrative) experience.

This paper situates literature as both a participant in and a commentator on media transformations, and advocates for viewing literature and computer games not as discrete forms but as co-evolving media that illuminate the temporalities of representation, engagement, and critique in an increasingly digitized world.

While the intersection of literature and computer games has long been recognized, the complexity of their interrelation has been obscured by the evolution of computer game studies. This paper documents a reciprocal relationship between literature and computer games, demonstrating how literature influenced the development of computer games and vice versa, and arguing for an approach to literature as a catalyst for the emergence of new forms.

The first part of my paper revisits on 3 key moments in videogame history. The inception of Spacewar! (1961) identifies the origin of human-machine interactivity in the pulp science fiction read by its programmers; the evolution of adventure games in the 1970s reveals the impact of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings on the interface technologies and digital depictions of space; the impact of the Atari 2600 platform (1977) and Taito’s Space Invaders (1978), on literary texts is evident by comparing two versions of Orsen Scott Card's Ender's Game, a highly-influential text for the Golden Age of the 1980s. Through these case studies, I demonstrate how literature provided narrative frameworks, aesthetic strategies, and conceptual underpinnings that shaped gaming’s emergence as an expressive medium.

Gaming reciprocally informs contemporary literary analysis, and the second part of my paper examines how computer games reveal latent aspects of literary temporality and reading practices. Here, my case study is like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy which, I argue, mirrors the structures and logics of video games, inviting readers to engage with a hybrid literacy, integrating the immersive depth traditionally associated with novels and the procedural, surface-oriented attention demanded by games. I describe how elements unique to the videogame medium operate to establish the relationship between the gamespace and the real world, to control the treatment of character, and, finally, to enfold the reader into the game world by eliciting from her “an explicitly hybrid form of attention” that videogame theorist Brandan Keogh calls “co-attentiveness.”

My approach to literature as both a participant in and a commentator on media transformations, and my argument that technological innovations reconfigure reading practices and vice versa, seems directly relevent to the panel's theme of literature as a medium in constant negotiation with evolving technologies, both a receiver and producer of media practices.

Bernard Stiegler is critical towards what he – in the spirit of Adorno and Horkheimer – calls the cultural industrial technology. He perceives it as composed of marketed media of capitalist control of production and consumption, enforcing the takeover of subjectivity which is thus denied the possibility of individuation. Furthermore, as he shows in De la misère symbolique 1. L’èpoque hyperindustrielle (2004) on the example of Alain Resnais’ film On connaît la chanson (1997), temporal industrial objects such as popular songs invade our subjectivity, “stealing” out time and swallowing the temporal vector of our existence as well as our sense of community and agency. In 1997 another remarkable monument of the media representation of the workings of media was published: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novel La télévision. The narrator – a scholar on a residence in Berlin unable to continue with his writing after the first sentence of his essay – had just stopped watching TV yet it haunts him everywhere, as well as other media. The mediated experience is counterbalanced by the felt perceptions of his body, momentary environment and mood, of what is out there, present in the world, what is unmediated or immediate. In my paper I will play out these two aesthetics and politics of media, Stiegler’s and Toussaint’s, against each other, in order to show what critical effects can be drawn from the representation and presentation of media in other media.