In literary fiction, the representation of consciousness has often been understood through what might be called the thought of looking: the ways narrative cognition renders a work into a perceptive, embodied, and self-reflexive experience through language. In cinema, by contrast, cognition typically becomes the look of thought: a mental interiority suggested through framing, editing, gesture, movement, and performance. Interactive stories told in videogames complicate this distinction through their intermedial nature. Games must not only represent what characters think, but also account for the player's "will to activity", translating the audience’s intentions into feedback, movement, and action. Thus, while interface navigation, dialogue choices, and mechanical input serve obvious ludic functions, they are also expressive forms through which cognition itself is represented. In other words, they represent the enaction of thought.

This problem has a surprisingly long history that predates videogames. Julio Cortázar's novel Hopscotch (1963), for instance, famously invites readers to choose between multiple reading orders. By proposing two radically different forms of participation and challenging passive models of reading, Hopscotch anticipates many questions now associated with videogames by asking readers to intervene directly in the construction of narrative while exposing the relationship between authorial design and readerly participation. This relationship becomes paramount in the interactive context of videogames, where the projection of one's moment-by-moment decisions into a gameworld appears kinetic in a way Cortázar's novel only imagines, transforming readerly participation into a form of embodied cognition.

But what happens when cognition is enacted by players rather than merely represented before them? From the player's perspective, one both wills about an avatar and watches how their intentions are translated in real time, an experience Danny Steur calls "cinesthetic empathy," adapting Vivian Sobchack's phenomenology of film. How a game's interfaces translate intention—from the dynamic movements of a character to dialogue choices and even the highlighting of buttons within an options menu—thus becomes central to its representation of thought and, ultimately, to its plausibility. Similar aesthetic questions have long emerged in theatrical performance, where the actor's dual consciousness emerges from the tension between performed role and lived subjectivity. Games likewise produce this sort of dual consciousness, requiring players to negotiate the relationship between their situated embodiment and their virtual embodiment. This becomes increasingly complex as contemporary videogames experiment with symbiotic and nonhuman character design, eye-tracking technologies in works ranging from Microsoft Flight Simulator to Before Your Eyes, featuring a terminally ill protagonist, and increasingly sophisticated RPGs such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where the player's character may learn to read by studying with a monk. It is also greatly complicated when a player’s feelings, intentions, or even subjective experience differ from those of the character whom they are actively roleplaying as.

In line with these questionings and observations, this seminar invites contributions that examine literary, cinematic, and ludic articulations of cognition. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:

• Focalization and its relationship to interaction.
• Narrative uses of surveillance technology (e.g., Before Your Eyes).
• The cybernetics of participation.
• Puzzles as articulations of the procedures of thought (i.e., deduction, induction, and detection).
• Agency in multiplayer or synchronous gameworlds.
• Phenomenological approaches to narrative cognition across media.
• Inner monologues in interactive storytelling.
• Nonhuman/technological embodiment.
• Controller input, jank, and narrative glitches in interactive storytelling.
• Representations of cognitive dissonance in storytelling.
• Representations of intersubjectivity and empathy.
• Narrativity and cognition.
• Asymmetrical knowledge in the player/character relationship.
• Human-computer and user interfaces in intermedial and interactive storytelling.
• Free indirect discourse in videogame narration.
• Hybrid and symbiotic character design (e.g., Banjo-Kazooie).
• Literary and filmic cognition (literacy, fluency, etc.) in videogames.

Please apply following this link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/8e8efc90-4a4d-493f-a5b2-66f64665504f