I discuss the four Perl poetry generators I have developed in the ppg256 series. My discussion of each program begins with the entire 256 characters of code and continues with an explication of this code, a description of aspects of my development process, and a discussion of how my thinking about computation and poetry developed during that process. In writing these programs, I came to understand more about the importance of framing to the reception of texts as poems, about how computational poetic concepts of part of speech might differ from established linguistic ones, about morphological and syntactical variability, and about how to usefully think about possible texts as being drawn from a probability distribution.

We describe six common misconceptions about platform studies, a family of approaches to digital media focused on the underlying computer systems that support creative work. We respond to these and clarify the platform studies concept.

Adventure game development systems are platforms from the developer’s perspective. This paper investigates several subtle differences between these platforms, focusing on two systems for interactive fiction development. We consider how these platform differences may have influenced authors as they developed systems for simulation and storytelling. Through close readings of Dan Shiovitz’s Bad Machine (1998), written in TADS 2, and Emily Short’s Savoir-Faire (2002), written in Inform 6, we discuss how these two interactive fiction authoring systems may have influenced the structure of simulated story worlds that were built in them. We extend this comparative approach to larger sets of games, looking at interactive wordplay and the presentation of information within the story. In concluding, we describe how critics, scholars, and developers may be able to more usefully consider the platform level in discussions of games, electronic literature, and digital art.