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    "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" - Marshall McLuhan.

    FPS-Punk stands for First Person Shooter Punk, a convergence between gaming and literature created by taking intrinsic elements within the narrative and turning them into game mechanics to engage the reader by turning the fiction into an immersive experience, and in the case of Ordo Abchao, turning the reader into an AIR member. In The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan states that "the book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view'" and that "the book page yields the inside story of the author's mental adventures." To McLuhan, the culture of the book is one of revelation, one where the truth is uncovered, discovered, or otherwise brought to light. Literature has often embraced the metaphor of being the mirror of society, of reflecting its truths and hidden secrets. The book was (and for now remains) a tool for representation, for creating fiction out of reality. FPS-Punk breaks with this literary tradition by embracing the culture of the screen. On the screen, we are immersed in hyperreality, a world where we can no longer tell where reality ends and fiction begins. On the screen, fiction both precedes and succeeds, both influences and is influenced by reality, fiction is simultaneous model and representation, mimesis and anti-mimesis, a circle of life imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, etc. In the culture of the screen, it is the fiction that is uncovered, discovered, or otherwise brought to light. The metaphor of literature should no longer be that of the mirror, but that of the virtual world, for the truth is no longer revealed but is instead experienced: representation now gives way to immersion. Is it in gaming that the potential of the screen is continuously explored, and if literature is to remain relevant in the culture of the screen, it will have to converge with gaming. FPS-Punk is such convergence, replacing chapters with levels, pages with status updates, and readers with gamers:

    "The gamer is the ambivalent explorer of an age experiencing first-hand the immersion, immanence, and immediacy of the virtual" - Jean Baudrillard.



    No Reader Left Behind


    The First Person Shooter Punk Manifesto, a.k.a No Reader Left Behind, is a short essay published November 2010, presenting the ideas about an innovative, immersive, and gamified reading experience:

    NoReaderLeftBehind.rtf






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