Thursday, January 29th 2026
3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
KMDI
Robarts Library, Room 7020, 130 St George St, Toronto
Abstract
Videogames and interactive fiction have deep, evolving histories that pose challenges familiar to anyone working with cultural heritage: How do we study digital artifacts that change—or disappear—as technologies shift? And what can these histories teach us about designing for the future?
This talk follows from our recent scholarly edition (co-edited with Ellen Forget) of an almost-forgotten piece of web-based interactive fiction: ApertureScience.com (Valve Software, 2006). Built in Flash as a promotional tie-in for Portal (2007), the site simulated a DOS-style command line and file structure, inviting visitors to uncover lore, easter eggs, and fragments of world-building. Today, it stands as both a paratext in a larger transmedia work (the Portal franchise) and as an experiment in literary form: a satirical story told in the form of a command-prompt computer interface.
Using this case, the talk examines the representational strategies available to scholars—simulation, emulation, and even scholarly editing—to make born-digital artifacts accessible to new audiences. Preserving and interpreting these works requires interdisciplinary methods and creative problem-solving. We will consider what fields such as design, videogame studies, literary studies, digital preservation, and textual studies can learn from each other—and from the ephemeral creativity of the Web’s adolescent years.
Supported by research funding from SSHRC and the Jackman Humanities Institute
About the speakers
Alan Galey is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to English, and a past director of the Book History & Print Culture program. His research focuses on extending and adapting textual scholarship to the study of new media and born-digital texts, including e-books, literary apps, digital music, large language models, and videogames. His recent publications include ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition (co-edited with Ellen Forget and Brendan Allen and published in the journal Scholarly Editing in 2025), and a special issue of Games and Culture on videogames and paratextuality (2023).
Brendan Allen is a PhD student in the Faculty of Information and the Book History & Print Culture collaborative specialization. He studies how independent videogame makers—especially those working within literary hybrid forms—navigate material systems of constraints, genres, and publication. Allen focuses particularly on game makers working with constrained tools and engines such as Twine, Bitsy, and PICO-8. As a poet and videogame maker, he is the author of the recent game poems A look of glass stops you (Game Poems #1, 2025) and Correspondence (Indiepocalypse #55, 2024).
