Author: kmwalsh

 How to Rob a Bank annoyed me in the way things that remind you too keenly of yourself can irk someone. To quote the kids, it made me feel “cringey”.  The games exploration of “how to” culture was the most compelling way in which the interactive story toyed with the technological pitfalls of our present moment, wherein the abundance of information plays surrogate to individual agency. The disastrous lack of self-reliance, problem solving, and dynamic thinking in today’s age where seemingly there is a literal manual for most things (including, as we’re shown by Elizabeth’s searches, a manual for raising children) became the fundamental crux of the story. Ted Armstrong, the protagonist, relies on his phone to tell him anything from robbing a bank to how he should feel about someone. The identities of the characters, Elizabeth, ted, and Deb, materialize through their mediated presences. If you could read a persons life, could you do it through their search history? The game seems to say so in a tongue in cheek sort of way. There’s a quasi-epistolary nature to story that aids in this. If we were to track the evolutions of “journaling” as a historical through-line, “How to Rob a Bank” seems to be a false archive of a current propensity to search first, and think later. 

The game provides a seemingly unresolved discourse regarding criminality and morality. Deborah’s self aggrandizing and proselytizing personality, position Ted and Elizabeth in the right. However all characters seem to function like pixelations–they’re cartoon-like, lending the piece to a kind of satire of modern crime dramas that’s borderline unbelievable. Elizabeth’s frivolity I think bothered me the most in this respect: from her baby journaling, to her ditsy diatribe, she was barely a character. The parodic nature of the game left its reader in a kind of ethical purgatory–made more so apparent by Ted’s incessant use of the “morality” app. 

However, while the individual human characters fell flat on the page (err. phone), the game seems to offer that it’s the ease of technology, the unlimited access of information, that’s the true criminal mastermind behind the bank robberies. 

The inherent paradox of a game like Her Story is that there is seemingly so much agency when a user is presented with a database, and yet there is a helplessness about it. What do we search? Where do we even begin with a murder?

One aspect of Her Story that is perhaps more coherent and  to me than other interactive pieces we’ve worked with is that the algorithm that connects code to a person’s language and ultimately their narrative. Her Story depends our ability to pick up on the patterns of language, on the intonation of the human voice, and the small idiosyncratic expressions of human beings. Data in Her Story is not the guiding force, but rather it is the user’s impression of a woman, or rather two women, or actually maybe just one woman (we aren’t truly sure by the end)–ultimately it is our intuition that leads us through the app. I think that is the fundamentally most compelling part of the game. The tropish “evil twin,” the cheating, and murder are the least compelling components of the story, ironically.

The manner of telling as well I found to be particularly interesting. We do not hear the voice of a police officer, we can only judge this woman, Hannah/Eve, by what she says. And frankly, I found myself endeared to her almost unquestioningly by the end of the narrative. She has unbridled control of the narrative in its 250 fragmentations. There are constant references to the act of storytelling in the clips such as the running theme of Rapunzel, the ballad, the news of Princess of Diana, etc.

In many ways the user becomes a kind of investigator, but the revelation that we are the woman’s daughter strikes almost inappropriately and feels more like an additional “M. Night Shyamalan twist” that wasn’t abundantly necessary other than giving credence to why we’re searching this archive in the first place.

“Dakota” represents for me some of my initial frustrations with interactive fictive texts like “Queers in Love at The End of The World.” Like “Queers in Love,” “Dakota” arrests readerly agency in the process of reading. Jessica Pressman deems this a “subversion” of “close-reading” in her book Digital Modernism (Pressman 97).

But, increasingly, I have been asking myself what the extent of transgressive digital texts does for the reader. From the perspective of reader response, the answer is seemingly well, little. The texts are frustrating, and at worst alienating, and though they may mirror the content of the subject matter they deal with, I am forced to wonder what the point of having a text that one cannot truly dig into is? Perhaps digital texts like these however should not be read in relation to “literature” and require a different logical parameter when approaching them. 

What if “logical” is itself a false parameter by which to approach digital fiction? Seemingly, “Dakota” offers an immersive experience into fast-paced youth and drunken stupor. “Dakota” offers more of a feeling than a narrative, and embodies relations and sensations more than it does story. It’s disorienting use of fragmentation, flashing, and rhythmic drums offers something akin to, as Pressman states, a “cinematic” experience (Pressman 88).

I think this also prompts questions about readerly agency. In the CYOA books, readers for the most part were allowed to assert their own decision making within the story universe. But in Dakota, as Pressman acknowledges, the point of “Dakota” is  antithetical to interactivity (Pressman 82). Especially in an age where we have so much individual control over our devices, Dakota seems to divorce us of that agency. But as a reader, I’m not sure I’d gravitate to fiction like that, even if I understand the creativity and thesis of the project.

Litrouke’s “Please Answer Carefully” draws our attention to the act of seeing— the flashes of screen that make the reader feel as if their own eyes were betraying them, calls attention to the process of reading itself. One of the most profoundly broadening aspects of Twine games as Anastasia Salter points out in her article “Playing at Empathy” is there “immersive” capacity that allows a true conflation of reader/character/POV (Salter 1) . I think this is most true in “PAC” for it, more than the other games, blurs the line between text and device seamlessly through its format as a questionnaire–a pop up survey you might see scrolling on the very device you play the game on. 

Particular to this Twine game are its glitches which are the earliest sign that the questionnaire is not as it appears. These glitches become a full on hacking of the survey as it is revealed to be a sort of digital entrapment from a distant stalker. What is perhaps the most unnerving, and true to the experience of stalking is the way in which the game initially makes us distrust our own vision, and our own choices, through the employment of these glitches. There’s a theme  of gaslighting that Litrouke is clearly tapping into through this manipulation of medium. As readers we are made to question our own vision? Did we really see that? Or is our mind just playing tricks on us? 

The sound effects egg this on, as our eyes are glued to the screen we’re made to feel suddenly entrapped in our surroundings. I’m interested to see how other members of the class felt about this game, specifically in regards to gender lines.  

In this regard, I wonder how empathy can become more complicated by interactivity. I’m reminded of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection which addresses the complication of empathy in slave narratives written by white abolitionists, and how their attempt to embody empathy was more complicated than the parameters of good intentioned activism–an in fact resulted in a promulgation of graphic  trauma. In Twine games where for example we are asked to immerse ourselves in potentially problematic, racist, traumatic, etc subject matter, what is the effect of such immersion and interactivity? What are we, as reader/players, enacting? Salter talks about Twine games in relation to their capacity to enable “emotional growth” and “experimentation” but are such games always spaces for the positive processing of such emotions (Salter 2-3)? 

What, if anything, are we forced to experience more viscerally than we’d like to in such games? 

Work Cited:

“Please Answer Carefully” by Litrouke

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes Of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, And Self-making In Nineteenth-century America. New York : Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Salter, Anastasia. “Playing at empathy: Representing and experiencing emotional growth through Twine games.” 2016 IEEE International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH) (2016): 1-8.

A through-line that connects many of the CYOA games and hypertext pieces we’ve been exposed to thus far this semester is a propensity for them to contain sexually explicit content–often surrounding culturally taboo sexual interactions. “My Body–A Wunderkammer” perhaps makes this thematic undercurrent most visually evident in its literal connection of the author’s physical body to the digital text. Wunderkammer itself is german for “a place where a collection of curiosities and rarities is exhibited” according to Lexico. I’d like to focus on this notion of exhibition and somaticism that hypertext and digital storytelling seem to adhere to frequently. 

One interesting paradox of “My Body” is the mediation with which the story is told. Ostensibly such digital/technological intervention into autobiography would feel inherently alienating or rather disembodying. And yet, the opposite is true. Shelly Jackson invites her reader into the somatic space through the graphic fragmentation of the artistic representation of the body. Such access is made clickable, and therefore virtually tactile through the hypertext. 

We as readers are literally invited to touch the body, albeit through the form of a cursor. 

In our chapter on hypertext in Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg makes a passing reference to Donna Haraway’s theory of “cyborging” in literature. In her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” Haraway argues that “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”(Haraway 1). Haraway’s manifesto is dense and complicated but can be summarized best by these above lines. Haraway is useful in an analysis of “My Body” in her theorizing of a body which inhabits a mechanical and “social reality”–one in which the body is inherently tied to the technology through which it understands itself. 

To return briefly to the sexually explicit nature of the hypertext, specifically that of the passage regarding the penetrative tail, the reader, through their interactivity with the body of the hypertext, is asked implicity to participate in this sexual act. Therefore the technological mediation of the fictive text enables the reader to engage in a more embodied way with the subject matter of the text. 

A similar dynamic could be seen in the game “The Girl and The Wolf“ in which the reader was provoked to analyze the most sexual and violent aspects of the story’s axis. Perhaps the formal way in which hypertext engages the tactile senses and POV of its readers/users lends itself to these more exhibitory narrative plotlines. But when these narrative lines have inherently misogynistic or sexually violent, a potentially problematic participatory voyeurism is at play

While the hypertext does mediate suh embodiment, it equally evidences and attempts to make lear its thematic concern with disembodiment. “My Body” also evidences what Rettberg references in his chapter as a medial reflexivity in which the fragmented and seeming alien nature of the intervention of technology in this deeply personal autobiography reflects the author’s view toward such embodiment. The author’s characterization of her body is told in an inherently, quite literally fragmented manner (the body parts are cut up and sectioned off). Therefore the alienating/disembodying nature of the autobiography is reflected in the games very structure. 

As a final note and to harken back briefly to my time in Death in the Digital Age with Dr. Sample, the inhuman humanity of the text or rather the bodiless body that the hypertext enables is ultimately an uncanny creation: one which seems to, by its very nature, necessitate discomforting content. 

.Work Cited

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.

“Wunderkammer: Definition of Wunderkammer by Lexico.” Lexico Dictionaries | English, Lexico Dictionaries, www.lexico.com/en/definition/wunderkammer.