Category: Group A

The first thing I noticed and I think everyone noticed when first reading through these types of poems was how a new stanza, or line in the poem would appear every couple seconds and that each combination would seem random as if it was generated by some sort of algorithm within the computer. This allows for a seemingly endless amount of possible combinations for the poems. However, this did in turn create a lot of stanzas or lines that just seemed to not make much sense. However, I think that the stanzas or lines that seemed to not make much sense to me, might actually have a meaning to a different reader and vice versa.

The Love Letters would produce a new stanza every few seconds, while Scholastic Texts would produce a new line every few seconds. Personally, I sometimes felt as I did not have enough time to read each line or stanza in order to fully comprehend it. However, with A House of Dust, it would produce a new line every couple seconds and slowly build each stanza to give off the feeling that the reader is actually keeping up and reading along with the computer. I much preferred the experience given by A House of Dust.

It was interesting to me the amount of influence Dadaist poems had on combinatory poems, especially since the instructions on how to make a Dadaist poems with a newspaper is how the algorithm for combinatory poems works. Tzara even said within the instructions, “You will now become ‘an infinitely original writer with a charming sensitivity, although still misunderstood by the common people'”. This line is interesting to me because these were the thoughts I first had when reading through the poems. I noticed how combinatory poems are seemingly endless with original content and that they produce many poems that seem very confusing and dumb to me but might actually have meaning to other readers.

While looking through the poems/games, I was quite intrigued by the rapid and spontaneous generation of text. Initially, I assumed that these poems were very random. However, Scott Rettberg explains that the use of combinatory poems expresses an unconscious collectiveness and helps inspire other digital media works. Another point made about the use of combinatory poems was the idea that these works are trying to fool people into believing that the computer/game/poem is actually communicating with them and generating works that cater to them.

I saw many similarities between “Love Letters” and “House of Dust” because they produced new stanzas of poetry about every 2 seconds. Sometimes the poems would be very moving, other times it was hard to comprehend these works. I honestly enjoyed these works because they allowed me to break free from the traditional poetic style, which is full of hidden meanings and deep emotions. These works allowed me to appreciate poetry and electronic literature in a different light. These combinatory poems forced you to understand these random lines and dive deeper than the surface level. They make you really try to find deeper meanings within the text.

The work, “Scholastic Texts” stood out because instead of providing a whole new stanza, it only generated a new line about every 2 seconds, to generate a poem that goes on forever. It is constantly changing the theme of the poem while also sticking to a strict pattern. I still see more similarities between “Scholastic Texts” and “House of Dust” because both works do not feel personal and are following a systematic pattern. On the other hand, “Love Letter” felt as if I was reading different versions of letters to give to someone or that someone gave to me.

In relation to the Twine games we focused on last week, these works are only similar to the forms of using a dark or colorless background. There is a clear difference of the lack of making your own choices and choosing your own path and the form of interactivity. The Twine games seemed to be internal exploratory while these texts are completely external exploratory. Twine games seemed more personal and allowed you to form quick connections with the text but these combinatory poems force you to make connections and aren’t personal at all. Despite all of this, I can appreciate combinatory poems as being a unique genre of poetry that allows the reader to be fully engaged because of the quick generation of new text while simultaneously losing the attention of the reader with the random pairings and spontaneous text.

Scott Rettburg discusses the history of combinatory poetics by analyzing some noteworthy works like “Love Letter Generator,” “Stochastic Texts,” and “A House of Dust.” These pieces of literature all produce their content through a programmatic procedure where lists of words are inserted into a standard sentence structure. High quality writing was never the goal of these early combinatory literature producers; instead, these works were meant to highlight how computing could produce literature with meaning and diverse variable outcomes.

Combinatory literature is not always as poetic or even as coherent as the programmer would hope. Lutz’s “Stochastic Texts” often produce sentences that make little sense at surface level, such as “every laborer is narrow.” This is because the combinatory algorithm is imperfect and does not account for linguistic trends and meanings. However, I think producers exploit this element of combinatory literature; ambiguous or ‘meaningless’ sentences result in a greater variance in reader interpretations of the text. Text that provokes thought in the reader is characteristic of poetry.

Some of the earliest origins of combinatory poetry come from the Dadaist movement and their methods of poetry creation. Words were cut out of a newspaper and picked at random to be used in a poem. I have personally used this technique several times, either for poetry subjects in English classes or for subjects in magazine collages. In both cases, picking words at random reveals unique outcomes that might not have been formed by human thought; I call it artificial creativity. However, artificial creativity is still creativity.

Falling close to the idea of creativity is originality. The randomized combinations of text allow for completely unique sentences, at least in relatively complex combinatory algorithms. In a way, this mirrors the creative processing system of a human writer, who is sifting through the text possibilities in their own mind. For this reason, it can be difficult to differentiate a work created by a computer and one created by human hands. I especially see this in “Love Letter Generator” where I could be convinced that any of the love letters were written by a human.

The genesis of electronic literature began with the kind of combinatory poetics seen in “House of Dust” by Allison Knowles and James Tenney, “Stochastic Texts” by Theo Lutz, and “Love Letters” generator by Christopher Strachey. All of these works were released as early as 1952 but no later than 1967, and by looking at the extent to which understanding the historical context of combinatory poetics facilitates a greater appreciation for the works, we being to understand how that type of electronic literature might not be as applicable or effective as it was at the time of its creation.

What struck me most about the historical context was the way artistic movements such as the Dadaists heavily influenced creativity taking place. The cut-up technique adopted by many within this movement rejected notions of common sense and unoriginality by taking an article, cutting up all of the words, and then drawing randomly from the pot to create something new which became a common practice amongst creative writers (Rettberg 21). Thus, digital combinatory poetics’ connection to print forms of poetry lies within the same principle—feed the computer random words and have it arrange them in a random order to create a distinctly original poem. Rettberg highlights the way as well in which “computers provide a variety of ways to easily select at random” material that can be used for randomization within poetry (23). This aspect of randomness, however, as a reader located well within the 21^st century, doesn’t as easily trigger my sympathies considering my externality from the original culture the text was placed in. Consequently, the randomness’ interjection in my ability to easily understand the text proves rather frustrating.

As a result, I am moved to ask: does the importance of combinatory poetic works lie within the text itself or rather within the process by which the text was created?

Simultaneously, the search for originality in the mid-20^th century not only gave rise to the cut-up technique but also the distinct form of the works. The text becomes more indecipherable, I argue, due to the way in which electronic combinatory poetics escape formally from the confines of the screen to never return except in a reincarnated fashion. The Nick Montfort’s implementation of Strachey’s “Love Letters” flashes the letters across the screen without proper time to read them, and if you can’t read it in time, it vanishes. This movement provides a reason for the why “Stochastic Texts” and “Love Letters” remain fundamentally poetic. Their representational meanings in addition to evocative meanings, as we discussed in class, remain under the control of the works’ forms. With regards to these two combinatory poetic pieces, their representational meanings are hardly the only meanings present, for the evocative meanings are heavily privileged when the content is difficult to decipher, disappears, and is recycled.

I remain intrigued by Rettberg’s claim that “if these letters are not great literature, they are literary writing produced by the procedural operations of the computer” and if this is the way we choose to think about combinatory poetics, then to what extent have modern computer science advancements also advanced (or diminished?) the ability for writers and scientists alike to be better storytellers (32). Particularly, what is the purpose of poetry if not to somehow come to understand it? Am I unable to understand the gravity of these works because I could not relate to the contextual culture?

In Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg asks the reader to consider the form of the procedurally generated poems and love letters that he presents. He is concerned, largely, with the fact that these poems are written with little authorial intervention, yet the reader is still able to parse meaning out of them. Despite many of these works using a type of programming where a predetermined part of speech is slotted into a preexisting structure, the reader can still create meaning from the work. Moreover, these poems are also fleeting.

Many of the poems we looked at only exist for a brief period of time and cannot be remade in the same way. All, except the second implementation of “Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator,” function as an infinite scroll upward where for every new implementation or line a previous one is lost. 

This fleetingness furthers the feeling of uniqueness to the poems. In “House of Dust,” with every new line, one line from a previous stanza is erased. Because you cannot scroll back through the entire log of stanzas generated, even if you have repetition, it is difficult to notice. Similarly, with the first implementation of “Christopher Strachey’s Love Letter Generator,” there are limited options, but each letter feels different because you are only able to see four at a time. Within the limited context, each letter or poem can be interpreted differently based on others around it. Thus, even if you do get an exact repetition, the context in which it is presented is still radically different. 

This final point is perhaps more apparent in “Stochastic Texts” by Theo Lutz. This poem is a single, continuous stanza made from excerpts of Franz Kafka’s writing (Rettberg, 33). Not only does this poem continually scroll, but having the surrounding lines affect how the reader interprets and understands the symbols presented. Because of its form, the reader expects there to be meaning, even if none really exists. Thus, in using surrounding lines, the reader begins to create meaning for the work. While lines can be repeated because of the limited options within the work, the chance of having the entire screen repeated again is very small. Thus, despite the limitations on the variation of language, the continuous scroll function keeps the work from becoming repetitive and stale.

In comparison to the game we played last class, The Baron, playing Shade was much more challenging. The Baron was easier to navigate and gave more information on what was happening in the game at that moment. Playing Shade I became frustrated very quickly with the failed commands I entered. In my opinion, The Baron gave more hints about what the next steps should be, but Shade gives more limited information. I found myself giving up much quicker while playing Shade in comparison to playing The Baron.

While playing this game, I was constantly entering different commands until it would let me move on. It was almost as if I was in an argument with the game, and the only way I could win is to do exactly what it wants. Douglas states that “the emerging character is a negotiation between play and design”. I agree with this statement and would also say that this limits the interactive freedom in most games. I would describe this game as an internal-exploratory because I am now involved in this game world, but there is a pre-defined storyline that I must follow. Making my own choices does not necessarily affect the outcomes, because if I make the wrong choice it abruptly stops me. The game does not allow your own personality to influence the turn of events, but you are still eager and persistent to proceed further throughout the game.

The use of the second-person during the game’s narration allows the player to get a more personal feel. I didn’t realize how impersonal and distanced the first-person narrative actually is until exploring more electronic literature. Receiving directions and commands while being referred to as “you” allows one to be immersed within the storyline. I feel as if this level of engagement made me so determined to finish, despite my frustration. Second-person narration can really grab the audience’s attention and coerce them to want to get to the end of the story of their characters.

My favorite part of Shade was the ending, even though it took me over an hour to get there. Towards the end of the game, the narration switches from second-person to third-person, as an outsider looking in at someone who is dead in the sand, but that person is you. This play on the psyche makes you question the entire storyline and makes you wonder if any of it was actually real. This rhetoric allows the player to not only be engaged while playing the game, but the engagement continues upon completion as the player tries to analyze the story line and question oneself.

After playing Plotkin’s Shade and reading Jeremy Douglass’ “Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade, I was plainly frustrated, but also reminded of this quiz the Washington Post published online by the extent to which it utilizes extended notions of light to craft a narrative. While this is fundamentally different from Shade, there are some interesting takeaways.

First, my initial engagement with Shade was so frustrating I had to quit. Immediately, I began a new document for this post to write down all of the aspects of the structure I found unhelpful or particularly crucial to the experience of playing. These notes included the exploration of a language barrier questioning the existence of a learning curve in regard to knowing the correct “command” language necessary to move the game forward. Douglass describes the sensation perfectly when he states that “no matter how many times you turn off the lamp, the requested interaction is politely refused” (3). Essentially, Douglass calls the frustrating inability to articulate the correct command the “hiding method” that necessitates a ransacking hunt which “produces a moderate amount frustration” – an understatement (6). Therefore, in realizing the scholarly legitimacy of this play induced rage, I am left questioning then whether or not the learning curve is from learning a new process of reading (that is, electronically) or rather learning how to play a new game in order to facilitate reading?

The concept that “darkness kills,” or at least generates fear, Douglass raises interested me for literal and metaphorical reasons (4). Literally speaking, I thought initially of more current interactive games that use darkness as a scare tactic that enlivens the second person nature of the game, most notably among them Slender Man which was discontinued due to a violent act that occurred when two girls took the simulation too far wanting to allegedly be proxies for the video game murderer. Second-person immersion can have serious real-world consequences, but that is another digression.

On a lighter and more metaphorical note, I found the idea of light important in Shade, as Douglass notes, such that “as a narrative, it tells a story of enlightenment” (4). The Washington Post quiz, “Which of these 2020 Democrats agrees with you most?” informs the idea of enlightenment as a narrative strategy. The quiz implies an understood “you” when answering policy questions granting the reader, or player, the agency to choose which narrative they want to craft to better embody their ideal political candidate. Conversely, readers may fashion their answers to craft their own political narrative. The quiz has interactive elements including the readers identification with a character and their construction of a story via online web-based media outlets – an affordance only provided through the Washington Post’s online presence. Thus, the idea of being enlightened through the construction of a story rings true even within the fabrication of our political identities. Moreover, most of what politicians say anyways is a fabricated story, so the media adopting IF as a means of news makes complete sense. Did I just make a case for news as interactive fiction?

When I attempted to play Shade, I just go increasingly frustrated with the lack of commands and how little you can do in the game. Most of the commands are not understood by the computer, so you just have to keep guessing until you find one that works. The goal of the game is also not apparent in any of the descriptions so you’re not even sure what to do. Every time I managed to get a command that worked, I would get excited and think that I was moving the story forward, but then I would spend five minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. The game takes place in a single room apartment so there is not much to explore and even when I would try to get up and walk around, the game would say that I walked enough the night before.

It is interesting however how the game describes the area around you and you have to take what is being described to you and use that as context for what actions you will make. If you are in the kitchen, you can grab a glass of water. But you have to type every command in order to fill that glass with water. As Douglass talked about in Enlightening Interactive Fiction, it is interesting that the game is focused on making you feel like you are the character, as instead of error messages, it displays messages for why the character can’t do that, such as saying you broke the habit of drinking from the sink when you were eleven. Interactive fiction focuses on making the reader a part of the story and Shade makes up for its lack of graphics to help paint a picture or set the mood by giving vivid descriptions of the mood and setting in order to drive the reader forward with its decisions.

However, the game is really frustrating to play and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to move the game forward.

Shade follows a less linear structure compared to other text games we’ve played for class. This is a marked departure from other IF games and text adventures, which often have an ultimate goal and objective. Further, as Jeremy Douglass mentions in his article, “Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade”, rather than a sprawling dungeon or map to explore, Shade entirely takes place in one room (Douglass, 132). The already small space of the apartment is not divided into rooms, only nooks from which the player can still see the rest of the space. The player is actively discouraged from leaving or even looking out the window. The map is big enough initially to promote exploration, but it quickly becomes confining and repetitive to interact with the same objects.

The game also initially appears to have a set of objectives, pointed out in the description through your to-do list. It begins with you looking for the plane tickets which you have misplaced. However, the tasks on the to-do list quickly become unimportant and you are left to your own devices in the apartment. Because of the lack of structure and goals, the game can become frustrating. There are times where the player will become stuck and be unable to forward the story. Only through ransacking the apartment and interacting with every object multiple times can the player progress. Even nonlinear IF games such as Galatea have an objective- learning about the art exhibit Galatea through asking questions. In Shade, there comes a point where there is no objective left to complete.

These unique features of Shade work to create the atmosphere inside the apartment for the player. Being unable to progress mimics the feeling of the character losing their mind, repeating commands ad nauseam. Further, by confining the entire gameplay to a small space and then drastically changing it, the game is able to further the shock that the player and the character feel about realizing they are really in the desert. Both of these mechanics function to parallel the experience of the player and the character.

Jeremy Douglass describes the history and meaning of interactive fiction, using Andrew Plotkin’s Shade as both a typical and an innovative example. Shade is a hypertext game where the reader is the protagonist. The reader is in room preparing for a desert vacation, but as the reader slowly unveils more details through exploring the room, they realize that they had already taken the trip and are stuck in the desert hallucinating about their past life. We have explored several interactive fictions in class, but Shade reminded me most of The Baron. Both require extensive exploration through space in order to solve some puzzle, and at the end, the reader comes to a realization about the meaning of the work.

I recently read an article for my game development class that argued how game developers’ ability to create emotional connections between the game and the player is what sells the game. I see Shade as a clear example of this. As I played Shade, I continually felt frustrated because I kept using invalid commands and couldn’t find any clues, yet I was compelled to continue for almost an hour. No matter what my emotional reaction to the game was (frustration, joy, anxiety), the important point is that I made that connection and became hooked. Interactive fictions are particularly skilled in doing this because of their internal interactivity and second-person mode of address. As with The Baron, I felt personally obligated to reach the ending of the story.

Douglass presents a rather thought-provoking analysis of the ending of Shade, where the reader sees a dying figure in the sand which is supposedly also the reader. Douglass argues that the second-person perspective could be transforming into a third-person perspective that views this interaction from a spectator’s point-of-view. This analysis only complicated the ending for me and brought it to a more abstract level than I’d like. However, it did prompt the following question: what are the affordances of using second-person versus third-person in this story?