Category: Group C

I was slightly taken aback at Rettberg’s suggestion that a new role for the human poet could be editing “poetry entirely generated by machine intelligence based on a process that remains both invisible and largely incomprehensible for the human poet” (53). Typically, I feel that we steer clear from or at the very least caution against giving artificial intelligence space with which it can overtake humankind (Hello Disney’s Smart House and Wall-E), but here Rettberg, by impartiality, seems open and even acceptive of the notion that artificial intelligence could further develop and become sophisticated enough to write poetry for us.

It should be emphasized that Rettberg is not, indeed, for or against the processes which he describes, as his book explores electronic literature rather than advocating for it (although the exposure garnered from writing about it could very well be considered advocacy), I began to think about the process of getting to the point of wanting to develop some sort of computer software that could write something we consider as intellectually engaging as poetry. More specifically, I want to know why. Are these people ruining the integrity of human-made writing? Computer-made poems aren’t thought to be the most profound, but Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, a book of poetry mimicking the most famous six-second vine video scripts, isn’t either. Computers aren’t that smart when it comes to syntax, but neither are we nowadays; who is go say what has or hasn’t been written by a computer nowadays. Or are these people just interested in exploring the limitations of computers and thought that poetry would be the easiest thing to start with? After all, it isn’t that hard to find an assortment of words to go together and make a haiku and many of the computer programs that create poems hardly make sense. Or are they exploring a rebranding or redefining of poetry, one without preconceived constraints placed on it from practically the beginning of time? Up until this new digital era, poetry was permanent once it was printed on the page; now, it can be changed at the drop of a hat with a delete key or, in the case of Abra, a swish of a finger. It will certainly be interesting to see where poetry goes with this added technical nuance.

Twine games are a step above hypertext and interactive fiction we’ve seen so far this semester, in my opinion. There are multiple reasons for this.

The first of which being that Twine games seem to build off the structure and features that are found in hypertext and IF. For example, in 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald’s (Corfman 2016), the user has direct choices that can be made. Unlike in IF, there is not as much failure involved because all of the user’s choices are seen on the screen instead of hidden in the code of the game. Like we discussed in class on Friday, this means there won’t be as much frustration for the user. It also means the learning curve isn’t as great as it is in most IF like Zork (1977). Thus, entry into Twine games is much easier for new users.

In addition to new users who play the games, Twine allows new developers to easily create their own games. Due to this, a writer who has little knowledge in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS can still create hypertext like games without losing out on any features that are found in hypertext.

Furthermore, the stories created in Twine games, at least 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald’s and My Father’s Long, Long Legs (Lutz 2015), flow much better than the complex narrative paths that are found in IF like The Baron (Gijsbers 2006). In The Baron, the narrative can be hard to follow because of the time it takes to find the right path. This relates to the easier entry previously mentioned. Users do not have to be familiar with the literary structure like that found in parsed-based text.

These reasons show that Twine has many benefits and games created with it expand upon previous hypertext and IF.

Of the games for this week, I was most intrigued by “16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonald’s”. Initially, I was struck by the shifts of color along with the narrative, moving between black, red, and green that effectively mimicked the feeling of movement throughout the space. Relatively dark, more ominous colors envelop the space in darkness.

After completing my first playthrough of the game, I was caught off guard upon entering the final screen, revealing all 16 possibilities for killing the Vampire. The presence of this screen evoked a very game-like atmosphere, despite having gone into my engagement with the piece.

For me, the game-like atmosphere took away from the ability to actually read the piece more than once. While reading through the alternative endings, I thought back to our conversation in class surrounding the role of guides and/or walkthroughs when engaging with electronic literature. “16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald’s” complicated this conversation. Though I find the use of external cheats/guides/etc. to disrupt the reading of electronic texts, Abigail Corfman’s intentional inclusion of the possibility list and hints makes the help part of the internal, textual experience.

Subsequent gameplay ultimately was affected by viewing the list and hints. In my own experience, even after only my first playthrough, reading the hints I was familiar enough with the game space to recognize what the hints were pointing narrator Lucy/the player towards. With each successive playthrough, I found myself going through the motions, increasingly aware of the space and the choices presented to me rather than using the narrative to find a way to get rid of the vampire (as I had done the first time). Though the narrative progressed in unique ways depending on the choices made, knowing the possibilities made engagement with the text feel limited.

Overall, I enjoyed the game-like atmosphere of the piece, especially being caught off-guard by this feature in the beginning, however; I find my enjoyment based more upon the play-ability of the piece rather than the literary/narrative merit (though the world was well-crafted, the text became less of a focus).

This new form of interactive fiction is more storylike than games like “The Baron” or “Shade”, although they remain just as sinister and outlandish. Between what we have read about and experienced ourselves, there don’t seem to be a lot of overtly positive interactive fiction games, and I wonder why that is. I believe that overall, stories that end well aren’t as captivating as games that give people the creeps to some degree, and people are more likely to want to solve a twisted game that they don’t have a clue where it is going.

We spoke in class on Friday about the affordances and downfalls of the games we had been discussing. I think that games like “My Father’s Long, Long Legs” and “Power to the People” and even “Queers in Love at the End of the World” are much less stressful to play because they are more narrative; the player doesn’t have to do the hard thinking, they can just choose what comes next in the story and let the computer do the playing. This does, I think, take away a certain degree of control that a player has in previous games we discussed, but I think that players (or maybe just most people in our class) prefer to have their decisions made for them instead of aimlessly searching for what the computer wants them to do next. The narrative structure of the game also gives it a more gauntlet or maybe loop-and-grow feel (to use Ashwell’s terminology) than “Shade”, “The Baron” or many of our CYOA books.

As I read through this batch of readings I found myself intrigued by the stories “Uncle Roger” and “Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.”

“Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse” was hardly an enjoyable experience to play. The slow loading times were frustrating and the ever more cluttered dashboard made the whole story overwhelming and hard to follow. The graphics and loading symbols reminded me very much of old school computers which helped with the immersion of the game, but overall the story it was trying to tell proved hard to find through the clutter.

“Uncle Roger” played more like what I was expecting from a textual fiction. We followed a series of paths, changing course by simply clicking one of the highlighted text options. I found the whole experience to be far more enjoyable that my time with “Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.” This was likely because “Uncle Roger” was designed to be more user friendly. The “story” unfolded using traditional english writing styles, with the text appearing in an abbreviated, poetic sentence structure. The narrative is gamified by its interactivity. I liked that I was able to pick what aspect of the story I wanted to hone in on or continue, but I also felt that this freedom to choose where the story went had some drawbacks. In particular I felt that the actual work suffered from the user’s ability to choose paths as it can lost continuity by providing so many paths to go down.

Such can be said for both “Uncle Roger” and “Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.” Both are non-linear stories that use player interaction to drive the story forward. The difference between the two is that the confusion and convoluted nature of such interaction within fiction is a critical spect of the user’s experience with “Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.” The game/story is supposed to feel increasingly busy and overwhelming, and though I found it frustrating I found it to be a very interesting and creative way for a story to unfold and be told.

While completing today’s assignment, I particularly enjoyed my time exploring Judy Malloy’s “Uncle Roger”. Malloy’s integration of more traditional text (in the form of short storytelling poems), with hyperlinks enabling readers to chart their own story within the poems, well-illustrated the non-linear storytelling potential of hypertext. Though the poems themselves were fixed, the ability for readers to “randomly” select the next poem in their larger narrative (sight-unseen), mimics the randomly accessible affordance of print literature. After clicking through the first “File” of “Uncle Roger”, I began thinking of successive clicks of the hyperlinks to the act of flipping the pages of a more traditional print text. However, unlike a print text, hyperlinks, though listed in an order, don’t require readers to engage with them in any particular way, nor with all of the sections. In fact, after making many clicks through the various hyperlinks, certain options became unavailable, ultimately adding the effect that certain storylines couldn’t occur after certain “actions” were taken. Readers make these actions almost arbitrarily, being given vague terms like “jane”, “food and drink”, and “semiconductor chips”, to choose from when constructing their own narrative from the poetic pieces. The second and third “File’s”‘ enable readers to make similarly arbitrary decisions by clicking one of three picture-links surrounding the text or an unlabeled key on a keyboard, respectively. Ultimately, through “Uncle Roger”, Malloy presents readers with the opportunity to engage with traditional text in a non-linear format while taking advantage of hyper-links and construct a hypertext of fixed pieces.

Today’s reading also prompted me to consider the role of hyperlinks and hypertext in my own online experiences. Nelson’s conception of, “a literature”, as, “a web of interconnecting documents”, enabled me to establish an understanding of how hypertexts fit into my typically more restricted definition of literature (Rettberg). More commonly thinking of the “canon” of print texts read in English classrooms, I never before considered the potential for seemingly unrelated texts I discover online to be literature in their own right. I began to think of my own experiences on Wikipedia, a website on which I frequently fall into a hole of clicking hyperlinks until I forget the place I started. Before reading Nelson’s conception of literature, I never would’ve considered my forrays into the depths of Wikipedia or times playing the Wikipedia Game with friends in middle school, as literary acts. Now reflecting on these experiences through Nelson’s lens, I regard them in a new light. Though clicking through links from an event, to a space, to an object, to a person, (and so on) doesn’t necessarily construct a clean narrative, the underlying logic constructs a web of text, or literature, and so engaging with a platform like Wikipedia, enables users to participate in a literary experience without picking up a book, or reading an article. Considering the plethora of information readily available on such sites, the literature constructed through hyperlinks then becomes essentially infinite and nearly entirely customizable by each reader, an affordance print text cannot achieve.

Ultimately, consideration of “Uncle Roger” and the affordances of hypertexts enabled by Nelson’s definition of literature, prompt me to ask the class the extent to which they agree with Nelson’s understanding of literature, and the infinite texts that subsequently contribute to the modern literary canon?

In Chapter 3 of Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg, he discusses the history of hypertext fiction and the features of it. These features described by Rettberg were multilinearity, metafiction, reflexivity, and fragmentation. Such features are still used in modern electronic literature. When Rettberg was describing the features of hypertext, I immediately made parallels to examples we have discussed in class. Some of those we have discussed are metafiction due to their focus on narrative structure rather than normal literary subjects such as characters, plots, or themes. This is exemplified by Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World. In this piece of electronic literature, because of the limited time to go through it, the main aspect of the piece is the narrative structure. The limited time causes the players to not be able to read what is on each screen, thus making the character names and plot irrelevant to the player and instead, making the player focus on the narrative structure. Fragmentation can be seen in Aaron Reed’s 18 Cadence. Though not formed by the author, the fragmentation is done by the player when they rearrange text in varying years to create their own story. These fragments form a completely unique story and cause the original one to be fragmented. Like metafiction, multilinearity can be seen in a large portion of the electronic literature pieces that we have discussed. For example, chatbots or AI bots allow for a story of many possibilities that depend on the user’s input. In addition to these examples, Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger exemplifies the multilinearity found in the antecedents of hypertext. In this example, depending on the file chosen, the user has a multitude of narrative paths that they can follow. Thus, there is not a single storyline. If the user chooses file 1, A Party in Woodside, they can choose which subject to start with and then repeatedly make decisions on what subjects to explore, such as characters. These aspects that were present in the antecedents of hypertext are still found in modern electronic literature. As a closing question, besides the multilinearity feature, do other features found in electronic literature parallel video games and their stories?

One of the things that interested me most about our readings were the short stories that we were assigned. In both, the books mentioned tested the limits of the affordances of books we had previously discussed while also reinforcing others. Take Ts’ui Pen’s Forking Graden, for example. While the labyrinth is volumetric, it appears to be only sequential as opposed to both sequential and random access. The Book of Sand seems to be both sequential and random access, but surely not finite because the pages multiply and rearrange every time the narrator opens its cover. Of course, neither of these books written about are real books; both exist within the finite boundaries of the short stories in which they were created. This does, however, raise a few observations and questions for me. Borges wrote “The Book of Sand” in 1975, “The Garden of Forking Paths” in 1941. This means that people have been imagining and playing with the notion of books existing beyond their most basic affordances as early as 1941. Borges paints said notion as being a magical, mythical occurrence, but the notion of books existing beyond their covers has become more real than imaginary with the creation of computers and the internet allowing people to expand upon books in a multi-faceted way with the opportunity to encompass more facets than imaginable. Take Queers in Love at the End of the World, for example. If written into a traditional book, the story would only have one ending and one way to get there. Since Anthropy created the story online, however, the story is allowed over one hundred different storylines and even embodies the acute sense of time Forking Paths begins to explore (although in the opposite sense of time limiting what one can glean from a story). The age of electronics has muddled the affordances of the codex we read about from Kirschenbaum, but what are some affordances that technology has served to offer to literature?

I particularly enjoyed reading Borges’s short story Garden of Forking Paths. It’s quite interesting imaging a novel written in the style of Ts’ui Pên, refusing to follow the typical narrative of a novel where each choice a character makes eliminates all other options at that point in the story. His novel isn’t even a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type of narrative where one can somehow return to a point: if the character makes a choice on page 74 only to realize it leads to a dead end on page 82 they might return to 74. Rather, in Pên’s story, every single possible outcome of any choice occur all at the same time which continually spreads into another round of all possible outcomes occurring and on and on and on. Albert tells Tsun that in the some of the story forks they do not exist, in others only one of them exists, in one Albert is a ghost, in yet another Tsun arrives to find Albert recently dead, then finally he foreshadows his own death by saying one scenario involved himself as Tsun’s enemy. Tsun promptly lies to him and then murders him.

After reading, I was considering why hypertext didn’t lead to the predicted transformed literary future of endless possibility with a move away from linear literature as a format. Rather, we commonly use hypertext in linear literature to more efficiently address the information level that each reader seeks: if they want the most in-depth look they can open every hyperlink, or they can skip over every link and absorb as little as they want. I think it is largely because non-linear literature quickly becomes a pain to read if written too similarly to linear literature, and if it is written “well”, it becomes a pain for the author, who must at each point must provide the reader background information on the characters and such to make the work at least somewhat digestible. So while hypertext hasn’t transformed literature, it has provided internet users the ability to hop around in a somewhat nonlinear fashion, seeking out what interests them from an article from The Atlantic or the details of a poll aggregated onto a model on FiveThirtyEight. –Levi