Neal Stephenson at University Temple United Methodist

So last night I heard Neal Stephenson read up by the University. I didn’t really know what to expect — actually it’s better to say I deliberately had set no expectations, because I like Stephenson’s writing a lot and was a little worried I would be disappointed by him personally. Maybe this shouldn’t be a problem for me but I’ve never been able to fully extricate my opinion of an artist from my appreciation of their work. It’s not like I’m a hardcore fan or anything, I’ve read only a few of his books. Snow Crash of course made a big impression on me when I was a skateboard riding hacker punk [some details may have been changed to protect the innocent - ed.] many moons ago.

Anyway, it turned out I had nothing to worry about, because Stephenson was pretty cool, refreshingly free of any bullshit. The recording below is full of echoes unfortunately (the reading was in a church) but I didn’t want to put too much into editing. I think I could clean it up with postfish but I need to check that out, I’ve never used it. Don’t worry, there’s still some good stuff in there.

Reading from Anathem

Q&A

I was….eviscerated

From the mind of Pacian, author of Gun Mute among other games: Into the Mind of the Sky Spiders.

“It was five years ago,” she began. “At the start of all these troubles. There was turmoil and danger of a less pernicious but more overt kind than you’ll find today, even in Circhester. It would be several years before Kirkham would unite Fortress City; armies were still abroad, fighting as best they could, or just looting. And, of course, there were the Sky Spiders too. In any case, without going into specifics…”

“Yes?”

“There was an occurrence, and, for want of a better word, I was…” She cleared her throat. “Eviscerated.”

“But you survived?”

“After a fashion. My uncle was close to hand. I’m sure you know already, but he was – still is, indubitably – the world’s foremost designer of mechanised war machines. Faced with my broken body, he repaired it. The only way he knew how.”

She placed both hands either side of her, revealing the ragged hole in her bodice. Behind it, her stomach was of smooth and polished metal. “So now,” she said, “I’m half woman, half tank.”

“And the way you move?” I asked, carefully.

She pinched the sides of her hoop skirt and lifted the hem of her dress so that I could see. “Caterpillar tracks,” she explained.

I stumbled onto this serial and it’s quite entertaining, check it out.

looking at a birkensnake

Guy Debord’s Kriegspiel

This is pretty brilliant. Thanks to falling down the rabbit hole at Pacian’s cantina and ending up at A Slime Appears I found Guy Debord’s game Kriegspiel. Yeah, that Guy Debord.

He wrote a wargame in the late 70s, and after a couple of editions through the years, it’s now been reproduced as a free digital game by R-S-G. Wow!

the social space of muds

is an oxymoron, right? Maybe I should call this the social space of text games, but…I don’t know.

I’m bringing this up after reading a Matthew Stadler essay at the new Rosa B. (thanks to if:book for the link), a French/English magazine whose layout seems at first quite psychotic — no, perhaps psychedelic, but I grew to like it.

Later in the night after reading the Stadler I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s recent piece in Harper’s. Both this interview of Stadler and LeGuin’s essay rest in part on the social space of art — reading, and discussion.

Looking at muds, here you have a somewhat unique phenomena — people reading collectively, synchronously. And talking about it, maybe not directly, but around it, through it. The pre-existing text is not a novel or a single story, it is a series of points on this graph of experience. Why call it a narrative? For that matter why call it an experience? Is this a fundamental difference between text muds and graphical muds — the social space of reading occurs simultaneously with the text itself. How is this different from the social space of play occurring simultaneously with play in WoW? Is someone who plays WoW out there?

Digressing a bit, I am constantly amazed to discover these new continents of text gaming — does Jove, Digichat, or SEAchat ring a bell for anyone? They didn’t for me until a day ago. And the constant refrain in the mudding community — are text games dead? How can you tell if you never knew who were the living?.

digital propp

Courtesy of a link at Fair Game, a simple Proppian fairytale generator. I’ve been thinking about joining things like this, the Abulafia generator, and IF in some way.

Robin Hobb at the University Bookstore

Following on the last post, the other night I heard Robin Hobb read at the University Bookstore, on her tour supporting her new book Renegade’s Magic.

I brought the recorder to try it out. I was about ten feet from the podium, and the bookstore is something of a big open space so there was a lot of ambient noise. For the introduction of Robin I had the recorder in my shirt pocket (I don’t have an external microphone yet) and for her reading I held the recorder in my lap pointing up. The PA system for the reading wasn’t very loud — kind of like a little louder than normal speaking voice. The final file was about half a gig of 44.1 khz WAV.

In Audacity I cut out a few spots of the WAV file and used the envelope tool and amplify effect to increase the volume on some points, and the envelope tool to decrease some loud spots, but other than that I didn’t do too much. I still haven’t figured out how much of that works.

I did cut up the file into two parts — so if you just want to hear the question and answer you can skip to that.

Robin Hobb introduction and reading:

Robin Hobb Q & A:

I was impressed by the reading, she seems really cool.

command lines: chapter 4

With some free time over the holiday I’ve finished Jeremy Douglass’ dissertation. Chapter 4 is taken up largely by close readings of several works, and I have somewhat less to comment on here.

23.

Here CL considers what it calls minimal works, to describe the essential of IF (241).

24.

Typing at the command line is primarily a site of anticipatory or prospective closure – an attempt (which may be frustrated) to discover or solve the gap between the current state of the simulation and its next state. [244]

Compare this with the new design notes for Deadline Enchanter, and DE’s possible “projective fiction”. I wonder if DE is not so unlike interactive fiction as may be first thought.

25.

CL goes on to examine tense and person in IF.

First and third person IF tend to complicate the narrative and functional relationships between interactor and protagonist by their nature, opening the distance between the two as separate selves. For this reason, first and third person increases the need for a framing tale to capture the separate self of the interactor in the diegesis; these modes thus encourage narrative elaboration. This is not to say that such elaboration is good or bad, nor must it follow that the minimalist mode of IF (second) be the dominant mode. Still, the fact that second person is by far the dominant mode might be telling about the general relationship of IF to framing complexity. [265-266]

You know, I’m still not convinced that first and second person in IF are really so different (in terms of complexity of the relationship between protagonist and interactor).

I’m perhaps as far from an English major as you could get, so my ability to understand the root cause of the dominant mode in fiction, third person (compared to IF’s dominant second person), is limited.

Whereas it’s easier to write IF in second person, maybe it’s easier to write fiction in the third person? That doesn’t feel right though — in fiction it seems to be more about convention.

Yet social convention is not so far removed from the function of physical technology, if not convention (i.e., what is possible with the tools).

26.

CL takes a brief detour into talking about interactivity (273), dispels some myths about IF’s relationship to graphical computer games (278), discusses “time fiction” and time-loop fiction, and then makes a close reading of three works: Aisle (287), Shrapnel (309), and Rematch (324). The diagram of possible commands in Aisle is particularly cool (297).

Somewhat disappointingly CL does not essay a conclusion, though really each chapter is more self-contained than leading up to some grand thesis. And of course the works cited is a great reading (and playing) list (369-383). You easily could make a self-study course out of that list alone.

I’ve found CL to be instructive in many ways. As a historical and theoretical work to be sure. I think it’s also answered the question of whether I would want to spend several years writing something comparable — and I believe the answer is no! Even though I did enjoy reading it. I would much rather be making games than writing about them. However some of this goes hand in hand with making games, does it not? Maybe not for everybody — time will tell.

LCRW #21

The zine Lady Churchhill’s Rosebud Wristlet has fluttered on the periphery of my consciousness for some un-specifiable amount of time. I finally ordered a copy, #21, to see what it’s all about. Other than reading Strange Horizons occasionally I haven’t kept up with SF (and most short fiction, really) at all — stopped reading F&SF and Asimov’s ten or so years ago.

A lot of the stuff in this issue has similar flaws. The writing lacks sustain, an emphasis on what’s important, interesting ideas, and kind of jumbles things together in a sophmore creative writing class kind of way. Not that I would really know I guess, I never took a sophmore creative writing class. I just read the stories my friends wrote in them.

On the other hand I think the cover is fabulous (though my friend and his girlfriend turned their noses up at the Xerox — people with taste!). And for the five or whatever bucks I spent I did get a really great story, “The Postern Gate” by Brian Conn. I’m happy with that.

I’ve also got a new subscription to Electric Velocipede but I’m saving that for the plane ride back to Seattle (not to mention an old copy of Fictitious Force sitting at home).

command lines: chapter 3

A little over the half-way point of Command Lines, and we have (I think) a confirmation of the idea of a central mechanic of interaction — but more on that in the final section.

17.

Chapter 3 deals largely with what CL calls the aesthetics of frustration — the art made within the ambiguous possibility space, the gap between the interactor and the IF. It heavily references Espen Aarseth’s book Cybertext among other theoretical works, and this sent me to the intarwebs quite a bit. Some useful background on Aarseth and his idea of textonomy is here:

Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying, Markku Eskelinen

Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star, Nick Montfort

18.

In running down the wayposts on the road of IF theory CL stops at the book Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort (I need to read this — I passed up a copy of it at Twice Told Tales a few months ago, incidentally). Apparently Passages makes the case that IF inherits from the riddle. CL responds:

My first concern is that a work of IF is seldom a riddle in anything but the most extended of senses, although most might be more credibly described as puzzles. This is because the riddle is ultimately a better metaphor for a small group of interactions or even a single interaction within a work of IF. The moment of closure of some state change that the interactor considers a strategic advancement is much like one question that demands one answer. Like the critics before him, Montfort is addressing the multitude of gaps that make up an IF work and characterize its aesthetics. Yet he does not present riddle-books or riddle-collections as an artistic ancestor (which in contemporary culture are generally seen as tawdry affairs), nor any form of riddle-networks (if such things exist and are acknowledged as art) but instead the riddle (singular) in itself. [183]

What to make of this in light of an earlier section of CL, I’ll just requote in full:

When considered as a process in time, the formation of the implied code can generally be described as a coming-into-understanding. In contemporary literary IF,the interactor’s progress in learning to interact is often paralleled by the progress of the protagonist within the work, who also struggles to understand something within the world of the story. Implied code sets the pace of a dual epiphany that is both the climax and the conclusion: the character understands the world in the moment that the reader understands the code, and at that moment the work ends.[62]

At first I thought, well wait a minute, is this not the ‘riddle’, that the interactor understands, at which point the work ends?

But taking this further, there is a difference between solving a riddle and understanding a world (or situation), and in any case, this would be a most liberal definition of a riddle. So there is some bigger central concept that is bigger than the riddle here, though I’m not sure how to describe it yet.

19.

IF and Puppet Theory [186].

CL talks at length about the meaning and definition of the player-character (PC) and prefers to call the PC the protagonist. The protagonist is not a puppet — a FPS avatar, say, where button mashing sends a fairly unambiguous signal to shoot a gun or jump or run. Rather the nature of the command line creates an ambiguous possibility space that denies the validity of the PC as puppet. However CL doesn’t stop there:

The term “player character” is itself wrong, and rather than redefining it in cybernetic terms we should replace it with one that better reflects the ambivalent complexities of IF identification. This suggested renaming might be a self-contradiction, as I strenuously defend the use of the phrase “interactive fiction” based in part on popular use (Ch. 1) but here resist the term “player character,” which also has a strong (if less universal) consensus in practical use. Yet the situation is not exactly the same. First, “player character” is a specific term of craft or criticism, and thus bears a certain responsibility for accuracy (and carries a certain consequence for inaccuracy) which genre labels do not. Terms of craft are also easier to change. Second, the term “player character” strongly implies that the player is embodied by her character, or that the player character is occupied by the player. They term also implies that IF works (which may be played, used, read, interacted with, explored, tested, and so forth) are always played, which is particularly strange in relation to conversational or art show pieces, but generally limiting in even more conventional cases. Third, and most importantly, by implying that the player character stands in for the player, the term implicitly conflates focalization (how the interactor perceives the diegesis) with action (how the interactor affects the diegesis). [206]

The most important bit here for me is whether IF works are always played. The concept of play itself is especially relevant if you’re going to talk about an aesthetic of frustration — but wait on that.

20.

I identify the figure through which interactor agency is focalized as the “protagonist,” or first actor: one who usually performs the interactor’s suggested acts. It might literally follow that multiple such figures (as in Berlyn’s Suspended or Granade’s Common Ground) are “agonists,” but for the sake of elegance we can simply call them “actors”: characters who perform the suggested acts of the interactor.⁸⁵ Figures who are not conduits of agency therefore need not be called “non-player characters” (NPCs). They are simply “characters,” and describing them in this way helps us to consider the many complex ways in which characters may be partial or contingent actors. [207]

In this sense the concept of agency seems very limited. Any object in the IF by which the interactor achieves an effect on the world can afford agency. What then is not a conduit of agency? Backdrops or scenery that don’t have any effect on the world whatsoever? Is a key then an actor? That doesn’t seem appropriate either.

Other text games have used the term ‘agent’, and while it flows very nicely from the idea of agency, if you say a bunch of agents are running around your IF it sounds kind of cloak and dagger-ish doesn’t it?

21.

Responding to theorists who advocate for a range of interaction in IF beyond that of genre tropes (for example, fantasy or science fiction stereotypes, though CL makes a good case that many theorists have been stuck near 1982 when it comes to analysis of IF work itself):

If we assume that the goal of the design space is to conform to strongly understood, previously available schema and scripts about interaction, then we have in the process implicitly stated that IF can never be accessible or usable on the one hand while still being unexpected, surprising, or unique on the other. We are arguing instead that the pattern of being unsurprising is what causes interaction design to succeed. To restate, accepting the hallmark of successful IF design as “reinforcing genre expectations” might also be positing good IF design as the antithesis of “subverting genre expectations.” To complete the syllogism: if subversion is a hallmark of artful literature, and the truly generic tropes are the opposite of subversion, does this mean that IF is in this sense the opposite of artful literature? [211]

CL then goes on to describe some ways that IF design can subvert genre expectations: by changing the interactor’s script within the process of interaction(by script I think he means the range of interaction, what the interactor can do in the IF), and by scripting for failure of the interactor. CL also defends against the idea that most IF is defined by genre tropes at all.

However, what CL doesn’t talk about, yet at least, is that the goal of the design space doesn’t have to be about genre tropes or transgressing genre at all — but instead about a central mechanic, a metaphor, that allows the player to come to terms with the work, regardless of genre stereotypes or whether it uses equally stereotypical tropes of literary fiction. The mechanic by its very nature imposes constraints and limits, and it’s the author’s job to reveal to the interactor what these are, and equally the interactor’s aim to discover them. Ultimately I think CL implies this idea [219].

22.

Many works of IF create a unified language constraint, combining the description of most individual psychological, social, or physical constraints into powerful, comprehensive systems of constraint that are deeply tied to the concept of the respective work. These systematic sources of constraint might be a special situation of the world or a special condition of the protagonist. Of these two options, the move to formalize constraint in the protagonist is often more effective, as the protagonist is usually the consistent element in an often-varied environment. Yet the distinction is not always clear, as the modeled IF world may in fact reflect the protagonist’s worldview, or some other special property of the protagonist’s mind. Whether the world, the protagonist, or some combination is the origin of primary constraint, a host of foreclosed options may be attributed to a single cause. This single constraining cause then provides a compelling negative shape against which the remaining possibility space may be explored.⁹⁵ The purpose of these limit-systems is to render the necessarily extreme constraints of the IF representation aesthetic by incorporating them into the diegesis [231]

And here we have it — CL is talking specifically about ideas of disability, literal and figurative, within IF, but you wouldn’t be doing too poorly if you said “a single cause[, a] single constraining cause [that] provides a compelling negative shape against which the remaining possibility space may be explored” was a description of the idea of the central mechanic.

I realize I’m throwing around this term of ‘central mechanic’ without many examples to back it up — I can only gesture vaguely to IF by Victor Gijsbers, Emily Short, Stephen Bond, Adam Cadre. I’m a doctor, not a cybertext theorist! — wait, I’m not a doctor either. Oh well.

This emphasis on the aesthetics of frustration is quite interesting — when we play IF we don’t say it’s frustrating us unless we’re stuck, and I don’t think this aesthetic is meant to apply only when you’re stuck. To adequately describe the experience of interaction it needs to apply when we’re having fun too, and while you may not play something like Galatea like you play Lock and Key, you are equally engaged. It seems odd to me to describe an experience of fun with an aesthetic of frustration. Nor am I satisfied that for some works we engage — with very serious faces on now — and for some we’re entertained. Maybe we can borrow something from drama (as some IF developers seem to be doing — or I should say interactive dramatists), as whether it’s Death of a Salesman or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s still a — well, maybe I shouldn’t go too far.