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The
power of cybertext theory in this context stems from the
fact that even the state-of-the-art literary theories of
today are ultimately based on literary objects that are
static, determinate, intransient and random access with
impersonal perspective, no links and utilising only the
interpretative user function. To this one special type of
object cybertext theory adds 575 rather fresh alternatives
capable of undermining and shaking many basic assumptions
and presuppositions derived from the print era.[2]
Ludology
gives us a perspective and a paradigm from which to approach
the interactivity or ergodicity of literary works without
any hype of the new versus the old, as interactivity has
always been dominant in games. In short, in literature we
may have to configure in order to be able to interpret, but
in games we have to interpret in order to be able to
configure and proceed from the beginning to the winning or
some other situation (Eskelinen 2001a). This ludological
double vision is all we need to situate the continuously
expanding field of ergodic literature between linear
literature and computer games.
It’s
time to formulate the first of my six challenges; let’s
call it the logic of expansion. There are many other fields
where the current media plurality seems to pose problems,
but the easiest way to show what I mean is by and through
narratology. Narratives are supposed to be transmedial, or
to put it in Seymour Chatman’s terms: “The
transposability of the story is the strongest reason for
arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of
any medium.” (Chatman 1978, 20) So, let’s see what
happens if we try to expand formal literary narratology from
its traditional one media position to those few hundreds
offered by cybertext theory.
1. From expanded narratology to the lack of
conventions
Aarseth contrasts ergodic mode with narrative mode
for various good reasons I fully agree with. Still, from the
outset Aarseth’s concept of ergodic literature seems to
concern differences only within one of the seven dimensions,
the main dividing line separating the interpretative user
function from the three other user functions. Therefore we
could begin our investigation by focusing on the other six
parameters of his typology of textual communication, as in
principle they could all be combined to the interpretative
user function within the realm of non-ergodic narrative
literature. We’ll have eight major shifts to deal with:
from static to intratextual and textual dynamics, from
determinate to indeterminate texts, from intransient to
transient time, from random to controlled access, from
impersonal to personal perspective, and from no links to
links and conditional links.
To
warm you up, let’s take two stock examples of narrative
power: the concepts of unreliable narration and dramatic
irony. The former makes sense only if there’s a
completely accessible and static textual whole against which
background the reader can finally understand and verify how
the narrator was positioned in relation to possible other
narrators and the narrated events and existents in general
and how reliable he actually was. The case is pretty much
the same with dramatic irony. The reader can by all means
believe she knows more than certain characters and narrators
do, but in the end this can be verified only in the context
of the whole text and nothing but the whole text. Of course
these things are always already actively interpreted and
hypothesized on a more local level one way or the other, but
the possibility that one is being misled remains until the
whole text is read. Both in print fiction and classic
hypertexts the whole text, that is, every single texton, is
there to be read, but in more dynamic works that
doesn’t have to be the case. To misquote Radiohead,
just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there.
Genette’s
formal narratology (1980; 1988) will serve as my point of
departure, as it gives us access to a wide variety of
already well-recognised, thoroughly studied and therefore
quite uncontroversial and conventional narrative devices.[3]
Genette’s model is a fairly simple and reliable system
of narrating, narrative, and story. The first of these terms
is used for the producing narrative action, the second for
the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text
itself, and the third for the signified or narrative
content. Genette divides his basic parameters into three
groups: tense, mood, and voice.
Tense
concerns temporal relations and possible distortions between
story time and narrative time. They are studied in three
registers: order, frequency, and duration. It’s now
time to add some cybertextual ingredients to this
simplicity. As we all know textonically dynamic texts like
William Gibson’s Agrippa or Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s
The Impermanence Agent are capable of reducing the number of
their original textons and scriptons to zero and thus either
disappearing or replacing themselves completely within a
limited period of time. Transient texts set temporal
limitations to their reading; in Stuart Moulthrop’s
Hegirascope it is 30 seconds max per node per visit. This
means we may have to add two new temporal categories to the
classic two: system time to account for the varying degrees
of the text’s permanence, in short the appearances,
disappearances and possible reappearances of its parts and
phases, and reading time for the text’s potentially
limited temporal availability to the reader.
For
the sake of simplicity and time we browse through these two
new temporal layers without inventing too many new
categories, as those of frequency, order, duration and speed
will do for our limited purposes. Accordingly, reading time
could be conceptualised to be either unlimited or limited in
all these categories, as in principle reading constitutes an
event like any other. These limitations could be applied
both locally and globally. Hegirascope, for example, limits
only the duration of its reading on the local level of its
nodes. There are countless other alternatives. Imagine your
favourite classic that could be read only once or only for
two hours, or in night time or outside office hours only, or
of which you are allowed to read only two chapters in a
decade or in a lifetime, tempting you to collaborate with
other readers or leave it and your vague memories of it as
an inheritance to the next generation of readers.
If
the text disappears gradually and not at once, we will have
to be prepared to attach different temporal values to each
of its dynamic parts. In principle, the text is permanent,
partially permanent or ephemeral. And if the text or some
parts of it are of the vanishing kind then we could study
this process in the aforementioned temporal registers. As I
think it is trivially easy to invent or discover useful
examples, I won’t bother you with them now. To sum up
these extra dimensions, suffice it to say that if we combine
the possible limitations regarding levels (global and local)
and the four temporal registers (order, speed, frequency and
duration) we’ll have at our disposal a system of 256
basic ways of constraining reading time only one of which,
the one containing no restrictions whatsoever, is compatible
with classic narratology (see figure 1 below).
|
Level
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Local
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Global
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unlimited
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limited
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unlimited
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limited
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Frequency
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Reagan
Library [4]
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Reagan
Library
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Agrippa
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(How
many times the work can be visited?)
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Duration
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Hegirascope
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Agrippa
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(For
how long can be visited?)
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Speed
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The
Impermanence Agent
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(Possible
limitations of the reading speed such as mandatory
pauses)
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Order
[5]
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Hypertext
Fiction
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(Freedom
of movement within a part between parts)
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Figure
1. Reading time
All
these limitations complicating reading and rereading may
seem to run counter to our cultural conventions and
therefore to be an exercise in futility. Still, if one of
the main attractions of narratives is the challenge to
construct and reconstruct a set of temporal relations on one
level from various explicit and implicit cues and hints
embedded in another temporal level, then it may not be
totally out of question to add more temporal levels to that
challenge. Reading time and system time can equally well be
used in non-narrative texts and for non-narrative purposes,
which means they are not narrative categories in themselves.
|
Control
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Not
controlled by the player/reader/viewer
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Controlled
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Communication
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Subject
(2-way)
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Object
(1-way)
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Subject
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Object
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Behavior
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Static
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NPC
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Characters
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Dynamic
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Bots
like Eliza
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Possible
digital characters
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Because in cybertexts
narrators and characters and other traditional narrative
elements and devices we are familiar with are just
potentially alterable strings of signs, we should make a
fundamental distinction between textonic and scriptonic
entities. On a slightly more practical level this means that
there might be a pool or an archive of possible narrators,
and every time the (cyber)text reorganizes itself a certain
number of these narrators are first selected and then
distributed to their temporary positions inside the
narrative text that is presented to the reader. It’s
easy to imagine possible operations of these dynamic fictive
entities: they can turn more covert or overt, trade places
with each other, split up or unite, extend or reduce their
territories, move between narrative levels and homodiegetic,
heterodiegetic, and mere character positions, alter the
degrees of their intrusiveness, self-consciousness,
reliability and distance, and so on (see figure 3 below).
|
Object/
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Narrator/
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Character/
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Narratee/
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Level/
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textonic
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scriptonic
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textonic
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scriptonic
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textonic
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scriptonic
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Operation:
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Addition:
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Substitution:
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Substraction:
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Multiplication:
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Division:
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Increased
presence:
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Decreased
presence:
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Increased
territory:
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Decreased
territory:
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etc.
(changes in intrusiveness, self-consciousness,
reliability and
distance
|
The same idea
could be applied to more abstract narrative devices as well.
If we choose to do it to narrative levels, in some fictional
world the story of Shahrazad may very well turn out to be
framed by the story of Sindbad the Sailor. In addition to
the traditional options of either hierarchic (A embeds B) or
heterarchic (A embeds B and B embeds A) arrangement of
narrative levels, there are two novelties (see figure 4
below): dynamic relations between narrative levels based on
how the text is being read, and rotating levels (let’s
say only five out of seven narrative levels are available
during any one reading session).
Number of levels in the
text: n
Number of levels available for the reader during any one
reading: n / <n
Mutual relations of available levels: static/dynamic
Type of framing: hierarchic/ heterarchic
Figure
4. Logic of narrative levels
It
might be helpful to make at least one more distinction: the
one between three different sides or dimensions of
narrators, that is, their position or positioning, their
identities, and their qualities or characteristics. In print
fiction these three dimensions are glued together but in
cybertext fiction that no longer needs to be the case. We
can separate them, not without consequences of course. Once
again, on a more practical level, this may lead to narrators
exchanging pasts, or competing with each other for the key
positions (in terms of time, space and credibility) inside
cybertext fiction, and also, as a result of these
transformations or for other reasons, changing the number
and identity of possible narrators in the following phase or
version of the narrative on the run. Working out the ways to
rewrite narratology with these possibilities of playing with
yet another attraction of narratives, the promised discovery
of narrators’ relations to and positions in the
narrative text, will definitely offer lots of fun, but as I
have already done it elsewhere (Eskelinen 2001b) I will not
dwell on that here.
Whichever
way we choose, adding strange new behaviours to easily
recognizable narrative devices or new categories barely
justified by loosely defined attractions, we’ll end up
in trouble sooner or later. Firstly, every well-established
and sophisticated narratological theory, regardless of
whether it puts its emphasis on communicative (Chatman,
Genette, Prince) or cognitive models (Bordwell, Branigan,
Sternberg), is ultimately a theory of interpretative
reconstruction based on the narrative text that is presented
to its readers or viewers. In other words, reading a
narrative is a construction process where based on
what’s presented to us we are supposed to figure out
what really happened and what the relations between events
and existents were. It seems to me there’s no
justification to expand the definitions of narrative beyond
this economy of presentation and interpretation. Secondly,
many of these new and hypothetical narrative devices and
techniques will exceed the cognitive capabilities of the
readers and in some cases humanly possible attention spans
as well. Thirdly, there are no broad cultural agreements,
shared conventions or readymade expectations to help readers
in their encounters with these would-be-narrative oddities,
such as rotating narrators and characters and playing with
time and temporal change in four registers instead of the
standard two.
Consequently,
our second problem or challenge has to do with conventions,
but before getting there let me conclude with four possible
solutions to our first challenge of how to expand
narratology to meet the multiple media positions offered by
cybertext theory:
1) Not to do it at all beyond its one media position, and
believe it is too intimately tied to it, just like film
narratology is tied to its one position, the difference
between these two well-established narratologies residing in
the transient time and temporally controlled access of the
film medium.
2) Try to expand it to accommodate all the 144 non-ergodic
positions and find out there’s a lack of conventions
for producing and consuming such artefacts even if the role
of the reader as an interpreter has not changed.
3) Try to expand it to accommodate the 432 ergodic positions
as well if certain other conditions are met, most
importantly that the ergodic mode will be in the service of
the narrative mode.
4) Try to expand it to absolutely anything the way the
pan-narrativists do in the context of games.
While
you can take your chances and try to fill the blank spots in
the charts, my choice is to focus next on conventions, the
supposed lack of which will form the second challenge.
2.
At the reception: you can't always get what you
want
As we move from narratological problems to those of
reception, we need to clarify something, and in order to
that we have to adapt a standard deconstructive position for
a moment or two. It could be shown that there always already
exist both thematic and formal overflow capable of
overturning and shaking whatever our structural
constellations or thematic interpretations our reading tries
to posit. In the context of narratology, expanded or not,
this means first of all that we should acknowledge the
endless interplay between narrative and other textual
designs. There’s nothing extraordinary in this; we can
take any decent half-experimental 20th century fiction and
show a recognizable narrative organisation to exist side by
side or intermingled with other, anti-, non-, or
counter-narrative organisations. From this perspective also
the ergodic and narrative modes could easily co-exist in the
same cybertext and either serve or undermine each other, and
it’s up to the reader-user to figure out which is the
case.
The
more or less hypothetical narrative devices we drafted
earlier could easily be used to complicate and defamiliarize
the text to every extreme, but that’s not the only and
probably not the best use of these relative novelties. While
it is true that these techniques set new demands and
challenges for the reader, it is also true that just like in
an ordinary work of print fiction they must be motivated to
the reader at least to a minimal degree. To reach that noble
goal we can thematize, conventionalize or trivialize the
functioning of the cybertext or try to shape its ergodic
side more playable.
Probably
the easiest way to do it is to ground the behaviour of the
textual machinery in themes. If the protagonist is under a
lot of stress and has to make more or less difficult and
fatal decisions in a hurry then why not boost this theme by
extending it to the reader’s experience as well by
setting limits for the time the text stays available without
changing itself. Likewise, the text that changes itself
could be described as hiding or destroying the evidence it
contains making it therefore very likely to suit the
well-known formats and clichés of thrillers and
detective stories. If the text, or more likely certain key
parts of it, is materially different in every rereading, it
would be very easy to connect this quality to themes of
memory and remembrance, as well as to countless others, from
Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic experiences to
resistances and defences in psychoanalytic sessions.
We
could say that the three classic hypertexts, Michael
Joyce’s Afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop’s
Victory Garden, and Shelley Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl all did what they could to make the
reader more receptive to the marvels of their labyrinths: by
using hidden and conditional links to highlight and parallel
the defences and self-denials of the protagonist in
Afternoon, his general unwillingness to know;
evoking and concretising the familiar literary tradition of
forking paths of Borges, Coover and Pynchon in Victory
Garden; and foregrounding Frankensteinian bodily
metaphors to ease the postmodernist butchery work of
connecting parts and wholes in Patchwork Girl.
Secondly,
we could banalize. It’s important to bear in mind that
every cybertextual media position seems to have its trivial
counterpart in everyday life. Textonic dynamics can be found
in discontinuous textual flows in blogs and online
discussions, and variable responses characteristic of
intratextonic dynamics can be found in our everyday
experiences with so-called intelligent machines. Humans are
not (always) predictable hence indeterminability is at the
core of our social life. Film subtitles are transient; even
the simplest board games make you assume strategic
responsibility for something, footnotes and encyclopaedias
fork the text and turn it to a system of fragments and
connections, passwords control your access, etc. These
familiar experiences offer countless possibilities for
taming the cybertextual machinery.
The
third way to make the functioning of a cybertext familiar or
at least more familiar to its user is to borrow conventions,
but not necessarily from literature or even art in general.
In Cybertext Aarseth devotes separate chapters to four
different specimen of ergodic literature: hypertext fiction,
story generators, textual adventure games, and MUDs. The
latter two use ordinary game and quest elements along with
common communication structures like dialogue and polylogue
to make it easier and more meaningful for the reader-user to
deal with the textual constructs and constellations she
encounters. Story generators will probably remain fundable
because of their tight connections to AI research, and need
neither familiarizing nor defamiliarizing touches.
This
leaves us with hypertext fiction and its somewhat
twilightish status as a relatively recent branch in the
networked traditions of experimental literature. To condense
what was said earlier about classic hypertext fiction, we
could wonder whether it was quite enough after all to borrow
the convention of the jig-saw puzzle and force or challenge
the reader to complete it. A puzzle is a puzzle is a puzzle,
a monologic experience if any.
Cybertext theory has already shown experimentalists a fresh
way out in the form of new targets, those shared strongholds
of both print and hypertext fiction: static scriptons and
intransient time. Still, cognitively speaking I can’t
be optimistic: if the simple hypertextual distortions of the
presentation order were able to generate such a commotion
and conceptual mess, it is unlikely that the much more
dynamic distortions will be recognised, understood and
conventionalised in any time soon.
Conventions
don’t appear or disappear overnight or in a decade. The
big question then is whether to wait for their emergence
without knowing if they’ll ever arrive or to apply the
already well-known conventions, not from literature, but
elsewhere: from games and computer games especially. The
justification would be that the minute there’s a
recognizable cultural divide between interpretative and
operational sides of literature, the latter will be measured
against the already existing and well-formed activities and
operational practices and if no matches are found then the
case is what it still is today: the bits and pieces of
ergodic literature without explicit play- or game-like
attractions are viewed as elitist and experimental oddities
(which is fine by me). This last possibility refers to
concrete relations and borrowings between sign-producing
machines, which is a fairly decent way to introduce our
third challenge: what happens when transtextual relations
cease to be merely interpretative?
3. Transtextuality meets
cybertextuality
Before taking a quick tour through Genette’s
five forms of transtextuality (1997b, 1-8), it should be
clear that from the cybertextual perspective there’s a
basic distinction to be made between interpretative and
ergodic relations between texts. The latter are concrete and
programmable, the former are those of traditional print
transtextuality, expanded or not by the variety of new
possibilities opened up by the digital media. The material
basis of interpretative relations between texts can be (at
least potentially) altered in ergodically dynamic cybertexts
(by adding, removing or otherwise manipulating scriptons) in
contrast to print texts and ergodically static hypertexts.
Within the latter group there's a crucial difference between
web and stand alone hypertexts. In the former environment
some links and transclusions could be said to function as
explorative forms of transtextual relations (that is, we can
concretely and seamlessly move from one text to another).
Similarly, nothing, except maybe deep-seated conventions,
prevents authors from designing configurative and textonic
relations between and among texts. This may sound familiar
and it is intended to sound that way since it might be
tempting to find an analogue between the ways scriptons are
revealed and generated from textons, and the ways these
textons could be generated from other textons. However, the
analogue is far from complete, and we shall postpone
discussing it until much later. For now it may be useful to
keep an open mind to the possibility that in addition to
interpretative relations there also are explorative
connections, configurative affects and textonic impacts
between texts.
In
order to see the bigger picture of changed relationships
between and within texts we should free ourselves from the
metaphysics of links, that is, from the famous convergence
or embodiment hypothesis. Obviously, links can be used to
make explicit references and transclusions will work as
direct quotations, if for some obscure reason we wish merely
to foreground, emphasize or boost the traditional notions of
intertextuality. However, it should be equally obvious that
although links have been too often confused with
intertextuality, there are both intertextual relations that
cannot be shown by links, and various uses of links that
have nothing whatsoever to do with traditional
intertextuality. Every traditional notion of intertextuality
is ultimately dependent on the unpredictably varying
interpretative and transpositional skills of the readers and
this dimension can neither be reduced to links nor fully
expressed in them. On the other hand, already the links
forming concrete connections (instead of mere references)
between online hypertexts are potentially very different
from their distant print relatives, as unlike the latter
they are not merely interpretative and they could also be
timed, changed, conditioned, chained, concealed, randomized
and layered for complex effects the tradition knows nothing
about.
Architextuality.
Genette means by architextuality "the entire set of general
or transcendental categories - types of discourse, modes of
enunciation, literary genres - from which emerges a singular
text." (1997b, 1) Here cybertext theory adds another
dimension and taxonomy to the already muddled project of
Western poetics and aesthetics: the 576 textonomical genres
or media positions describing the functional or behavioural
side of any literary work. At stake here is the whole
necessary and unmanageable project of Western poetics, a
cluster of modal, generic, formal and thematic categories,
combinations and considerations. It is safe to say
dynamically ergodic texts will have long lasting uneasy
relations with them. One needs only to imagine fictions the
genre or the mode of which will change based on how the text
is being read - let’s say the faster you read a
detective story the faster it becomes a horror story to slow
you down with gruesome details or that only the dialogue
will remain to be reread while the rest of the text once
read, hopefully, stays in someone’s memory.
Paratextuality.
Paratexts are heterogeneous elements that lie on the
threshold of the text and which help to direct and guide the
reception of a text by its readers (Genette 1997a). In
digital cybertexts this dimension should be discussed in
relation to various interface issues as well as to
user’s manuals, help-files, web sites and etiquette
given to users and readers to consult while approaching,
interpreting and learning how to operate ergodic works. In
some cases, the text may explicitly comment upon the way it
has been read and offer genuine or mocking assistance, which
nicely blurs the traditional difference between guiding
paratexts and self-referential commentaries – yet
another distinction inherited from the golden age when
literary works didn’t react to their reading.
Metatextuality
is “the relationship most often labelled commentary"
(Genette 1997b, 4). In certain encounters with indeterminate
cybertexts, commentaries may turn out to be commentaries on
one's own singular experience of ephemeral constellations of
signs never to be repeated again or to be seen by any other
user. There are at least three types of new challenges.
Firstly, in addition to the usual interpretative skills the
critic needs ergodic skills to use the textual system in an
appropriate way. Secondly, the continuous and potentially
never-ending variation and supplementation may well exceed
any humanly possible attention span. Thirdly, an ergodic
work may be very sensitive to how it is used and this may
result in unique textual responses to the critic’s
efforts. I can almost hear the boring me-my-mine rhetoric
this may well lead to, so it's better to move on to the next
transtextual relation.
Intertextuality.
According to Genette's rather restricted definition
intertextuality is "a relationship of co-presence between
two texts or among several texts."(1997b, 1) This includes
the practices of quotation, allusion and plagiarism. In
principle, it is just a matter of recognition. But in these
days just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there
and vice versa. The invisible, hidden, and inaccessible
parts of the text will deny the reader the comfort of
knowing for certain what exactly is there in the text. To
make matters more complicated it’s not only the
dialectic between visible and invisible parts of the text
that counts, but also the relations between what’s
visible now and what, if anything, will be visible later.
Also the threshold between what’s inside and
what’s outside the text is getting blurrier, as
it’s so easy to supplement and replace the original
text from the outside (as certain famous software agents
have already shown). In some ways, all this may lead to the
decreasing importance of intertextuality in dynamically
ergodic works, or at least to more drastic ways of
foregrounding intertextuality. In any case we’d be
better prepared to understand the widely varying degrees of
co-presence at work.
We
could perhaps take one step further in order to follow the
concept of co-presence to its logical end, and add yet
another category of relations, the one between textual
wholes (or entities) potentially capable of annihilating and
incorporating other textual wholes, or arresting and
releasing them, in short making other texts (and parts of
other texts) appear, disappear, and reappear. In other
words, I suggest we distinguish between independent,
dependent, dominant and co-dependent works of art. This may
very well be the end of intertextuality as we know it, but I
feel fine.
Hypertextuality
in the Genettean sense deals with systematic grafting of a
text (a hypertext) upon an earlier text (a hypotext) in a
way that is not commentary (1997b, 5). These imitations and
transformations are formal and thematic, and it is safe to
say that cybertexts add a third option, the functional one,
as well as transform the previous two. There are least three
separate aspects to that situation. Firstly, there's a new
possibility of gradual and serial transformation where the
text goes through several different phases and quite
possibly loses contact with its first or previous hypotext
in the process; just imagine some banal desert island story
that first models itself after Ibn Tufayl and then after
Grimmelshausen, Saikaku, Defoe, Tournier, and Eco. To get to
know the serialized nature of these hypotexts you just have
to keep on rereading. Secondly, this transformation may be
purely functional; let's say we first turn a detective story
into a hypertext and boost its epistemological structures
with conditional links, hiding the evidence so to speak, and
then turn this ergodically static hypertext into an
ergodically dynamic cybertext that after certain time starts
playing with both its own and its users’ time and
begins to destroy its static scriptons, that is, its very
evidence.
Virtually
every text generator can show us the transformation of
textons into changing scripton combinations in a way that is
challenging enough to every traditional notion of inter- and
hyper-textuality. The words waste and land may or may not be
combined to constitute a reference to Eliot. You'll never
know until it happens, and when it does you might not be
there to witness this intratextonic nihilogue. Another case
that comes to mind is the emergent growth of textual
systems. Let's say there are two such systems connected to
each other over the net continuously affecting the
organization and reorganization processes of each other. The
host and the parasite, the hypotext and the hypertext
reprogrammed n times, until the one completely consumes or
deadly inflicts the other. Scholars are very welcome to
attach their favourite meanings to every morph, or forced to
change their approach as there's no way to slow down the
rotational speed (rpm) of the hermeneutic circle under such
circumstances.
Users
are an obvious source for altering inter- and hypertextual
relations, but what happens or should happen when a
Shakespeare snob meets a Shakespeare bot in some
programmable textual environment? Is there any reason we
should trace the connections whatever they are, or should we
finally let the sleeping traditions lay and concentrate on
more interesting issues if there are any? When users bring
their transtextual fields and priorities into conversation
and consumption, they may have a carefully calculated chance
to convert the process to certain inter- or hypertextual
directions (as in John Cayley’s Book Unbound). There's
also room for an interesting inversion: the cybertextual
machine may turn critical or even allergic to such
civilizing processes and may begin to defend its own
priorities against the invading flow of the user’s
cultural capital. Imagine a text that needs to be regularly
fed by other texts from the outside: a textual tamagotchi, a
vicious little cybertext using, say, Kafka as a catalyst to
induce series of transformations in its incorporated textual
nourishments and their relations to each other thereby
producing the next generation of minor literature.
To
conclude, any notion of digital transtextuality has to take
into account at least three basic things or changes.
Firstly, the relations between texts have ceased to be a
mere matter of interpretation; dynamically ergodic
cybertexts may concretely affect each other’s form,
content, behaviour and very existence. Secondly, the
relations of such texts to themselves has to be taken into
account, as they may now consist of several more or less
autonomous parts and phases imitating and transforming each
other and having their own transtextual specifications in
all five dimensions. Let’s call this new opening a
field of dynamic autotextuality. Thirdly, the reader-users
armed with configurative and textonic user functions can
have fundamental impact on the text, a possibility not even
on the horizon of Genette’s work in the early
1980’s. To take one concrete example, how should we
conceptualize the personalized differences in ergodic works
like Book Unbound or The Impermanence Agent, as the
different ways their readers use them will make the versions
of them very different from each other.
After
this brief exercise in the fluidity of textual
relationships, we might want to stop for a while to find out
whether we need the traditional notion of the textual whole
any more, and if not, how to get rid of it and what to
replace it with? Enter the fourth challenge, dynamic
intratextual relations.
4.
The whole and nothing but the whole
I will be following Brian Eno’s maxim about
going first into an extreme position in order to be able to
shift into a more useful position. So let’s take the
seven cybertextual dimensions as far as possible from the
behaviour of the print works of our shared cultural
heritage. This may sound like an exercise in futility, and
maybe it is if futility is just another name for our
unrecognized presuppositions. So; imagine a textual process
continuously supplementing itself by outside sources,
unpredictably varying its response to the activities of the
reader which it also constraints temporally and by denying
complete and random access to its parts and phases, using
conditional linking and demanding not only explorative but
also configurative and textonic activity from the reader in
order to overcome the obstacles she’s bound to through
her personal perspective on the consequences of her very own
strategic choices.
After
this condensed glimpse at the almost non-existent
extremities we could perhaps finally ask what will happen
when there simply are no more expectations left to be
manipulated or crashed. The seven parameters of cybertext
theory will serve to illustrate the ways the textual whole
may vanish or disappear from the reader’s grasp if not
from his aspirations or work ethics.
Before
going into that it is important to remember that this
assumed literary whole or totality can be described at least
in interplaying perceptual, behavioural, structural (or
intratextual), cultural (or transtextual), temporal,
spatial, causal, and functional terms. Needless to say it is
not reducible to any of these dimensions.
Dynamics. Our traditional concept of the textual whole is
tied to the unchanging amount and material content of
signifiers, and it is not well suited to deal with
potentially endless variation or supplementation. There are
two rather effective ways to naturalize variation: dialogue
structure as in Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza, a
granddad of many if not all subsequent bots and artificial
characters, and anamorphic game or puzzle schemes where the
variation is crafted as a challenge which promises a
solution thus putting end to variation (at least until next
time if there’ll ever be one). This is common to
textual adventure games and interactive fiction in general.
In these cases variation is tied to its rather immediate use
value and it is not given the high status as literary
expression to be contemplated; in other words the user is
given a prior permission to actively ignore and dismiss
certain variations.
With
textonic dynamics the challenges to traditional notions of
the whole get even more complicated. In principle, the
source of supplements, changes and additions can be either
the user himself, other users, or the text can supplement
itself from the outside as in The Impermanence
Agent or John Cayley’s idea of using a
Reuter’s news-feed as a real-time material for one of
his Speaking Clocks. All these open up a potential
for never-ending metamorphoses that don’t have to be
balanced by personalization, social interaction or
conceptual clarity, although these three are the best
candidates for achieving that goal.
Determinability.
Indeterminability is usually associated with randomness or
chance, but that’s only one side to it, and perhaps not
the most interesting one. In Aarseth’s model it’s
about the stability of the traversal function. In practical
terms indeterminability means that if I react or act the
same way in the same situation the system doesn’t
respond the way it did the last time. The crucial question
is then how do I know it is the same situation after all; is
it even possible to be in the same situation twice? Here
too, the traditional wisdom related to the textual whole
doesn’t get us very far, as it is bound to the notions
of repeatability (controlled by the user).
Transience.
Transient texts don’t allow the reader to control the
time of their reading. Texts are available for limited
periods of time, sometimes only once as was the case with
William Gibson’s Agrippa, or more precisely with its
unhacked copies. Here we are dealing with cycles of
appearances, disappearances and potential reappearances in
the context where the text, and not the reader, controls the
pace. We are asked to prioritize our fleeting perceptions
and to decide what to read and see when it is impossible to
read and see it all. According to Janez Strehovec (2001,
104), in the context of digital web poetry this easily leads
to foregrounding kinetic and visual affects, effects and
constellations at the expense of the usual syntactic and
semantic complexities.
Access.
If we don’t have random and complete access to every
part of the text, our potential mastery is once again denied
by constraining our traditional right to traverse and to
skip the text any way we please. Controlled access contains
the very real possibility that some parts of the text will
remain hidden and out of reach despite the best efforts of
the reader.
Links
have potential to undermine the relation between parts and
wholes allowing different degrees of local and global
wholeness, but that potential should not be overestimated,
as the average hypertext fiction shares many stabilising
qualities with its print predecessors (from static dynamics
and determinability to intransient time and impersonal
perspective).
Personal
perspective forces the reader to assume strategic
responsibility and then face the consequences of her
actions. This is a very game-like feature, but it is also
possible that the required strategic choices have to be made
in the absence of explicit rules, goals and manipulative
procedures.
Finally,
the user functions. While I save studying their mutual
relations until a little later, it is safe to say that
whereas the explorative user function brings in the rhetoric
of choice, navigation and labyrinth, the configurative and
textonic user functions give us the chance and necessity to
affect the text and therefore to use or conceive it as a
playground, an obstacle, or more or less malleable raw
material to build upon. These latter two user functions
clearly foreground the user’s own extranoematic
activity without which there would be no experience of
wholeness whatsoever.
All
these shifts away from the traditional media position
(static, determinate, intransient, impersonal perspective,
random access, no links and interpretative user function)
seem to suggest a certain reversal and exhaustion in the
reader’s role. The “new” cybertextual media
positions may constrain and limit the reader’s freedom
of movement and his control over reading time, undermine and
even deny such traditional luxuries of reading as guaranteed
repeatability, possibility to re-read, complete access and
strategic passivity, and open up the finality of the
literary work to potentially endless metamorphic processes[7]
setting new demands for the reader’s attention span[8]
while
requiring much more than interpretative involvement from
her. As the text sets conditions for its reading, it
doesn’t make much sense to keep clinging on to
traditional values and habits of reading for much longer.
Traditionally,
the work of art or literature can exhaust even the best
attempts of its reader by using extensive duration or
variation. Computers can be of great help in this, but they
are not necessary in creating such effects as Queneau’s
100 000 billion poems have already shown. To
counter this we could say that Queneau’s work is easily
exhaustible, because all its textons are readily available
and the sonnet form is already automated to boredom and
beyond. In any case, these examples have been rather
marginal and have left no traces on ordinary horizons of
expectations, which still take it for granted that a work is
(and should be) materially exhaustible.
In
hypertext theory, Jim Rosenberg (1996) did propose a concept
of session as a new unit of reception (and attention) to
account for the difficulties in traversing the text and
variations in the reading order the hypertext reader is or
was supposed to struggle with. Despite that common sense
effort, the paradigm of reading it all still reigns,
probably because at least the well-informed readers know
that it is possible to read every single unchanging lexia of
Afternoon, Victory Garden and Patchwork
Girl. The case is a bit different in the later works of
Stuart Moulthrop, especially in Reagan Library and
Pax. The paratextual intro to the latter even tries
to convince the reader-user of the impossibility of reading
and experiencing it all (Moulthrop 2003b).
More
than two decades before Rosenberg Roland Barthes drafted
four pleasurable ways of how the readers combine their
reading neurosis with the hallucinated form of the text. Let
me quote: “The fetishist would be matched with the
divided-up text, the singling out of quotations, formulae,
turns of phrase, with the pleasure of the word. The
obsessive would experience the voluptuous release of the
letter, of secondary, disconnected languages; of
metalanguages (…) A paranoiac would consume or produce
complicated texts, stories developed like arguments,
constructions posited like games, like secret constraints.
As for the hysteric (…) he would be the one who takes
the text for ready money, who joins in the bottomless,
truthless comedy of language, who is no longer the subject
of any critical scrutiny and throws himself across the text
(which is quite different from projecting himself into
it).” (1975, 63) In short, if you read for your
pleasure, you don’t have to read it all.
To sum
up: it is trivially easy to use cybertextual machinery to
undermine traditional notions of the textual whole. We
simply can’t read it all in Book Unbound or
The Speaking Clock, and our own activity is always
already there in the beginning to replace and contaminate
the original text in The Impermanence Agent. Still,
these three works are far from chaotic or strenuously
difficult; in Book Unbound the process and chance
of inevitable personalization gives a firm enough teleology
to the work’s potentially endless mutability, and if we
adjust our attention spans and kick our reception habits we
can now and then take a relaxed look at the workings of the
Agent and the Clock.
Even
if the textual whole might have vanished or be under
erasure, the expectations may remain the same. Cybertexts
are machines for producing variety of expression, and at the
moment we can discern at least four degrees in the deep
rooted humanistic fear of variety: You can read for the plot
and look for exaggerated rather than moderate or minimal
forms of coherence and closure. The typical result is
hypertext whining, the contradictory and hype-ridden
practice where critics keep disappointing themselves by
projecting their mainstream expectations onto works that
continue the long and winding tradition of experimental
literature.
Secondly,
you can read for pleasure and stay happy within your very
own hallucinated form. It’s more than likely that
Barthes’ ideas about the reading neurosis could be
extended to psychoses, borderline cases, and perversions,
and not only in literature, but in games as well.
Thirdly,
one can read for metareading as the connoisseurs of
experimental literature do and cherish intertwining
epistemological, ontological and ergodic challenges to the
doxa of the day or the literature as we used to know it.
Sometimes it may even be advisable to read literature the
way the OuLiPo used to write it - as combinations of objects
and operations.
And
fourthly, one might consider balancing reading with playing.
There’s a long and binding aesthetic and
trans-aesthetic convention that you are not supposed to
exhaust the potentials of an instrument of any kind. Or if
you do, it is not much of an instrument. Or much of a game
either.
Generally
speaking, it would be good to give up the idea that
interpretative user function will and should always be on
top, and the most important one. When the textual whole has
gone, interpretative mastery should follow its master as
well, especially when we are entering our final challenge
that situates itself firmly on the no-man’s land
between the last two stages in the following chart:
|
User
function(s)
|
Aesthetic
realm
|
|
Interpretative
|
Linear
literature
|
|
Interpretative
served by other user functions
|
Mainstream
ergodic literature
|
|
Intrepretative
undermined by other user functions
|
Experimental
ergodic literature
|
|
Interpretative
serving other functions
|
Play,
games, toys, instrument
|
It’s
time to move on to our two final challenges, which are
implicitly tied to two almost mutually exclusive attitudes
and approaches to play, games and literature(s).
5. Against the fear of variety
When the safe and somehow manageable totality, be it
coherent or not, vanishes from sight, the spectators and
readers have to try different strategies of comprehension,
which may seem complicated if and when the users do not know
the limits and the functional principles of whatever they
are encountering in the disguise of an artwork. There’s
no guarantee that the work works as it seems to work, or
continues to work as it has worked so far, not to mention
that it’d work as its manual or other paratext claims
it works.
From
this perspective computer games are interesting, as they
domesticate the excess looming large in both ordinary and
avant-garde products and processes, and the fundamental
potential for change and unreliability inherent in new media
objects. It would be tempting to generalise and argue that
for as long as we have systems where there are either one
material level or several material levels with trivial
mutual relations, narrative is the most powerful (and
certainly the most popular) arrangement that can be used in
them – but whenever the relation of levels turns out to
be arbitrary the concepts of gaming and simulation will be
more and more attractive and popular. Despite the fact that
computers can support, emulate and modify whatever aesthetic
tradition and convention there is, the most satisfying way
of pacifying consumers facing potential insecurity and lack
of motivation caused by endless variation will be computer
games. They promise fun and pleasure in exchange for
following and applying the rules in order to reach the
(given, chosen or created) goal.
A few
words about ludology might be in order before I take my
favourite pick of the challenges it provides. The very idea
of ludology is to study games and especially computer games
as games, and not as a derivative of something else like
narratives, drama or film or their interactive and/or
remediated offshoots. In short, games should be studied as
their own transmedial discursive mode. It is important to
understand what this doesn’t mean. It does not mean
there can’t be hybrids, as no-one in his right mind
working with computers, these famous universal machines,
could deny the possibility of hybrids. It sounds trivial,
but it isn’t.
In a
poorly defined opposition to ludologists there have been
three major camps of narrativists: firstly, those who do not
even define the contested concepts they try to compare
(stories, narratives, games); secondly, pan-narrativists who
try to stretch their definitions of stories and narratives
to the extreme where everything we cognitively construct
from whatever is presented to us will result in a story; and
thirdly those who care to define their concepts, but focus
on just hoping and predicting that some day, maybe, a useful
definition will arrive to combine games and stories, but
don’t seem to have the brains to do the conceptual work
themselves. No wonder the ludologists won that debate, the
particularities of which don’t need to concern us here,
as we are talking about our six more or less literary
challenges.
It’d
be trivially easy to point out the differences between games
and narratives: the former an economy of means and ends with
rules, goals and necessary manipulation of an equipment; the
latter an economy of presentation and interpretation with
story and discourse. Of course one could still try to
rewrite narratologies to extend to the realm of games, but
as we speak, such theories have not emerged and the burden
of proof lies with those who continue to make narrativist
claims. It’d be much easier to do the opposite and
redefine narratives as games of interpretation if one really
wants to have a unified field, where literary knowledge will
still be of some use.
However,
our real issue is elsewhere. If we wish to build hybrids
called instrumental texts or textual instruments,[9]
we need to get rid of silly and worn-out prescriptive ideas
of how to do it, one variation of which can be read from
countless futile proposals for civilizing games by adding
narrative must-haves such as plot, themes, coherence or
fictional worlds. Here’s a schematic chart of dominant
features and differences between interpretative and
configurative practices:
|
Interpretative
practice
|
Configurative
practice
|
|
Interpretation
|
Action
|
|
Economy
of representation
|
Economy
of means and ends
|
|
Conventions
|
Rules
|
|
Meaning
guaranteed by minimal coherence
|
Variation
pacified by rules and goals
|
|
Reception
|
Play
|
|
Fiction
|
Simulation
|
|
Work
and text
|
Model
and system
|
|
Spatiotemporal
|
Causal
and functional
|
The
above list is not meant to cause blindness and irritation in
purist anti-binarists; the right hand side merely highlights
game-related characteristics that are perhaps more important
to take into account in the process of building textual
instruments than their traditional and thoroughly studied
counterparts on the left. In short, I propose we focus on
the expressive potential of the former terms instead of
constraining playability by the latter. Before viewing this
challenge from the perspective of game studies in the next
section, I’ll try to figure out what literary theories
and traditions could offer.
As we
saw in the previous section, the “new”
cybertextual media positions are typically used to diminish
the reader’s autonomy over his reading time and habits.
The idea of building instrumental texts and textual
instruments could be seen as a countermeasure giving the
reader the chance to exercise his precious freedom in the
form of play. It is still too early to say whether this
recent shift of focus from the functioning of the cybertext
to the actions and activities of its user-player is more
than a minor trend caused by the accumulating pressure and
attraction of computer game studies. From the perspective of
David Rokeby’s decade-old insights it’s not very
odd that also in literature navigable structures exist side
by side with transforming mirrors and automatons.
In any
case an instrument is supposed to shape and frame the
player’s action and to produce interesting variation.
This is a challenge that goes far beyond the overly hyped
problems of non-linear presentation. As in any economy of
means and ends, it is important to find suitable goals and
patterns of change and variation in the functional and
causal framework. The questions of how to use one’s
resources and for what purpose haven’t been the bread
and butter of literary theorists except maybe in the
author-centric context, most explicitly so in the Oulipian
tables of operations changing the order, length, number or
nature of linguistic objects from phonemes and letters to
paragraphs and beyond.[10]
Only if we remove a major implicit constraint from these
schemes, the idea that these operations should be used by an
author in order to produce a final and fixed literary
object, could we get something to play and build an
instrument with.
Literary
tradition contains at least five easy dialectics that could
be adapted as flexible frames for the necessary variation:
the text as an object and a process, the work and the
oeuvre, the text and the intertext, the reader’s and
the text’s control over reading, and the maintenance
and destruction of the text. The task and the pleasure of
the reader-player-instrumentalist would be to maintain,
break or (re)create the balance between these oppositional
poles.
The
instruments could be tuned by theories that are precise
enough; in addition to the Oulipian corpus there are many
other almost ready-made candidates ranging from Freud’s
analysis of Schreber[11]
to the particularities of the traversal function in
cybertext theory. All these theories are more useful or
instrumental in building textual instruments than
instrumental texts, as the former should in principle be
able to handle any given text and not just the one
particular text that comes with the system.
Wardrip-Fruin’s
attempt to build a 3-gram instrument (2003) relies on
syntagmatic substitution. It would be interesting to see it
complemented by similar but somewhat fuzzier paradigmatic
capabilities (maybe by using self-organising maps).
In
many cases an instrument gives us information we
couldn’t otherwise have. It’d be rather
unproblematic to build instruments that detect
constellations and statistical features that the readers
can’t or won’t. The way people use instruments is
also unpredictable to a certain degree. These emergent
patterns could be boosted, paralleled or countered if the
text and its behaviour were at least partly organised by
a-life applications.
The
already existing multitude of instruments is just waiting to
be exploited, especially those cheap everyday ones already
capable of communicating with other smart objects. We are
just one step away from the texts for the alcometer or other
such devices detecting meaningful fluctuations in the
physical condition of the player (allowing the player to
play also with herself).
6. Games and textual instruments
We could perhaps begin to see the rise of concretely (and
not metaphorically) playable literature if we imagine works
that shape their ergodic side by taking their cues from
Aarseth’s recent game typology (Aarseth, Smedstad and
Sunnanå 2003). This system has 15 dimensions resulting
in more than 220000 functional game genres, circumscribing
yet another neglected area of research. The reasons for
choosing this typology for closer inspection are rather
self-evident: if this model is any good it gives us an
overview of the most important features of game structures
and their basic variations. It is also clear that game
structures affect and shape gameplay. So; if we were to
follow John Cayley, Stuart Moulthrop (2003b) and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin’s (2003) recent suggestions and build
literary instruments we could do a lot worse than see what
Aarseth’s typology has to offer.
Let’s
begin with the categories of space. “The perspective of
the player can be either omnipresent allowing the player to
examine the entire arena or field at will or vagrant where
the perspective follows a main player-token or avatar.”
At first glance this is reminiscent of the category of
access in cybertext typology. Still, this game category is
more directly connected to the user’s perception, and
that allows us to imagine literary practices playing with
access and perspective, examples ranging from Eduardo
Kac’s holopoetry (1996) where the user’s physical
movement changes her perspective on the work as well as the
work’s visible content to hypothetical hypertexts where
the node starts to destroy itself from the invisible end at
the very second the reader begins to read it from the other
end. As noted before the more fundamental question is
whether it makes any sense to build instruments that could
detect and analyse textual features, constellations and
statistical frequencies humans either can’t or
won’t - or could but only with great difficulty (like
chart the field of possible multilingual anagrams in
Hexentexte or Finnegans Wake) and
reorganize either themselves or the playtexts using this
non-human information.
The
second category is topography: “a game’s
topography can be either geometrical with continuous freedom
of movement, or topological, giving the player only
discrete, non-overlapping positions to move between.”
In this respect classic hypertexts seem like badly designed
board games allowing the reader to navigate between discrete
reading positions (in contrast to such kinetic texts as
David Knoebel’s The Wheels). This could be
made more obvious and challenging by adding a chess-like
interface to a 64-node hypertext and allowing the reader to
traverse it from the positions of different pieces and
according to their possible moves. In a turn-based
two-player mode, you could lose your piece if your fellow
reader’s piece enters the same node, making it harder
or impossible to traverse the whole text. This game could be
made more challenging if the players didn’t see each
others’ positions until it was too late and they
overlapped with fatal consequences. In this arrangement the
game and the literary text would be each other’s
by-products.
Thirdly,
the game environment is either static remaining unchanged
for the duration of the game or dynamic letting itself to be
modified by the player. Obviously, MUDs are often dynamic in
that sense, but there are other environments, including our
physical surroundings, which we can now or soon tag and
populate with miniature literary devices producing variety
of expression.
Aarseth’s
game typology contains three parameters of time: pace,
representation, and teleology.
The category of pace
divides games into real-time and turn-based ones, which is
almost but not quite the same as the category of transience
in cybertext theory. We already have boring turn-based
collaborative writing practices, but since we seek to build
instruments they won’t do. Hegirascope comes
close to being a real-time instrument, as its 30 second
constraint feels like a challenge or an obstacle, which is
the first step away from passive “timeless”
hypertexts towards more complex real-time adversary
structures.
The
representation of time is either mimetic or arbitrary
depending on whether the time of the actions in the game
mimics the time of corresponding actions in the real world.
It’d be rather easy to build adaptations of literary
classics and instruments for playing them that use strictly
mimetic reading time freezing the reader’s movement or
progress. In a more competitive setting the reader-players
could block each other’s ways and navigation options
inside an online hypertext using mimetic time.
The
third temporal category relates to the final goal of the
game. The games with clearly defined successful outcomes for
one or more players are teleologically finite, and those
without such outcomes are teleologically infinite, and could
in principle go on endlessly. Book Unbound is
clearly infinite while hypertext fictions as we know them
are all teleologically finite, successful conventional
outcome requiring that every node has been read at least
once. More complicated goals could be crafted after Brian
McHale’s studies of postmodernism (1987; 1992): the
reader should maintain, restore or destroy the delicate
balance between ontological and epistemological problems.
The
next provisional subcategory, player structure, reminds us
once more about certain fundamental differences between
literature and games. We are given six options:
singleplayer, twoplayer, multiplayer, singleteam, twoteam
and multiteam games. It’s a combination of
adversary-structure (none, one or multiple) and
team-structure (individual or team-based). In a quick
comparison it’s obvious that contemporary literature is
single-reader, that is, the combination of individual
interpretative effort and no adversaries. Superficial
imitations would give rise to literary texts that could be
read only as a team effort, and to readers interfering with
each other’s reading positions and possibilities,
obstructing them to the best they can. On the more positive
side, these kinds of practices would counterbalance the fuss
about collaborative writing, which is such a banality.
The
category of player structure contains also two categories
currently best suited to mobile games, the question being
whether the proximity of the players to each other and the
physical location of the players matter. Probably, these
possibilities will multiply with various wlan technologies
and cheap Bluetooth chips added to appliances of every kind,
shape and size. Literary fictions tracking down your
everyday routines, habits and movement and analysing them in
order to make the text more suitable to you and your blood
pressure (or other problems) would not be to
everybody’s liking - if in addition to the physical
location also the physical condition of the player-reader
counts. Other obvious applications would require you to be
at an intimate distance with someone to access a love story
or pornography connected to sexual sensors and
paraphernalia.
Aarseth’s
next grouping of fundamental game categories addresses
control in terms of mutability, saveability, and
determinism. Mutability refers to rewarding the player by
strengthening her player-character or player position. In
literary contexts such rewards might include gaining better
access to or having more effect in the fictive world, or
acquiring more resources like agents to help you scout the
as-yet-unread territories, perhaps their style or genre. One
form of saveability is already available and at work in
Book Unbound, where the user can save her favourite
extracts from generated text before the next generation
takes place. This type of collected work saved by the reader
is yet another solution that could be expanded to certain
other contexts and practices as well (to challenge copyright
laws for one). Obviously, the way the text is used could be
used to determine how much of it could be saved until the
next reading. The category of determinism is about
unpredictability and random functions that are always
already there if two or more humans play against (or with)
each other. An instrument with multiple degrees and criteria
of determinability would be ideal for games of increasing
and decreasing coherence or certain kinds of preferred
coherence; playing de Sade with Christian tunings or the
Bible with libertine lardings[12]
could be fun.
Finally,
there are rules and three simple meta-rule dimensions: the
presence or absence of topological, time-based or
objective-based rules. As a concluding inversion to our
topic, this meta-dimension could be further analysed by
running Aarseth’s game typology through his cybertext
typology, or vice versa. In any case, we’d have to make
a fundamental distinction between textonic and scriptonic
game structures, that is, game structures as they exist in
the game and game structures as they appear to the players.[13] This
distinction would open up the possibility of meta-games
where one plays both by the rules and about them, and where
different teams play the same game by different rules
without knowing it (at least for a while). Here, finally,
literary knowledge might have some value, as in case we wish
to build unfair and unequal games, we don’t need to go
any further than 20th century fiction for great ideas.
[1]
Here’s a crash course for those who are not familiar
with the former: in cybertext theory the elementary idea is
to see a text or a work of art as a concrete (and not
metaphorical) machine for the production and consumption of
signs, and consisting of the medium, the operator and the
strings of signs. The latter are divided into
textons (strings of signs as they are in the text)
and scriptons (strings of signs as they appear to
readers/users). The mechanism by which scriptons are
generated or revealed from textons is called a traversal
function, which can be described as the combination of seven
variables (dynamics, determinability, transience,
perspective, links, access, and user function), and their
possible values. This combinatory approach gives us a
heuristic map of 576 different media positions into which
every text could be situated based on how its medium
functions, but independently of what that medium is. It is
important to notice that the relation between textons and
scriptons is arbitrary in digital media: that’s the
“essence” of its unique dual materiality –
which stems from the separation of the storage medium from
the interface medium. Aarseth’s Cybertext
(1997) focuses on ergodic literature, where the user has to
do non-trivial work or effort to traverse the text, that is,
ergodic literature requires more than interpretative
activity from its user.
[2]
I made a somewhat similar point in an earlier article
(Eskelinen 2001c). In her response to it N. Katherine Hayles
(Hayles 2001) manages to confuse the tasks of theory with
those of criticism and chooses to ignore the fact that in
Cybertext functional differences are deducted from
material ones (in Aarseth 1997, ch.3). She also claims that
“A third limitation of cybertext theory, especially as
interpreted by Eskelinen, is mistaking numerosity for
analytical power.(…) Simply because cybertext theory
predicts 576 different combinations, using Aarseth's scheme
for parsing the semiotic components of cybertexts, does not
mean that all 576 combinations will be equally interesting
or worthwhile. Nor does this number alone indicate the value
of the theory, beyond setting up so many pigeonholes to be
filled.” Here she attacks only her own fabrications, as
she turns a blind eye to every single example I give of the
theoretical power of cybertext theory and its already
empirically existing ingredients in the context of
modifying, transforming and expanding hypertext theory,
narratology, and theories of postmodernism and new media
(etc.) – and not in the context of analysing an
individual text or filling pigeonholes. Hayles’
blindness to theoretical matters (and consequences) is well
in synch with the embarrassing theoretical blunders she
makes in her How we became posthuman (Hayles 1999).
I discussed some of them in my article, but for some reason
Hayles didn’t defend her shortcomings in her response.
In retrospect, the funniest part of Hayles’ reply is
her firm belief that she’s capable of setting the
record straight “about what cybertext theory cannot do,
as well as what it can do.” If that’s the
professional appearance Hayles wants to keep up, then she
should know a lot better than to confuse textons and
scriptons with surface and depth (for further details, see
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/04/23/narrtive-digital-storytelling-12/#comments).
[3]
At least they should be as Genette’s study is also a
reading of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past, and a lot has happened since the 1920’s.
[4]
Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library (1999)
rewards the persistent reader by adding more text to its
nodes in the first three revisits. In our terminology, the
frequency is limited during these revisits and unlimited
after the text does not change anymore.
[5]
Here we could
make a further distinction between static and dynamic
architecture based on the stability of basic conditions. In
Afternoon, as the result of its guard fields, the
number of possible links to follow will vary at the level of
nodes, that is, locally. In this scenario Afternoon
is not dynamic as a whole (globally), as there are no
changes in its basic architecture of nodes, links and guard
fields.
[6]
Characters in literature
and film are said to be independent as the readers and
viewers can’t influence them. The behavior of these
characters is static as it remains exactly the same
regardless of how many times the book or film is read or
seen. They are objects as there’s no direct
communication or dialogue between the user and the fictional
character. This simple chart with three basic parameters
gives seven other positions for the possible existents, and
I see no valid reason why all of these should be called
characters too, as that practice would only help to mask the
crucial functional differences in the control, communication
and behavior of the existents. In live drama the characters
are minimally influenced by the spectators (by applause and
other feedback conventions), and they may also become
dynamic if an actor is given the freedom to change certain
attributes or personality traits of the character between
performances.
[7] These processes
can be both teleologically and temporally indeterminate and
infinite.
[8]
In
books the continuity and discontinuity of the attention span
is up to the reader. That’s not the situation with
works like The Impermanence Agent or
TheSpeaking Clock. We should perhaps introduce two
conceptual divisions to meet the demands set by the
behaviour of programmable texts. First, the possible and
necessary attention spans and their mutual relations, and
second, the relation of the text’s duration and speed
to the reader’s attention span (the former can either
exceed or match the latter).
[9]
Wardrip-Fruin
2003. Instrumental texts are texts that can be played with a
system that is inseparable from them; textual instruments
are systems that can play many different “outside”
texts.
[10]
See
Bénabou 1986, and Mathews and Brotchie 1998, 213-214
(Queneleyev’s table) and 227-228 (systematisation).
[11]
”Delusions
of jealousy contradict the subject, delusions of persecution
contradict the verb, and erotomania contradicts the object.
But in fact a fourth kind of contradiction is possible
– namely, one which rejects the proposition as a
whole.”(Freud 1979, 203). Needless to say this
systematisation and mechanism could be situated or embedded
as a parergon in all four great scenes and schemes of
writing and textual production: sender/receiver,
signifier/signified, text/intertext, and
textons/scriptons.
[12]
See Mathews and Brotchie 1998, 163.
[13]
I’m not referring to the player’s always possible
non-understanding or non-knowledge of the rules and goals,
but about potential game structures that vary in time and
during the game depending on how the game is played.
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published
in dichtung-digital
3/2004
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