digital work

This paper looks at two interactive digital works where female-centred/lesbian desire provides an implicit logic and motivation to the works’ interactivity, which focusses on the control and transgression of language. This wordplay is aimed at resisting dominant regimes of phobic categorization and erasure that pathologize queer desire. In Lucky Special Games’ visual novel Locked-In, the interactor experiences the story through the perspective of Jacqueline Brown, who, as the result of a car crash, has locked-in syndrome, which is characterized by consciousness paired with the complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Each of the women who visit Jacqueline's hospital room has a motive for wanting Jacqueline incapacitated or dead, so when Jacqueline discovers that she can slightly move the little finger on one hand, she must decide to which of these women she should reveal that she is conscious. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Locked-In is its casual indication of Jacqueline’s lesbianism (inferred via her relationship with her spouse Delilah). This lack of explicit labelling suggestively contrasts with the governing structural conceit of LockedIn: the dictionary entry, which plays on the hoary “if you look up [term] in the dictionary, you’ll find [person]’s name” joke. The cumulative effect of the wordplay results in lesbianism in Locked-In eventually escaping the fatalistic homophobic imaginary of dominant definitional regimes and causal logics while simultaneously eschewing a (hetero)normative “happy ending.” The second work, Neven Mrgan and James Moore's Blackbar, requires the interactor to unredact an archive of communications to a young woman, Vi Channi, from her friend Kentery Jo Loaz and others conducted under an Orwellian regime of expressive surveillance geared towards conformance, ‘sanitization’ and ‘propriety.’ The process of unredaction enables a queer reading of the relationship between Vi and Kentery and the Resistance they join. Unlike the blackbar redactions of the callous Listener #19445 and their grotesque attempts to make their redactions humorous, 'Lorraine,' as I will call the Resistance agent, engages in clever and pleasurable open box word play that exposes the slipperiness and queerness of language. Both works show how close reading and textual and formal analysis can be applied to interactive or ergodic works to reveal the same kinds of subtextual and subversive richness that characterize conventional literature, problematizing beliefs that eLit’s home is at periphery of the literary.

This paper reports on an the initial stages of compiling a comprehensive, historically deep "atlas" of the structures of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and Twine games. In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io. What do we find when we consider these forms of electronic literature (and their crucial precurors) as one comprehensive atlas of a vast transmedia territory of interactive storytelling? Which methods may be adapted between print and digital works, and which demand new approaches?In summer 2017 the Transverse Reading Project began surveying an archive of over ~2500 interactive gamebooks in the Katz Collection at UC Santa Barbara -- and began building a collection of visualized interactive plot structures that shape a reader's choices. Mapping interactive stories is a tradition in gamebook culture, with examples of mapping by authors and readers dating back to at least the 1930s. Writers created hand-drawn maps as an aid to writing -- and then readers re-created their own maps as an aid to tracking the explored and unexplored options of interactive reading. In this project, data visualized "story maps" use similar network graphs that simultaneously reflect the branching plot structures of each gamebook or digital game, the way scenes are ordered in the pages of the codex, and the order of individual choices on each page. In addition, the patterns of an "interactive periodic table of elements" are extracted for each work.In print, data was collected by student researchers using a custom format for rapidly encoding gamebooks (~30 minutes on average), and data-mined / visualized using the open source and cross-platform software tool Edger -- which was custom written for this project. These techniques of data collection, visualization, and exploration will are of particular interest to scholars in related popular interactive genres such as visual novels, Twine games, or life sims. In the second case study, on Twine, automatic harvesting and mapping methods where used to extract network patterns from a large subset of publicly available Twine works -- with results bringing in to focus both the deep similarities and the surprising differences in interactive works from the 1930s to today.

(source: ELO 2018 website)