Empathy Games

Twine’s accessibility and ease of use have allowed more people to write and develop videogames. Merritt Kopas writes in Videogames for Humans: “Twine’s financial and technical accessibility are major reasons for its broad adoption, especially among economically marginalized, nontraditional game designers...” (10). These ‘nontraditional game designers’ have produced an influx of narrative and gaming content, and, as Stuart Moulthrop notes, despite the fact that Twine games can be seen “as an evolution from literary hypertext in the late 1980s,” many in the Twine community insist they develop games, not electronic literature (2016). This defiance should not go unnoticed, as Moulthrop asserts: “This resistance is important... Their return to the story/game problem implies a working- through of earlier issues, if not clear dialectical progress. Their willing embrace of the ludic also signifies an ability to stand among and against hegemonic interests like the videogame industry” (2016).

Developing Moulthrop’s observation further, I argue that Twine game creators’ insistence to ‘play through’ the game vs. story debate is theoretically significant in terms of otherness. For instance, some Twine games have been defined as ‘empathy games,’ a term coined by established game designer Vander Caballero: “They [empathy games] help us put ourselves in other people’s shoes” (Huffington Post 2014). Unfortunately, when Twine games, such as Dys4ia,are labeled as empathy games, they can be used to illustrate otherness as a single story (Christian Science Monitor 2017).

Of course, the issue of representation and otherness is a recurrent topic within literary scholarship. James Meffan and Kim Worthington, for example, highlight the ethical implications of ascribing otherness through representation, which reduces “the Other to the order of the same” (“Ethics Before Politics: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 133). I argue the impulse to label certain Twine games as empathy games, to define and situate them against other works of literature or videogames, ultimately reduces the games ‘to the order of the same.’ I suggest examining Anna Anthropy’s The Hunt for the Gay Planet as an example of the political resistance and ethical issues of representation of the Other in games. Moreover, The Hunt for the Gay Planet emphasizes the importance of play when resisting hegemonic definition, and it is this commitment to the ludic that offers hope.

Developing the topic of play within Anthropy’s game, I turn to clinical psychologist Shachaf Bitan, who explores the writings of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Derrida and how they “proposed a playful turn” in their theoretical work. Bitan stresses the importance of Winnicott’s ‘transitional space’ as a space for play, where play can avoid hegemonic definition (“Winnicott and Derrida: Development of logic-of-play,” 34). In the same light, when Twine game creators resist the definitions of play, stories, and games, their work remains in a transitional, undefined, and ludic space. Therefore, the political and categorical ambivalence of certain Twine games, along with their devotion to the ludic, demonstrates how these games can ‘play in the gap’ and potentially serve as an undefined space for the Other to play.

(Source: ELO 2018 Conference; Pinpointing Twine's Others Panel; There’s An Other Gap in Play Speech)

There is a moment in Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive (2014) when we must choose whether to join a murderous mob (albeit one murdering soft, pink, kitten-like “princess spores” that have spawned from a Skull Empress). It serves as a prompt to read digital narratives of choice – often, binary ones – in light of the intensely binarized socio-political moment more broadly.

In theorizing Twine, an initial impulse might be to identify and celebrate what looks like a significant historical return to the early experiments with narrative networks, including pre- Web Storyspace fiction and early Web-based digital fiction. By no means a simple or direct lineage (how long is a piece of twine after all), Interactive Fiction inflects Twine’s form while the gaming industry colors its rhetoric. That said, Twine fiction is decidedly digital fiction and, more specifically, “network fiction” (Ciccoricco 2007). As Patrick Jagoda has observed, “the problem of global connectedness cannot be understood, in our historical present, independently of the formal features of a network imaginary” (2017, 3), by which he means the network in all of its material and figurative forms. In theorizing the “network aesthetics” of Twine, however, a tension arises between the conspicuous connectivity of an idealized network and the starkly oppositional pathways and alienating disconnections found in Twine fiction in practice. In a second impulse, then, the digital literary critic might be cast back into the historical now, into the unmoving shadow of the 24-hour news cycle, forced to read and repeat With Those We Love Alive, as I was, at the same time as reports of Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017. Would you like to join the mob?

This proposed paper brings elements of narrative theory to bear on the emerging category of “empathy games” (Caballero 2014). It questions where the focus of reader empathy ultimately falls in a work such as With Those We Love Alive in relation to character or author as Other, and ultimately suggests that reading Twine fiction – despite our best intentions – risks a return to an uncritical and problematic form of biographilia. My final critical move is, nonetheless, redemptive in arguing that it is not only possible but also necessary to interbreed formalism and historicism (plus biography) when reading Twine. Indeed, we should see the very gap between the two as specious, a byproduct of an outdated “Criticism, Inc.” (Ransom 1937) that has collapsed under the weight of history – or at least a new historicism that feeds on “the power of formalism” (Liu 2008).

The proposed paper will close with some speculations on the next generation of digital literary scholarship: Twine fiction clearly represents an opportunity for the development of digital literature and the material, figurative, and human networks it engenders. But it also presents us with an opportunity to cultivate a compassionate criticism, nourished in intimate fashion by the paradoxically detached interconnectivity – what Jagoda calls the “alone- togetherness” (6) – of our digital culture.

(Source: ELO 2018 Conference, Pinpointing Twine's Others Panel: Narratologize it, Don’t Criticize it: feat. With Those We Love Alive)