cybernetics

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

The world of game development is heavily male dominated and sexism is notoriously endemic in online gaming and videogames. In this context, as a feminist woman and sole writer, developer and designer of an interactive digital narrative, I am something of a rarity. Doing it all myself may seem perverse, especially in a field where collaboration is common, but the ability to author code myself is empowering and, crucially, gives me independence - a development environment of one's own - a classic feminist goal. In this presentation, I will discuss how these factors are reflected in the interplay of genre, narrative, discourse, gameplay, game logic, character development and thematic content in my interactive digital narrative, Stitched Up (currently a work-in-progress).

In an extremely rare inversion of the 'Damsel in Distress' trope, a common plot device in video games, the central male character in Stitched Up is a 'dude in distress' (Sarkeesian 2013). A powerful female antagonist has trapped Joel in a perilous situation and he must be rescued by his wife, Sarah (both Joel and Sarah are player characters). However, rather than action adventure, I describe Stitched Up as a psychological thriller. Moreover, its feminist narrative themes, problematizing the idea of home, significant others, working women, parenthood and masculinity, suggest similarities with the emerging literary sub-genre of Domestic Noir.

To create an interactive narrative that is capable of exploring these issues, I am drawing together concepts from second-order cybernetics with Possible Worlds theory from narratology. Combining these abstractions provides me with a framework for not only thinking about character-driven playable narratives, but also a methodology for authoring and designing them. I am drawn to Possible Worlds theory because, unlike structuralism, it does not regard fictional characters as purely semiotic constructs but regards them as make-believe life-like persons, able to arouse emotions in the reader. Influenced by cybernetics, along with the concept of feedback and 'the art of steering' (cybernetics' etymological root), I am exploring the idea of the fictional character as a Black Box in order to simulate psychological depth.

An observer can only infer what is going on inside a Black Box from its inputs and outputs. Stitched Up is text-driven but highly visual and I am coupling my dialogue-based game engine with a responsive abstract visualisation system for the characters' internal emotional data to deliver subtextual layers of meaning. These combined outputs will affect the choices that reader-players make, the inputs. This stimulus-response model, which is my core gameplay loop, functions as a kind of rudder for the reader-player to steer a course through Stitched Up's narrative universe of Possible Worlds. How the reader-player chooses to interpret the characters' behaviour will determine the kind of story they experience and its outcome. The 'Damsel in Distress' trope invariably decrees a revenge-driven story, Stitched Up's 'dude in distress' device challenges that edict.

Cybertexts are the pairs of utterance-message and feedback-response that pass from speaker-writer to listener-reader, and back, through a channel awash with noise. Cybertextuality is a broad theory of communication that draws on the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) to describe how we manage these dual message-feedback cybertexts into being and that helps explain the publishing, the transmission, and the reception of all speech and text. Recursiveness, complexity, and homeostasis are three principles of cybertextuality. Because we are cognitively blind to how we create most utterances (language belongs to procedural memory, which can be recalled only by enacting it), we unselfconsciously model even our own language acts (not just ones by other people) simply in order to recognize and revise them. We observe or receive our own language acts before anyone else does. Our feedback is to represent those acts meaningfully. Mental modelling, as a feedback mechanism, is recursive. Our every utterance or output serves as input to another (possibly silent) uttering. Messaging-feedback is also complex. It operates cognitively on phonetic, lexical, grammatical, semantic, and discourse levels of language and often handles different utterances simultaneously. However, cybertextual cycling serves us well. It is a dynamic, self-regulating (what is termed homeostatic) steering mechanism. Using it, we can manage our language creation just as James Watt’s flyball governor controls a steam engine. We can observe this cybertextual self-regulation in our mind’s working memory as well as in the many language technologies -- manuscript, printed book, word-processor -- we have built to extend the very limited capacity of that working memory. Digital infrastructure offers, in some ways, a better cybertextual avatar for communication than supplied by our own mind.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

In Gerard Genette’s (1993; 1997) narratology, “rheme” is contrasted with “theme.” While themes are symbolic indications of what texts mean, rhemes are super-formal indications of texts themselves. The title of this article is highly thematic because it indicates much of that what is being discussed; a title like “Only an Article” would be highly rhematic due to its lack of indication of the subject matter at the expense of non-reflective form.

Veli-Matti Karhulahti has recently argued that the aesthetics of the videogame phenomenon are better understood through “rhematics” than the rhetoric of “meaning” that has so far dominated the analysis of cultural products, especially within literary studies:

While [videogame play] is essentially meaningless – there is no decipherable message to be understood – it is not senseless: there is a sensation to be understood. What exchanges (or more correctly, comes into being) is data that cannot be made known by signs. This sensible nonsense gives shape to an aporetic rhematic [that] cannot be understood by means of any conventional interpretative discipline, a new discipline is needed; a rhematic discipline. (Karhulahti 2013)

This paper introduces rhematics as an analytic tool that facilitates comprehending the multiplicity of aesthetic ends in electronic literature. It is suggested that the rhematics of electronic literature operate on two levels, the conceptual and the material. As the former has already been mapped out extensively by literary theorists through “poetic” functions (e.g. Burke 1941; Jakobson 1960; Eco 1989), the present focus is on the latter and its “configurative” functions (see Aarseth 1997; Eskelinen 2012). The material manipulation of electronic literary works is thus examined as an intrinsically rewarding mode of interaction that is not guided solely by hermeneutic methods of interpretation but also by cybernetic engagement (see Iser 2003).

The configurative competency of the e-reader, it is argued, must hence be taken as a serious contextual factor in electronic literary analysis. This also calls for an ontological problematization: if reading and literature are identified as noematic or hermeneutic entities, do extranoematic configurative aspects not conflict with the ‘literariness’ (cf. Randall 1988) of electronic literature?

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

How can a convincing interactive character, with apparent psychological depth, be modelled in a playable narrative that adapts to a reader’s choice? This is the central question of my practice-based research that I address through the authoring (in both natural language and computer code) of an interactive text-based psychological thriller Stitched Up.

Narratives “by their nature are riddled with gaps” and characters are “some of narrative’s most challenging gaps” (Abbott 2008), yet filling in these gaps can be an enthralling source of readerly pleasure. On the other hand, flat characters “seem to exist on the surface of the story, along with objects and machines. There are no mysterious gaps to fill since what you see is what you get” (Abbott 2008). The majority of simulated characters in video games and interactive adventures tend to be more flat than round probably because, as Montfort (2007) has argued, a flat character can still be compelling and meaningful due to the nature of simulation, especially when combined with narration. Nevertheless, I aim to create round simulated characters in Stitched Up. These individuals in the storyworld will be compelling precisely because they are complex and undergo development as a result of reader–player interaction. In my playable psychological thriller, the readerly process of filling in the characters’ “mysterious gaps” is the core gameplay loop.

Stitched Up is based around the idea of a character as a “black box”. An observer or external entity can only infer what is inside a black box from its inputs and outputs. Interaction between two human beings could be viewed similarly. One person can only infer what the other one is thinking and feeling from their outputs, from their behaviour or what they say.

Since an interactive character must be constructed in code, I am researching how the properties and processes of programming in JavaScript can be used as functional metaphors to represent the psychological make-up of fictional characters and their dynamic interpersonal relationships. In JavaScript, as in other programming languages, encapsulation (the technical term for the black box) is an important strategy for organising complex code into modules (and/or functions), whereby internal code is hidden from external objects so that they can interact with each other safely and effectively via an Application Programming Interface (API). In this paper, I will discuss how I am repurposing the modularity of such JavaScript design patterns to dynamically model the internal mental states of my interactive fictional characters – their emotions, memories, moral values, opinions, etc. – and how this affects the process of creatively writing characters in natural language. Overall, this entails developing a modular form of character design where these attributes are discrete elements that can be amalgamated and delivered in multiple combinations yet still offer an individuated, meaningful encounter with a person in a storyworld.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.

Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

(Source: University of Chicago Press catalog copy)

Chaos & Cyber Culture brings together a series of articles written by Timothy in from the 70s to the 90s, including the title article, published in 1994, covering his reflections and predictions about the digital universe and its communications network. It is impossible to map the rich source of Leary’s ideas, some of which I shall try to summarize here, without using the creative terminology with which he expounds the exuberance and turbulence of his imagination.