Digital Narratives

This paper explores collaborative processes in electronic literature. Specifically, it examines writer authority as it applies to text, code, and other media. By drawing from cinematic auteur theory, Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994), Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), Cayley’s Grammalepsy (2018), and Flores’s (2019) generational approach to digital literature, this paper highlights unique issues that arise in the creative collaborative production of digital literary works, and the influence these processes have on how these works are ‘read’. The creative processes employed in Montfort, Rettberg, and Carpenter’s respective Taroko Gorge, Tokyo Garage, and Gorge (2009), Jhave’s ReRites (2017–2018), and Luers, Smith, and Dean’s novelling (2016)), as well as reflections on the author’s own collaborative creative experiences (Paige and Powe (2017) with Lowry and Lane, Little Emperor Syndrome (2018) with Arnold, and V[R]erses (2019–) with Breeze) are explored in detail. From these analyses, this paper concludes that in digital literary practices code should be regarded as a meta-authority that denotes authority to specific components of the work. A better understanding of these complexities as they apply to attribution is emphasised in the future development of digital literary creative practice and education.

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)

This paper examines a selection of examples of AI storytelling from film, games, and interactive fiction to imagine the future of AI authorship and to question the impetus behind this trend of replacing human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. Increasingly, we’re becoming familiarized with AI agents as they are integrated into our daily lives in the form of personified virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Recently, director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter, who named himself Benjamin. Both Sunspring (2016) and It’s No Game (2017) were created by Goodwin’s long short-term memory (LSTM) AI that was trained on media content that included science fiction scripts and dialogue delivered by actor David Hasselhoff. It’s No Game offers an especially apt metacommentary on AI storytelling as it addresses the possibility of a writers strike and imagines that entertainment corporations opt out of union negotiations and instead replace their writers with AI authors.After watching Benjamin’s films, it’s clear that these agents are not yet ready to take over the entertainment industry, but this trend is growing more common in video games. Many games now feature procedurally generated content that creates unique obstacles, worlds, and creatures. The most well-known example might be No Man’s Sky (2016), but it is not the first; Spelunky (2008), for example, made use of procedural generation many years prior. Although attempts at algorithmically generated narrative are rare, Ludeon Studio’s RimWorld (2016) boasts that its sci-fi game world is “driven by an intelligent AI storyteller.” Its AI, however, became the subject of controversy after Claudio Lo analyzed the game’s code that supports its storyteller and revealed that the program replicated problematic aspects of society, including the harassment of women and erasure of bisexual men.These examples offer insight into issues that have and will continue to arise as AI storytelling advances. This paper addresses questions concerning not only the implications for human authors in the face of this very literal take on Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” but also those related to what AI will learn from reading our texts and what it will mean to look into the uncanny mirror that AI will inevitably hold up to us when producing its own fiction. Though it may be a while before Siri will tell us bedtime stories, it is no doubt a feature that has occurred to Apple, as requesting Siri to do so results in a story about her struggles working at Apple and the reassurance she receives from conversing with ELIZA. ELIZA is one of the earliest natural language processing programs that was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s and was designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by parroting back user input in the form of questions. Siri’s reference to this program is both an acknowledgement of the history of these agents and evokes a future where our virtual assistants grow to become more than canned responses.