Platformization

While both can produce choice-based interactive fiction works playable via a web browser, the hypertext authoring tool Twine and the narrative scripting language Ink are, at first glance, two very different platforms. Twine takes text input in the form of passages and transforms it into HTML. Ink, as a scripting language, uses applications like Inky to create JSON files representing a compiled Ink project capable of more easily being used with game engines like Godot and Unity. The communities for each, however, approach these processes in the same ways: they create guides, make tutorials, and build resources to help other users understand how each tool moves content from input to output. They provide, in a word, service. It is this labor supporting the connections between users across these platforms, and it is the members of these communities maintaining its resources and reinforcing the platformization of each. 

This roundtable examines two different primary documents related to these platforms, the community labor histories behind them, and their current iterations. The first, the Twine Cookbook, was born out of a collection of resources and has become, over three years, the go-to source of Twine knowledge. During its lifetime, it has slowly absorbed content spread across other services such as the Twine wiki, forum, and details found in development posts. The second document, the Unofficial Ink Cookbook, is a more recent creation that was born out of the combined experiences of two instructors. It has slowly grown into an expansive document now quoted and used as a reference document by students learning Ink and as part of the Ink Discord to help new users understand concepts within the scripting language Ink. 

As editors and contributors to these documents, the members of this roundtable will speak to the ways in which community labor, service, is the conduit through which knowledge is shared, rules are enforced, and the sense of a “platform” emerges through the pedagogical resources created by the communities around Twine and Ink. Given the variety of platforms and tools available for creating interactive fiction, the members of this roundtable will review common problems, discuss possible solutions, and examine how a “platform” cannot exist without its community supplying the labor to sustain it.

We will discuss the issue of the platformization of culture from a Latin-American perspective and decolonial thinking. Platforms strive on the automated algorithmic administration of access and reproduction of creative works (text, sound, video, o code-based). The common trait of current platform culture is the maximization of profit by means of garnering data and attention in order to capture more attention (and more data). In this context, is there any space for pursuing artistic digital activism and decolonial e-lit? The presentations in this panel will try to answer this question. The panel will be Spanish-English based in a sort of tentative of linguistic decolonization of e-lit field:

Agustín Berti: The Country and the Platform, or The Issue of NanofundiaThe issue of latifundia and the consolidation of vast productive land owned by a very reduced minority of wealthy elites has been one of the distinctive traits of lasting inequalities in Latin-American countries. This has seemingly nothing to do with digital culture, and yet this push forward the concept of nanofundia as a continuation of the reprimarization of production in the developing world and the digital extractivism of platform economy described by Pasquinelli and Joler. If there is any chance of reverting this situation in terms of decolonial geopolitics of electronic literature, the struggles will be about national and regional digital infraestructures and the local regulations over the globalized attention economies.

Anahí Re: It Will Be Difficult or Won’t Be. Challenges of Latin-American E-Lit.Platforms that nowadays enable large scale production and distribution of third generation e-lit (Flores), and even this kind of e-lit itself, promote a specific temporality. Doing so they guarantee the permanence of users in social media. What is at stake is clearly our “available attention” (Stiegler). Following Stiegler’s organological perspective, this presentation will focus on why “the difficult” (Tisselli/Torres) is, and should always be, an emancipatory alternative within Latin American poetic industries.

Claudia Kozak: Occupy the Platforms. Scope and Limitations of Decolonial Contemporary E-Lit.This presentation will analyze cases of Latin American e-lit that particularly engage to deconstruct and/or occupy contemporary platform culture. Being these cases either strictly experimental e-lit based on “the difficult” (Tisselli/ Torres), or digital activism in indigenous languages or even attempts of decolonial mixtures between experimentalism and third-generation platform e-lit, there is an opening for discussing how e-lit might temporarily occupy contemporary platforms without being (completely) absorbed by their agenda.

Leonardo Solaas: The Pull of The Banal: Digital Systems and Programmed FreedomInternet platforms are based on a perfect formula: they provide us with the endless satisfaction of choosing, while they get to know all about us and better anticipate our tastes and desires. They create for us dazzling worlds of perfect visibility, while their own logic recedes into the unreachable depths of an ever-blacker box. We will analyze how the space of possibilities generated by digital systems deploys a field of power under the guise of freedom, and how users can adopt three positions with regards to it: integration, rebellion, or critique.