How to Read Interactive Fiction

Hypertext Literature 101
(as if)

#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:
listen (please, please);
open yourself, wide;
join (you, me),
connect (us, together),

tell me.
do something if distressed;
@dawn, dance;
@evening, sing;
read (books, $poems, stories) until peaceful;
study if able;
write me if-you-please;

sort your feelings, reset goals, (friends, family, anyone);
do * not * die (like this)
if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-bet-you, close them, yet.
accept (yourself, changes),
bind (grief, despair);

require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;
select (always), length (of-days)
-- Sharon Hopkins

I. Before You Begin
You are about to begin reading "How You Read Interactive Fiction." Dispel every other thought. Turn off your cell phone. Block the instant messages. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the crowd playing the PlayStation or X-Box in the other room seems to have moved-in permanently. Tell them right away, “No, I don’t want to play Grand Theft Auto!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read "How You Read Interactive Fiction!" Or, if you prefer don’t say anything; just hope some ring, bing, or buzz won’t distract you. You have to read this article in preparation for a class (or randomly happen upon it). Your mind has already wandered. You start over.
Maybe you already flipped through the pages of this journal while standing in line at the bookstore. In that case, you already know that jumping ahead, making your own links, and considering yourself as a character in the story are essential aspects of reading interactive fiction. You consider yourself a first person reader and the book seems to unfold from your personal vantage point. You start to consider not just the meaning of the words, but how the author has constructed the story – its style and organization. You start to think about your responses. Is this a puzzle, a clever game, a mystery, or a scholarly treatise on interactive fiction as a form of literary Modernism? You get to the cashier and forget your line of thought.
Maybe, and more likely, you start reading this journal in the library or online (via a library's subscription). You collect your thoughts on index cards. Maybe each card examines one topic essential to reading interactive fiction (as literary modernism).

II. Reading Narrative Confetti
You already know that rereading segments (by jumping ahead and back again) constructs the story of a hypertext fiction. Now, tracking a reading functions like "breadcrumbs marking, electronically, a path." Usually, in electronic fiction there are no page numbers to create linear bearings; so, navigation depends on the reader creating a mental map of the fictional space and constantly looping back. This type of navigation does not create a single path, but instead explores a space. In that story world, enigmas remain, but without single answers or closure. Without one path toward an unfolding story, the fictional space consists of readings and world building rather than a traditional story. Re-reading, in hypertext, means literally re-printing electronically hyper-text-marked up pages. Narrative, even if in a non-linear form, can still exist in a reading that jumps around. In that scenario, the reader, not the author, determines narrative time: the time it takes to unfold the story. Given the importance of the links that jump some place else in a story, the process of reading hypertext parallels re-reading print; so, maybe you re-read those lines at another time. In that process of flashback, ricorso, and renewal a new type of storytelling appears. Stringing together the "narrative confetti" creates the impression of an infinite database of stories. Once one allows, and encourages, interruptions of a linear story, then the first principle of interactive fiction, its foundation, removes linearity and fixed sequence as the premise of storytelling. In rhetorical terms, interactive fiction leaves behind Aristotelian schemas of a good story. Instead of one grand narrative plot, the accretion of narrative confetti creates a circumstance well suited to create literary images. The epigraph of Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue (a story in eight bars)(1996) from William Gass’s On Being Blue becomes a coda for understanding interactive fiction: “So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.”

III. Bricoleur
A bricoleur is a tinkerer (a "do-it-yourselfer”). A bricoleur creates things from scratch by organizing pieces of information in ways not necessarily intended. The result forms a new kind of narrative unity in a “rhapsodic stitching together.” The reader-as-bricoleur functions much like the “bard who constructed meaning and narrative from fragments provided by someone else, by another author or by many other authors.” If you decide to read like a bricoleur, then you build a narrative world, make meaningful connections, or find the hypertext fiction satisfying.

IV. From Public to Private to Intimate Interfaces
These momentous changes to reading reminds some scholars of the shift from public readings for courtly audiences to solitary readings of one’s private copy. In the latest shift to interactive reading, no longer does one study someone else’s subjective state; now, the text makes one self-aware of the reading experience. Because the processes of reading (and writing) become subjects in interactive fiction, these processes replace writing (and readings) as finished products. The question becomes whether author or reader have ultimate control of the branching narrative or if the reader constructs the shape and substance. In the early examples of interactive fiction, readers chose branches, but the reader did not modify the text. Although those earlier interactive fictions allowed authors to set the level of control, even these examples demanded the reader’s intervention to make meaning; this demand for intervention and interaction creates an intimacy between reader and text. In that scenario, interactive fiction may give away the clear window into the soul of characters, but it gains intimate access to the process of constructing meanings, images, and narratives.

V. Formulae and Plots
Maybe you start reading other texts on the (valiant/irrelevant) attempts at theorizing the literariness of interactive fiction. You rethink the (insightful/naïve) conclusions described above. Instead of re-reading and discontinuity, you realize that interactive fiction often encourages one to avoid re-reading. In fact, some might point out that one can only skip and skim a linear text. The author, not the reader, carefully controls the text’s fragmentation and punishes random skipping; choosing the correct path creates the story that the author intended. Instead of a new form of storytelling, interactive fiction can depend on formulaic and traditional plots like escape adventures, revenge, sacrifice, love, forbidden love, and a limited number of other major plot lines. Interactive forms that satisfy readers, rather than defamiliarize, include the following: Choose-your-Own-Adventure, play a fantasy role, or an electronic version of Dungeons and Dragons produced by Gygax in 1978. Instead of the reader jumping around a story space, some see the situation differently as interactive fiction extends the traditional functions of satisfying stories. Instead of studying hypertext as a new form, it may prove more important to study it as a narrative literary genre. Reading hypertext as a literary technique, rather than something more akin to a game, focuses on the differences with other types of fiction rather than a new form of communication. Perhaps you should avoid all general theories of hyper-literature as it tends to reinforce presuppositions whether correct or simply cultural myths. For example, scholars mistakenly categorize hypertext as both different and better than print/book instead of finding the obvious continuities; the extension of media technologies does not necessarily suggest that the new replaces the codex (the bound and printed book).

VI. Images of an Emerging Discipline?
You might notice the fierce debates among the literary critics involved in considering how you read interactive fiction. The heated rhetoric includes claims by one scholar that another, cited in this essay, works on an “imperialist pretext,” a second for making a faulty analogy, and a third for making her interpretation more “important” than the text studied. One scholar worries that other scholars, cited in this essay, have invested too much faith in the deconstructive or avant-garde power of hypertext. So, rather than this essay simply presenting the terrain as a given, you, dear reader, recognize the field as an ongoing, and sometimes contentious, debate. It suggests that the field is vibrant rather than moribund (and you feel momentarily optimistic). The debates surrounding e-media or i-media studies in general demonstrate the efforts to map out a new object of study: what is interactive fiction and what are its essential qualities or forms? The debates also concern formulating corresponding and apt methods and theories: what are the cultural implications; how do those implications change reading, the study of literature, and even the sociopolitical foundations of culture?

VII. Spectrum of Readings
You flip through the pages of this essay again. You try to reconcile these disagreements. Perhaps you read how interactive fiction creates a tension “between anarchic readings (polysequentiality) and authorial control (conjuror’s trick).” Neither a radical avant-garde break-with-the-past, nor a system perfectly suited for military war simulations, interactive fiction exists on a spectrum. There is a spectrum of types of interactive fiction from the ability of the reader to add texts and links to the more typical make believe. In either case, it demands the responsibility of the reader to make links to undermine any “singular fatalism, fostering instead an ethos of responsiveness and engagement.” Given these demands on you, dear reader, you recognize a “paradigm shift in the way we read.” Although the reader can now respond in idiosyncratic or bizarre ways, the reader must take some action (typing, clicking, navigating) or the story will not continue. Instead of the grand narrative, the singular story, the reader collects “pieces of story.” Literary scholars soon realize that their raison d’être, establishing the singular authoritative text, has given way to interactive texts with no fixed pieces. Perhaps, you worry that studying interactive fiction will open a Pandora’s box: if this type of fiction undermines definitive critical editions, then readers will be able to combine, tinker with, and invent the boundaries of the text. It almost seemed that modernist literary style inf(l)ected the essay that unfolds in front of you.

VIII. First-Person Reader
You imagine yourself as a character in the story: a first-person reader. You have the ability to change the plot, the characters, the setting, or the language used by the author. You now create the narrative structure in your effort to find a story. Perhaps, you resign yourself to a significantly different first principle of interactive fiction: the author or designer carefully structures your actions and experience of interactivity. The issue of control highlights a foundational distinction between defined narrative scripts and open-ended hypertext fiction.
Defined scripts, like those in flight simulators and sports games, do achieve the most complete fusion of immersion and interactivity, but producers that seek to create these directed scripts fail to understand narrative and storytelling even as they seek it as their Holy Grail because they “flatten motivation,” create “sledgehammer causality,” and simplistic goals. Because military and entertainment necessities – winning – prevent aesthetic issues to enter into the discussions, the absolutely particular details get pushed aside. But, in interactive narrative, details and alternative worlds play a key role. In game making, visual design, and engineering of software, solutions supercedes discussions or studies of expressive storytelling. Corporate interests, rather than literary or artistic concerns, need an industry of workers implementing pre-determined paths; those interests do not want independent producers/readers making compelling stories. The future Homer of interactive fiction will combine literary ambition and computational expertise with a connection to a wide audience. Currently, those with computational expertise work on games and simulations that have definite paths, goals, and life-or-death comprehension. The experimental forms of Modernism may offer an alternative to the dreary (and treacherous) actual results of digital fiction (especially games, simulations, and VR), but those experiments in interactive fiction may have to take place in print forms and in unlikely places (outside of traditional venues for interactive fiction).
Goals, clear paths, and efficient interface design are advantages for immersion and military necessity, but those advantages also create limits and impasses. Military necessity demands that simulation experts, like spies, suppress “any alternative path, the fullness of multiple outcomes, for the one best suited.” Flight simulators, video games, and military scenarios share that problem: military necessity forces one conclusion, one right answer, and returns the possibilities of e-media to a training manual. You fidget nervously on re-reading this section since you had almost completed your degree in digital design, simulation and training, or game development. You recognize these issues. Perhaps, you decided to major in Literature, and consider hypertext fiction a way of “thinking opposition-ally about situations of fatality and hierarchal discipline.” You want to learn how to seize the “responsibility of the reader” to “undermine any singular fatalism, fostering instead an ethos of responsiveness and engagement.” You want to discover how hypertext fictions present more than their narrative or discursive elements; you start searching for something beyond the “functional elements concerned with specificity, regularity, and constraint,” something “outside the military-entertainment complex.” Avoiding the science of control, you wonder about a “mutant machine” that would offer a “reflexive critique of war machines.” You realize that hypertext and computer viruses suggest “two faces of this mutant machine.” To make interactive fiction serve as a tool for controlling games and military simulations may interest you or you may seek an alternative.

IX. Precursors
Maybe you wondered about a reference to a group of experimental novels. These novels represent, at least to some in the lineage of literary criticism about interactive fiction, the precursors to electronic hypertext fiction. You realize that you must read modern and postmodern novels, especially Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler . . . , to appreciate electronic interactive fiction as a kind of reading of Modernist literature. You notice that the first word of the title, "If," could be read as an acronym for Interactive Fiction. You imagine re-writing the novel as if it was about interactive fiction on a winter's night a traveler. You imagine reading this very article. You laugh and dismiss the conceit as s/he leads you to the Fiction & Literature section and pulls a group of books off the shelves.
Robert Coover’s collection of his stories that includes “The Babysitter;”
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch;
works by Paul Auster and Robbe-Grillet;
stories by Jorge Luis Borges including “Garden of the Forking Path;”
William Gass’s On Being Blue;
Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet;
Roland Barthes’ S/Z;
Italo Calvino’s stories and novels;
Dictionary of the Khazars;
and, a collection of OULIPO poems and novels.

This is a nice start. S/he also mentions that one can apply interactive fiction’s solutions back to literature of the past especially those works that reached impasses in literary history (Ziegfeld). S/he mentions Faulkner’s desire for different colors as a way to distinguish different sections of the text, Melville’s need to include more information about a ship’s operation, or Flaubert’s potential use of the “changing pace of reading ... to capture the change in Emma’s activity from paralysis to frenzied activity.” If great writers of the past had interactive fiction, readers could tell authors about their preferences, new ideas, etc., and authors could respond directly to readers and make changes to the fiction. In fact, many authors now respond to precisely these types of requests on their blogs (web logs or diaries). One could re-write the entire canon of literature (under the guise of e-books).

X. Canon
Perhaps later, when you are sitting down to play an online game, you consider the possibility of an electronic literature; not just interactive fiction, but a canon of great works. You go online and buy copies of what many consider the canonical works: Carolyn Guyer’s Quibbling (1993); Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991); Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995); Judy Malloy’s and Cathy Marshall’s Forward Anywhere (1993); Adriene Jenik’s Mauve Desert; Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987). Earlier critics, before Joyce’s works appeared, might have included Rob Swigart’s Portal (1986) and later critics would include a large and growing array of works listed in part on eliterature.org and many published by eastgate.com. Of course, then you may think of those texts as separate from a literary lineage.
Before one can generate a list of works of interactive literature, one must construct a list of criteria for the literariness of hypertext. The list would include de-familiarization or making new the familiar; interactive literature makes the process of reading strange through non-linear, discontinuous, and associative combinations. Although these structures were once rare in print-based fiction, except in Modernist avant-garde or experimental literature, in hypertext they become the key literary values.

XI. Cognitive Mappings and Navigation
You think visually and construct a table outlining various elements found in interactive fiction. You divide the elements into two categories of the goal of any literature: satisfaction or defamiliarization. You cite a few authors for each element as it relates to the over-arching goals for interactive fiction. The references to the writers simply suggest who writes about each element in particularly apt ways or with heightened focus; sometimes they advocate a position, and sometimes they describe it only. Others, not cited, sometimes discuss, or even advocate, these topics. Your table makes a useful cognitive map to understand how the various issues examined in this essay line-up under satisfaction or defamiliarization -- the twin towers of literary criticism. It also demonstrates how these scholars examine different goals, or outcomes, for successful interactive fiction. Focusing simply on one set of outcomes, like many misguided literacy and educational programs, dismisses alternative forms of texts, and the corresponding reading practices, without investigating those form’s and practice’s unique advantages.


Essentials Aspects of Interactive Fiction SATISFACTION
(Modernism as rational) DEFAMILIARIZATION
(Vanguardist Modernism)
Reader’s self-awareness of reading process and re-reading determine navigation: Game of Narration. Or, Reader moves plot forward. Read discussion in Douglas, Niez & Holland, Randall, Sloane, Ziegfeld Read discussion in Randall, Kelley, Aarseth, Gaggi, Moulthrop
Authorial control of maze-like puzzle manipulates navigation. Or, author’s revelation of character and enigmas lead readers through plot and narrative scripts. Read discussion in Niez & Holland, Randall, Sloane, Douglas Read discussion in Aarseth, Kelley, Douglas
Plot has no beginning or end; all middle. Or, plot can use interactivity in a quest and/or mystery in the style of a game and hypertext fiction has polysequence and ending(s). Read discussion in Douglas, Niez & Holland, Ziegfeld, Randall, Ryan, Aarseth, Sloane, Douglas, Read discussion in Landow, Ulmer, Moulthrop, Joyce, Case,
Compare: Digital Fiction reminiscent of literary experiments. Or, fictional world immersive and transparent like VR. Read discussions in Ryan, Kelley, Douglas, etc. Read discussions in Ulmer, Landow, Ziegfeld, etc.
Meaning, imagistic and thematic, created by contiguity, accretion, and aesthetic matches among segments and links. Or, meaning created by participating in fictional world without self-awareness. Ryan, Sloane, etc. Ulmer, Joyce, Case, Gaggi, Moulthrop, Sloane, etc.
Filled with hubris, you bring your visual table to class. Your peers, recognizing it as a useful “cheat” sheet on this essay and for a toolbox of literary strategies, celebrate your generosity. As your classmates pat you on the back, the professor notes how the chart does not discuss the many other topics included in the essay, and seems to flatten arguments to one-phrase high-concepts. Your chart ignores the subtle nuances of the individual citations to the (tired/significant) lineage of literary criticism's last gasp/insights/limit cases. Perhaps, you decide, before class, not to share your “cheat” sheet. In that situation, you never hear the objections that your table charts only one path among many. You use the chart on the exam. You’ll need to copy it on the palm of your hand. Try not to sweat or the text will run (and the categories and elements may blur together). You may fail, but at least you found a way to visually organize the information.
You probably rushed home without starting to take notes on index cards. You didn’t stop at the library or the quaint independent bookshop. If you did pop into the bookshop with the attractive and helpful assistant, s/he would have told you with a smirk and laugh that you must read modern and postmodern novels, especially Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler . . . , to appreciate electronic interactive fiction. S/he leads you to the Fiction & Literature section, pulls down a paperback, and looks at you (no, looks through you—reading you). Perhaps you quickly and shyly buy the book and leave; perhaps you strike up a conversation about electronic fiction. You say, “I’m reading "How You Read Interactive Fiction" and Calvino’s novel speaks to an important issue examined.” S/he seems interested. Perhaps hypertext fiction represents the beginning of a canon, or perhaps these experiments represent a small tangent (a difficult to understand tangent to boot) to the larger stream of e-books: mysteries, games, and educational puzzles. Texts like Afternoon or Victory Garden lack dramatic tension, have stories with weak plots, and fail to compel the reader to continue reading along a sequence (Sloane). Listening, you worry you may be out of your league.
While s/he rings you up, you glance down at the first page of the Calvino book you’re about to buy and you read the following.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

You laugh and realize that your digression actually seems to make perfectly coherent sense; you begin to see in the lists and details (and even in the stylistic quirks, literary games, and clever tricks) an argument. To some the self-reflexive fun and games, of interactive fiction, proves un-satisfying and a cloying annoyance; to others it makes the reading process strange, new, and invigorating. You decide.

XII. Virtual Worlds
Although 3-D immersive virtual reality will probably not appear in popular games or interactive fiction for some time, virtual worlds do exist in MUDs (text-based multi-user dungeons), RPGs (role-playing games), and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). The study of these different types of “twisty little passages” begins by distinguishing these genres of virtual world fictions from each other. Virtual reality makes the fiction immersive, it surrounds the participant, includes real-time interactivity, and makes the participant feel present in the virtual environment. In its vivid reproduction of 3-D space, “immediate mapping of gesture to result,” and invisibility of the system, VR extends the satisfaction of fiction that employs a transparent or invisible style. This move toward speech, physical movement, and non-linguistic commands and constraints, rather than text, makes fiction palpable despite its lack of materiality. Defined narrative scripts, like those used in flight simulators, sports games, and more, follow a narrative logic and include visuals, sound, movement all to achieve the most complete fusion of immersion and interactivity.
Unlike the de-familiarizing hyper-textual experiments, and the postmodern precursors, VR (and fiction that moves in that direction) considers immersion, rather than critical detachment, as the goal. VR’s immersion, not defamiliarization, heightened participation, and intimacy between reader and text, most closely resembles genre fiction, like romance. The aesthetics of immersion has now replaced the aesthetics of textuality especially in pop culture. Using VR as a goal and analogy, one should resist, not encourage the “metafictional gesture” that discourages immersive participation in fictional worlds. Given VR as a model, interactivity conflicts with either immersion, or aesthetic design, or both. Instead of interactive fiction, immersive fiction demands more constraints on reader choices and discourages authors exposing the processes of construction. Interactive fiction may attempt to both immerse the reader with narrative suspense, even as it exposes the fictional structure.

XIII. Problems with Writing About Evolving Fiction
Because interactive fiction has developed rapidly over a relatively short period of time (since the 1980s), some of the insights and descriptions have historical interest only. Some works, from the 1980s, are now difficult to access, because of changes in technology and forms. For example, comments about a game “on virtually every major computer installation in the country [...] every brand of microcomputer” seem dated not only in the jargon (i.e., PC not called a “microcomputer” anymore), but also in the details (e.g., a game by Don Woods and Willie Crowther called “Adventure” written with FORTRAN on the PDP-1 in 1972 exists on virtually no computer installations). The production process and aesthetics have also changed dramatically as well. Describing “high-resolution graphics” as “dot displays on the screen” has a new ironic retro-appeal only in the current climate of ever increasing HD resolution. Describing “drawing that outlines visual figures” or “selecting geometric shapes by touching screen” similarly seem dated. In 1984, most of the interactive fiction appeared in written form on a screen only, but more recent interactive games and fictions have limited written text, no plot, no dialogue (except that between the players), and a narration subsumed in setting and architectural spaces. In the 1970s and 80s one might say “finishing a work of interactive fiction can take as long as one hundred hours,” but today one does not finish but leaves the game world to return later, and many play for a hundred hours or more every month without ever finishing. The changes to technology also make the previous opposition between video versus branching choices now makes little sense. Because electronic interactive fiction began recently, and changed dramatically since its emergence, the issues and focus will continue to evolve.

XIV. Navigation With Inference
Just as literacy depends on print media, electronic literacy (or electracy) exploits features of the new apparatus: hypermedia is particularly good at expressing atmosphere, mood, and feeling all in the manner of a poem. An image, a figure (e.g., the experience of drowning), can take on an “allegorical effect” versus the reality effect. In hypertexts, neither revealing a character’s motivation, nor solving the enigmas of the plot’s action, work particularly well; the discontinuous segments instead make meaning through similarity, contiguity, and aesthetic matches. Reading proceeds by the reader’s inferences about the poetic connections among the pieces of story rather than by following one grand narrative. Electracy teaches how to read texts and pictures as poetic images and as the practice of reading. In a number of hypertext fictional works, fluidity and reflectivity of water functions as one of those key images. Small bits eventually create patterns (accretion) with a shifting, split focus, and figure becomes ground. One encounters this new type of story as a “body of water [...] sputtering and guttering our way through a narrative.”

XV. Feminine (hyper-)ecrituré
The interface of hypertext fiction, with its shifting stories and multiple lines of focus, described with the analogy of “women telling each other stories,” suggests it is not just that women writers are important in the production and the essential scholarship of hypertext interface and writing. The very interface design may demonstrate “women’s writing” as a form and process. When accretion replaces plot line, the new reading process may also suggest a new type of reader and subjectivity. In at least one hypertext novel, “composition style,” rather than the literal story alone, suggests a “lesbian desire.” Changes in compositional, or interface design, may have implications for the way the texts address the reader. There is not one correct way to couple and overlap segments of texts and images (no privileged order; meaning not made from one order). The dis-conjunctions focus less attention on the impossible duality of oppositions and more on the becomings between them.

XVI. Ergodic
The ergodic (derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning "work" and hodos, meaning "path") describes a chain, or play, of events (a path, sequence, etc.), produced by individuals choosing (e.g., clicking, navigating, typing) or working to follow a path. The ergodic requires special effort to navigate. For example, actions within a game have no narrative actions, but they are ergodic and require the player to actually input information. Narratives have two levels (description and narration), but a game has only one level (ergodic). A video game contains both description and ergodics but not narration. A hypertext has all three: description, narration, and ergodics. To make sense of a hypertext a reader must produce a narrative version of the construction of the text, but those texts are “limit cases.” Most ergodic works are either games, video games, or stories, not combinations.

XVII. Axes and Spectrums of Reading
Interactive fiction exists on a series of axes rather than oppositions. We have already discussed the issues involved, but it is worth repeating that these issues exist in a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive positions. The four major issues include the following:
reader choice;
inclusion of image, motion, sound;
complexity of network organization;
and, variation in literary elements.
One can modulate how much reader choice to include just as one can include more, or less, sound. The impact of these choices changes the reader’s perception of the text. So, for example, in Mark Bernstein’s and Erin Sweeney’s The Election of 1912 – interactive narrative nonfiction – the context and contiguity changes the bits of information presented. Depending on the reader’s sequencing choices, the database seems much larger than a normal book on the same subject. The perceived extent of the database, and corresponding choices available, can exceed the actual choices. A limited database of choices leads to a more immersive experience. If one seldom needs to “pause and think purposively or collect artifacts,” then one can become immersed in the story space. Too much participation leads to less immersion. In that sense, “the burden of interactivity and the continual necessity to choose directions for movement never allows us to forget we are reading.” You cannot forget you are reading.

XVIII. Implications for Literary Criticism and Rhetoric
Digital forms force literary critics to rethink what, and how, they read, but the process began less than 15 years ago. The first conference on cyberspace, staged in 1990, recognized that electronic cyberspace had not yet appeared. Literary criticism and rhetoric will change to meet the new demands of interactive fiction. Effective literary communication depends on “fixed sequence, definite beginning or end, definite magnitude, and the wholeness of all these.” The new digital forms, like interactive fiction flaunt the lack of all of these characteristics of literary communication. Unfortunately, traditional literary scholars used to study the art of effective communication (literary or otherwise), but now scholars must re-define rhetoric to respond to the changes in communication media (i.e., digital and online forms).
Further, the literary scholar must address the heightened importance of poetic image (over character or plot) produced by the juxtaposition of segments. Also, in this situation, the texts no longer anchor the meaning of graphic design, pictures, and illustrations. With the graphic element freed from text, communication and thinking change dramatically. Rhetoric, the study of the art of effective communication, can no longer privilege single denotative meanings and plots. In digital rhetoric, a literary critic studies suggestive moods, atmospheres, and poetic image.
The new digital forms have unique advantages; for example, they allow for a way to classify a great quantity of information, but the “problem of critical media literacy” is to “avoid translating back into old language” the new forms. A first impulse is to just put print-based forms, with the corresponding literacy, on computers. In that case, literary scholarship does not change, and the primary task of traditional humanities, to fix texts, remains un-disturbed. A more appropriate approach to literary study will use multimedia to produce “bricolage scholarship.” A new task of literary scholars, to recognize felt moods or atmospheres, depends on details, rather than any character’s motivation, that capture the specific reader’s attention. These shifts in literary criticism and rhetoric are contentious and controversial precisely because it forces a change in the established protocols.
The first step in this shift occurs with a shift from work to text. A text is a combination of elements such as a reader’s reaction, other comparable texts, the technologies that deliver the texts, and historical events, not just the physical entity of a work; hence literary critics already talk of a “text” in relation to the social practice and technology of reading rather than a physical work.
When literary studies allows an appreciation of texts, the next step in the shift demands “a new rhetoric and a change to fundamental poetics.” In traditional studies, the critic focused on the themes, plots, and character development expressed through a transparent, unobtrusive, and unselfconscious literary style. The purposefully obtrusive style of interactive fiction (i.e., it requires interactive effort) forces literary studies to seek a new way to read and behave. The humanities might return to a founding text, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, to find a practice appropriate to the new terrain of digital reading. In the practice of sprezzatura (rehearsed spontaneity), readings become performances instead of fixing on definitive documents. Critical editions no longer fix the text, THE “humanistic raison d’être since the Renaissance – it is what literary scholars do.” Instead, literary study functions more like an interactive fiction game in which a critic can add graffiti, graphics, and change past literary texts as well. If literary scholars used to “teach how to read books,” then now its task will include plotting “all the ranges of expressivity now possible without regard to high/low, visual/auditory, iconic or alphabetic.” Rather than eliminate the self-conscious and opaque, literary studies will “plot its prevalence on a continuum.” Using this new literary scholarship, one could read this essay on a self-reflexive continuum (i.e., in terms of sprezzatura), or add comments under each topic, or follows poetic figures that capture the reader’s attention. One could read this essay as an extension of contemporary scholarship employing sprezzatura, or on your own performances (readings).
Besides these new approaches to literary study, one could apply interactive fiction’s solutions back to potential solutions to impasses in literary history. For example, Faulkner’s desire for color to demarcate different sections of The Sound and the Fury, or Melville’s need to include more information about a ship’s operation. Flaubert, if we translated Madame Bovary into digital form, could indicate the changing pace of reading “to capture the change in Emma’s activity from paralysis to frenzied activity.” In these scenarios, the texts change according to readings, and the idea of text and textuality becomes more important. These elements change not only the future of literary criticism and all humanities scholarship, but also the history of literature and the actual literary works. The literary text has already changed and become changeable.

XIX. Mood & Style
Perhaps you choose to walk outside and sit by a fountain—one with those spouts that spray up at random or patterned intervals. You watch the kids stepping on and off the flows determining the course the water (and at least the perception of the fountain’s pattern and timing). The blue water and the workings of the fountain seem apt images for interactive fiction. You randomly choose a page from the lineage of literary criticism about interactive fiction. You feel blue (hasn't the interactive fiction marked the close of the literary). You realize that even the color blue has some metaphoric significance for appreciating the literariness of e-texts, at least in Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue,” and you’ve already read of water as a recurring metaphor for/in hypertext fiction.
You put down this essay; perhaps you’ve marked the pages with highlighter: blue for important phrases, to track down later online, and yellow, for the major issues and arguments. Did you mark the image of the interactive fountain? The image of blue as an argument highlighted in yellow? Perhaps you are reminded of Umberto Eco's "Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language," where he discusses the semiotic quagmire Adam and Eve find themselves confused by. You consider it, but on re-reading it decide making a blue fountain yellow would open too many paths, links, and flows. Frankly, you’ve had enough and consider dropping the course (or decide not to teach interactive fiction as a variant of literary Modernism) or, maybe you haven’t had enough: consider dropping into the bookshop again. You close the book, but keep your index finger stuck in the crease marking the page, while your thumb and ring finger keep the book closed around your improvisational book-marking finger, you run (or skip) toward your rendezvous—or a missed encounter—at the quaint bookshop. Such are the pleasures of reading interactive fiction.
You look again at the title of this article and notice it has changed:
Chapter I:
In Which
Fiction Changes When E-Media Visits

Along this path, dear reader, children’s literature has used stylistic strategies (e.g., asides, comic allusions) to make us aware of the process of reading planting the seeds of interactivity.
Similarly, the fast emerging epistolary genre (i.e., the spam letter begging for financial help or a get rich quick scheme) spreading through email begs for a response. If you got such a letter from this author, it might begin like this:


Dear Reader,
I write to you most-dearest friend, even though I have not made the acquaintance of you [sic – so a friendly editor does not change the style; the awkward phrases and grammar indicate the sincere and innocent tone], in this spam-letter, pleading you for kind assistance to me. Something in the electronic begs a response. In this new genre of electronic literature, the de-familiarizing of the processes of reading will include implicit, subtle, visceral, or explicit pleas for response. Literature always needs a response—you have to read the words for starters—but electronic literature will make that begging for a response strange and new as if learning to read all over again (as IF).




Endnotes