Twine and the Challenge to Reading

config.style.page.font: "Iowan Old Style/Constantia/Georgia/serif 18" config.style.page.color: "gray-9 on white" config.style.page.link.font: "small caps" config.style.page.link.color: "gray-9" config.style.page.link.lineColor: "red-8" config.style.page.link.active.color: "red-8 on red-0" config.style.page.header.font: "16" config.style.page.header.link.font: "small caps" config.style.page.footer.font: "16" config.style.page.footer.link.font: "small caps" -- <div style="text-align: center"> <h1>Twine and the Challenge to Reading</h1> Stuart Moulthrop University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Electronic Literature Organization - Orlando July, 2020 </div> [[next->About]]

<div style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"> {embed image: 'cover.png', alt: 'Cover mockup for Twining'} </div> The full paper on which this talk is based is available at <a href="http://www.smoulthrop.com/essays/ht2020/paper.pdf">smoulthrop.com/essays/ht2020/paper.pdf</a>. The paper is an excerpt from the final chapter of Twining: Critical and Creative Perspectives on the Twine Platform, by Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop, to be published by Amherst College Press later this year. The book will be available both as print-on-demand and open access. Chapters of Twining alternate between critical/historical discussion and examination of works made with Twine, and presentations of practical projects that explore Twine's potential for making. For more information, contact Anastasia (anastasia@ucf.edu) or me (moulthro@uwm.edu). [[next->Doubts]]

John Cayley has always been one of the keenest thinkers about electronic writing, so we take his thoughts about Twine (in his "Aurature" essay from ebr in 2017) very seriously indeed: "In the case of expressive hypertext — with choose-your-own-adventure gaming capabilities — we can now point to Twine as a platform still gaining significant popularity. But will it ever end up supporting Twine-writers and designers commercially, or as prominent literary practitioners?" [[next->Challenge]]

The paper does its best to answer Cayley's doubts about Twine and its users, but first we have to deal with an even more substantial question Cayley raises about electronic literature in general: "Formal bewilderment discourages reading and readers. Reading is a learned practice; it is not innate to the human animal. Asking readers to learn new forms is asking them to extend their learning rather than immediately offering them aesthetic experience. Of course, some formally innovative artifacts will be of a quality or importance that necessitates and rewards extra learning and effort. Literary culture moves on. But how will readers pick and choose amongst forms when every artifact is formally distinct if not entirely outside of any pre-existing formal categories? And how are they to discover any quality or importance for the language of the work if formal bewilderment makes it difficult or impossible for them to read?" [[next->Problems]]

Cayley's "challenge to reading" has three major aspects: - The formal difficulty of multicursal or algorithmic text; - The failure to form a consistent body of practice, as a result of unique, disruptive innovation; - The lack of sustained, considered critical response Does the e-lit community in general have answers? What about Twine makers? [[next->Ludic turn]]

Twine has strong roots in literary culture: "stories," "story formats," "passages"... but the technology has been most intensively used among game developers. The turn to gaming is significant. Despite Wittgenstein's famous insistence what games are undefinable, the form is well understood in practice. We can point to at least one handy definition (Thomas Malaby, "Beyond Play," 2007): "A game is a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes." [[next->Game culture]]

Though Twine games famously exist at the margins of mainstream game culture (thus GamerGate), they still exist within that sphere of social legitimation. A game is a kind of experience about which arguments are made. We may not agree about the value and sometimes the nature of play, but we know how to do it. "Game" is a recognized if controversial category... [[next->Reception]]

Text-based games -- interactive fictions, text adventures -- have in fact the longest record of systematic response of any form of e-lit. Two major award series, IFComp and Xyzzy have been running continuously for decades. Twine works are part of this tradition. [[next->Literary?]]

But is this tradition "literary?" Some might say so, others not. The decision implicates a host of assumptions about institutions and privilege. Who is a writer, who is a legitimate critic, who is a fan? Can these identities blur or combine? These are questions e-lit as a whole has yet to resolve, or maybe even address. Generally speaking, though, the IF world has a good handle on them, and on the nature of its enterprise. [[next->Sustainability]]

The harder parts of Cayley's critique have to do with "support" or sustainability. Here our answers are not very satisfactory. Chris Klimas, main developer of Twine, admits his Patreon income amounts to less than his state's minimum wage. The things we do for love... Maybe Twine isn't sustainable in the long run... but what is? [[next->Precarity]]

Ironically, Twine's first decade coincided with the largest economic expansion in U.S. history. That was then. Today the plague bill reached half a million humans worldwide. Historic economic collapse seems likely. In the face of this collapse, how can we care about things like Twine? Or e-lit for that matter? [[next->With or without Twine]]

Twine in and of itself will not save the world. But if we can imagine a future, how can we say that a future that includes Twine (or e-lit) is better than one without it? Two arguments... [[next->Cognitive mapping]]

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, 1990: "this latest mutation in space -- postmodern hyperspace -- has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment... can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects." Here's a Twine game... does that help? [[next->Gaming the maps]]

Well yes, maybe -- Jameson believed an aesthetic of cognitive mapping would be essential to politics in the 21st century. In order to address injustice, oppression, and ignorance, we need to understand in the deep way art makes possible the baffling structures of a world that is too large, too fast, and too intricately detailed for ordinary human witness. Perhaps a generation of gamers will be less inclined to call for regime change in regions traumatized by imperialism; or route tank trains full of volatile hydrocarbons through major population centers; or forget how fragile is our biological existence; or deny science when the plagues come; or fail to grasp that, ironically, iteration only applies in software, so we can’t reboot the West and replay from 1820. [[next->And writing]]

Twine is a (peculiar kind of) game platform; but it is also a WRITING platform -- and this aspect leads to a second argument for a world not without Twine. Aarseth's "ergodic literature" is the point of encounter between expressive prose and the executable language of computation. Resources like Twine expand the reach of language. Though Graham Nelson's Inform 7 is the real hero here... [[next->Chomsky]]

The following is valid Inform 7 code: Color is a kind of value. The colors are red, green and blue. A thought has a color. It is usually Green. A thought can be colorful or colorless. It is usually colorless. An idea is a thought in Chomsky with description "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." A manner is a kind of thing. Furiously is a manner. Sleeping relates one thought to one manner. The verb to sleep (he sleeps, they sleep, he slept, it is slept, he is sleeping) implies the sleeping relation. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. [[next->Enough or too much]]

"It compiles. It just doesn't do much." O ye of little mind! That the "Chomsky" example does compile is something very much indeed, showing how natural language can converge with programming code. Twine is less ambitious in its trickery, but it too can cross the streams in powerful ways. All the more so in Chapbook, the new story format, which can take users seamlessly from simple hyperlinking to much more ambitious scripting. [[next->New language]]

Back in the 1980s, when I gave a wild talk about the potential of hypertext to the fellows of my college, an eminent linguist (not Chomsky) said to me afterward: "But you will have to create a new language." It's why you go to college. Twine (and Inform, and e-lit) belong to the project of making this new language. Maybe it will allow us to think and write in ways that avert future catastrophes. In any case, if creating a new language is what we're caught doing as the world ends, it seems the best way to exit. [[next->Title]]