Learning about Interactive Fiction, especially after reading House of Leaves, makes me think about what a Reader’s goals are when they engage a text. The most striking difference between “interactive” fiction and regular books (even ones like if on a winters night and House of Leaves) is that in the interactive version you have a concrete goal or a way to win. Although everyone can explore the text differently, everyone wins in the same way.
When we read books in the traditional codex form, every reader has a unique approach to the text, which can arguably be as limiting and controlling as an IF game. But unlike an IF text, reading fiction (as opposed to…interacting with it?) produces much looser variations of winning and losing. I’d like to argue that when a reader “wins,” he or she can understand, appreciate, and internalize or utilize a text. When a reader “loses,” he or she is unable to find anything useful in the text or refuses to acknowledge the assumptions necessary to interact with it (and therefore does not find any enjoyment in the reading.)
I guess what I’m really grappling at here is what are the differences between so-called Interactive Fiction and just -regular- fiction. The word “interactive” seems to suggest that experiencing other forms of fiction is a purely passive experience, which we all know it is not. While I can understand why IF authors and readers (gamers?) reject terms like “Text-Based Video Game,” I think “Interactive Fiction” isn’t really pegging down what’s going on here either. I’m not going to be the one to propose a proper term, though, and I’m sure I’m far from the first person to speculate about this.
However, if you want to keep looking at the ideas of ‘winning’ and ‘losing,’ then maybe we should look more at the book form in juxtaposition with the computer program-based form of fiction. I think one important aspect of codex books is that they have a physical, linear beginning and ending. IF certainly has a beginning and ending as well, but unlike when you read a codex, you can’t relax under the (false) assumption that when you read that last page, you’re done. How many times have you read an entire book, only to reach the bottom of the last page and rejoice thinking “Thank God it’s over! I win! Homework complete!” How you experienced the text and whether you gained anything from it doesn’t necessarily matter–you read the book, so you won. This is different from in IF, where you could presumably play forever and ever and ever and you’re never finished with the text until you accomplish a given task.
Anyway, I’m really just arguing with myself now. But I’m excited to explore IF and its relation to post-print fiction in class on Wednesday. It seems great that we’re studying this in an English class, and I can certainly value IF from a textual standpoint, but its relationship to its readers (and I feel awkward calling them that) makes me a little unsure of what to do with it.
And as a total aside–someone in class had once mentioned that Danielewski’s House of Leaves seemed to account for all of our presuppositions about what goes into a book. It was full of footnotes, appendices, and even an awkward (but interesting) index. However, it’s occurring to me that the one thing Danielewski didn’t account for was an “interactive” part of the text. Maybe you could argue that the option to read Pelafina’s letters in the beginning instead of at the end offers a sort of “Choose Your own Adventure” reading. But I like to wonder what an interactive fiction component to House of Leaves might have look like…obviously, you could explore the house, talk to Karen and the kids, etc…but what else? How could Danielewski have incorporated this into House of Leaves, or would it have been impossible? House of Leaves maybe strikes me as being as close to an IF text as a book can get, without actually becoming IF.