You have to write a blog post for your Post Print Fiction class. This week’s readings and assignments surrounded the phenomenon of interactive fiction. You know nothing about interactive fiction. Do you X the articles before delving into the interactive “games” or do you play the games before reading the articles?
> Play the games.
You selected “play the games” first. While this may have seemed like the best way to immerse yourself, this was not the most ideal. Because you were unfamiliar with how to play them, your naïveté solicited sardonic responses such as this:
-or-
Frustrated, you decide to consult the articles and redirect the voice of this post to the first person.
Similar to discussions we have previously had in class, interactive fiction is a self-aware genre that more or less has a predictable existence. After fiddling around with these three games for a good half hour each (before reading the articles), I started to succumb to pattern recognition. While there were times when I wanted to commit to insensitive reading, embodying Rabinowitz’s idea of launching attacks on stock responses, I tried to adjust myself to this paradigm and understand how to interact with them correctly. However, with games with more nebulous directions such as Varicella‘s “Write a thousand words,” I was in need of more instruction. I was not sure exactly what to type. I tried to be clever and merely type “a thousand words,” but that did not leave me with a fruitful response. While these games are ones that fall under a textual/literary context, they require the individual to play by certain rules in order to progress.
Referring back to the discussion we had on September 21st about the differences between paradigmatic and syntagmatic genres, this type of fiction would fall under paradigmatic as the individual is given options that work to reinforce a larger syntactic role. According to Nick Montfort’s video, Exploring Interactive Fiction, the user has to interact “pleasingly symmetrical” in order to make his or her way through the fiction. Therefore, as much freedom as he or she thinks is available, is actually manipulated within the framework of the creator’s story line. I often got responses such as “That’s not a verb I recognize” or “You can’t see any such thing” which forced me to read into the context clues of the preface. As Andrew Plotkin implies in his “How to Play Interactive Fiction” website, the preface and answers the individual receives act as a pattern to provide insight on how to progress, “It’s not trying to teach everything an IF expert would know; it’s just conveying the pattern.” These “novels” are condensed into databases that reflect one of Rabinowitz’s four pillars of reading, as this type of reading calls upon the rules of signification, or, drawing significance from various elements.
Then, I have to ask, are the individuals who experience this type of fiction readers or players within this genre? To consult Lauren’s post, to be the latter of the two roles is to reflect a goal of winning or finality to the fiction. The genre becomes more objective than a statically published novel. Montfort refers to interactive fiction as a “literary riddle” and one that affords the reader/players with different perspectives. However, I do not feel this gives the reader/player a different perspective if this fiction has various parts that only support one viable outcome. In a class discussion we had regarding Calvino’s book, we brought up the question: is the “you” a character in search of an author? This question could be as equally applicable to interactive fiction, as the individuals are the characters who push through all these options in search for the desired (or “right”) outcome.