Neverending Stories: The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction 9781501364945, 9781501364914, 9781501364921

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Neverending Stories

ii

Neverending Stories The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction R. Lyle Skains

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © R. Lyle Skains, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design and illustration by Rebecca Heselton Cars © MircoOne/ Shutterstock; Trees © vectorpark / Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Skains, R. Lyle, author. Title: Neverending stories : the popular emergence of digital fiction / R. Lyle Skains. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Neverending Stories examines the re-emergence of digital fiction into popular media such as TV, film, and publishing”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022669 (print) | LCCN 2022022670 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501364945 (hardback) | ISBN 9798765100790 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501364938 (epub) | ISBN 9781501364921 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501364914 Subjects: LCSH: Hypertext fiction–History and criticism. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Storytelling in mass media. | Digital storytelling. Classification: LCC PN3448.H96 S353 2023 (print) | LCC PN3448.H96 (ebook) | DDC 813/.60911–dc23/eng/20220815 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022669 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022670 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6494-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6492-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-6493-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com ​ ​ and sign up for our newsletters.

For Paul. Thank you for keeping me alive.

vi

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations 1

Introduction The State of Digital Fiction The Book

ix x xii 1 3 8

Part One  Digital Fiction Contexts 2

3

4

Innovation Origins Innovation Cycles Digital Fiction as Innovation Conclusion Digital Fiction Emergence Digital Fiction: Definition by Function Digital Fiction’s Evolutionary Pressures Digital Fiction Around the World Conclusion Digital Creativity: Democracy and Capitalism Internet as Democracy Digital Fiction and Free Enterprise Between Creativity and Capitalism Conclusion

19 20 27 37 39 40 44 48 59 61 62 66 70 73

Part Two  Digital Fiction in Popular Culture 5

Evolution from Mainstream to Niche: The Case of Interactive Fiction The Historical Devaluation of Women’s Work A Brief History of Women in Computing Interactive Fiction Reframing Interactive Fiction History

77 78 80 85 87

viii Contents

Interactive Fiction after Infocom Conclusion 6

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8

It’s Not a Book, It’s Not a Game: Literary Games The Market Ecology for Literary Games Persistent Literary Games Conclusion Everything Old Is New Again: Ergodic Literature Components of Ergodic Literature Mainstream Ergodic Literature Conclusion Hunting the Holodeck: Interactive, Alternative, and Immersive Realities Interactive Cinema, TV, and Drama Alternative Realities Extended Reality Immersive Theater Conclusion

93 95 97 99 101 119 121 124 129 141 143 144 151 158 161 164

9 Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Archontic Fiction Archontic Culture The Nature of Archontic Fiction Archontic Fiction: Communities of (Transmedia) Practice Conclusion

187

10 Conclusion

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Mediography Works Cited Index

197

167 171 176 181

217 261

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Screenshots from 17776 S-shaped adoption of innovation curve Screenshot from Uncle Roger Screenshot from My Boyfriend Came Back from the War Screenshot from Cloak Room Examples of “BIC for Her” pen reviews on Amazon.com Pages from To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure Screenshot of Plundered Hearts Screenshots from King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella Screenshots from Seed Screenshot from Along with the Gods Screenshot from Doki Doki Literature Club! Screenshot from Dear Esther Screenshot from Queers in Love at the End of the World A lorem ipsum version of a scanned page from Harlan Ellison’s The Region Between Cathy’s Book Pages from Night Film Images from components of PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE Screenshot from Her Story Screenshot from Life Is Strange Example of social media narratives Screenshot of tweets from Such Tweet Sorrow Screenshot of the first Reddit comment composing The Interface Series Screenshot from microstory “The Thing Tableau” from V[R]‌ignettes Images from within House of Eternal Return The photoshopped images and original forum post that launched the online creepypasta folktale of Slender Man

22 26 49 51 55 65 70 86 90 105 110 112 114 118 126 134 139 141 147 151 154 156 157 161 164 168

Acknowledgments This book has been a long time coming—much longer than I’d anticipated. I want to thank Katie Gallof and her entire editorial team at Bloomsbury for their grace and patience. You helped me to not give up on it. My mentors deserve credit not only for a great deal of whatever meritorious content may be within, but also for their steadfast encouragement and support. Astrid Ensslin has set an impossibly high standard, but her amazing work and even better friendship have helped me to become a better scholar. Eben Muse has always encouraged me in my rebellious streak and in thinking of creative approaches to almost everything in life. Stuart Moulthrop has shown me that the history of our field is almost as important as the future, as long as we continue looking forward and embracing change and new perspectives. Any face-plants present in the book are mine and mine alone, despite the spectacular examples and mentorship I have benefited from. The past few years have been difficult for everyone, worldwide, in terms of productivity and mental health. I have been more fortunate than most when it comes to my day-to-day job and being able to complete this work. For that I have to thank Shelley Thompson and Anna Feigenbaum. You took me on in the middle of a pandemic, and you’ve let me run with some out-there ideas. Thank you for giving me a new home. At the start of this pandemic, worried about my circle of writers and research students, I started a Discord server and a weekly Zoom session. We haven’t seen each other in years(!) despite our geographical proximity, and while you all may have thought I was helping you, you were helping me. All your Bizarre Internet Things, your art, your conversation, and your determination have helped to keep me sane and focused. Thank you to Eoin Murray, Kate Stuart, Emma Venables, DeAnn Bell, Charlie Wilson, Isabel Linton, Kristin Lissel, Murphy Parys, Ali Wood, Jordan Glendenning, Holly Thomas-Wrightson, Jak Matthews, Lynda Clark, and everyone who has joined us. May the Mystery Flesh Pit trouble our noodles forever, my friends. I have wonderful friends-peers-colleagues whose art and research I love to draw on as much as possible, and whose support and encouragement (and

Acknowledgments

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occasional review and feedback) are beyond valuable. Melissa Kagen, Anastasia Salter, Jeneen Naji, Deena Larsen, Mark Marino, Anne Sullivan—you are all tremendous friends-slash-geniuses. John Murray, Kathi Inman Berens, Mia Zamora, and Rui Torres, otherwise known as the ELCv4 Editorial Collective, the discussions we have had and the works we have been able to review over the past year have influenced me, my research, and my art in so many ways. For their ongoing support and the opportunities they continually feed my way as a more junior scholar-practitioner in the field, I’d also like to thank Leo Flores, Alice Bell, Jim Pope, Bronwen Thomas, and Dene Grigar. I would also like to thank those who could be considered more junior even than I: the newcomer scholars and practitioners. Your ideas, your contributions, your insights—they are all not only valid, but necessary. You have opened up new avenues for my research and thinking; keep pushing at whatever old guard there may be. You’re going to outlive them anyway. Many thanks to every PhD student, postdoc, and early career researcher, but especially to Chloe Anna Milligan, Sarah Laiola, Reham Hosny, Samya Brata Roy, and Kirsten Rutter. Finally, I want to thank my family. My mom Julia, my dad Quin, and my stepmom Laura, for never really understanding what I do but agreeing that I’m the best at it. Kate Taylor-Jones and Amy Chambers have been the most amazing friends and sisters, and I can’t wait until we’re old and crotchety living in an attic somewhere. Sam Robinson is an excellent bibliographic reference, and Nick, Amelia, and Florence provide endless giggles. Finally, I want to thank my partner Paul Mullins and all our “stuff.” I definitely wouldn’t be anywhere without you; home is where you are.

Abbreviations AR ARG ARS AU CoG CSS CYOA DF elit FMV GIF GPL HTML ICL IDN idrama IF imovie IXR LARP LGBTQIA+ MOO MR MUD Netprov NYT OS PC PoC RPG STEM

Augmented Reality Alternate Reality Game Alternate Reality Story Alternate Universe Choice of Games Cascading Style Sheet Choose Your Own Adventure Digital Fiction Electronic Literature Full-Motion Video Graphic Interchange Format General Public License Hypertext Mark-Up Language International Computers Limited Interactive Digital Narrative Interactive Drama Interactive Fiction Interactive Movie Immersive Extended Reality Live Action Role-Playing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual/ Aromantic Plus MUD, Object-Oriented Mixed Reality Multi-User Dungeon Networked Improvised Narrative New York Times Operating System Personal Computer Person/People of Color Role-Playing Game Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics/Medicine

Abbreviations UGC VN VR XR YA

User-Generated Content Visual Novel Virtual Reality Extended Reality Young Adult

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Introduction

I don’t allow my students to email me (it’s a whole thing, but it’s better for all of us).1 They email me anyway, but because of my policy what they send me is joy. They send me memes (often mocking some awkward thing I have said in a class) and point me to Bizarre Internet Things. I am a collector of Bizarre Internet Things, and I love that my students (okay, a decided minority, but I’ll take it) like me enough to feed my habit. There are alternate universe national parks (complete with merchandise), rabbit hole conspiracy theories, and trans-internet scavenger hunts. There are funny little sites that transcend browser updates and burp out little codes with unknown purposes, numbers stations of the World Wide Web. Best of all, there are works of digital fiction (DF) out there, just growing wild, that I would never know if it weren’t for my students’ sharing them from their individual cultural niches and communities. Along with Bizarre Internet Things, DF is one of the things that, for me, truly cause wonder. I love books, film, TV, of course—I’m not a monster. But DF can do something that my other stories don’t (unless they, too, become DF): it can refresh itself. A work of DF is unstable. Potential. Multiplicative. Metaphorically, I can read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein today and, based on my readerly contexts, it will be a different book from the one I read as a teenager. Literally, it is the same book it has been since 1818. Shelley Jackson’s hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl (1995), on the other hand, can literally be a different work every time I experience it. The effect isn’t reliant upon hypertext; DF’s multiplicity extends in many directions, including non/multi/polylinearity, reader/player input and

Because everyone always asks: student emails are either questions that can be answered by looking in the course materials, or questions I can’t adequately answer over email, so they’re going to have to come to see me in person anyway. Thus when they email me in open defiance of said policy, my email client sends an auto-reply with answers to FAQs, and my office hours schedule for any questions remaining unanswered. Students get an instant response that answers their query, and I don’t have to waste energy lamenting their emails. Win-win. 1

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agency (and illusory lack thereof), algorithmically generated elements, layered media and perspective, collaboration and participation, and much, much more. DF can be as simple as a multiple-choice story, as expansive as a transmedia franchise, and as social as a Facebook group. It is a many-headed hydra that not even the Avengers could destroy (and why would they want to?!). The purpose of this book is to celebrate DF that has often been neglected in discourse within the field of electronic literature (elit). The reasons for this neglect are many, and complicated—and expounded upon within. And despite elit academia’s disregard for the quotidian, DF has always been present in mainstream and popular culture; we just don’t seem to talk about it. I have an array of examples when I discuss my research field with those outside it, when the academic term “digital fiction” rings no bells for them (varied according to their experiences): Zork (1977), Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” (2018), 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future (2017), Alice for the iPad (2010), Homestuck (2009–16), Slender Man (2009–), and Gone Home (2018), among others. We haven’t yet collectively agreed upon a way to discuss these works that hit the sweet spot between narrative and game, but my argument that DF exists—thrives, even—in mainstream culture is as easy to make as this list. Thus, the book does a bit more (because it’s not worth an academic publication if it’s easy, amirite?): it delves into the factors leading us to disdain the works in popular culture. It attempts to examine the academic culture relevant to elit that persists in presenting edited collections and conference panels with few or no representatives of women or people of color (see Hayles 2017; Mencía 2017), and how this relates to the works we do and don’t study, the genres and trends we do and don’t accept as canon. It eschews defining specific genre boundaries, which exclude some and include others; for one, DF is a form without form, defined by its potential rather than its structures. For another, popular culture (and thus the DF of that popular culture) is porous, with ideas, stories, memes, properties, and practices intermingling across communities, borders, and languages: a digital plenitude “in which there is enormous diversity and everyone is ostensibly free to follow some cultural threads and ignore others” (Bolter 2019, 48). Instead, the discussions herein coalesce around communities of practice creating and sharing DF in niche cultures and gift economies, innovating with form and distribution, carving inroads into indie game and book publishing markets, and filling in the gaps between the media they are given and the stories they seek.

Introduction

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The State of Digital Fiction The definition of DF that I have applied to the work in this book is rather broad, adapted from that of Alice Bell, et al.: narrative fiction created for and experienced on a digital device “that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium” (2010, n.p.). It’s not the only term applied to this sort of work: interactive digital narrative (IDN) (Koenitz et al. 2015) is also prominent, and others such as narrative technologies, interactive storytelling, narrative games, and storygames, among others, have all been used—in academic discourse, that is. Popularly, the works go by many different names, some that stick and some that don’t: cell phone novels, webnovels, adventure games, interactive fiction, webtoons, visual novels, Twitter fiction, webcomics, Twine games, walking sims, alternate reality games, virtual reality films, interactive movies, book-apps, enhanced books, vooks, fanfiction, transmedia universes, and many, many more. Popular culture has no need to group the works under one banner, or to label them beyond the simple desire to be able to find more of the types of stories they enjoy. As a scholar, and perhaps more as a practitioner, I’m more interested in seeing what emerges and persists than in what a very small few academics want to call it. Thus, DF: narrative-based fiction that requires the unique affordances of digital media either in their creation, their audience experience, or both. I say “unique,” because almost all means of media production are now bound in the digital for the sake of cost reduction and ease of distribution; only when they incorporate the user input, haptic interactivity, multimodality, networked structures, generative texts, and/or algorithmic polylinearity do they fall into the (increasingly porous) realm of DF. The history of DF is the history of narrative, and the history of computing. Narrative is as fundamental to the human as walking upright and opposable thumbs: we can only surmise its actual origins and uses, but the fields of linguistics, narratology, psychology, anthropology, and evolution tend to agree on the basics. Narrative is how we share information, how we socialize, how we predict the future—all key aspects to the survival of a tribal, highly cooperative species (Boyd 2009; Bruner 1991; Dautenhahn 1999; Zunshine 2006). We engage in natural narratives (Fludernik 1996) in the course of our everyday lives, and our brains and bodies have responded to the importance of narrative for our survival by registering high levels of pleasure when engaging in stories and storytelling.

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If we can turn a tool, a setting, a chance encounter, or a technology into a story or a means of conveying stories, we absolutely will, whether it’s a cave wall or a box of rare metals and binary code. And we did, as soon as computers advanced beyond their status as basic calculators and war-necessitated code-breakers (see Chapter 5), programming them to simulate civilizations and tennis matches, linking them together to expand our communicative reach. As I discuss in Chapter 5, computing, however much it has impacted our world, has a history of exclusionary practices harmful not only to those it excluded, but the computing industry as a whole. These practices continue to ripple, as information sciences remain the least diverse university subject in terms of student make-up; gaming, computing’s largest contribution to popular culture, is so thoroughly steeped in toxic masculinity that entire genres of DF have emerged (such as Twine games and walking sims) from developers seeking to avoid the culture of triple-A development studios, and the most successful studios (in terms of revenue) are crumbling under the weight of decades of harassment and inequality (BBC News 2021). “Digital fiction,” of course, is an academic term and an academic field of study, unfamiliar to those outside of it. In Western contexts, the field rose out of literary studies (aka English Literature), which has shaped it significantly. While Anglo-American literary studies arose as a bourgeoisie reaction to the increasing mass literacy and decreasing power of religion during the Industrial Revolution, threatening the cultural hegemony (Eagleton 2008; see Chapter 2), most of us come into the field because we love books, whether reading, writing, or both. As students and young scholars, we enter into structures and theories that, like most institutional cultures, have changed little in the intervening decades.2 So even as new forms of creation and new communities of practice arise, we judge them from a position of institutionally embedded systemic bias, from their linguistic qualities to their authorial origins. Thus, for DF, a great deal of our scholarly discourse occurs within those confines; in order to gain recognition from our peers (a career necessity), we must engage with and add to that discourse, resulting in a great deal of elit that is “avant-garde and aggressively experimental narrative,” “purely conceptual texts,” and “theoretical claims that strongly [resemble] manifestos”—neither interesting stories or emotional connections, but “interesting textual objects” (Ryan 2016, 331, 336, 333; emphasis mine). A culture humorously and somewhat accurately portrayed by the recent Netflix series The Chair (Peet and Wyman 2021). 2

Introduction

5

Slowly, this discourse is changing, as younger scholars immersed in games and digital culture, with all its convergences and participatory spaces, enter the field and expose us all to fresher perspectives; as a field we can only be strengthened by these neophyte voices offering us chances to move on from our hegemonic origins. As Ryan points out, the works we have identified as our DF “canon” (she specifically points to the Electronic Literature Collections, volumes I–III) are the avant-garde, conceptual, and objects of interest. Markku Eskelinen argues that the hypertext works so dominant in elit discourse were never going to be fodder for anything resembling an “ordinary [publishing] career” (2008, 4), both because the mainstream publishing industry is so risk-averse and digitally illiterate, but also because elit authors either struggled to or never intended to produce anything other than experimental works. Not that any DF creator has anything less than exuberant enthusiasm, as exemplified by Stuart Moulthrop thrilling to the “promiscuous, pervasive, and polymorphously perverse connection” of hypertext (1991, 8), Deena Larsen stumbling into “the hidden wonders and unsurveyed complexities of hypertext” (2007, n.p.), and Judy Malloy delightedly sharing her database-fiction “narrabases” with her professional and personal web communities (1999). Moulthrop’s optimism even extended to the possibility that hypertext fiction could serve both popular and elite culture (1991, 9), though later he acknowledges this was perhaps naive: “I was trying to write something less challenging than afternoon, to see if hypertext could appeal to a broader reading public” (2011, n.p.)—noting that he had come to embrace hypertext fiction as niche rather than popular, valuing its place as experimental. Both have value, of course. But in circling the wagons around the “serious” and the avant-garde in order to justify its practice and study in literary academia, ye of elitism and steadfast gatekeeping, the field of elit has emphasized the experimental at the expense of the popular, shutting its gates to nonacademic practitioners and artists who have differing goals (such as earning a living from their work). The “Twine Revolution” spurred by queer indie game developers Anna Anthropy and Porpentine (now Porpentine Charity Heartscape) was a specific response not only to the toxic atmosphere of triple-A game development but also to the elitist structures pervading elit (Anthropy 2012; Porpentine 2012; cf. Ellison 2013); likewise, the popular and commercial emergence of strongly narrative-based games termed walking sims or “wandering games” (Kagen 2017) illustrates the same extrusion of creators from both gaming and elit spheres.

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What’s more, by continuing (consciously or unconsciously) the theoretical traditions of the literary and computing fields, elit scholars have not only created an “us and them” between the avant-garde and the popular, but they have also reiterated harmful hierarchies based on gender, race, and nationality: Elitism is a logic by which the avant-garde distinguishes itself from other classes of artists, generating hierarchies of art, such as high or low, advanced or delayed, experimental/innovative or not. These hierarchies are informed by a deeper, Western logic of white supremacy, that quickly racializes the aesthetic positions of high–low, advanced–delayed, formally engaged–content-driven into aesthetic or ethnic categories. (Ikeda 2021, n.p.)

Ryan Ikeda continues, noting that elit criticism emerges from a white, Eurocentric perspective, and I add cis-het, abled, and male to that list. Part of establishing a more inclusive scholarly discourse in the field is engaging with work outside of the established dominant paradigm, accepting work that doesn’t place the Anglo-American as its core audience, and that uses digital technology in contexts different from our own to produce narratives from varying traditions. Any notions of canon at all may be doomed before they even begin. Jay David Bolter points out the current “digital plenitude” as he argues that digital media have fractured mass culture into niche communities, ‘free[ing] us from a rigid definition of ‘high culture’ (2019, 25). In their examination of the effects of the digital upon cinema, André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion, and Tim Barnard argue that cinema has entered a new phase or “birth,” a “post-institutionalization” (2015, 126), “an integrative and intermedial birth involving a degree of return to porosity, to a hodgepodge, to hybridity, to crossfertilization” (2015, 123). These qualities are shared with the art form’s first “birth,” as it took shape and found its path as a new medium for expression, creativity, and narrative. Comparably, DF as a form seems to continually engage in birth and renewal, evolving so rapidly in the spaces where digital technology and cultural trends meet that it never settles long enough to be institutionalized in the same way that theater, literature, and cinema were. As such, it would probably be more appropriate to talk about it in terms of “cultural series” (as Gaudreault, Marion, and Barnard call these evolutionary processes) than any sort of established or desired canon. The framework of various overlapping and coalescing cultural series would also provide more opportunities to acknowledge and integrate the vast diversity of forms, authors, and perspectives that fall within the realm of DF.

Introduction

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Toward that integration, widening the perspective and deepening the discourse within a decades-old field with diversity-challenged origins is a difficult task, a maze of barriers. Because computing, games, and DF has been so dominated by American and Japanese industries, enormous swathes of the global population have an entirely different history with elit. Language, technology, and access have manifested in various ways throughout the world. Early forays into DF as we understand it in the Western context, primarily in commercial interactive fiction/adventure games, were very tied to the English language—they were duplicated in other languages, but the timeline was such that graphic games overtook these markets before text games had much of a chance (see Chapter 5). The independent, innovative programming that led to so much of our early DF was impossible in countries where technology was slower to develop and implement, such as India and most of the African nations, or where governmental structures and policies stifled it, as in China (see Chapter 3). These factors greatly influence how DF has developed in these areas—but we cannot deny that it has, in fact, developed, albeit in forms our limited perspectives often fail to appreciate: for example, webnovels, blog and social media fictions, and 360° films. Japan and Korea, removed from and yet paralleling some of the West’s marginalizing tendencies, nonetheless developed their own DF practices in cell phone novels, webtoons, and visual novels; these are much more mainstream and popular than their equivalents in the Western world, putting many more texts on offer even as the commerciality reduces the variety of forms. Visual novels in particular have made their way into Western culture, though as a very niche form of indie games. Language becomes an additional barrier in terms of scholarship surrounding these forms, whether in studying the DF as Western scholars, or accessing scholarship communicated in other languages. Recent work from practitioners and scholars who straddle multiple cultures and languages has made inroads into connecting the field of Western elit to that of China, the Arab World, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea, as well as to practices in the Spanish, Polish, German, Italian, and Russian languages that are often missed out. I have been reliant upon this emerging scholarship throughout this book; I am hopeful that this area of DF scholarship will continue to expand, exposing my discussion of international DF for the shallow overview that it is. I have had the delight of serving as judge for the New Media Writing Prize and a coeditor on the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 4, while I wrote this book. As a result, I have been immersed in hundreds of works of DF from

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around the world; what this has shown me is that the field of DF is enormous, even outside the realms of commercial and popular practice. For every work I’ve experienced, there are hundreds more that I haven’t; while I have tried to use as wide a lens here as possible in order to show the depth and breadth of DF in popular culture, it’s a bit like examining an elephant with a microscope. There are bound to be works, both in practice and in scholarship, that I have missed. This is in no way a reflection of the legitimacy of those works, however that may be defined, and only a reflection of the limits of my capabilities.

The Book Popular culture is, according to John Fiske ([1989] 2011), inherently progressive and resistant. While this book is about rather than of the popular, it is nevertheless my own form of resistance. I am, apparently, fueled primarily by contrariness: I wrote this book because its basic premise was (initially) rejected. It originated as a conference talk in 2018; my co-panelists’ topics were embraced (rightfully so), yet when we proposed our panel as a trio of papers for the associated journal, my examination of elit emerging in “the wild” was denied on the abstract alone. It wasn’t unexpected: “literature” has a long history of denying “popular.” As a reader and then a creative writer, I have always resided in the realm of the popular. I was a voracious reader as a child, but one summer my teachers convinced my parents I wasn’t reading “quality literature” and sent home a list of more appropriate texts to elevate my exposure. It was a long list, but the standout novels for me were Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain (1969). These books were all popular novels in their day (and, frankly, mine), and all genre fiction. My die was cast. When I went to university,3 my creative writing courses banned genre fiction and anything else that could be construed as popular; when I became an instructor myself, I insisted on allowing my students to write everything and anything they liked, retroactively soothing the years of chafing those restrictions had caused me. Indeed, as I became more aware of the fields of creative writing and literature, I doubled down on more

Again, as an act of resistance: I quit high school and went straight to college after my ninth-grade physics teacher refused to sign off on AP Biology for the following year, claiming it was “too much writing” for me. 3

Introduction

9

inclusive teaching methods and reading lists, pushing back against the patriarchy and white supremacy in which both areas were strongly grounded (see Skains 2019a; 2019c). When I rediscovered DF as part of my PhD program (having read/played simulation games and interactive fiction as a kid), my reaction to the first “experimental” work I read was very similar to Stuart Moulthrop’s: the form was brilliantly exciting, but the narrative didn’t live up to it. I wanted to create works not to be lauded by a relatively small scholarly field, but to connect with others like me: highly active, engaged readers who would take pleasure from an entertaining story with a novel format. Whether or not my works have ever succeeded in that vein, that has been my motivation: a motivation toward popular culture, grounded, like many creative acts, in the desire for social connection and recognition. Perhaps it is another manifestation of my innate oppositional nature that while my peers strove to write the next Ulysses or afternoon, I was writing YA portal fiction in both print and digital forms, and publishing hyperlinked epubs on mainstream book platforms. The experimental works of today will likely be kept alive, at least in some form, by academic literature and archives; the popular works, however, could become the next century’s Frankenstein or Dracula. Therein lies my interest: what catches on, what speaks to culture, what affects culture and history and the ways we see our world and our selves? As a writer and a researcher, my interest lies not only in the text, but in its cultural contexts. As with most critical ideas related to digital narrative, Marie-Laure Ryan got here first. She identifies three metaphorical zones of elit: “the Tropics is popular culture, the North Pole is avant-garde and aggressively experimental narrative, and the Temperate Zone is the favorite destination of an educated but not specialized public who likes to be immersed in a story, but maintains a critical attitude and an appreciation for style” (2016, 332–3). She argues that works in the avant-garde North are often lacking in cohesive, enjoyable narratives (and that they are far too text-heavy), while the popular culture of games has decided that narratives to engage a “critical attitude and appreciation for style” don’t have enough of a market to bother with. She expresses derision for “a model that divides cultural production into an innovative avant-garde and a rear-guard” with little interest in progression (ibid., 349), noting that the zones are porous, with ideas easily exchanged between them. While Ryan does not make an explicit connection, her zones map rather neatly to Pierre Bourdieu’s “competing principles of legitimacy” for cultural

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productions (1983, 50). Special applies to works produced for fellow producers— the avant-garde North exchanging experiments with one another. Popular are those efforts lauded by the masses. In the middle, Bourgeois’ taste, are works consecrated by “the dominant fractions of the dominant class … such as salons, or … academies” (ibid., 51). For Bourdieu, these correspond to poetry, the novel, and drama, respectively, but they can certainly be applied to DF, as Ryan has essentially done. Bourdieu’s discussion privileges the special, the avant-garde driving progress and innovation; he cares little for examination of the popular. In contrast, Ryan’s discussion seems to acknowledge that to reside entirely in the avant-garde North is “aggressive” and possibly untenable. For her as well, a disdain for the popular remains: the Temperate zone is presented as an ideal, a gap that DF has not yet filled save for one or two texts. The subtext is an intellectual elitism that privileges bourgeoisie tastes while discarding the popular as something created by industry for the crass purposes of profit. Yet popular culture, and the texts that shape it, is our culture. Even most of us who enjoy creating, sharing, and experiencing experimental texts spend a portion of our time playing Halo, watching Avengers films, bingeing The Witcher on Netflix, and listening to Beyoncé. Pop culture is our daily lives, the shared experiences connecting us to one another, creating social solidarity (Asimos 2021, 2); it is central to “norm generation, boundary maintenance, ritual development, innovation, and social change” (Kidd 2007, 86). What’s more, we shape our popular culture, through the media we engage with, share, review, purchase, and talk about—it cannot be imposed on us by Hollywood or game studios (Fiske [1989] 2011, 19). “Popular culture is the art of making do with what the system provides” (ibid., 21), the process of producing, reproducing, and circulating meanings. We see it in meme culture, those little images, jokes, and references that are so quickly bandied about the internet, replicating and mutating to apply to individuals’ niche cultures and society’s broader questions. As I write, the current “protagonist” of the season is Jorts the once-buttered cat, whose trials and tribulations have encompassed gender equality and workplace harassment, in addition to performing as a wholesome balm upon an increasingly despondent pandemic society. Fiske highlights this very important aspect of popular culture: in making meaning from the mass-produced texts and objects our capitalist industries provide us, we are also resisting those hegemonic forces, albeit on a micro- rather than a macro-political level (ibid., 46). Far from being a stagnant pool of endlessly repetitive and diluted massproductions, popular culture is excessive, painted in broad strokes, accepting

Introduction

11

the materials of capitalism and inverting them for its own carnivalesque uses— creating and participating in producerly texts that are, yes, “built on repetition, for no one text is sufficient, no text is a completed object. The culture consists only of meanings and pleasures in constant process” (ibid., 101). Its progressive resistance on the scale of everyday existence is what makes popular culture a phenomenon and collection of texts worth studying. Fiske argues that the popular analyst should begin with what has been ignored: “those texts that have either escaped critical attention altogether or have been noticed only to be denigrated” (ibid., 85)—“quality,” that subjective notion used as a weapon of aggression against any text that does not support or conform to the hegemonic ideal, becoming absolutely irrelevant. As I have attempted to instill in my students in every practice from technical instruction manuals to experiments in interactive prose, the success of a work lies in whether or not it meets its audience’s needs, whatever that audience and their needs may be (and it may be an audience of one, the creator). A work’s success, its relevance, is judged not only by its audience, not only by its intended audience, but also by its actual audience. The intended audience for the TV series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Faust 2010–19) is children; its popularity with an additional actual audience of adult males self-dubbed “bronies” indicates that it created relevant meaning in an unexpected community (Valiente and Rasmusson 2015). Further, popular creativity emerges from subordinated groups often excluded from producing cultural resources, such as women, people of color, those from lower socioeconomic classes and education levels, and other historically marginalized groups (Fiske [1989] 2011, 119). It is from these groups and their pop culture progressive activities that Fiske argues real social change originates, rather from any form of radical art (ibid., 151), such as Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner’s (supposedly) first-to-air-on-TV interracial kiss (Christian 2001) and Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) bringing the history and role of African American women onto the screens of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If DF is to become culturally relevant, it must be processed in popular culture. The good news for those of us who love DF, of course, is that DF has long been practiced and embraced in popular culture—it’s time that academia reciprocates. The organization of this book is, like any individual reading of a DF, only one of its many potential iterations. Loosely, the chapters are centered on DF genres linked by the themes I deemed relevant; another researcher, even myself in a different time or place, would be liable to arrange them in very different ways. Likewise, DF has no defined form, format, content, age group, or style, and

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this nebulousness trickles down into all the different codes and communities of practice. Many works of DF—many genres of DF—can easily be labeled with multiple tags: an alternate reality story may also be a Twitter fiction, which may also be a creepypasta, which may also be archontic, and so on and so forth. I have drawn my arbitrary lines for the purposes of having a way to talk about the works and the themes arising from them; the nomenclature within is in no way meant to be field-defining, only sufficient so that my readers understand the functions and features of the works I discuss. With that caveat, the first section of the book examines the wider contexts of DF. Chapter 2, “Innovation Origins,” situates DF in the context of creative and technological innovation, establishing the model of cultural cycles of art and industry as they evolve from individual needs and invention to integration into mainstream acceptance and use. Innovation, at its core, is an individual pursuit, driven by material needs, self-actualization goals, and emotional desires; it is far more common than we realize, given that many worthwhile innovations never progress to the mainstream. That mainstream acceptance is, conversely, industry-based, as capitalist structures mine these innovations for novel products to attract fractured consumer attention. DF originates in the same innovations that computer games do, yet games became a dominant cultural force while DF occupies more niche aspects of mainstream culture; this chapter examines DF as an innovation whose cultural barriers put it on a significantly different path. Chapter 3, “Digital Fiction Emergence,” traces the many instances and variations of DF as it emerged, and continues to emerge, in languages and cultures around the world. It begins with a much more extensive definition of DF for the purposes of this book, including the aspects of interactivity, participation, and multimedia that place a (porous) boundary around what I categorize as DF. An overview of DF’s evolution follows, with discussion as to how it has been shaped by variations in geographical politics and economies, pre-digital narrative traditions and texts, institutional and educational structures, and technology infrastructures. Finally, the chapter offers a whirlwind around-the-world tour of DF and its formation in many different contexts, with specific focus on Western DF in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, and German; India; the Arab World; central and south Africa; China; Korea; and Japan. With the understanding that technological infrastructures, laws, and languages are not universal, Chapter 4, “Creative Democracy,” examines the prevailing notion that the internet, conversely, is universal, and universally open and accessible. A great deal of DF practice and works exist in a “gift

Introduction

13

economy,” created and shared for free in an exchange of art, narrative, pleasure, and community standing. The chapter examines how this aligns with the initial premise of the “California Ideal” of the early internet, yet never achieves a true utopia of a free market web-based democracy. Even if we are humans on the web, we are still humans, and we brought all our baggage with us, including culturally enforced perspectives on whose work has value and whose doesn’t, leading to a networked culture that in many ways exacerbates the worst tendencies of offline humanity. Additionally, not everyone accesses tech and the web through the same means, their media channels shaped and directed by governments and corporations; the sheer amount of materials online have in any case atomized our attention into subnuclear particles. Any platform that rectifies any of these access or attention issues is almost necessarily exploiting its users and participants for capital gain—yet another obscuring gloss of paint over the transparent democracy the internet was purported to provide. Given that the internet is DF’s sole habitat (as opposed to books, film, and games, which had/ have materialities outside of digital networks), it is perhaps unsurprising that DF fulfils multiple cult cultural niches rather than a major role as a singular media genre. Chapter 5, “Evolution from Mainstream to Niche: The Case of Interactive Fiction,” moves into Part Two, beginning the examination of specific types and genres of DF in popular culture. It doesn’t, however, leave the contexts of DF behind, as it offers a particular perspective on how Western culture has extensively and repeatedly excluded women from computing, art, and literature, and how this shaped the early rise and fall of DF’s first foray into popular culture, interactive fiction (or adventure games). While women were essential to the early days of computing before and after the Second World War, their subsequent expulsion in favor of men eventually resulted in a toxically maledominated industry. This was exemplified in the Infocom Corporation, the leading producer of interactive fiction during the 1980s. Infocom epitomizes the notion of “men creating for men,” producing only one woman-led work in its entire oeuvre (offering it somewhat apologetically to its expected audience of men and boys). Its exclusion of a large potential audience of women, who make up the majority of “heavy readers” the company desired, and its egodriven tendencies toward untenably risky business decisions ultimately led to its demise. Happily, however, interactive fiction continued in a niche, internet gift economy, adopting practices that widened its community, and it persists as one of the most consistent DF communities today.

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Astrid Ensslin uses the phrase “literary gaming” to examine and theorize works of DF (2014). In Chapter 6, however, I use it in a more restrictive sense, applying it to DF in the overlap between print and digital media: mobile apps (including book-apps), webcomics, visual novels, and walking sims. By their nature, mobile apps, visual novels, and walking sims participate in a market economy, as they are distributed through ecommerce platforms: Google Play, The App Store, and Steam. The structures of such platforms coerce the developers to define them either as books or games, when in reality they are both and neither. This stumbling block to commercial publication and distribution has negatively impacted DF’s ability to transition from gift to market economy, as issues of attention and discoverability obscure it from mainstream awareness. Webcomics, in contrast, straddle both gift and market economies, adopting subscription, patronage, and merchandizing models to monetize the attention garnered by varying levels of freely offered content online. Chapter 6 also includes a discussion of several DF studios and/or platforms that have created “circular DF economies,” carving out sustainable commercial niches for their literary games through development of free authoring tools, community publishing, and recognizable textual conventions (some of which arguably constitute their own subgenres of DF). These communities include Choice of Games, inkle, and Twine. Chapter 7 engages much more deeply with the literary side of DF in ergodic fiction, using Espen Aarseth’s foundational definition of ergodic as texts that require nontrivial effort to traverse (1997). As so much of the discourse around DF and elit “antecedents” or forebears in print literature is built upon that of the historically exclusionary literary studies fields, I have adopted an approach that illuminates works often neglected in the preceding literature. Tracing our proclivity for ergodic literature back to the origins of the print novel itself (in eleventh-century Japan), I connect practices of cognitive and conceptual interactivity, and textual multiplicity to the feminine. In doing so, I highlight works and authors that cycled through popular culture even while (or perhaps because) they challenged their readers through ergodic content and/or structure. This discussion includes works of print literature (pre- and post-digital), gamebooks, and a still nascent hypertextual practice within ebook publishing, “hyperbooks.” I dive into the deep end of digital again in Chapter 8, looking at how DF emerges in immersive storyworlds—those of interactive movies, TV, and drama; alternate reality games and stories, including MUDs/MOOs and social media fictions; augmented, virtual, and mixed realities; and digitally enabled

Introduction

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performances such as netprov and immersive theater. This is a very broad swath of DF to cover in one chapter, but they are all connected by the liminal effect they create. These works that span the actual world and the digital create a “hypnagogic” effect, a pleasurable cognitive dissonance caused by simultaneously inhabiting a physical reality and a dream. It’s the same magic sensation sought after in lucid dreaming, fantasy, and role-playing. Further, these are often highly successful examples of DF, in terms of popular awareness and even commercial revenues, and show that mainstream audiences are more than just tolerant of interactivity in their narratives—they are delighted by it, if done according to expectations. The extended realities—virtual, augmented, and mixed—remain more of a potentiality at this stage, but given current commercial investment in the technology, it is likely they will become a more significant factor in the near future. Finally, in Chapter 9 I present perhaps the most popular and pervasive form of DF in the mainstream, not to mention some of the most lucrative works: archontic fiction. Abigail Derecho deems fanfiction an “archontic” practice, building as it does a growing archive of texts all responding to and feeding back into one another and a foundational source text (2006). Thanks to the network and multimodal capabilities of digital media, archontic creative practices have expanded to include more than fanfic alone (although elements of digitality and communal practice lead me to include fanfic within DF as well), into collaborative storyworlds, transmedia franchises, and spreadable culture as it incorporates memes and social media narratives. Archontic culture is by nature popular and participatory: there is perhaps no better example than fanfic of communities taking the products they are given (source texts) and “making do” with them, envisioning their storyworlds and characters with new contexts to better suit the audiences’ needs and contexts. Communities engaging in archontic practice also include collaborative stories, sites where community members contribute to a growing wiki based in the same storyworld, and transmedia narratives, where multiple “above-the-line” producers contribute multiple texts to an expanding universe, as well as individual creators incorporating multiple “unmixed” media as separate pieces of a collective whole. These communities include massive media franchises earning billions in revenue, as well as grassroots creators contributing narrative for social enjoyment. They extend to all corners of media and the internet, their communities of practice so enticing, so popular that there is perhaps no other form that can compete with archontic fictions. Given that these are social storytelling practices dating from our very origins as a species,

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it is unsurprising that archontic fictions, more than any other, are the future of narrative. In the course of researching and writing this book, I discovered many things about the culture and community in which I practice. Things that explain (if never excuse) many elements of practice and discourse that I struggle to reconcile with a field whose people I consider family, and whose work has influenced me in every aspect. I have also discovered so many works of DF, including ergodic print literature, from all corners of the world, narrative traditions, and linguistic origins, that I am certain my to-read/play list will never approach a conclusion, future works notwithstanding (and for that reason, I have included an annotated list of the works noted in this text). I began with the notion that, finally, elit was entering into the mainstream, that there were tiny indications of its burgeoning in interactive television episodes and indie games that favored narrative over gunplay. I finished with the understanding that DF has always been a part of our popular culture, and that only our own biases prevent us from recognizing it.

Part One

Digital Fiction Contexts

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2

Innovation Origins

Historical cycles of art innovation and technological innovation follow similar pathways, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable and possible, moving from experimental practices to cultural and even industrial interest and usefulness as they enter the mainstream. Popular entertainment media straddle these fields, continually seeking new methods of storytelling in both content and technology as they seek to peddle narratives for monetary profit. Novelty is, however, significantly flattened by the time it makes its way to mainstream culture; the truly experimental is fascinating for only the few experienced enough in the relevant field to understand it and enjoy its subversion. For innovation to be appreciated by the many, it must necessarily be simplified, filtered, its rough edges sanded and presented in mostly familiar packaging, so that enough of today’s increasingly fractured audience can understand and enjoy it sufficiently for a commercial entity to turn a profit. In other words, in today’s neoliberal Western society, innovation is individual and niche, and the process that brings innovation into mainstream culture is overwhelmingly capitalist. Digital fiction (DF), as a nascent storytelling form that subverts the very structures of narrative as well as integrating a plethora of new media technologies, is in almost every instance an individual innovation, a primordial pool of rapidly cycling attempts to create something that will be fresh enough to be novel, and stable enough to persist. Its inherent instability, its dynamism and variety, work for the former and against the latter. Nonetheless, it persists, albeit in a variety that resists the overall conformation to a singular, recognizable, labelable and marketable genre. Specific instances, or species, of DF have cycled from experimental to mainstream (and back out again), through the “periods of integration, equilibrium and disintegration” (Chapin 1925, 600) typical of cultural cycles, often emerging in parallel from different sources. These cycles form “chain links” of innovation, “a learning process in which knowledge is constantly developing and being modified in an iterative series of feedback

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loops” (Bakhshi, McVittie, and Simmie 2008, 47)—a process that is both material and social, needing not only physical and technological cohesion, but also recognition and acceptance from sociocultural spheres that would make use of the innovation and seek to reproduce and mimic it (Coeckelbergh 2018, 509). As such, innovation alone is insufficient to launch a new form into cultural awareness and even stability: the ebook and eInk existed for a decade before Amazon’s business innovations pushed them into mainstream acceptance and use. If invention is the mainspring of material (and thus human) evolution (Stewart 1958, 73), then media inventions are the instruments of humanism, “dynamically engaged within and as part of the socially realized protocols that define sites of communication and sources of meaning” (Gitelman 2006, 170). For DF as an innovation to take hold in mainstream culture, it must be a site of communication for the mainstream, for significant proportions of our cultures, global and local, to parse it for meaning and take some pleasure and understanding from that. There is no doubt that DF is now a part of mainstream, popular culture (as the remaining chapters of this book will demonstrate); this chapter explores how the chain-link cycles of ingenuity, innovation, progression, and saturation have evolved DF, as well as how aspects of its literary history have caused its disintegration in some spheres.

Innovation Cycles “Innovation” is often paired with “technological,” and thus we have a tendency to connect the notions of ingenuity and invention with tools, machines, and computers (Coeckelbergh 2018). But of course it also applies to concepts, organization, and, most relevant here, art and literature. Art and literature, in these days of economic downturns and austerity measures, tend to be sidelined as extraneous, even frivolous. Yet they account for significant contributions to the economy, culture, and health, and they infuse almost every aspect of dayto-day life. Humans have a constant and driving need for mental stimulation, whether that be in daily tasks like work, or in cultural enrichment like reading or gaming. Innovation in arts and literature is therefore occurring continuously, whether or not any given experimentation becomes part of mainstream awareness and practice. A confounding factor is that we are largely unaware of most innovations—the ones that fail to garner significant attention. Regardless of their fitness for purpose (e.g., a light bulb that actually casts light), many



Innovation Origins

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innovations fail for many other reasons, including timing, resistance, lack of attention, and lack of investment. The innovations themselves arise from various motivations and sources. With regard to DF, many who create are highly experienced literature readers and writers, often researcher-practitioners with university positions. This presents one side of DF innovation motivation and source: playful experimentation from a position of relative “wealth.” On the other side is necessity, which drives a great deal of innovation outside of art, from better weapons in war to agricultural seeds with higher yields. In DF, necessity-driven innovation is often related to job and career prospects. From the creative writing side, aspiring writers constantly strive to be “original,” to provide novelty1 in their books that will attract agents, editors, buyers, and readers. The game and digital development side asks for similar “palatable” innovation. Yet both industries provide little opportunity for newcomers, particularly if those newcomers identify with or are addressing inequalities in society, such as ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+, religious minorities, or disabled people. Many of these marginalized voices turn to alternative streams of creativity that have not yet been heavily colonized by existing powers in creative industries, as was the case in the early days of elit (Coverley 2017; Goicoechea and Sánchez 2017). In many ways, DF remains an underexplored wilderness encouraging such innovation by necessity. In both these categories, however, the innovation is largely driven by individual interest. An artist or inventor plays with new ways to express or accomplish something; a doctor or engineer is tasked with developing a more efficient tool or to solve a logistics problem. Even when a team or existing corporation produces innovation, it is the culmination of individual motivation to create, to succeed in a career or contribute to a project. To shine. In these cases, the processes of innovation and diffusion of that innovation are muddled and hard to differentiate: individual innovations within existing corporations are not usually highlighted to the public, and most of what the public sees is the finished result and the diffusion. Diffusion of innovations in mainstream culture is almost always capitalist: mass production, marketing, and distribution of a product for the means of profit, from electric cars to ecommerce to streaming television. Digital media afford noncapitalist diffusion of innovations, such as memes and DF that hits that sweet spot between novelty and accessibility

While remaining familiar enough to be marketable, of course. 1

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Figure 1  Screenshots from 17776 (Bois 2017). This freely available, widely shared hyperfiction conveys the dialogue between sentient satellites observing millennialong and nationwide American football games in a highly accessible multimodal infinite scroll format.

(e.g., sportswriter Jon Bois’s viral 2017 hyperfiction 17776; see Figure 1; see also Chapter 9), because its ease of replicability and sharing takes the brunt of production, marketing, and distribution costs, assuming a work can garner sufficient attention to be shared.

Individual Ingenuity Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. Just as often, they don’t really know, because idea-generation in art is a very internal process, with little record left behind to expose how the mind eventually arrived at the idea of a modern Black woman time-traveling to the antebellum southern United States (Octavia Butler’s Kindred) or an assassin robot who develops humanity (Martha Wells’s Murderbot). Innovation for specific interventions comes with more documentation, as the inventor records what did and didn’t work in the iterative process toward the end goal. Yet what exactly is “innovation”? Is it a new way of working? A machine? Inspiring people to look at or do things in a new way? Innovation can be all of these things. It can be a machine that automates separating cotton from plant debris, a surgical technique to repair faulty heart valves, a method of workplace organization that improves both employee morale



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and productivity, and a work of art that turns its audience’s understanding of the world upside down. Across many fields and practices, innovation is defined in different ways. In academia, we confer PhDs that demonstrate new and original knowledge, through new discoveries, new methods, new applications, and new theories. Hasan Bakhshi, Eric McVittie, and James Simmie define innovation as an output, the result of combining new ideas with existing research and development resources (2008, 45). This definition calls attention to two important factors: that innovation is a process, rather than some form of divine inspiration, and it draws from and builds on existing knowledge and resources. In other words, brilliant new inventions in any field take hard work, and an influx of some form of capital, whether in the form of knowledge, materials, and/or financial support. This need for capital is the base for one school of thought as to where innovation arises. Pierre Bourdieu theorizes that innovation, or “avant-garde undertakings which precede the demands of the market,” depend on “possession of substantial economic and social capital” (1983, 67). This line of thinking posits that many human innovations throughout our history have been developed out of “leisure, free activity, creation” (Mumford 1934, 379), that as we find ourselves with free time and plentiful resources, we have room to experiment and invent, from art to machinery to philosophy. On a surface level, this theory has a certain draw, and the historical record of “gentleman scholars” seems to confirm that enough wealth to afford leisure time and the ability to weather risk is a key factor in successful innovation: Eli Whitney, Charles Darwin, Johannes Gutenberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Lord Byron (and his daughter, Ada Lovelace), Alan Turing, Bach, Steves Jobs and Wozniak, Bill Gates—all were born into middle- to upper-class families, if not outright aristocracy. Even historical artists, inventors, and scholars who were born into relative poverty—Edison, Tesla, Keats, Ford—nonetheless benefited from wealth that the vast swath of humans (in the Euro-centric Western world) were absolutely denied: they were white men who attended school, could get jobs, could get financing and loans, could start businesses or sell to existing companies, and could travel. They were able to learn their fields, work in relevant industries, and pitch or sell their work to well-connected social contacts. Thus innovation seems to come from leisure not because, according to similar men’s conjectures, wealth affords them the time to experiment and the cushion to take risks, but because others’ lack of such wealth and privilege prevents them from doing the same. For these sources, innovation arises from necessity rather than economic and/or social capital. Necessity encompasses ad hoc creativity—reuse, DIY,

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make-do, or “MacGyvering”—“quick makeshift improvised things to serve immediate precise needs” (Chorpash 2013, 2). It also includes desire paths (e.g., shortcuts worn into paths through green spaces indicating where people “desire” to walk) and hacking, whether that be creative uses of existing products, or subversive uses to effect a form of social hacking. Lisa Gitelman presents an interesting case study of innovation in the form of Edison’s phonograph (2006). Edison invented the phonograph (an instance of innovation through relative wealth) primarily for business use as a dictation device. Even when the nickel phonograph (essentially a novelty item in shops and pharmacies that, for the price of US$0.05, recorded and played back the user’s voice) proliferated, it was intended to record and play speech. The phonograph was invented to replace business letters, not symphonies. Yet consumers, and eventually producers, “hacked” the device for their own purposes, developing “new social practices for producing and consuming music, new corporate structures for capitalizing and disseminating performance” (ibid., 73). Innovation created the phonograph, but it also subverted the phonograph’s purpose toward a desire path as people— artists, in their way—responded to the material, which cooperated to move the device and its uses in new directions (Coeckelbergh 2018, 506).

Mainstream Adoption The question of how singular innovations progress to mainstays in wider culture requires further digging into the phenomena of innovations and how they evolve beyond novelty status and into mainstream awareness and use (becoming, eventually, established norms). Here I am going to distinguish between “cult” adoption and “mainstream” or popular adoption and awareness: cult adoption or awareness applies to innovations that profligate and persist in niche groups or subcultures. These include phenomena such as fanzines and fanfiction, meme culture, maker groups, the resurgence of “crafts” such as knitting and home beer brewing, to name only a few. The internet has certainly aided niche subcultures, as it allows people from disparate geographical, age, culture, language, and social circles to locate one another via websites, forums, and social media. Thus many of these subcultures grow, and as a public we are generally more aware of them than we were pre-internet. Much of DF, in fact, has proliferated as one subculture or another, such as the interactive fiction (IF) and webcomics communities. Mainstream adoption, however, is inherently capitalist. The ruling classes— those with financial and social capital—utilize technology not, as early technological



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utopic discourses would have it, for the good of all, but rather to increase private profit (Mumford 1934, 27). Certainly, there are very few innovations in mainstream culture that are not driven by commercialization: converting an invention or idea into a product through production, manufacturing, packaging, marketing, and distribution (Rogers 1983, 183). Most innovations do not make it to the mainstream; it takes a great many elements aligning in the right place at the right time for any particular invention or new idea to succeed into mainstream culture. It is almost never a case of “if you build it, they will come.” The innovation must have potential for commercialization, but it must also come to the attention of someone (or someones) who recognize that potential and have the ability to act upon it. They must be capable of either making use of existing infrastructures for manufacture, marketing, and distribution, or have sufficient existing capital to create new ones. They must then be capable of marketing to and reaching a large enough proportion of the population to make their investment profitable. Consider two significant juggernauts of commercial innovation in the digital age: Amazon and Netflix. Neither created a new product. Their innovations were in devising new ways (internet ordering) to reach a wider customer base using existing infrastructures (postal services) to distribute known products (books—initially rare and out-of-print books—and DVDs). Their businesses followed the standard economic “S-curve” (see Figure 2), as they grew slowly at first, then expanded rapidly until they gained wide or mainstream coverage, then at a slower rate as they achieved market saturation (Rogers 1983, 244). Even their later innovations—ebooks/readers and streaming services—were simply combining existing technologies with their now-significant customer base. It is easier, of course, to point out innovations that made it to mainstream awareness than those that failed. Everett M. Rogers, though writing in 1983, noted that “the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that 90 percent of all new products fail within four years of their release” (1983, 211); we simply don’t hear about the great majority of that 90 percent. There are likely thousands of aspiring Ada Lovelaces and Steve Jobses laboring in basements and garages and university fab labs whose inventions never go beyond family and friends. The timing is wrong, or they can’t convince investors of the product’s worth, or the marketing goes awry, or the manufacturing and distribution lines fail. Even if a product does make it to market, the predicted desire simply may not be there, often because of a failure to understand the culture of the target market (Linden and Finn 2003). Amazon’s Kindle Worlds falls into this category, as

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Figure 2  S-shaped adoption of innovation curve.

it attempted to commercialize fanfiction through rather restrictive licensing and publication—anathema to established fanfic culture. We frequently see corporate failures such as these, and those from similarly giant corporations like Google and Apple, as well as smaller endeavors like favored authors or musicians whose newer works seem to fall short of previous, because they’re already visible. Unlike innovations from unknowns, we see them when they fail. In many ways, this makes known entities—corporations, content producers, authors, music acts, actors, publishers—risk-averse. They are unwilling to test new avenues out of fear that they will damage their current standing. They often become gatekeepers against innovations from other sources, those that have less to lose: for example, Amazon significantly privileging indie publishers who use their services exclusively or FaceBook buying Instagram and WhatsApp to control a very large slice of the social media pie. Even in the relatively nonmainstream realm of DF, Eastgate Systems maintained its proprietary hold (and elite price points) over its StorySpace software and the early cultural series of hypertexts it published. Thus it is clearly insufficient to merely note what an innovation does that’s new and improved. What is most useful to consumers or other sort of public is not always what makes it to mainstream commercialization. Timing, culture, expectations, connections—so many elements contribute to the relative success or failure of an innovation that it is almost safe to say that the innovation itself



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is actually less important than the culture that receives it. After all, like DF, many innovations arise independently from more than one source. Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us that “Gutenberg’s invention by itself is insufficient to account for the fifteenth-century communications revolution” (1980, 39), echoing Mumford’s supposition that “Not merely must one explain the existence of the new mechanical instruments: one must explain the culture that was ready to use them and profit by them so extensively” (1934, 4). Computer games and DF, these new mechanical instruments, provide a strong model for how innovations can result in either untethered success or relatively unknown niche.

Digital Fiction as Innovation Computer games (and video games) and DF have a common ancestry (explored more in Chapter 5). Mabel Addis and William McKay’s The Sumerian Game (1964), Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger’s Oregon Trail (1971), and Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1975–7) are all held up as examples of early computer games, in addition to the standard examples of Spacewar! and Pong (Juul 1999, 7–8). A distinction is made between “action” games like Pong and narrative games like The Sumerian Game: the former lent itself easily to the boom of arcade games in the 1970s and 1980s, before home computers became common, where a single coin could take you as far as your skill could go. Narrative games, however, were more suited to private play, where clues and maps could be noted down and developed, and progress could be saved. Little cultural distinction is made between these genres of computer games; they were and are computer games, drawn from analogue ancestors and cousins such as board games, choice-based narrative novels, and table-top roleplaying games (RPGs), some of which involved narrative and some of which didn’t. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can see the origins of DF in the more narratively oriented works. Both aspects of these works as computer games went brilliantly mainstream, from experimental and/or educational origins and hobby innovations, to arcades, personal computers (PCs), and home consoles. Today, gaming and game development is a US$126.5 billion industry (Clement 2021), outstripping all other media industries combined; DF, however, is still largely a niche subculture, despite its shared origin. The difference lies in culture, from one that is populated with early adopters to one that is purposely founded in tradition and maintaining status quo.

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The Innovation of Digital Fiction Drawing lines between innovation pathways—those of leisure and those of necessity—is certainly not a clear binary. Many instances of experimentation and invention, particularly in the area of DF, are amalgams of the two. Arguably the very first DF arose from the collaboration of IBM and Mabel Addis, an accomplished New York teacher with an undergraduate degree in ancient history and psychology from Barnard and a master’s in education from Columbia University (Henley 2020; Willaert 2019). The relative wealth of the IBM Corporation in the 1960s combined with Addis’s wealth of knowledge regarding education and ancient history (boosted by a large grant from the US Office of Education) to create The Sumerian Game (Addis and McKay 1964), the first computer game to incorporate narrative as well as the first “edutainment” game (Smith 2020, 226; cf. Wing 1966). The Sumerian Game thus established DF, the “serious game” genre, civilization and simulation games, and text-based adventures out of the interleaving environments of wealth and necessity: the skills, funds, and capacity to develop an experimental educational tool, along with the need to develop more and better lessons in economics and pre-Greek history. Other early DF and games (which at this stage, were one and the same) followed similar paths. The Oregon Trail (Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger 1971), perhaps the best-known serious game, was developed by a trio of student teachers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, wanting to experiment with coding and gaming and needing to deliver a teaching unit on nineteenthcentury Western expansion (Wong 2017). Will Crowther developed his Colossal Cave Adventure (1975–7) both from leisure, as Crowther was a programmer with sufficient knowledge, downtime, and access to equipment to construct the spelunking tale, but also from a personal need to connect more with his children as his family went through a divorce (Jerz 2007; see also Chapter 5). These early experiments in narrative computer games fall into what Lewis Mumford calls “playful innovations,” arising in a peaceful society with time and energy to experiment and invent largely for the sake of the personal pleasure (1934, 101); these early works represent the digital version of the eighteenth-century clocks, toys, and automata Mumford refers to. In the decades that followed, DF would continue innovating primarily from this position of relative wealth and leisure, eventually diverging into two (overlapping and somewhat messy) streams: creative industries and academia.



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The former stream correctly predicted that the popularity of the early text adventure games paired with a maturing population, who learned from them in schools and were now investing in home machines of their own, would lead to a very promising market for these texts as entertainment: the Infocom era of text adventure games on floppy disks was born. The latter stream continued Crowther’s practice of creating hypertexts and multimedia works on external disks and drives (pre-internet) and distributing them according to the familiar royalty publishing model for books (though, of course, many just gave them out). An enterprising group of academics established Eastgate Systems (Bolter and Joyce 1987), which sold both the software platform for creating these hypertexts (StorySpace) and published the works themselves, an innovation that was both a necessity (as no publisher existed for these works) and a product of wealth (academics have the benefit of full-time salaries, knowledge, and networks to draw on when experimenting with new endeavors). The development of subsequent dedicated DF platforms mirrored that of Eastgate and StorySpace. Graham Nelson developed Inform (1993b), the dominant authoring platform for parser-based text adventure games (known as “interactive fiction” or IF), as a hobby and coding cred in the wake of the Infocom era’s decline while pursuing his PhD at Oxford (Maher and Nelson 2019; Nelson 2018). Chris Klimas created Twine (2009–), a popular tool for indie games and hypertexts, in spare time between his job as a web developer and his graduate courses at the University of Baltimore because he was dissatisfied with the existing DF tools (largely Inform and other parser-based platforms) (Parker 2018). Ink and ChoiceScript (and their various iterations) are freely available tools created by indie IF/games companies inkle and Choice of Games; according to their respective web pages (Choice of Games n.d.; inkle n.d.), both these tools were developed in-company to create IF/games in the desire path of each, and later released to the end users. The result of these more commercial— yet still free—innovations is to benefit the companies themselves, as they build communities that both purchase and play their outputs, and create new outputs for publication. DF creators were not and have never been restricted to platforms specifically purposed for digital narrative; in fact, some practitioners and scholars determinedly turn away from such platforms in the interest of crafting and studying “truly” original work. These practices, again, are a combination of wealth-innovation (artists and writers who have the privilege to create works with almost no expectation of monetary return on investment) and

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necessity-innovation (they are forging desire paths to the work they want to author through software programs not intended to be used in this manner). DF creators have used graphic design tools (Macromedia/Adobe Flash), ebooks (ePub), social media (forums, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and even YouTube), business tools (Microsoft Office, Google Forms, Google Script), mobile apps, artificial intelligence, various programming languages, and plain old HTML/CSS/JavaScript to populate the web with a vast array of textual forms. Many of these are experiments that are largely unrepeated (such as Porpentine’s All Your Time-Tossed Selves (2016), constructed with Google Forms), but many catch on and become DF genres of their own, such as Twitter bots, generated novels, Flash works, and interactive films. The question remains: why are some innovations repeatedly taken up enough to catch on (as computer games clearly have), and others languish as once-promising-novelties (like a great deal of DF)?

Mainstream Games and Niche Digital Fiction Despite their common origins, games and DF operate in very different cultures. Introducing the new technology of the computer to games has proven vastly different from introducing it to books. Rogers describes a similar puzzling dynamic from the introduction of Roman Catholicism to the Native Americans of the Southwestern United States (colonialism issues notwithstanding): in New Mexico, tribes in the east adopted the new religion readily, while western tribes violently revolted. His conclusion was that the eastern tribes’ patriarchal-based religion made them more favorable to the patriarchal Catholicism, while the western’s matriarchal-based religion predisposed them to outright rejection. “Old ideas are the main tools with which new ideas are assessed. One cannot deal with an innovation except on the basis of the familiar and the old fashioned” (1983, 224). Acceptance of the computer, and all the changes it wrought, is greatly dependent on the existing cultural attitudes of the group contemplating its adoption. Games arose from a tech-literate, early-adopter culture. It is no coincidence that the first games were developed by tech companies, university laboratories, and hobbyist programmers: these are people who are eager for change, open to new ways of working, capable of handling risk, with more favorable attitudes toward science and greater knowledge of and access to newly emerging technologies and concepts (Rogers 1983). Early game developers were influenced by the early



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twentieth-century wave of technological utopianism:2 “better living through science,” the moon landings, the futuristic tech-enhanced fiction of H. G. Wells and Isaac Asimov and Star Trek and Amazing Stories. This culture’s discourse for decades had been looking forward to just such an innovation as the computer, something that would provide a wealth of resources, time, leisure, adventure, and, yes, war. They eagerly embraced it for what it could offer in terms of positive change, and there was very little discourse as to its negative potential (such as driving board games out of existence). Their early adoption, as we now see in the enormity of the games industry, was well-rewarded. Just as games drew from war and sport, they also drew from narrative. Many early text adventure games were based on table-top RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, but they also included adaptations of popular novels and stories that might have been at home on a shelf next to Ursula Le Guin or Raymond Chandler: for example, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams and Meretzky 1984), A Mind Forever Voyaging (Meretzky 1985), and Trinity (Moriarty 1986). Infocom’s era in mainstream culture, the era of the text adventure game, largely ended when PCs and games consoles progressed to more sophisticated graphical capabilities (see Chapter 5)—though its niche culture continued as “interactive fiction,” thanks to efforts such as Graham Nelson’s Inform software (1993b). Yet, the industries most closely associated with narrative—book and magazine publishing, literary scholars and critics— took the opposite viewpoint on computer-aided storytelling to the tech industry. They (almost violently) rejected them, repeatedly, at least in Western culture. The history of publishing and the study of English literature tells us a lot about why the computer as an innovation in narrative was rejected. Publishing, while founded on one of the most well-known and world-changing innovations in history, has nonetheless had 600 years to become embedded into culture. As a technology, printing has had very little competition in all that time—the publishing industry has incorporated upgrades, including laser printing and print-on-demand, but few to no “disruptive” innovations. Print culture is defined by notions of authority, copyright, and permanence, all very top-down and hierarchical. Combined with the modern publishing industry’s declining share of a very competitive media market, this embedded culture makes for an attitude

With the exceptions of pioneering women such as Mabel Addis, Kathryn Johnson, Ada Lovelace, Hedy LaMarr, and Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.), these were also largely white cis-het maledominated fields, a trend that continues to infect the games industry and culture today. 2

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that is extremely resistant to change. Even minor innovations are treated as oneoff novelties or fodder only for critics and scholars, such as the experimentation with narrative forms and conventions that present in texts like Finnegan’s Wake, Ulysses, the Oulipo movement, The Left Hand of Darkness, House of Leaves, Hopscotch, Composition No. 1, The Unfortunates, and even Ryan North’s To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure choose-your-path Hamlet adaptation (Cortázar 1966; Danielewski 2000; Johnson 1969; Joyce 1939; 1922; Le Guin 1969; North 2015c; Saporta 1962). Ebooks, which are merely digital representations of hard copy books and thus do not alter anything other than the delivery mechanisms and materials of print narrative, likewise presented a widely resisted innovation. Despite existing in some form or another in approximately the same timeline as the computer game (since the mid-twentieth century), the ebook had very limited mainstream acceptance until Amazon pushed it there almost by force, presenting its own dedicated ereader in 2007 and strong-arming publishers into ebook agreements (Laquintano 2016; Skains 2019b; Warren 2010). Ebooks bloomed as a result (in addition to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing aiding indie publishers), and the subsequent proliferation of mobile personal devices and ereader apps helped to establish the form in the mainstream. The scholarly culture surrounding English-language literature (with knock-on effects to post-colonial cultures) puts further brakes on any element of change or innovation within the field. The study of English literature as an academic subject is founded in efforts to maintain specific cultural values and norms, particularly those of the patriarchal, aristocratic, late-nineteenth-century Britain. With wars, literacy, the decline of religion, and the rise of industry bringing wholesale changes to British society, the study of English literature was seen as a handy replacement for the indoctrination of shared cultural values in all British citizens (Eagleton 2008). The literary canon was established not to laud innovation, but to quash it—to cultivate, particularly in the revolution-prone working classes, an emotionally driven loyalty to the existing social hierarchy: [English literature] would communicate to [the masses] the moral riches of bourgeois civilization, impress upon them a reverence for middle-class achievements, and, since reading is an essentially solitary, contemplative activity, curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action. (ibid., 22)

If this blatant purpose was unknown (or tacitly accepted) in literature departments, classrooms, and publishing houses throughout the Englishspeaking world by the time computers entered the scene, it was nonetheless by



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then entirely embedded in the pedagogy and practices of all associated with written narrative. Martin Luther had used the printed word to lead a revolution against Catholic dominance and dogma; Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and their contemporaries used it to create a new religion and culture of stagnancy based on English patriarchy, colonialism, and classism. Thus when computers entered the scene, the literary, writing, reading, publishing, and critiquing culture that had been taught with the English literature canon and embedded with those particular values outright rejected every element. Literature—prose, poetry, the novel, even the theatrical play— had become the measure of civilization, and any attempt to alter it was an attack, not only on a nation and its history but on each individual personally. Literary culture has many techniques for othering and thus discounting (and even decrying) works that emerge despite its efforts, including burdening any innovation with a “genre” label: experimental, trade, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, special interest. Many of these encompass work that is primarily written by or for an audience other than white cis-het males: young adult, romance, women’s lit, chick lit, and “identity” genres based on race, religion, or sexuality. While current discourse is using this practice to forge new paths (e.g., authors and publishers creating LGBTQIA+ fiction, BlackLit, Afrofuturism), both industry and scholarly literary culture remain intensely conservative and defensive. If it is gauche to push back against the movement toward gender, sexuality, and race inclusivity in the field, there are few social norms to prevent it from rejecting technology in the same way; the industry may be unable to resist “identity” publishing, but it can and does actively resist all things digital. Thus one of the best innovation-killing phrases emerged from literary culture: “the death of the book.” Much debate has circled around this topic, from pessimistic prognosticators to skeptical scholars. Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a relatively steady rise in the use of the phrase since the mid-1960s, coinciding not only with the first computer games and DF, but also with home televisions and Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), which lamented the stagnation and authoritative effects of print on culture in general, and predicted a decline of print thanks to newer media. The phrase rises to a peak in 1998, at the confluence of Geoffrey Nunberg’s edited volume The Future of the Book (1996), which once again noted the death of the book at the hands of new media, and the rise of mainstream-available internet and ebooks. Interestingly, the phrase declined dramatically until 2011, perhaps as a result of computers and the internet not, in fact, having deleterious effects on book production,

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as well as the precipitous rise in ebook publication and sales thanks to cheap ereader devices and apps and direct-to-consumer epublishing around 2007. In all likelihood its current peak is related to the backwash of discourse: critics and scholars pointing out that, yet again, the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated (Fitzpatrick 2006). The “death of the book” discourse had little effect on the actual book (production of which has increased, rather than decreased, in inverse proportion to the rise of such fears); it did, however, cut off DF’s head whenever it rose above the parapet. DF, rather than riding the coattails of games’ rocket to success, continually tried to nose its way into literary realms. Enhanced books, vooks, hypertext books: they all seem to have looked at computer games and attempted to mimic that innovation without understanding the underlying culture. Regardless of how useful enhancements might be to books (and in cases like children’s books and medical texts, they caught on), literary culture was not going to open the gates for them the same way gaming and tech culture did. As the games industry moved on to multiplayer and graphic-based games in the wake of networked connections and more capable machines (growing enormously in terms of commercial and mainstream market share and relevance), computer-aided literature dribbled away into cracks in the literary establishment: subcultures of IF, hypertexts, and web fiction, largely centered in the relative wealth of university settings. That it would do so in the very foundations of literary scholarship is something of an irony. To date, there are no departments for DF, elit, or other such nomenclature. Most scholars who work in the field, either as critics or as practitioners—or both—are embedded in literature departments where they are often the only member of staff to embrace technologically enhanced narratives. Others are seated in media departments, which can commiserate as victims of literary elitist bullying, while some luckier academics find homes in the many games studies departments that are emerging as the neoliberal university eyes the enormous industry and attempts to suckle on its teat. Regardless, this academic “avant-garde” often fails to stray far from its roots, playing the black sheep in the literary field while still striving for paternal acceptance. The largest academic organization in the field adopted the moniker “Electronic Literature Organization (ELO),” its associated journal the electronic book review. The ELO and ebr embrace “born-digital” poetry, narrative, and even performance, but not games until relatively recently, and in the organization’s first three volumes of “canon-establishing” collections of elit, no works available for commercial sale



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were permitted. These practices all align with the literary field’s attitudes and values, gatekeeping the works in an avant-garde ivory tower from positions of privilege (salaried posts that provide wealth for experimentation and risk) (cf. Porpentine 2012). Thus the cycle is cemented. A culture that actively resists innovation essentially created a moral panic over its supposed demise, the death of the book, and pushed the innovation into small niches and subcultures; those who persisted in pursuing the innovation either formed communities similar to internet fandoms, or were ostracized enough to build their own ivory tower in the same literary cultural model to justify their continued existence. Elements of the community distanced themselves from “non-literary” work such as games and commercial IF, just as other literary scholars distance themselves from “lesser” work such as genre fiction and popular media in order to maintain their position. In this sort of environment, constantly pushed to demonstrate the worthiness of their work, elit academia continually favored the experimental and avant-garde. Compounding this march toward elitism is the fact that these are scholars who earned advanced degrees in English literature, by and large: they are exceptionally experienced readers with deep awareness and understanding of literary tradition, in a field that has historically emphasized linguistic and structural defamiliarization over cultural contexts. It makes complete sense, then, that they would seek to study and create works that push boundaries of language and form, as opposed to what a media, communications, or social studies scholar might be interested in: the cultural effects of such works. Nonetheless, the results are the same: once mainstream computer games moved on from text-oriented environments, most of the DF that remained came from scholars and artists positioned in academia (even Inform was created by Nelson while studying for his PhD at Oxford). The works that emerged—those “canonical” elit texts—were created for fellow academics, those exceptionally experienced readers, not for the mainstream public. Thus, when the mainstream public encountered them, they were already too far diverged from what the average reader or gamer was familiar with. The innovations were too extreme, too complex to gain a hold, and once a reader/player had developed negative experiences with DF, they were not only less likely to seek it out again, but they were also more likely to spread their negative reaction to others, “damn[ing] the adoption of future innovations” (Rogers 1983, 224). Inversely, if these texts ever attempted to represent themselves as games, as in the case of Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013), they were rejected by the gaming community as “not

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games,”3 thus policing them into a wasteland of a gap between literature and games—at least for a while.

Digital Fiction (Re)Emergence in the Mainstream Recent cultural movements and the maturation of new generations born into digital cultures are changing the landscape for DF. As a form it has evolved more than once: in early educational games, in text adventure games, in hypertexts, Flash fiction, interactive film, and more. It would be easy to posit that this wild proliferation of forms and media could be another factor in its failure to rise to mainstream awareness; I would counter that games come in every shape, form, and size, from puzzles to RPGs to mobile apps and first-person shooters, and no argument has ever been made that this harms the form. Rather, it is in spite of this frequent emergence and obvious adaptability that DF has stumbled, as it struggled to recover from the cultural blows literary culture dealt it. The moral panic over the death of the book continues to subside, problematic othering of genres and forms due to sexism and racism is being called out, and, particularly in the wake of a global pandemic that found us all reliant on digital media for entertainment and connection, almost every cultural industry has awakened to the benefits of digital technology. Strong cultural movements renewing fights for equality for women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, disabled people, religious and ethnic minorities, and indigenous groups have trickled into interactive media to counter the dominant white cis-het male patriarchy in both gaming and publishing industries.4 With little creative power in triple-A games, these historically excluded groups have turned to indie game development in smaller, more personal and emotional games, text-based games, and IF. Similarly, in developing countries with unstable infrastructure and fewer available digital devices, innovations are being applied to mobile technology and cross-pollinated with older media forms including film and television. “Creative life,” as Mumford notes, “is necessarily a social product … neither tradition nor product can remain the sole possession of the scientist or the artist or the philosopher, still less of the privileged groups that, under

In addition, of course, to the larger issue of sexism and misogyny in gamer culture that #GamerGate illustrated. 4 While the publishing industry is often touted as majority female, the positive numbers do not persist in executive positions, bestselling authors, or prizes, or for people of color. 3



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capitalist conventions, so largely support them” (1934, 409–10). Innovations are not created in vacuums; they are subject to the cultures that produce, perceive, and implement them (Coeckelbergh 2018).

Conclusion Art and literature, like any industry, have cycles of innovation, establishment, and reinvention. The innovation inherent in various art and literature movements such as modernism and postmodernism is a dialogic response to that which has come before: modernism rejecting strict realism in an attempt to reveal deeper truths, and postmodernism rejecting all notions of convention and structure in order to call attention to the artificiality of all creative work. Innovation is the heart of art and literature, as creators seek to show us our world and our selves in new ways, to defamiliarize them for the purposes of enlightenment and emotional connection. The electronic turn for artistic endeavors is no different; it’s simply that it has emerged in a medium opening the floodgates for innovation in a many-to-many model, battling against creative industries that have grown overlarge and view such subversion as a threat, and lost in a sea of innovation that atomizes audience attention. Innovation in DF is occurring everywhere, at all times, just frequently hidden in niches and subcultures. Yet it is specifically these niches and subcultures that make it rich with diversity, a huge component in the successful survival of any newly emerging genre or field, enabling the form to offer a little something for everyone, to adapt to new environments, uses, and cultural leanings. As the chapters in this book will demonstrate, DF has expanded many times beyond the walls of academic privilege and the passive gatekeeping of the avant-garde, regardless of whether or not that particular community has recognized or accepted it. For decades we scholar-practitioners have pondered why elit hasn’t “caught on”; it has, of course—it’s just that our elit hasn’t entirely caught on. It’s time we descended and accepted the innovations rising from communities and cultures outside our own if we are interested in seeing DF rise and make an impact on the world: “such change is only possible if there are sufficient shifts in the entire holistic configurations in which individual and human material-poetic performances participate” (Coeckelbergh 2018, 509). DF is already shifting the entire configuration of popular, mainstream storytelling in fascinating ways and timely innovations.

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Digital Fiction Emergence

The relationship of the reader/player to the work is particularly important once we start looking at how digital fiction (DF) has developed in different locations, languages, and cultures around the world. Whereas Western discourse on DF (strongly rooted in English-language and North American culture and practice, where the term “electronic literature” (elit) is favored) has focused the text (Sandvoss 2007) and its potentiality of interaction for Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader (1978), other forms and practices have emerged primarily based on the actualized interactions and relationships between interactive narrative designer, text, and reader. These practices have been shaped by the environments in which they arise, including oral narratives, literary traditions, languages, cultural values, sociopolitical climates, and access to technology. While this chapter is by no means comprehensive in its coverage of all DF in all global contexts (which would require many volumes), it provides an overview and comparison of how those environmental pressures lead to substantial diversity in DF worldwide. Though emergence of any nascent form is almost always experimental, and in arts often resides for some time in the avantgarde before being accepted as the new convention of “normal” and thus entering the mainstream, DF has not typically followed that cycle. Examination of its parallel evolution in various cultures, languages, and nations around the world, however, illustrates that DF isn’t restricted to experimental forms and enclaves, but that it has a great deal of appeal to vast numbers of popular audiences. The drive to create DF—and, indeed, most human artistic endeavors— is to communicate, to inspire, to spark an emotional response: all aspects of the cognitive processes involved in taking our ordinary world and portraying it in a novel and illuminating way that activates the pleasure centers of the human mind. We take what we know, what’s familiar, and we twist it somehow, we defamiliarize (Shklovsky 1917) it so that we can experience things with fresh senses. This is the principle behind artistic movements (impressionists, postmodernism, etc.) (Ryan 2016, 335), as well as most science—after all, both

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art and science are founded on the quintessential question of “what if?”: “What if I merge the novel with computer programming?” “What if we send humans into space?” English-language scholarship on DF has primarily focused on the technology as the defamiliarization mechanism (Silva 2017), but this is based on an assumption of monolithic cultural, political, and linguistic influences on the form. Though by all accounts DF arose in the United States initially (thanks to the innovations in technology occurring there), existing oral and print narrative traditions are not the same everywhere, and the emergence of DF in different cultures is affected not only by the new technology but also by the culture in which it arises (Fülöp 2018, 2; Younis 2017, n.p.). Therefore to understand DF in our own individual contexts, we must also seek to understand it in more distant, yet increasingly global and shared, contexts. The following sections in this chapter are an attempt to do just that: to understand how DF has evolved in different cultures, languages, and sociopolitical systems around the world. In doing so, I first offer a clear and functional definition of DF for use in this text, considering existing definitions from relevant contexts, and encompassing the array of DF forms as created around the world, many of which have not been thoroughly considered in the Anglo-American avant-garde-centered approach to DF. I then evaluate the various evolutionary pressures that come to bear on narrative traditions leading to DF, and how they can push a particular community’s practice in one direction or another. Finally, the chapter gives an overview of how these pressures have actualized in various contexts around the world, resulting in DF traditions (both established and emerging) reflecting their origins and environments.

Digital Fiction: Definition by Function DF is an amorphous concept, difficult to pin down. Part of that is the nature of digital media itself, given its unique ability to represent almost all other forms of media. Books, film, TV, games, music: all can be expressed in binary code, and thus all are technically now “digital.” While it is certainly true that any feature film, novel, or scripted TV show could be considered digital fiction, this isn’t useful for the purposes of understanding the new media forms arising from this mutable medium. “Fiction” is also a term rife with nuance, as the lines between fiction, nonfiction, satire, memoir, and personal narrative can become very blurry in convergent digital spaces (Jenkins 2006) where consumers can insert



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fictional narratives into product reviews (Ray 2016; Skains 2018) and game developers use interactive media to explore their own personal experiences (Bernardi 2013; Harvey 2014). Thus theorists have defined it repeatedly as “born-digital literature” (Hayles 2007, n.p.) “that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium” (Bell et al. 2010, n.p.). This is a highly academic definition; while apt, specific, and accurate, and very useful for critical discourse, it is not intended or appropriate for lay audiences, most of whom have experienced DF in some form but have not recognized it as such. The ambiguous nature of both “digital” and “fiction” lead most non-academics, upon hearing it for the first time, to associate DF with ebooks and epublishing, which is frustrating for both parties. Alternatively, Hartmut Koenitz et al. define “Interactive Digital Narrative” (IDN) as a “relationship between creator, dynamic narrative artefact and audienceturned-participant” (2015, 18); including the reader/player in this definition sets it distinctly apart and makes it more thorough, while switching out “narrative” for “fiction” is more welcoming to works that cross genre boundaries in multiple ways. Both, however, are applied more or less to the same types of digital literature, and though this book largely uses “digital fiction,” they are often used interchangeably, though different schools of thought may use one or the other preferentially. Interestingly, both definitions focus on the function of these works, rather than the form, a departure from other forms of narrative media. This is because the digital medium affords a wide array of syuzhet (Shklovsky 1917) or discourse (Chatman 1978) forms that defy standardization; these unique affordances contribute to the formation of a new narrative form that is “neither an amplified print narrative nor a new literary genre but ... a model beyond print literate thinking” (Kaul 2018, 223). Despite this tendency toward undefinable form, all DF is cocreated by the designer, the computer, and the player/reader (which George Landow termed the “wreader” to denote the heightened role of the audience in digital work (1992)) through three key overlapping and variable functions: interactivity, participation, and multimedia. Interactivity and participation are highly related, as interactivity is essentially a form of participation. Here I am making the distinction in terms of the relationship of designer-machine-reader. Many DF works, particularly those arising prior to the Web 2.0’s dialogic capabilities (O’Reilly 2007) and resultant social media, situate their participation solely between the text and the reader.

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The text is designed and programmed with all of the creative and cognitive activity from the designer that the act entails, but once it is released to its audience it is usually detached from the designer; realization of the text’s syuzhet is predicated on the interactivity between the programmed text and the reader/ player. Interactivity of this sort occurs in antecedents and corollaries of DF, such as the postmodern works of the Oulipo movement (Tabbi 2010) and gamebooks exemplified by Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books published by Bantam Books (and now owned by Chooseco). This type of interactivity is created, for example, through the technology of the command line (such as in parserbased text adventure games or interactive fiction (IF)) or the more ubiquitous hyperlink. Other interactive design tools include mouse actions, keyboard directions/feedback, touch/tap on mobile devices, inputting image or sound into the DF (e.g., Bouchardon et al.’s Storyface (2018) or Pullinger et al.’s The Breathing Wall (2004)), scanning QR codes for locative works, or experiencing the work through augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). Interactivity between reader and text is where unique features of DF emerge, such as non-, multi- and poly-linear structures, multiple potential syuzhets/discourses, personalized narratives, and repeat readings as standard. Other types of DF call for active participatory exchange between not only the text and the reader/player but the designer as well. This type of participation has narrative origins that long precede the technology of the book, which severed the direct connection between author and reader that was and is afforded by oral culture; until digital media enabled this reconnection in a secondary orality (Ong 1982), the one-to-many media model encompassing publishing, film, TV, and radio largely maintained this separation. Social storytelling was, instead, kept alive through table-top games, role-playing games (RPGs), pantomime and other forms of participatory theater, fanfiction, and, of course, everyday interactions of natural narrative (Fludernik 1996). Many of these practices found parallels in online spaces: media fan sites (livejournal, fanfiction.net, archiveofourown.org); bulletin boards and forums; multi-user dungeons (MUDs); and eventually massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In the DF realm, participatory texts include social media fictions like Twitter fiction and alternate reality stories (Rutter 2020), some fanfictions, collaborative novels, webnovels, and netprovs (Marino and Wittig 2012; Wittig 2011). These works in their final forms may appear more like print narratives, particularly fanfictions and webnovels, but their method of collaboration and reciprocal construction (which includes all aspects of narrative communication



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in the same online environment) in the distinctive social spaces of online media places them firmly in the realm of DF. Finally, DF is also defined by its multimedia qualities. Multimodality (incorporating multiple modes of communication, such as text, speech, visual, audio (Ryan 2006)) is quite common across all media, as books include both text and image, film audio and visual, radio oral speech and music, and performance almost everything from text to dance. These media (print text, film, TV, etc.) were once defined by their technology, the methods of dissemination that shaped how they were delivered (ibid.; McLuhan 1964); now that they are digital, almost all forms are multimodal in some fashion. Streaming films and TV can be subtitled, ebooks can include video, and all can be employed together on the web. I would argue that they haven’t necessarily converged, as Jenkins’s nowsomewhat-dated argument goes, so much as they have amalgamated. Rather than converging into some new hybrid species of media (as one might describe film as a hybrid of image and sound), they are glued together, layered upon one another to form multiplicative meanings (Lemke 1998). Even for DF texts that don’t seem to incorporate multiple media—parser-based IF, default-style Twine games, fanfiction and webnovels—the simple combination of text-plus-links (or command line) places all DF as multimedia in terms of Ryan’s second typology of media, which defines them not so much by “conduit” as by properties that affect narrative (semiotic channels, sensory channels, spaciotemporal elements, kinetic properties) (2006). DF even at its simplest incorporates the semiotic channels of text, color, links; sensory channels of mouse and keyboard; and spaciotemporal elements of narrative and screen. The broader properties of digital, networked media contribute to the amorphousness of DF: those that remove the significant barriers to entry that still remain in media industries. The publishing industry, though using the most ubiquitous and accessible of technology—the written word—nonetheless places barriers to entry in the form of cultural, linguistic, and economic barriers, particularly in Western cultures and economies. Yes, anyone can place text on the web (and even place a price on that text), but without the marketing and distribution might of the Big 5 publishers few authors see any income from their work (for that matter, the few authors who make it out of the Big 5 slush piles rarely see much income from their work, either). The film, music, and triple-A game industries have similar barriers, with the addition of costs for recording and development technologies and skills. Independent practices have certainly emerged in all creative industries as a result of digital technology lowering these

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barriers, from indie ebook publishing to SoundCloud album releases to itch.io games. While these practices seek to circumvent the gatekeepers of industry, they still aim to sneak in the back door: to become successful within that industry. The resulting works offer some deviation from their mainstream counterparts, but usually in content rather than form; they are still trying to be accepted and lead to success within the dominant paradigm, getting picked up by an editor, producer, or studio. As DF has no such established route to production, manufacture, and dissemination, and generally makes use of easily accessible technologies, it has largely evolved free from the constraints of capitalistic expectations, and thus expresses greater variety in form and content. Such diversity not only leads to the difficulty in clearly defining exactly what DF looks and sounds like (because it has no such monolithic tendencies) but also to a wonderful richness that invites novelty and defamiliarization almost within every example. Like its digital growth medium, DF is adaptable, taking different shapes according to its environment, history, cultures, designers, and users. The following section traces its evolution, exploring how varied evolutionary pressures have given rise to such a diverse field of DF.

Digital Fiction’s Evolutionary Pressures Humans like patterns, but we also like neatness in our patterns. We frequently share the “Ascent of Man” image, wherein we evolve in a straight line from an ancestral ape to modern Homo sapiens (which many people unfortunately take rather literally, much to their dismay), which doesn’t account for the many branches of hominid species (and other, now extinct, genera), particularly those that likely interbred, and thus exchanged genes. The evolution of human beings is less of a pretty branching tree, and much more of a tangled, networked rhizome. And though we attempt to apply similar arboreal aesthetics to the emergence of DF as a form, DF’s evolution, too, is messy and interconnected. The defining characteristics of any particular DF form or genre are subject to evolutionary processes of many sorts: existing media, the culture in which it arises, influences outside that culture, political affordances and limitations, cross-pollinations, bottlenecks, education, linguistic and alphabetic structures, histories, commerciality, and capitalism. Putting chronologies and lineages of DF into straight lines and neat categories (particularly if only one linguistic or cultural tradition is examined) ignores the complex tapestry that makes up DF as



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we know it. For example, the attempt in Western discourse to place elit into first, second, and third “generations” (Flores 2019; Hayles 2007) largely ignores the emergence and development of DF in other parts of the world (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2019). DF certainly has common origins and influences around the world due to increasingly open and ubiquitous technology, but the varying economic, cultural, and political pressures have pushed it down varying pathways. Those common origins are evident in a wealth of oral and print antecedents, or “proto-hypertexts,” in many narrative traditions. The I Ching, China’s ancient (ninth century bc) configurable text, is identified as the earliest and perhaps most complex proto-hypertext (Aarseth 1997), though it may only be the earliest in terms of physical artefact. Oral storytelling is rich in multimodal and hypertextual qualities, including multicursality, audience participation and dialogue, multimodality, textual metalepsis, personalization and unique narrative realizations with each telling (Malloy 2018; Younis 2017). One Thousand and One Nights (eighth to fourteenth century ad), the collection of Middle Eastern folktales, is a foundational example of these types of antecedents, though now usually studied/portrayed in print. Souvik Mukherjee notes that Indian oral narratives in the Katha and Urdu dastangoi traditions are hypertextual and multimodal in nature (2017), as they are interwoven with performance, religious texts, anecdotes, commentaries, digressions, music, and dance. In terms of print texts, we point to the playful Oulipo movement in French literature, placing constraints and combinatorics on their works (Tabbi 2010); German Romantics’ attention to fragmentation (Fülöp 2018), Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges’s ruminations on libraries of forking paths ([1941] 1962); unbound and/or shuffleable novels such as Hopscotch (Cortázar 1966), Composition No. 1 (Saporta 1962), and The Unfortunates (Johnson 1969); and visual experimentations such as concrete poetry (Aarseth 1997; Fülöp 2018). The persistence of these types of texts, with their nonlinear structures and their responsiveness to participatory audiences and shifting environments, demonstrates that narrative storytelling is perhaps closest to its original nature when it engages in these techniques, drawing upon and stimulating human cognition in terms of memory links, multiple modes of communication, and varying realizations (syuzhets) of foundational stories (fabulas) (Flower and Hayes 1984; Herman 2013). Given that these oral traditions and print antecedents exist across many cultures and languages, to understand how DF has presented so differently in varying contexts requires examination of environmental and cultural

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factors: what evolutionary pressures are placed on narrative as it enters the digital medium? A significant factor is related to economics and politics: access to technology. Various Western and East Asian countries, those with developed infrastructures and largely capitalist cultures, have led the world in terms of their populations’ access to digital technology and information exchange via the internet. In 1996, as the World Wide Web made the internet accessible beyond government agencies and researchers, the United States led in terms of access, with 16.4 percent of its population online, compared to 0.1 percent for the rest of the world (Roser, Ritchie, and Ortiz-Ospina 2015). By 2017, North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Chile, and Malaysia all topped 70 percent, with most in the 80–90 percent range; yet West, Central, and Eastern Africa afforded access to less than 15 percent of the population (and in most nations, much lower) (ibid.). Though China and India have the most internet users in terms of raw numbers, the percentage of population accessing the internet, as of 2017, was only 54.3 percent and 29.6 percent, respectively (ibid.). Wealthier countries in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, achieve 70–90 percent saturation rates, while most other countries in the world remain in the 40–60 percent band (ibid.). Notably, much of this access worldwide is not afforded through computers, but through mobile devices; worldwide, only 47 percent of households include a computer as of 2019 (ITU Publications 2020). As authoring platforms (including simple web development, Twine, ink, Inform, ChoiceScript, Unity, etc.) are largely restricted to computer usage, development of DF in many areas around the globe is therefore significantly limited by access, exposure, and technological capabilities. Thus, while DF has had decades to develop in North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea, hand in hand with the digital revolution and network culture, in many other parts of the world it is only recently emerging. In many places, DF is influenced less by the history of computer games and the World Wide Web (with its blogs and hypertextual lineages), and more by oral culture, both primary and secondary, as oral literature takes “different and more resilient forms in this digital age” (Kaul 2018, 216). Whether because of state-imposed restrictions on activities (e.g., China) or internet access being provided by private companies (e.g., Facebook in Africa (Nothias 2020)), creative exploration in these locales often leap-frogs the transitions from oral to print and print to digital narrative, and draws directly from oral culture into social media narrativity. The performativity, generative and mnemonic techniques, and participatory elements of oral storytelling are more easily remediated into digital and social



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media, and social media is equally accessible to both computer- and mobilebased authoring (Roy 2022). This affords populations that have otherwise had very limited access to media technology, from publishing avenues to film and TV, a contemporary role in global digital culture. Indigenous cultures, in particular, benefit from this access, as often their narrative traditions have been marginalized by existing media; mobile gateways into social media storytelling offer these groups “an opportunity to reverse the alienation that the written word has brought to many oral cultures” (Kaul 2018, 223). Finally, DF is subject to pressures from institutional and educational structures. These are often embedded in a nation’s approach to culture and language, and in how conservative that approach is. As discussed in Chapter 2, the study of the English language is a conservative school, designed to maintain the status quo of British culture and values (an inherited paradigm in many Englishlanguage literary traditions, including the United States). Chinese, German, and Romanian cultural institutions have similar tenets (Hockx 2015; Nicolaescu and Mihai 2014; Suter 2012); Beat Suter’s outline of the development of German elit shows a very similar pathway to that in English, yet notes that it withered quite a bit in the face of institutional resistance and lack of attention in Anglo-American discourses. France, though notably fierce when it comes to protection of the French language, embraced the computer, though its literary school was slower to accept born-digital literature; nonetheless, elit has a strong contingent in the French language, perhaps because of its culture that embraces the experimental and avant-garde (it is, after all, the origin of the Oulipo movement) (Bouchardon 2012). Many other DF traditions, though they may have early and/or avantgarde experimentations with the intersection of computer and narrative, were either suppressed through similar conservative cultural systems, or faltered due to poor technological access, and are only now regaining a foothold. Clearly, many factors affect the development of DF in any given language, narrative tradition, culture, nation, and political structure. The reach of European influence is large, thanks to its imperialist past (and present); postcolonial nations suffer from both the institutional hang-ups about language and culture as well as the economic hardships of their burgeoning and often turbulent independent development. Nevertheless, DF exists in many different forms around the world, its variability a testament to the rich history of cultures, languages, and environments in which it thrives. The following section looks at DF globally, and how these evolutionary pressures have shaped existing traditions and practices into the digital storytelling emerging today.

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Digital Fiction Around the World The emergence of DF in any given culture is driven by many factors. Access to technology itself is insufficient: Saudi Arabia, for example, has very high technology saturation rates (ITU Publications 2020; Roser, Ritchie, and OrtizOspina 2015), but no significant digital narrative practices (Hosny 2017). For DF to arise, it must have both some form of technological access and some motivation to innovate, whether that be from cultural precedent, capitalistic invention, or personal or cultural need. Economic strife and political suppression are drivers of innovation just as are playful experimentation and market differentiation. This book examines all forms of DF, of IDN, on a level-playing field, acknowledging that many forms and practices have been privileged by an elitist discourse favoring the avant-garde, largely benefiting white, Western, and English-language traditions (Ikeda 2021; Yu 2009). By taking a global view, and acknowledging the evolutionary pressures placed upon narrative and digital practices in different cultural and linguistic niches around the world, I hope to offer a broader, more inclusive understanding of DF, viewing all emergences as both avant-garde innovations as well as continuances of historical narrative traditions and discourse.

Western Digital Fiction I begin with Western DF not to prioritize it, but because it offers the earliest DF forms thanks to the origins of digital technology and the internet, and thus has an influence on most DF practices. The first instances of DF occur in the United States (Addis and McKay’s (1964) The Sumerian Game, Rawitsch et al.’s (1971) The Oregon Trail, and Crowther and Woods’s (c.1975) Colossal Cave Adventure), and it is in the United States (specifically, MIT) that Infocom and its era of text-adventure games or IF emerge. IF became popular worldwide, inspiring Britain’s Acornsoft, Italy’s Brainstorm Enterprise, Spain’s Dinamic Software, and, eventually, visual novels (VNs) in East Asia. Arguably, the first hypertext was American Judy Malloy’s (1986) Uncle Roger (see Figure 3) (Grigar 2017), though as this was pre–World Wide Web, a number of artists were creating computerbased texts and stories and distributing them via portable storage (floppy disks). Certainly the first hypertext publisher was Eastgate Systems in 1987, though its adherence to the elitist refrain of “serious hypertext” and its insistence on offline distribution for its texts persist to this day, severely limiting its global



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Figure 3  Screenshot from Uncle Roger (Malloy 1986), updated to HTML and available online.

influence. The latter notwithstanding, English-language texts have dominated the primary academic field devoted to the study of DF (Nicolaescu and Mihai 2014; Simanowski 2001). This dominance as lingua franca in both DF and its surrounding academic discourse has increased its reach (as English is the world’s most commonly spoken language (Eberhard, Simons, and Fennig 2021)), even while limiting its influence within educational and nationalistic infrastructures that desire works and discourse based on the national languages (Nicolaescu and Mihai 2014, 2). The development of DF in other Western cultures and languages follows similar pathways, albeit with some variation. Serge Bouchardon traces elit in the French language, which is very similar to that in English, though much more heavily weighted in the experimental and avant-garde than commercial

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adventure games, with the work of Philippe Bootz a defining and continuing influence (2012); this is not unsurprising, considering how influential French critical theory, philosophy, and the Oulipo movement were to literature and DF in English. Portuguese-language works are also strong in the avant-garde, with Pedro Barbosa’s influential experimentation with generative literature beginning in 1977 a key progenitor (Silva 2017). While both Communist and post-Communist politics limited tech access in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia (among other Eastern Bloc nations), digital literature nonetheless thrived: Robert Szczerbowski published the first Polish electronic novel, Æ, in print in 1991 and hypertext in 1996 (Pajak 2008, 31), and Zuzana Husárová traces elit practices in Czech and Slovak languages back to 1966 (2017). And while Andrzej Pajak notes that “Polish e-lit was produced most fervently from 1996 to 2002” (ibid., 36), the Polish elit journal Techsty (https://www.tech​sty.art. pl/) was launched in 2002 and continues to thrive twenty years later. Politics and infrastructure similarly affected Russian-language DF, with the Cyrillic alphabet an added complication to technology largely programmed in English with the Latin alphabet. Nonetheless, some hypertext experimentation emerged on the early “RuNet” and via the Teneta literary competition (Fedorova 2012), including the collaborative hypertext novel Roman (Leibov 1995) and Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) (see Figure 4) (Schmidt 2021). Henrike Schmidt argues, however, that content outplayed code with regard to Russian DF, as most interactive writing on the RuNet consists of “samizdat,” or selfpublishing, in the forms of blogging, fanfiction, and collaborative writing (ibid.); Natalia Fedorova, however, notes that IF, descended from the text adventure game tradition, did have some traction, at least at that time (2012, 123). German-language DF showed exciting early promise, with arguably the first epoetry experimentation as early as 1959 leading to the field of “Netzliterature” (hypertext/media literature) by 1995; Beat Suter laments, however, that “the literary world in Germany, Austria and Switzerland has never really given a chance to net literature. The new movement was ignored from the start and suppressed by the critics,” with many practitioners and scholars either departing for other locales and languages, or reorienting their work toward other, more institutionally acceptable endeavors (2012, 38). Other languages demonstrated the influence of English hypertext, including Italy’s Ra-Dio (Miglioli 1993) and Sweden’s Iaktagarens’ förmåga att ingripa (participant’s capability to interfere) (Tallmo 1992) (Di Rosario, Grimaldi, and Meza 2019, 11). Finally, Spanishlanguage works provide nearly as much variation as English-language DF, largely



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Figure 4  Screenshot from My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (Lialina 1996), an early web-based hypertext.

due to the rich mosaic of Spanish cultures in Europe and Latin America. Though many touted DF antecedents arose in Spanish-language literature, including a mechanical proto-ebook invented by Ángela Ruíz Robles in 1949 (Goicoechea and Sánchez 2017, 282), the slow proliferation of technology throughout much of Latin America hindered the development of DF for some time. Dolores Romero López traces the development of DF in Spanish as it evolves from the kharja oral tradition and the collective novel, and is largely embraced as an artistic experimentation field: pioneers such as Juan B. Gutiérrez (e.g., Condiciones Extremas (1998)), Blas Valdez (e.g., Dolor y Viceversa (2002)) and Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez Ruiz (e.g., Gabriella Infinita (1999)) produced DF in the late 1990s and early 2000s addressing political and nationalist concerns prominent across many disparate Spanish-speaking nations (2017a; 2017b; Kozak 2017; Pitman 2007; Sassón-Henry 2017). This avant-garde practice continues across Latin America and Spain, as well as drawing on the strong Spanish experimental literary tradition and providing metatextual discourse on digital technologies themselves (Taylor 2019). In almost all Western cultures and languages, DF in terms of hypertext novels and interactive narratives has historically been either marginalized by academic or nationalistic discourses. As discussed in Chapter 2, conservative literary traditions combined with moral panics over the “death of the book” has largely kept those who practice and study DF in a mode of experimentation; perhaps as

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a response, DF practitioners and scholars embraced this niche, and eventually closed ranks to IDN that did not fit within this avant-garde. Alternative practices and approaches arose outside of this niche nonetheless; the remaining chapters in this book examine that dynamic. First, however, we must take a look at how DF has emerged outside of Western culture’s evolutionary pressures.

African and Arabian Digital Fiction There is no simple geographical divide between cultures, developing countries, or technologically immersed communities. North America, Latin America, and Europe are all continents made up of nations with diverse political, linguistic, and economic backgrounds that have affected the evolution of DF; even with shared influences, the many varying factors create unique DF histories and practices in each. The same is true of Africa and the Arabic World: both are geographic regions with wide variations in language, wealth, and political histories that affect what types of interactive literature might arise. The Arabic World consists of those nations in the Middle East and Northern Africa in which Arabic is spoken as a majority language: twenty-two “Arab League” countries from Syria across the Arabian Peninsula, and from Western Sahara across Northern Africa to Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. In some cases, slow uptake of technology and network connectivity may have slowed down the development of Arabic DF. In addition, English as the initial lingua franca of digital technology and the internet differs significantly from Arabic, in that Arabic uses Arabic characters as opposed to the Latin alphabet and is read from right to left. The English language is also somewhat scarce in the Arabic World; Egypt has the highest percentage of English speakers at 35 percent (Ramaswami, Sarraf, and Haydon 2012), but the remainder are at much lower levels, though the history of colonization has left remnants of French in West Africa. Whatever the reason, DF was slower to emerge in the Arabic World: Eman Younis places the first interactive novel in 2001, with Muhammad Sanajilah’s Zilal al-Wahed (One’s Own Shadows) (2017). Despite multiple subsequent works from Sanajilah and some epoetry practices in Morocco and Iraq, DF and elit in general have been slow to develop in the Arabic World, though Reham Hosny points out that Libya held an Arabic digital literature conference in 2007, and universities in United Arab Emirates and Morocco have begun including elit in their curricula (2017). Perhaps as technology, the internet, and more interactive and social media texts become prevalent, more artists in the Arabic World will engage in DF.



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In the rest of Africa, despite inconsistent tech and internet access, a richer DF scene is developing. Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang identifies Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Ghana as nations with vibrant digital literature (2020, 3), with oral traditions remediated into digital spheres in creative ways. Africa provides an apt example of how narrative storytelling has transitioned from primary orality to secondary orality with only a slight detour for print culture. Print literary production has been a troublesome area for African authors, battling through “the politics of postcolonial literary production which expects them to adopt certain styles, treat themes in particular ways and publish books to certain markets” (Adenekan and Cousins 2013, 199), and which places work from anyone other than white Anglo-American authors into “identity genres” (Ikeda 2021, n.p.). Thus, creators with even minimal tech access (mobile phones with internet capability) in these African nations have embraced blogs, microblogs, social media, and SMS text messaging for construction of serial and collaborative DF (Adenekan and Cousins 2013; Santana 2018). Stephanie Bosch Santana points to serialized stories delivered through mobile devices, such as the Yoza Project’s m-novels (2010–16) and Mike Maphoto’s Diary of a Zulu Girl (2013–20) as significant successes, particularly in southern Africa, as practices that help to “foster multiple cyberplaces in which new literary forms and indigenous languages are thriving” (2018, 188). Facebook’s efforts to provide internet access to many parts of Africa (Nothias 2020) mean that many Africans’ first portal into online spaces is via the social media juggernaut; users are developing new oral modalities in this space based on existing traditions, such as Akpos stories in the humorous tradition of trickster tales (Yékú 2016) and remediations of oral narratives in the now-deprecated Jungle Jim digital pulp mag (Santana 2018, 189). Opoku-Ageymang notes that a significant period of stable democracy and free speech in his native Ghana has been a significant contributor toward the practice of digital literature (2020, 5); hopefully as more nations achieve both political stability and access to digital technologies, the field of African DF will continue to grow apace.

Asian Digital Fiction The emergence of DF in Asia provides perhaps the most parallel comparison to that in Western cultures, as Japan and South Korea are two of the few countries on Earth that didn’t suffer imperialization efforts from the West (noting that Japan did exert imperialist control over Korea in the first half of the twentieth

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century). Cultures in these East Asian countries have exchanged influences with European nations, yet have developed without the colonial rule and linguistic, cultural, and economic effects felt by nations in Africa, and indeed neighboring Asian nation India. As a result, Japan and Korea, and even China, have developed DF traditions that are significantly different from those of the West. First, however, India. Though India has almost 700 million internet users as of 2020, second only to China (Keelery 2020, n.p.), its history in DF is very shallow—though not as absent as it at first seems. Souvik Mukherjee lamented that (as of 2017), India “does not have a significant electronic literature,” nor do its neighboring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka (2017, n.p.); Samya Brata Roy’s update notes growing practices of blog and social media fictions (2022). Indian oral traditions certainly fit within the nonlinear structures that have led other cultures to remediate to digital media, such as Katha stories and Urdu dastangoi plays (Mukherjee 2017), and ancient practices Gita Govinda (epic poetry and performance), Patta Chitra (narrative scroll paintings akin to tapestries), and Chitra Kavi (Tamil picture poetry) (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2019, 64). India is certainly not the most saturated nation with regard to computer and internet access, particularly in rural areas, but with so many people online, a strong link to English language and literature due to its prior colonization, and social media sites being some of the most prominent (ibid., 66), it is surprising that more DF, or at least epoetry, has not developed. Mukherjee blames inaccessibility of early Eastgate hypertexts due to cost and distance, as well as an extremely conservative humanities education system that resists introduction of the digital (2017, n.p.). Perhaps, however, it is only a limited, Western-derived definition of DF that causes him to state it is almost nonexistent in India; others note that India has a growing game industry (Zalbidea, Marino, and López-Varela 2014, 2), which, as Chapter 6 will discuss, can encompass games with strong enough narratives to be included as DF. Mukherjee himself points out Studio Oleomingus’s 2017 walking sim Somewhere (now an expanded storyworld) as an example. Similarly, like Africa, India has a thriving contingent of social media literature, including Twitter fiction and Instapoetry, which belies the notion that the nation has no DF or elit at all (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2019, 66; Roy 2022). T. Shanmugapriya and Nirmala Menon also point to the establishment of SMS novels in India with Ro Gue’s Cloak Room in 2004 (see Figure 5). Thus Indian DF is not so much nonexistent as it is appearing in forms not considered avant-garde enough to warrant the classification in Western academic circles.



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Figure 5  Screenshot from Cloak Room (Ro Gue 2004). The text is composed in blog format, each post reaching subscribed users through SMS messaging.

China’s DF development is also divorced from the avant-garde, though it has forged a highly unique path. Unlike most Western cultures, Chinese print fiction as a whole is rather amenable to digital affordances. It evolved not from epic tales and romance, but more closely from oral dialogue and natural narrative; Ming Dong Gu notes that a strong insistence on faithful recordings of such rambling and conflicting accounts leads to nonlinear stories with conflicting points-of-view (2006, 313–14), and that Chinese fiction is potentially based on the principles of the I Ching, a key DF antecedent (ibid., 335). Also unlike Western literary traditions, Chinese literature makes no distinction between realism and fantasy: “Rarely can one find a classical Chinese fictional work that

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contains no fantastic and supernatural element” (ibid., 326). With such native structures and tendencies, what is perhaps most surprising is that China does not have a thriving tradition of hypertext and hypermedia fiction, though an examination of environmental pressures reveals why. Technical access in China was somewhat slow: in 2005, less than 10 percent of the population had internet access (Roser, Ritchie, and Ortiz-Ospina 2015). Even once computers and the internet began to proliferate, users found a great deal of online environments difficult to navigate and contribute to, as technology that was developed in the West did not support Chinese characters until some Chinese students studying in the United States created a word processing program for them c.1991 (Guo 2014, 7; Hockx 2015, 30). Further, the Chinese government’s restrictive regulation on internet use makes it much more difficult for its citizens to establish personal web pages; where non-Chinese internet users are able to purchase domains, establish websites, and upload hypertext, hypermedia, and experimental digital forms as much as they may like, Chinese citizens have a much higher barrier to entry (Hockx 2015, 191). Faced with these barriers, most choose to use and/or subvert existing structures for their narrative purposes, including blogs, forums, and social media sites. Similarly, governmental internet regulation and censorship has restricted the content produced even on these social sites, so that the key driver of innovation that has inspired DF in African and South American traditions—subversive discourse on political and cultural inequalities creating need-based innovations—is far less available to Chinese authors. Thus the dominant form of DF in China is the webnovel, also called Internet Literature or wangluo wenxue (Hockx 2015, 4). Webnovels are serialized stories constructed in a collaborative, forum-based, online community; the form has been duplicated in the West on the Wattpad platform. As a result, Chinese DF makes far more use of the participatory function of DF than any other. Once users in China began accessing the web, they made use of specifically purposed forum platforms to collaboratively create ongoing, serialized stories, which could then be collated and published as print novels in “Internet Literature” sections of bookstores (Hockx 2015). Michel Hockx claims the first of these online-serialto-print-novels was Di-yi ci de qinmi jiechu (First intimate contact), distributed via bulletin board system (BBS) in 1998 (ibid., 31), while Jinghua Guo (2014, 3) places primacy on Youquing Lu’s 2000 Diary of Death, a serial memoir of living and dying of cancer on the newly established Banyan Tree (http://www.ron​gshu​ xia.com) site for Internet Literature. The form was quickly established, reaching millions of readers from 2005 onward; Guo notes that of the 649 million Chinese



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internet users in 2014, 294 million were engaged in webnovels, with an estimated annual growth rate of 7.1 percent (2014, 3). The webnovel, and lately the mobile phone version of the standard webnovel, has remained the primary, and possibly only, form of DF to take hold in China, though epoetry has surpassed it in terms of experimentation and variety (Hockx 2015, 141). Japan’s DF creators face no restrictions on content or technology, and have an ample reader base to cater to; two forms of DF have become so mainstream that they are now simply part of the cultural narrative landscape. The cell phone novel (keitai shōsetsu, or thumb novel) (Zalbidea, Marino, and López-Varela 2014, 2) and the VN are both prominent enough that they have transferred outside of Japan to South Korea and even Western cultures (the latter primarily engaging with the VN). The cell phone novel, quite similar to the Chinese webnovel in a mobile environment, arose from the frequent and long commutes common in Japan and the early adoption of advanced mobile phone technology (Horne 2018). Also like the Chinese webnovel, or Wattpad in Anglo-American nations, these texts are composed and posted all on the same site (such as http://maho. jp), comments and feedback are exchanged, and all through the technology of the mobile phone (ibid.). The prevalence of this collaborative, participatory story method in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Anglo-American contexts (though often denigrated as fanfiction and thus “derivative” (Skains 2019b, 67)), illustrates that born-digital narrative is not beyond the realm of modern mainstream culture, and that it already exists in forms that engage and amplify the quintessential and pleasurable elements of human narrative communication. While the Japanese cell phone novel is primarily written by women (Horne 2018, n.p.) (contrasting with the Chinese webnovel, which seems to be split evenly between genders (Guo, 2014, 7)), VNs1 arise from a predominantly male milieu (Saito 2021, 2); the women’s market expanded significantly with smart mobile devices in the 2000s (ibid., 7). These works are “intensely narrativeoriented games in a novel-like format” (ibid., 1), and primarily operate within the genre of romance of one sort or the other (and some are referred to as “dating sims”). The most prominently discussed early VN was Yuji Horii’s (1983) The Portopia Serial Murder Case, inspired by IF of the Inform variety though Horii had only read about them (Szczepaniak 2007, 76). Hiroyuki Kanno and ELF Corporation’s (1996) YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World

See also Chapter 6. 1

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revitalized the market with its Auto Diverge Mapping System (ADMS), which greatly expanded the number and methods of branching storylines (Sorlie 2011, n.p.). While Japan did eventually import IF works in the 1980s, VNs dominated the market; by 2006, they accounted for almost 70 percent of all PC games released in Japan (Ciesla 2019, 79–80). VNs exist in many types of narrative, including a wide variety of strictly adult-themed fare, though most can be categorized as either bishoujo for male audiences or otome for female audiences (ibid., 85); LGBTQIA+ themes are basically absent, due to cultural unacceptance (Laurent 2017). Many are produced in studios, much like PC and console games in the West; others emerge from the “indie” or dōjinshi (self-published) market, which accounted for almost half the US$1.65-billion anime-oriented Japanese industry in 2007 (Ciesla 2019, 85). Thanks to proliferation of anime in the West, VNs have also entered, often referred to as JRPGs, or Japanese RPGs. Notable examples include Kanon by Key (1999); the American Doki Doki Literature Club! by Team Salvato (2017, free, 2mil downloads in 2018); and Clannad (2004 in Japanese, 2015 in English), a crowdfunded VN that topped Grand Theft Auto V and Call of Duty: Black Ops III in Steam’s 2015 charts (Ciesla 2019). Korea shares in enjoyment of Japanese manga, anime, cell phone novels, and VNs, but also adds its own unique DF form to the mix: webtoons or webcomics (Jin 2019b, 2086). Unlike the webnovel, the cell phone novel, or even dōjinshi-type participatory or “prosumer” (Toffler 1980) DF, webtoons arose as a transmedia form produced by the largest internet portals in Korea (Daum in 2003 and Naver in 2004) as part of expanding, interactive, transmedia storyworlds encompassing film, game, and television properties (Jin 2019a, 2019b). Webtoons play an important role in Korea’s “snack culture,” or desire for short and quick information and cultural resources, as they are now optimized for scrolling on mobile devices and incorporate multimedia elements (ibid.). Further, unlike almost all other forms of DF, the Korean government has embraced the form, providing financial and legal support to the industry—Dal Yong Jin cites the equivalent of US$5 million provided to webtoonists in 2013 alone (2019a, 2100). Webcomics are an important type of DF in the West, but they remain largely an experimental or community-driven form, and have not yet achieved the mainstream cultural status that webtoons have (see Chapter 6); it is, however, feasible that webtoons will filter into the West, like many other popular elements of Korean culture. Of course, there are more nations in Asia than have been accounted for in this section. Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example, have both engaged in elit,



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though Hong Kong’s efforts have largely been marginalized as experimental, and Taiwanese preferences lie in epoetry (Guo 2014). It is likely that DF in Asia encompasses much more than what I have identified in this section, both in actual works and in scholarship. Language barriers prevent me from identifying more, and from analyzing what works do exist. Nonetheless, this section has attempted to offer an overview of how differing cultures, languages, and sociopolitical environments give rise to an impressive variety of DF styles, traditions, and discourses, most of which are still young enough to be termed nascent.

Conclusion Cultural, linguistic, and sociopolitical origins clearly shape DF that emerges in any given context, including whether the form remains in a holding pattern of avant-garde innovation or enters mainstream and therefore commercial consciousness. Oral storytelling traditions in some cultures transfer quite easily to digital media, particularly social media, dismantling some elements of barriers such as technological inaccessibility and postcolonial othering. In other cultures, DF’s defining characteristics of interactivity, participation, and multimodality are given different weightings, depending on contextual factors such as tech access, digital skills literacy, antecedent narrative traditions, and the creators’ purposes in innovating through the form. All of these influences and evolutionary pressures combine to create a bountiful diversity of DF around the world which, thanks to digital media and the internet, can be shared, experienced, and recombined to innovate in still further cycles. DF is still an incredibly young form in comparison to all other narrative media, taking its first steps, as it were, out of the nursery of experimentation and innovation and into the wider world.

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4

Digital Creativity: Democracy and Capitalism

Numerous cultures have shifted from the margins of society into the mainstream in recent decades, thanks to the affordances of digital media and the internet— geeks, makers, crafters, gamers, comics, anime, media fandoms, and many more. While these groups are niche in local environments, the internet can connect isolated pockets into virtual communities (Scott in Jenkins [1992] 2013, xv). This phenomenon works not only for geek and fan cultures but also for creative communities: creators of all inclinations can share their work, find mentors and peers, and develop their practice and their genre through the portal of the World Wide Web. Sharing in this open and distributed environment increases the consumption of such work, ensuring its place and relevance in popular culture; it also enriches the pool of common creativity available to creators for new iterations of art and creativity (Currah 2007, 468). In terms of digital fiction (DF), Pierre Bourdieu’s three principles of legitimacy have historically applied: specific, recognizing “producers who produce for other producers”; bourgeois, corresponding to legitimacy (or attention) bestowed by the dominant social class; and popular, recognized by the mass of ordinary consumers (1983, 50–2). Digital media and the internet have enabled specific and popular legitimacy to cross over more than ever before, as they have resulted in an environment with very few barriers to entry, and thus almost everyone now is a producer (or “prosumer”). In some ways, this has made the split between bourgeois (which I will mainly term the “avant-garde” in the context of DF) and popular legitimacy more pronounced than ever, despite sharing so many practices and values: appreciation of novelty, desire for innovation, and a tendency toward subversion. The avant-garde and the popular streams of DF, interestingly, both operate in sharing cultures, and usually from a position of privilege, in that they do not have a fundamental need to make their living from their creative work. The former reside primarily in the academy, earning salaries in higher education

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institutions; their academic activities subsidize their artistic activities. The latter are passionate amateurs, creating and sharing DF for “imaginary internet points,” as common vernacular would have it; the internet allows publication and distribution, and thus audiences and attention, of such “hobbyist work,” where previous technologies did not. Somewhere in the middle are the professionals: the web and visual novelists, narrative designers, and indie game developers striving to make a living from their creative practice—a difficult task in an era of fragmented audience attention and open sharing of amateur work. The tension between these groups, their aims, and their ideals has fueled a great deal of discord between them. In this chapter, I will present the environments in which they create, and how the culture of the internet has led some DF practitioners to value experimentation over commerciality and vice versa.

Internet as Democracy In 1995, two years after CERN placed the World Wide Web into the public domain with an open license (CERN n.d.), Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron critiqued what they called the “Californian Ideology”: the rise of technological determinism emerging through the intersection of technology seated in Silicon Valley and neoliberalist West Coast politics. According to this optimistic ideology, “community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech ‘gift economy’ in which information is freely exchanged between participants” (ibid., n.p.); the internet was the new American frontier, in which individualism would once again be rewarded, and a system of free enterprise benefiting all would flourish. As Barbrook and Cameron pointed out, of course, the American notions of manifest destiny, equality, and free enterprise have always come with caveats, restrictions, and provisos: democracy, social mobility, and the overall American dream have historically been limited to white cis-het men, particularly those born into existing wealth. Nevertheless, the internet was touted as a levelplaying field with opportunity for all, and the refrain is renewed every time a new platform or app makes waves. In some ways, these idealogues were correct: digital media and the internet have shifted media power structures from the overwhelmingly dominant oneto-many model of newspapers, TV, and film in the twentieth century, expanding and to some extent democratizing access to means of cultural production and



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circulation (Jenkins 1992; Jenkins, Lashley, and Creech 2017). Online media, including many sites and platforms operating on the “prosumer” model (Toffler 1980), have invited and encouraged user-generated production and many-tomany consumption, bypassing gatekeeping structures like the royalty music and publishing industries, and the film and TV studio system. An enormous proportion of this user-generated content (UGC) is shared in an internet gift economy, where content and data are given away (well, endlessly duplicated, a unique feature of digital media) in return for community status (expressed through follows, likes, shares, and comments) (Currah 2007). Lawrence Lessig defines this economy as democratic in the sense that it provides all community members the opportunity to contribute (2008, 73), whether through exhibition spaces such as YouTube and Flickr, collaborative spaces such as Wikipedia and SourceForge, or peer-to-peer sharing such as torrent sites. New models of sharing and copyright have arisen in recognition and response to this democratic sharing or gifting: Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for open-source software, and Lessig’s own Creative Commons copyright system, which provides an à la carte menu of copyright coverages to widen creative opportunities on media objects (Voyce 2011). In this idealized version of the internet and digital creative environments, all citizens have access to technology and the web, the freedom to produce and distribute creative work, and a copyright system that protects intellectual property even as it enables sharing and community innovation, as “creativity is the process by which available cultural resources … are recombined in novel ways” (Burgess 2006, 6). Jean Burgess defines vernacular creativity as a renewal of traditional cultural practices through innovative methods of production, democratizing spaces of production as the distance narrows between the everyday and conditions of cultural production (ibid.). The first iteration of the World Wide Web, despite its limitations, was perhaps more apt for this democratic ideal of vernacular creativity than what has resulted from the second. On the early web (what we now call Web 1.0), in addition to access, one needed only a basic level of HTML skills to publish to the internet. In many ways, no one site was any more privileged than another, and apart from service providers, web designers, and chain email scam artists, the ability to passively capitalize off of anyone else’s content was severely limited. In this manner, the early web demonstrated its power to support a read/write culture, where netizens both produce and consume, “creating and re-creating the culture around them” (Lessig 2008, 46); on the other hand, however, there is no doubt that the vast majority of these early internet users were

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consumers, rarely if ever contributing to that particular gift economy. While the Web 1.0’s read/write medium did require some digital literacy skills in the ability to publish at least a rudimentary website through HTML, it certainly reflected a shift to read/write culture and Deborah Brandt’s writing-based literacy, in which significant cultural activity is conducted through writing as opposed to reading alone (2015; cf. Bolter 2001). The next iteration of the internet doubled down on this writing-based literacy even as it continually rolled back the need to engage in any specialized skills beyond keyboard use: the Web 2.0 gradually emerged in the early 2000s, in the form of blogs, wikis, media-sharing sites, collaboration platforms, and social media (DiNucci 1999; O’Reilly 2007). Some call Web 2.0 the “participatory web,” because dynamic websites invite user-generated activity, content, and interaction; sites like Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and even eBay and Etsy exemplify this participation. In his discussion of it, however, Tim O’Reilly refers to it as a “platform” (2007), which incorporates participation, but also connotes the social and commercial inequalities that have duplicated themselves in online spaces: where there is a platform, there are different levels of visibility, performance, and benefit. That is not to say that significant works of narrative creativity have not emerged from these gift economies, even within the platforming occurring in the latter stage of the web. In fact, a large portion of DF exists within a gift economy, particularly those practices that have not yet been commercialized (or that have fallen out of commercial favor), as well as those in the beginning stages or fringes of commercial DF industries. The first three Electronic Literature Collections (Borrás et al. 2011; Boluk et al. 2016; Hayles et al. 2006) permitted no works from the commercial sphere (even “canonical” hypertexts published by Eastgate), yet they contain approximately two hundred works of such value that they have been preserved and promoted as worthy of scholarly study. These collections largely exclude the works developed in rich digital literary traditions as discussed in Chapter 3: German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—which means that hundreds, potentially thousands, of works of similar quality exist in other digital environments. Outside of the avant-garde-leaning-academic platform is the interactive fiction (IF)–created post-Infocom era, as the text adventure game form was reappropriated into the gift economy through open-source software like Inform and TADS, and community-driven platforms like the Interactive Fiction Database (https://ifdb.org/). There is also what I term “DF in the wild,” works that have no clear association with known communities of elit or



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DF: 17776, a hyperfiction created by a sports writer imagining what American football might look like 15,000 years from now (Bois 2017); The Interface Series, a subversive alien-conspiracy tale enigmatically performed on Reddit (2016–); SCP Foundation and Psychic High, both examples of collaborative narratives based on a common storyworld (2008–; 2014–); Broken Horseshoe Ranch, a comics-like narrative told in episodes through Facebook photo albums (Eva 2020–); alternate reality stories (Rutter 2020) like Dear David, a Twitter fiction (Ellis 2017); and fictional narratives like the Amazon reviews for the “BIC for Her” pen (BIC n.d.) that appear in nonfictional spaces of the internet such as ecommerce sites, which I have termed “dissonant fabulations” (Skains 2018) (see Figure 6). As long as there is opportunity, writers and designers will find creative ways to use the affordances of the internet in new and interesting ways. On the other hand, Barbrook and Cameron’s argument against the Californian Ideology’s unbridled optimism has, with twenty-six years’ hindsight, proven unfortunately astute. Time has shown that technology and internet access is a significant equality issue around the world; even while web access via mobile coverage has grown significantly, more than half the world’s population does

Figure 6  Examples of “BIC for Her” pen reviews on Amazon.com (BIC n.d.). These dissonant fabulations (Skains 2018), and others like them, provide fictional characters and narratives in nonfictional spaces of the web (such as ecommerce) to enter into sociocultural discourse.

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not have access to a computer at home (ITU Publications 2020; Roser, Ritchie, and Ortiz-Ospina 2015), which is still the primary means of creative production (as opposed to mobile devices). Even those who have access suffer inequalities in community credit and distribution, a phenomenon exemplified by the experiences of historically marginalized groups in games development (Harvey and Shepherd 2017; Jenson and de Castell 2021; Srauy 2019), and in womendominated spheres such as fanfiction, where women’s activities are classed as “hobbyist” while men’s are professional (Flegel and Roth 2016, 264). Andrew Currah also notes downsides to gift economies in general, including copyright theft (beyond what is permitted even under GPL and Creative Commons), asymmetric participation (more taking of community commodities than giving), and quantity flooding (where so many products of varying quality flood the community, making discoverability increasingly difficult) (2007). And, of course, the paradox of a “gift economy” arises, as even within the Californian Ideology the notion that activity might not be monetized is laughable: in a capitalist society, any critical mass of potential consumers will attract commercial attention, sooner or later.

Digital Fiction and Free Enterprise The idea that the internet would level a playing field in an increasingly corporate global economy has been proven fantastical, even in a niche community or market such as DF. In the early stages of DF’s evolution, the technical expertise and access necessary to produce this work placed it almost entirely in one commercial realm or another, in production processes focused on the works as physical objects to be manufactured and sold: a provider-based value creation model (Anker et al. 2015). This approach follows the established publishing model, a linear circuit from the creator, through the publisher as gatekeeper, to the audience as purchaser and consumer (Darnton 1989). Simone Murray points out that “developments in digital culture fundamentally challenge Darnton’s model through a process of disintermediation: questioning the necessity of publishers’ roles as mediating (and profit-making) go-betweens” (2010, 26); the read/write nature of the web has led, as discussed, to disruption, with a platformdriven model of commercialization emerging in the creative industries. And while the platforms themselves do not replace publishers as gatekeepers or determiners of value, they have nonetheless implemented a model in which



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commercial value lies not in the creative activity, but in the digital environment in which that activity occurs. Prior to the internet, DF was necessarily published and commercialized as physical objects, manufactured and distributed by corporations. While IBM only implemented Mabel Addis and William McKay’s educational adventure The Sumerian Game (1964) for two years, until its government support was withdrawn, most of the known early works of DF entered into a productpublication model. Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Colossal Cave Adventure sparked the formation of Infocom, and IF dominated the games industry during the 1980s, sold as packages of discs containing the game code along with “feelies.” Paratexts like photos, documents, decoders, and maps made the game package a collectible physical object, a strong marketing factor that made a significant impact in the sector (Briceno et al. 2000, 24). The Oregon Trail (Rawitsch, Heinemann, and Dillenberger 1971), home-grown though it was, nonetheless entered into the product-publishing model through creator Don Rawitsch’s job at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), which eventually published the educational game to the tune of 65 million copies (Lussenhop 2011; Rawitsch 1978). To a certain extent, hypertext publisher Eastgate Systems attempted to pick up on Infocom’s product-publishing model, packaging early hypertexts like Patchwork Girl (Jackson 1995) and Victory Garden (Moulthrop 1992) on floppy discs seated in book-like covers. While all of these publishers continue to hold the copyrights to the DF works they published, Infocom (merged with Activision, now Activision Blizzard) and MECC no longer produce the texts for sale; various “retrogame” simulators have reproduced some of the works for current machines. Eastgate, however, retains all its published works in its proprietary StorySpace software, attempting to repeatedly update the hypertexts within that framework to keep up with continual technological advances, restricting their publication to physical storage devices (floppies, then CD-ROMs, now USB flash drives) rather than converting to more open and sustainable systems such as HTML and the web. Other product-oriented attempts to publish DF have certainly arisen even on the participatory/platform-based web. Some DF works are published as indie games and apps, entering the commercial space through games publishing (see Chapter 6). Less successful ventures have been made with fanfiction, such as FanLib (De Kosnik 2009, 119) and Amazon’s Kindle Worlds; both were topdown corporate attempts to monetize the enormous wealth of consumer-created value in fanfiction, and both failed due to crucial lack of understanding and

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engagement with the specialized culture that creates these works (Skains 2019b). Choice of Games balances between product- and platform-oriented production, as it makes its multiple-choice games’ programming language ChoiceScript open for all to use, and invites publishing (either free or on consignment) on their platform (Choice of Games n.d.). They also engage, however, in selecting and publishing premium works in a commission model, in which designers pitch games that the company can publish through relevant outlets such as Steam and app marketplaces (Choice of Games 2016). Far more prominent in the current era of the internet and DF, however, is the platform model exemplified by social media, in which a platform is created that facilitates and shapes the content, but all content is generated by its users (usually, unpaid). Martin Kenney and John Zysman identify two types of platform-mediated content creation relevant to DF: consignment, such as app marketplaces where the UGC is uploaded, and the producers monetize it with a fee or percentage going to the platform owner; and uncompensated UGC, wherein user activity on the platform generates data that can then be packaged, analyzed, and sold (2019). The former includes Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, YouTube, Steam, Apple’s App Store and Google Play, as well as webnovel platforms in East Asia such as Banyan Tree. Certainly these platforms have revolutionized the creative industries, in that the gatekeepers of publishers and studios have been disintermediated, ushering in the new-normal of peer-topeer sharing and distribution, and some content creators have seen enormous returns, with much-touted success stories like Hugh Howey, Justin Bieber, Angry Birds, and Gone Home (Nordhagen 2018). By and large, however, most of the content produced and consigned to these platforms has little engagement and no return whatsoever, drowning in the flood of content and unable to garner sufficient attention; the individual content producer has taken on all the risk, the cost of production and marketing, and the platform benefits from the hope of popularity and stardom from the sheer number of participants (Kenney and Zysman 2019). Platforms that host and share uncompensated UGC include Google, Facebook, and Wattpad. Kenney and Zysman call out Google as the most powerful: as the internet’s “librarian,” sites or content that don’t appear on Google (or even the first page or two of search results) effectively don’t exist (2019, 27). User data, including personal information as well as online activity, is monetized through sale to marketers, corporations, and investors for the purposes of advertising, shaping product and service development, and training artificial intelligence



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algorithms (Matsakis 2019). These platforms participate in a “hybrid economy,” leveraging value from sharing or gift economies (Lessig 2008, 211); Lessig theorizes these economies as sharing communities in which everyone receives value either through access to content or in monetization. To an extent, this is true, as these platforms persist even as they are vilified for creating billionaires out of their founders while engaging in questionably ethical practices (as many view data sales, not to mention algorithm tweaking and vulnerability to social hacking) (Anker et al. 2015, 553): their users must be getting value out of them. Some of that value lies in social interactions and attention—some of it, however, lies in the instances of innovation and subversion as writers and designers use the affordances and constraints of these platforms to generate narratives in new and varied channels. All content, user-generated, platform-mediated, or otherwise, is subject to an attention economy (Goldhaber 1997), particularly now that so many gatekeepers have been disintermediated, and creative work that would have previously only had a two-person audience of creator and rejector is given the same space and privilege as any other. This is a benefit for riskier work such as Ryan North’s gamebook adaptation of Hamlet (To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure (2015c) (see Figure 7)), which the publishing industry deemed too risky but which garnered sufficient attention on Kickstarter for indie and, eventually, royalty publication (Skains 2019b, 35–6). In the specific case of fanfiction, wherein creators exchange work for free that is based upon existing media properties, the attention capital indirectly benefits the source texts, as the proliferation of fanfic online acts as huge amounts of the best kind of advertising: word of mouth (De Kosnik 2009, 124). Unfortunately, for any given genre or designer, Michael H. Goldhaber notes that not only is attention an increasingly scarce resource, but it is increasingly based on novelty, forcing innovation and creativity into extremely fast cycles. Such an effect makes for a constant supply of interesting and original DF, but it results in fragmentation of an already highly variable form, and further division of attention and remuneration. Only platform owners and passive consumers benefit from such a system, leaving creators in a continuous scramble. Thus we have entered into an economy in which each new platform has only a small window affording any semblance of democratic opportunity for creators; once a platform has generated enough attention to have financial value, those who have existing capital quickly dominate the channel. YouTube is dominated by clips from television networks and mainstream press; Instagram is

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Figure 7  Pages from To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure (North 2015c).

weighted toward influencers and celebrities; even memes are often generated by marketing departments seeding the cybersphere with branded reaction Graphic Interchange Formats (GIFs). Pierre Bourdieu’s question of such dynamics is “who is the true producer of the value of the work?” (1977, 76)—the creator or the platform developer?

Between Creativity and Capitalism A tension persists, then, between DF as it emerges in internet gift economies, and DF as it becomes standardized in a platform economy attempting to garner sufficient attention for monetization. In both spheres, novelty and relevancy is prized, though these areas have different benchmarks for novelty: defamiliarization and aesthetic in the academic and avant-garde circles; playfulness and participation without alienation in commercial. The more an element of novelty becomes standardized and commercialized, it decreases in value not only for the avant-garde but also for the earlier, smaller audiences



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who first encounter it: the larger the audience, the less credit a work or genre receives for being art (Bourdieu 1983, 48). Further, audiences often fracture if work transitions from a gift economy to the commercial sphere, perceiving such a move in myriad negative lights. Because it has existed for so long in so many gift economies since the advent of the World Wide Web, from IF to elit to web novels, DF that has been successfully commercialized is subject to the same sort of cultural phenomena and resistance as works in the nearby fields of epublishing and fanfiction. Despite decades of disdain for self- or “vanity” publishing, digital media and platform-mediated epublishing has created multiple zones of literary activity accessible to everyday people (Laquintano 2016, 6–7). This democratization led to some remarkable early successes in indie publishing—including Hugh Howey, E. L. James, and Anna Todd—but the market thereafter flooded, and it is more difficult than ever to garner sufficient attention to achieve success through large sales or bestseller status. Fanfiction in Western culture (which served as a base for both E. L. James and Anna Todd) has also produced successes, though corporate monetization efforts have failed. The fanfic community also has great disdain for authors who benefit from the fanfic gift economy, and then “file the serial numbers off ” the work (alter enough of the text to bypass copyright concerns) to publish. (Such disdain appears not to factor in Japanese culture, in which a great deal of fanfic, or dōjinshi, is retailed alongside the source texts (De Kosnik 2009, 120).) DF has seen similar instances of one-off early successes that then are difficult to duplicate, though for somewhat different reasons than indie publishing and fanfic. The late 1980s/early 1990s was an exciting and tumultuous time for interactive digital work: the end of the Infocom era, the beginning of hypertext, the birth of the World Wide Web, and the explosion of console gaming prompted a lot of attention and discourse for how digital media were changing the face of narrative media. Hypertext works were all over the literary sphere: Stuart Moulthrop predicted the changes would be felt all throughout literature (1989); Robert Coover hyped the sort of “serious” hypertext offered by Eastgate (though his list of such “worthy” works was entirely white and male) (1992, 1993a, 1993b); Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1992), Michael Joyce’s afternoon: a story (1987), and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), along with other Eastgate titles, were much discussed in scholarly journals. As discussed in Chapter 2, however, the notion that the printed book would give way to hyperlinked experiences on floppy drives, as well as the aporia and

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disorientation hypertext readers experienced, kept hypertext fiction sidelined to a niche segment of academic avant-garde. Some years later, when Chris Klimas’s Twine platform (2009–) finally earned sufficient attention for a role in the DF and gaming spheres, and Dear Esther (Pinchbeck and Morgan 2012) brought walking sims into the spotlight, the arguments against them centered not on whether they would replace books, but whether they deserved a place amongst games. Depression Quest (Quinn 2013) was the internet’s primary punching bag in this “not a game” lamentation, and the backlash contributed to the misogynistic discourse of #GamerGate; likewise, the term “walking simulator” was originally a derogatory term for a group of games that didn’t include a comparative level of gameplay to first-person shooters and RPGs. Like indie published books, however, both hypertexts (of the Twine variety) and walking sims have outpaced their detractors, and now their markets are quite significant, if not yet flooded. Visual novels, webnovels, and to a certain extent, Twine games (as they are known, rather than hypertexts) and walking sims, represent genres of DF that have become standardized in commercial markets (IF, of course, is standardized, but now exists almost entirely in a gift economy). Each of these, with perhaps the exception of walking sims that are more difficult to create on an amateur/ hobby basis, exist as commercial genres at the apex of an enormous volume of works exchanged in a gift economy. In a Bourdieusian framework, works like these are “commercial” rather than “genuine” art, a distinction embraced by the “cultural entrepreneurs” in the avant-garde who have the privilege of being able to renounce economic profit from their work (1977, 82–3). Both, of course, are reliant upon one another in attention economies that reward novelty; what constitutes that novelty is simply somewhat different in each, as the niche for avant-garde is smaller and more experimental, while that for more mainstream work calls for less distance between the conventional and the new so as not to alienate large swathes of the audience. Novelty in each trickles into the other, as experimental works play with and twist what has become conventional, and, conversely, their experimental novelties eventually become common enough to be conventional. The “converged metamedium of the Web” (Stroupe 2007, 433) is created by experimental artists, amateur writers, casual readers, and participatory audiences, and while the creative internet economy has not become the democratic ideal envisioned by the Californian Idealogues, it nonetheless continues to provide space for a wide array of DF for a variety of audiences.



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Conclusion DF exists across the internet, from the nooks and crannies of elit to the vast commercial spheres of visual novels and webnovels. The optimism expressed by early netizens regarding the potential of the internet to provide a democratizing environment for culture, creativity, and even commerciality has not come to fruition, though certain elements have disrupted gatekeeping structures of creative industries. Netizens can publish books, films, podcasts, music, and games with minimal barriers to entry, though they face significant challenges from an attention economy that is, ironically, increasingly fragmented thanks to the dissolution of gatekeeping. Nevertheless, novelty continues to be the driving factor behind the success of any given DF, from the avant-garde to the commercial sphere, though the latter’s need to maintain recognizability through conventions is somewhat more limiting. There is no question that DF, despite its turbulent years in a custody battle between avant-garde and popular culture, bouncing between the houses of Infocom and IF, Eastgate and Twine, will persist as a significant narrative form. Or rather, as significant narrative forms, given its wide variability. Some have already emerged as established popular commercial genres—webnovels, webtoons, visual novels, walking sims—their influence and longevity strengthened by volumes of work in internet gift economies. Others may always remain in experimental niches, like their antecedents in cut-out novels and corollaries in postmodernism. Nonetheless, all practices, subversions, novelties, conventions, and shared works contribute to the richness of a narrative medium that has only just begun to find its feet.

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Part Two

Digital Fiction in Popular Culture

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Evolution from Mainstream to Niche: The Case of Interactive Fiction

If this entire book is centered on the argument “digital fiction is already mainstream,” then interactive fiction (IF) is its poster child. IF, after all, has already dominated the commercial sphere, so much so that even contemporary pop culture like TV’s Black Mirror and Big Bang Theory have referenced it directly. IF originated computer games as we know them and helped to put personal computers (PCs) in our homes, yet its heyday was short. In both popular and academic discourse, IF’s rise and relative fall has been blamed primarily on the advent of graphic computer games, and secondarily on poor business decisions. Looking at the historical context of IF, and the wider context of computing, I argue in this chapter that a significant contributor toward the dissolution of the most prominent IF creator, Infocom, is the more thorny and complex element of exclusion: its innate assumption that the default IF programmer, writer, narrator, and consumer must be white, cis-het, and male. IF has been known by other monikers, including text adventure games; the truncated “adventure games” often applies to both text-only games and those with graphical elements (Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020). For the purposes of this discussion, IF refers to text-only adventure games: “a computer program that accepts text input from a user and produces text output in reply” by means of a “parser” (Montfort 2011, 29; 2003), creating a unique narrative from the interaction of user and machine. IF is a computer adaptation of preceding literary forms in print, such as the hypertext antecedents discussed in Chapter 2 (Hayles and Montfort 2012), the collaborative role-playing game (RPG) Dungeons & Dragons (1974), and gamebooks exemplified by the Choose Your Own Adventure series (1976) (Salter 2014). IF’s primary commercial era, also referred to as the “Infocom era,” was from 1980 to 1989, though graphical adventure games persisted through companies like Sierra Online and LucasArts through the early 2000s (Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 204). Its influence in global digital

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fiction (DF) and games development cannot be under-emphasized, as it directly inspired regionalized forms in no fewer locations than Italy, France, Spain, Czechia, and Japan. In almost all these locales and languages, however, IF remained firmly rooted in the patriarchal model that dominated the computing industry by the 1970s and 1980s. While recent popular books and films have brought attention to the women, and particularly Black women, whose contributions to the early days of computing were so vital, the subsequent devaluation of women in computing had—and continues to have—significant knock-on effects for computing, gaming, and DF culture. Attributing Infocom and IF’s decline merely to technological advances and inadequate management ignores women’s role, or lack thereof, in computer science, games development, and electronic literature (elit) that continues to be problematic today.

The Historical Devaluation of Women’s Work The work of women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and other historically marginalized groups has been and continues to be devalued, not only monetarily in terms of pay gaps, but also in more subjective areas such as prizes and respect. This devaluation is created not only through the discriminatory practices in the years before the women’s and civil rights movements prompted laws concerning equal pay for equal work, but also by unequal opportunities and lowered esteem for work seen as feminized or inferior (Hicks 2017). Certainly, women were at a disadvantage in almost every arena of labor, as laws and culture precluded them from many roles, and from advancement in the few roles they were permitted. For professions in which esteem can be subjective, such as art, literature, and science, the devaluation originates and persists in societal bias against the default of white, cis-het, and male. The women’s movement of the mid-twentieth century cycled around this bias, attempting to draw it into more explicit discussions. Linda Nochlin’s influential 1971 essay points out the many reasons there are “no great women artists,” a lengthy and somewhat exasperated response to the notion that if women were truly equal to men, we would as easily be able to name artists and movements based on their work as we do Van Gogh or Da Vinci. Nochlin brandishes the many disadvantages women have when it comes to developing as artists: lack of access to artistic education and apprenticeships; societal



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expectations that women should be mothers and wives first and foremost; and that artistic institutions, made up as they are of mostly men, favor those most like themselves. Women’s art, therefore, is untrained, labeled as “folk art” (textiles, knitting, crochet, tapestry, etc.), and perceived as primitive. Women lack role models and networking structures—both historically and now—to aid them in achieving high status within the industry. Further, unconscious bias leads to lower purchase prices for art by all historically marginalized people, including women. For women in literature, Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing recounts the ways women’s literature has been discarded and devalued ([1983] 2018). She cites many women authors using pseudonyms or initials to obscure their gender for the sake of sales, and notes that till very recently women were either forbidden from institutions of higher education or are marginalized while on the programs, and that genres written by and for women are considered “not serious,” such as romance, young adult, and “confessional” stories. Despite the fact that (white) women dominate the editorial ranks of the publishing industry (Feijao 2018), number of writers (Cima 2017), and readers (Ballard 2018; Gleed 2013; Scales and Rhee 2001), men are overrepresented in best sellers (Cima 2017) and literary prizes (Griffith 2015). A contributing factor is the unconscious bias that shows up in consumer reading patterns: male readers tend to prefer books written by men, about men, while female readers will read both male and female authors, about male and female protagonists, skewing the numbers in favor of male authors and characters (Summers 2013). Even within a single “feminized” genre like romance, male authors receive more respect, as illustrated by the current (as of this writing) Wikipedia entries for Nicholas Sparks and Danielle Steel, respectively. The former lists his genre as “romantic fiction” (not romance), with notes on how many of his works have been adapted, and a special section on his philanthropy. Despite her much grander level of success in terms of best sellers and adaptations, Steel’s page is arranged in sections describing each of her marriages and denigrating the quality of her writing; her own philanthropy, which is significant, is contained in one sentence at the end of the section detailing her fourth marriage. Scientists have similarly been defined, or rather not defined, according to their husbands. Margaret Rossiter’s research career has been dedicated to uncovering the accomplishments of women in science, terming their devaluation the “Matilda Effect” (1993). Many women have contributed in highly significant ways to scientific discoveries worthy of Nobel Prizes, yet found themselves passed

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over in favor of male colleagues, particularly if those colleagues are also their husbands (ibid.; Light 1999). Perhaps the clearest example is “Frieda Robscheit Robbins, the associate for thirty years of pathologist George Hoyt Whipple and the co-author of nearly all of his/their publications, [who] did not share his Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1934” (Rossiter 1993, 330). Rosalind Franklin’s groundbreaking X-ray crystallography revealed the double-helix structure of DNA, for which her male coworkers won the Nobel and subsequently self-promoted themselves into household names while ignoring her contributions (ibid.). American anthologies of prominent scientists were titled “Men of Science” until the 1970s (ibid.); as Jennifer S. Light notes, “Occupational feminization in the sciences fostered long-term invisibility” (1999, 459). DF is an endeavor that incorporates art, literature, and (computer) science into its foundations. As such, the histories and cultures of these fields influence the creation and reception of DF works: who creates them, who reads them, who studies them, who writes about them, who sells them, and who buys them. In order to understand how DF plays out in popular or mainstream settings, we must first understand the powerful influence that marginalization has had in IF as a key originator of the field in general.

A Brief History of Women in Computing The history of women in computing is so recent, and relatively well documented, that it provides a clear and inarguable example of aggressive male usurpation and colonization of women’s innovations. Women were and are essential to the development of computing, but were deliberately replaced by men both in historical accounts and in reality. During the Second World War thousands of women programmers contributed to code-breaking and scientific computing, almost entirely developing software systems (such as they were in the time of vacuum tubes and punch cards) on their own (Gürer 2002), and then after the war went home to obscurity and invisibility once again. As computers developed first into useful tools for business and government, and then into personal devices for both work and play, women’s reversal of fortune in the field became so complete that computer science remains the lone STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics/medicine) area with declining numbers of female enrollment (Fisher, Margolis, and Miller 1997; Sherman 2015). Their absence from the field and its history “perpetuates misconceptions of women as



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uninterested or incapable in the field” (Light 1999, 455); when they do enter the field, they are faced with deliberate exclusion. In the early days of computer development, most of the focus—and thus the prestige—was on the hardware (Abbate 2012; Light 1999). British and American women were excluded from this development, though the Soviets’ more egalitarian gender ideology incorporated women into the design and build of their first computer in 1951 (Abbate 2012, 4). “Computing” (calculating by hand) and programming hardware was considered clerical work, thus demeaning for men but just fine for women in the few years between school and marriage; in those days many women had mathematical training to prepare them to be teachers, and thus as war approached they were seconded into ballistics computation and programming (Hicks 2017; Light 1999). During the Second World War, British women were recruited into the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and thousands (80 percent of the over 10,000 workers were women) were employed at Bletchley Park to program the Colossus computers for code-breaking; these roles were kept secret, from both history and families, until 2000 (Hicks 2017). American women were similarly recruited to program IBM’s Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (the Mark I), and later, the world’s first electronic computer, the ENIAC (Abbate 2012; Gürer 2002). Betty Holberton, who was on the ENIAC team, programmed the first practical computer applications, and played a key role in standardizing the FORTRAN programming language (which Will Crowther would later use to create the “first” IF); her Sort-Merge Generator would inspire Grace Hopper to build the first compiler (programs creating programs) (Gürer 2002, 117–19). These women were deliberately recruited into the workforce due to war-related resource shortages, with the “understanding that they would vacate these positions after the war to restore the accustomed gendered division of labor” (Abbate 2012, 19). The cultural result of this dominance of women as programmers led to a devaluation of the work, a presumption that programming was mundane and unworthy of male energy and intellect; such was the feminization of clerical and office machine work that (male) managers initially resisted the addition of keyboards as computer accessories because they resembled typewriters— which were tools for women’s work (Gürer 2002; Hicks 2017). After the Second World War, computer manufacturing transitioned from war effort to commercialization, first in scientific institutions and then in businesses. For a while, women enjoyed the advantages of their experience, as computing and programming was a dynamic and growing field, and no formal training yet

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existed. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, women retained their clerical—and sub-clerical—roles as programmers and “machinists” but struggled to achieve any level of advancement or security. Discrimination based on race and gender was still legal, and it was assumed that any woman entering the workforce was only temporary, as she would leave upon marriage (and in the UK, this “retirement” was mandatory) (Abbate 2012; Hicks 2017). Thus they were a source of experienced and cheap labor, as they did not need to earn as much as men as family “breadwinners,” and had no career prospects. As computing rose in status and necessity, and men returned to the workforce, however, societal pressure endeavored to force women out of computing. In the United States, “an avalanche of materials urged women to leave work” (Light 1999, 479): the FBI released all the women it had hired as cryptographers, and the Department of Labor launched a strenuous campaign of patriotic rhetoric directing women toward teaching (ibid.). In the UK, a special labor class of “sub-clericals” was created for “machinists” (women programming computers) that was lower in pay, had no career advancement, and required retirement upon marriage (a particularly heteronormative assumption) (Hicks 2017); as computers became more sophisticated and embedded in government and business operations, there was a concerted effort to defeminize computing and reassign its domain to managerial (and thus male) roles, and to promote men out of the lower labor grades. As training began to be necessary for anyone working in computing, employers favored young men with no experience over even experienced women, as they were perceived to have longer careers that would justify training expenditures (ibid.). These discriminatory practices continued even after imposition of equal pay laws: men were promoted out of labor classes dominated by women, justifying their higher pay rates, and parttime or home-based workers were not permitted, leaving no opportunities for women with children and home responsibilities. As Mar Hicks notes, “The larger socio-technical system becomes reengineered from the top down in order to accommodate and extend existing patterns of privilege and power” (2017, 604). Toward the late 1960s and 1970s, as hardware became stable and standardized, the demand for programmers grew—yet many young men resisted opportunities to do “women’s work.” In order to attract these more desirable workers, managers shifted to terming it “software engineering”; despite having little in common with engineering, this moniker associated programming with that deeply masculine field (Abbate 2012). The masculinization of computing was so complete that by the time home computing arose in the 1980s, computers



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were indelibly linked to boys and men, and the perception of women as less technically competent persists today (Abbate 2012; Hicks 2017). Hicks, in tracing the history of computing in Britain, argues that these specifically gendered and classist practices actually stunted the British computing industry. The second half of the twentieth century saw a decline of British power, as the empire’s colonies regained independence and the United States and USSR dominated the politisphere. With its Colossus machines, Britain had pioneered computing hardware (despite their secrecy and postwar destruction), and envisioned future efforts to regain some of their standing by leading computing in less industrialized nations. Their strategy was to streamline British computing into one entity, International Computers Limited (ICL), which would have preferential treatment from the government in exchange for Treasury control over its projects. These were directed to government applications, such as the national tax service (Pay As You Earn, PAYE) and National Health Service (NHS). Instead of concentrating all innovations in one dedicated stream, however, the result was bloated government projects that were often scrapped before being implemented as the rest of the computing industry passed them by. Workers—men and women—left stagnant and hierarchical government computing roles for better pay and career options in industry, and women and other marginalized persons who remained staged strikes and passive work slowdowns in an effort to actually receive the equal pay enshrined in European, and thus UK, law. Hicks argues: Although seemingly two very different issues, the failure of ICL and the continued failure to equalize women’s place in the labor market both had their roots in the same soil: attempts to engineer a computerized state that gave government more top-down control and strengthened existing hierarchies of gender and class. (2017, 490)

The government’s continued neglect of women in computing labor was the primary cause of labor shortages and delays, leading to failure of the British computing industry. Though the United States was less institutionalized in its neglect of women in computing and made no attempt to nationalize technological innovation, the masculinization of the field was nonetheless equally achieved. So extensive was the exclusion of women—and even moreso, people of color (PoC)—that computer science remains the only STEM field in which student enrollments from women and PoC continue to decline, resulting in a skills gap that contributes to

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continuing inequality in pay and losses to the economy (Abbate 2012; Margolis and Fisher 2002). Several studies indicate a number of interrelated social reasons for this inequality: early childhood exposure to computers and who uses them, perceptions of a hostile culture and working environment, and a lack of female role models to help navigate the male-dominated industry (Fisher, Margolis, and Miller 1997; Galpin 2002; Margolis and Fisher 2002). By the 1980s, when computers entered homes, they were used almost exclusively by fathers (who were programmers) and brothers. Often, they were in private spaces, such as the father’s den or the boy’s bedroom. School computer classes and clubs stereotype computer activities as male; as gaming rose to dominate entertainment media in the 1990s and 2000s, it cemented this perception, as games are overwhelmingly made by and for males. In contrast, Vashti Galpin notes that Singapore, whose government promoted computing as gender-neutral, had no such gender imbalance in computer careers (2002, 95). The stereotype of “antisocial male nerds” and “computer geeks” is also off-putting to young women (Abbate 2012), who aren’t as likely to approach the computer as an obsession; women are found to be more likely to see computers as tools that can enhance user experience, rather than intricate “toys” to be controlled, as men tend to see them (Fisher, Margolis, and Miller 1997). Technical discussions, particularly those occurring online and/or involving games, are often rendered in gendered language and aggressive tones, and women who do enter the technical field often find themselves victims of gender-based harassment like online abuse, doxxing (posting personal information online), and SWATting (reporting hostages or weapons sighted at the victim’s address so as to prompt violent police response), as occurred to game developer Zoë Quinn and critic Anita Sarkeesian in the wake of #GamerGate (Chess 2017, xii; Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 478). The lack of women in computing and gaming also results in a spiral of fewer women, as newer entrants have no one creating content for them, serving as role models, or mentoring them (Abbate 2012, 150; Chess 2017, 17). The underrepresentation of women in computing and games industries is, clearly, a gender disparity, but also an economic issue, as technical industries continue to grow (Abbate 2012, 2), and even nontechnical industries increasingly require digital skills (Nania, Bonella, and Taska 2019). The economic, societal, and individual repercussions echo more loudly once other marginalized communities are considered: in recruiting computer science students to interview about their motivations for entering the field, Jane Margolis and Allen Fisher could not garner sufficient students of color to survey (2002, 10).



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The United States and the UK governments and computing industries were so determined to preserve the positions of the dominant white, cis-het, male patriarchy, they deliberately created the monolithic “brogrammer” culture that has led to perpetual labor shortages, plagues of software production problems, neglect of more than half of its potential consumer base, and the scuppering of British computing (Abbate 2012; Hicks 2017). From the deep, dark center of this history comes IF.

Interactive Fiction IF came of age in this hyper-masculinized world of computing, which had been largely formed by women before being aggressively colonized by men. Most of the public discourse, both popular and academic, has omitted this cultural context, leaving our understanding of the rise and fall of IF as a commercial property remarkably incomplete. The history of IF, primarily focused on its invention and subsequent commercialization through American software company Infocom, has been covered in numerous texts, including profiles and interviews in RetroGamer (RG Staff 2004), the first PhD on IF from Mary Buckles (1986), Nick Montfort’s take on IF as elit (2003), Emily Short’s highly accessible overview (2014), Dennis Jerz’s history (2007), Clara Fernández-Vara’s history (2008), Jason Scott’s documentary Get Lamp (2011), and most recently Aaron Reed, John Murray, and Anastasia Salter’s Adventure Games (2020). As such, I will not recount it extensively here, other than to pull out some salient events and themes. Though the earliest work of DF I can identify dates to 1964 with Mabel Addis and William McKay’s The Sumerian Game (see Chapter 2), along with Don Rawitch, et al.’s Oregon Trail in 1971, and both of these could be classed as “adventure games,” most histories place the first adventure game c.1975 with Will Crowther and Don Woods’s Adventure (aka Colossal Cave Adventure). The oft-repeated origin story notes that Crowther had been an early Dungeons and Dragons player and an avid spelunker along with his wife. As they were going through a divorce, he wanted a way to connect with his two young children: based on the concept of RPGs and dungeon-masters, in his spare time as a programmer he created Adventure in FORTRAN, using a story map based on Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The game floated around on the burgeoning ARPAnet, where Don Woods found it in 1976, asked if he could enhance it, and added some puzzles, a points system, and various endings, and released the result back onto

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the ARPAnet. In today’s parlance, it broke the inter(ARPA)net: apparently all American programming ground to a halt for two weeks as everyone played it to completion, including a group of young programmers at MIT. This group would eventually form Infocom, releasing Zork in 1980. Infocom’s games, which they preferentially called IF, were distinctive from the typical arcade games of the era, as they were bundled with home computers, entirely text-based, and not reliant on reflex action to progress (see Figure 8). Instead, they were driven by narrative, by the interaction between reader and machine, and by solving puzzles. These Infocom titles were massive hits: each sold over 100,000 copies, and by the mid-1980s Infocom’s annual sales were around US$10 million (RG Staff 2004, 36). Thus, as many tech start-ups do, they expanded. Their expansion was not into graphic adventure games, which by this point were already competing with text-only games (as Ken and Roberta Williams’s Mystery House launched in 1980, and LucasArts released Labyrinth in 1986 (FernándezVara, 2008, 218–19)). Rather, Infocom’s board wanted to get on with the “serious” work of software design and develop a business application: Cornerstone. They invested heavily in this new branch, more than doubling staff numbers and

Figure 8  Screenshot of Plundered Hearts (Briggs 1987). Segments (or lexias) of interactive fiction narratives are released based on reader/player’s commands in interaction with the machine and the program.



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necessitating a move to a new facility, gambling that their IF branch would continue growing. It was a gamble too far: “The [Cornerstone] software went on to sell well, clocking up 10,000 sales in its first year. Unfortunately, the cost of producing it—$2.5 million—coupled with the fact that it brought in $1.8 million in sales, rather than the projected $4.7 [million] gross profit, made it an expensive failure” (RG Staff 2004, 37). The games division had held steady, but not hit its growth mark of US$12 million; in an effort to recoup costs, Infocom reduced staff, but it was too late. They were bought out by Activision in 1986, and the subsequent changes that Activision enforced on the IF division caused sales to fall. Infocom attempted to introduce graphics, but poorly, and never recovered. By 1989, Infocom and commercial IF were a thing of the past. Despite its relatively short tenure, Infocom’s IF was influential worldwide, though there were various challenges to internationalization of the works themselves. Most notably, just reading about IF inspired Japanese game developer Yuji Horii to create Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (The Portopia Serial Murder Case) (1983), which originated the wildly successful visual novel genre in East Asia, and eventually worldwide (Crimmins 2016; Szczepaniak 2011, 64). Enrico Colombini pioneered adventure games in Italy with Avventura nel Castello (Castle Adventure) in 1982; Italy’s IF tradition was mostly propagated through magazines and “adventure toolkits” that published game codes for consumers to enter into their own machines (Cordella 2011). French-language adventure games are primarily graphics-based, as “France is not traditionally a country where English is widespread” (Labrande 2011, 401), and neither the games nor their programming languages were translated into French; text-only IF reemerged in France with the translation of open-access Inform’s libraries, and a small community formed (ibid.). Spanish “company Aventuras AD created interactive fiction games from 1988 to 1992 and was massively successful, spawning a great interest in interactive fiction” (Labrande 2011, 425). With such influence and reach, even if only peripherally, Infocom and the wider field of adventure games provided the foundation for the massive games industry that would overtake all other media forms by the early 2000s.

Reframing Interactive Fiction History What is missing, by and large, from this oft-repeated epic of Infocom and IF in general, is what is conspicuously missing in its actual history: women. The

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MIT lab that played Crowther and Woods’s Adventure to distraction, which would form Infocom’s board, included no women. Infocom’s games, save one, were aimed at male consumers. Home computers, packaged with adventure games, were marketed to men. The feature-length documentary Get Lamp, which recounts Infocom and IF history through interviews with its founders, employees, and enthusiasts, includes only three women, who receive a combined screen time of three minutes. The IF Theory Reader, a key volume establishing critical theory on the genre, includes twenty-six chapters, but only two written by a woman (both by Emily Short). The history of IF, much like the history of computing, is one that has excluded more than half the population, once other marginalized communities are considered. As Mar Hicks has so eloquently demonstrated, excluding women from an entire industry is highly detrimental, not only to women, but to the industry itself. Here, I fill in this contextual gap in IF’s evolution. Will Crowther’s name is synonymous with adventure games; the genre was in fact named after his Adventure. Most histories include the notation that Adventure’s game map was developed from his hobby as a spelunker, based on Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and that prior to his divorce he “had done some caving as a hobby with his wife” (Lessard 2013, 128). Here is an example of Rossiter’s Matilda Effect in action: Will was not the true spelunker. His wife Patricia Crowther was. She was a “gung ho caver” whose physical capabilities enabled a team to map Mammoth Cave and Flint Ridge Cave, discovering a long-suspected link between these two massive systems (Lyons 1972, n.p.). It was her map that Will used to create the fantasy cave system in Adventure that was so remarkably accurate to the actual system. Yet she is almost only ever mentioned as his wife, who went caving with him, and whose divorce from him prompted his desire to create the game; in fan-culture terms, historical accounts of Adventure’s origins effectively “fridged” Patricia Crowther.1 Further, while Adventure’s narrative is styled after Dungeons & Dragons and thus appeals to boys, Will specifically created the game for his daughters; the first specifically identified computer game consumers were 100 percent female, and were similarly fridged, serving only as a footnote to Will’s motivation in creating the game. Comics artist Gail Simone (1999) coined the term to refer to the frequent comics trope wherein female characters are “either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator” merely to provide motivation for the male protagonist. “Fridging” comes specifically from issue #54 of Green Lantern, in which Green Lantern finds his girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. 1



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It’s worth noting that Patricia Crowther was also a computer programmer. Neither Crowther spent much time in the spotlight, deliberately, so it is impossible to know if her skills in this area were equal to his; what it is possible to surmise, however, is that even armed with similar skills and motivation, Pat Crowther very likely wouldn’t have had time to author a work like Adventure. Given women’s historical and ongoing roles as mothers and wives (Abbate 2012; Chess 2017; Hicks 2017), in addition to the fact that she was newly a single mother, Pat’s spare time was much more likely spent caring for her daughters than creating games for them. Adventure and IF hit the ARPAnet in the mid-1970s, deep in the dark ages for women in computing. It was embraced by the all-male MIT team, springboarding them into the all-male Infocom. Women at MIT were rare (though Patricia Crowther earned her BS there, in Physics), particularly in computer science; as summarized above, women in computing were quite rare by this point, full-stop. Nonetheless, there were people from historically marginalized communities involved in Infocom and adventure games: “Representations of people of color and LGBT characters in early games were even rarer [than women], but often the first substantial such appearance was in an adventure game” (Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 338). Liz Cyr-Jones contributed to Beyond Zork (1987) and Hollywood Hijinx (1986) (Salter 2020, 67); Amy Briggs was the first and only female Infocom “imp” (Implementor, or narrative designer) to lead on a game, Plundered Hearts (1987); and Roberta Williams co-founded Sierra Online and designed King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988) (see Figure 9) and fought for its female protagonist (Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 327). The games themselves were and are popular with disabled people, as their challenges are more focused on puzzles and narratives than reflexes and physical interaction (ibid.; Scott 2011). Unfortunately, all of these elements were exceedingly rare, with Briggs’s Plundered Hearts often listed as a sign of Infocom’s descent into irrelevance (Salter 2020, 69), rather than an attempt to address a neglected segment of their audience. The consumer-focused elements of IF were similarly focused on the male experience: “the men of Infocom and game design more broadly were continually writing for themselves” (Salter 2020, 74; cf. Chess 2017). Briggs’ Plundered Hearts was Infocom’s only game with a female protagonist; the rest were inspired by Dungeons & Dragons (the Zork series in particular) and other science fiction and fantasy tropes (a genre that, similar to computing, was not friendly to women, as Joanna Russ documented). Anastasia Salter breaks down

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Figure 9  Screenshots from King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (Williams 1988). The game incorporated both point-and-click and player text commands to direct the female protagonist.



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the marketing and reviews for Plundered Hearts, demonstrating a clear bias toward male consumers: unlike other “imps” at Infocom, Amy Briggs did not feature in the marketing or prominently on the packaging, and games reviews were both skeptical that a romance title suited the computer even as they tried to convince men—their obvious audience—that it was a worthwhile play despite its feminine trappings (2020). The designers also focused on making the games as long as possible, as “players expected a certain amount of play time for their money” (Granade 2011, 371), with challenging puzzles to extend the gameplay and increase sales of the accessory hint books (ibid.). Just as Pat Crowther likely wouldn’t have had leisure time to program a game for her daughters, female consumers (the few who bucked stereotypes and marketing and had access to PCs themselves) would find carving out time for these games difficult: “what a woman considers play or leisure is not necessarily defined only by the activities she enjoys, but also by the activities that fit neatly and cheaply into her fragmented schedule” (Chess 2017, 20). This factor is likely what leads women to partake more often in “casual games,” which don’t require dedicated hours in front of a screen (a games genre that is often denigrated for not being “hardcore,” a clear devaluation of the genre related to its popularity with female players) (Salter 2014, 98). These games created by males for males were bundled into the sales and rentals of PCs as “free” software (Abbate 2012, 61; Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 842); for example, Zork was included on the Apple II, boosting sales significantly (Scott 2011). As discussed above, PCs were marketed almost exclusively to boys and men: male-directed games on male-directed machines fit together neatly to exclude girls and women from both purchasing PCs and playing these early adventure games. This cooperative packaging not only harmed games sales, contributing to the eventual demise of Infocom, but also continued the cycle of excluding women from computing. Boys got PCs as gifts, were mentored by fathers, played games featuring male player-characters on adventures, and were (and are) thus a leg up on their female cohorts. Both sexes were inundated with media and discourse that aggressively ringfence computing and games as male domains, so much so that males defend their territory with violence, and women either stay away or suffer substantially. This is a trend that has never slowed down: as I write, Activision, the company that bought Infocom in 1986, is currently under fire from its home state California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing for “an ingrained culture of discrimination and sexual harassment” that contributed toward a hostile working environment for

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women, and led to one female employee’s death by suicide (BBC News 2021). The problem is not just with one company, of course: it is widespread throughout computing, in no small part due to the historical exclusion and deliberate erasure of women in computing and games in Anglo-American contexts. IF as a genre likely suffered significantly as a result of this exclusion. Women, as noted above, read more than men do; Infocom deliberately shaped its games to appeal to a demographic of readers. Joel Berez, president and CEO, claimed that Infocom’s “audience tends to be composed of heavy readers. We sell to the minority that does read” (in Ferrell 1988, 18). They considered their audience a “minority,” and yet they made no effort to reach the more significant proportion of these heavy readers, women. Shira Chess notes that “early games such as Ms. Pac Man and Centipede were specifically popular with female audiences” (2017, 9); it’s likely that IF could have been as well, had it considered a female audience. Mary Buckles argued for Adventure, and others of its nature, to be considered as literature, though she noted that it was as yet immature and that Infocom’s need to create for a market “stifles creativity,” as market studies focus on what has already sold well, and encourage mimicry and repetition (1986, 78). Due to the extreme bias present in computing at the time (and which remains in games today), that focus was entirely on white, cis-het men. It was certainly possible to do things differently. “The early history of software services is littered with firms that expanded too fast and perished” (Abbate 2012, 123), much as Infocom did. Janet Abbate profiles two firms, however, that catered to women on the labor side, and succeeded where many tech firms failed: Elsie Shutt’s Computations, Inc. founded in 1957 in Harvard, Massachusetts, and Stephanie Shirley’s Freelance Programmers Ltd. founded in 1962 in London. Both women launched their freelance software companies when they lost their programming jobs at IBM and ICL, respectively, due to pregnancy. Both staffed their companies with other women like themselves: married women and mothers who could work part-time out of their own homes. The major computing firms and the British Civil Service considered part-time work incompatible with their structures, and managers were uncomfortable being unable to see their workers laboring away in person. Shutt and Shirley independently came up with creative solutions that kept their businesses not only afloat, but successful, long after many other software firms folded: Shutt ran her company for 45 years, and Shirley’s is still in business today. They were willing to take on smaller or more difficult projects and focused on steady work for themselves and their staff, setting flat rates for the purposes of stability rather than raking in huge



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profits. They developed communication and documentation systems for flexible work patterns: employees who were not in the same room or on the same schedule needed clear guidance and histories for every project. They instituted “modular” systems, wherein individual programmers could work independently on specific sections of code, which could then be amalgamated into a whole. Recognizing that this “cookbook philosophy” (Abbate 2012, 132) could easily introduce errors, and that such errors would be more grievous, reputation-wise, for companies composed of women, they introduced rigorous processes for quality assurance. This resulted in higher-quality work than their competitors, at lower prices. Finally, rather than hoarding the profits made or seeking to expand significantly, they reinvested income into training their workers and, using the inside intelligence from the constant influx of new workers cast out of major computing companies for daring to become pregnant, they anticipated where the industry was moving and adjusted their training programs accordingly, putting them ahead of the curve. By focusing on women’s work, Shutt and Shirley founded two long-running and highly successful computing corporations, during a time in which an estimated half of software firms went under (Abbate 2012, 133). I argue that, by conducting their business in an opposite manner to Shutt and Shirley, Infocom set itself up for failure. The all-male board made no apparent effort to increase the number of women on their payroll (Salter 2020, 72). They entirely ignored at least half of their potential consumers, neither creating nor marketing for women. Their business decisions were based on aggressive expansion and risky investment into an area of software where they weren’t known and had little experience, and they were reluctant to alter their course (either toward graphics or toward abandoning expansion when no investors could be found) in the face of contrary evidence—extreme choices that are far more likely to be made by men than women (Thöni and Volk 2021). Yes, the economic overextension for the Cornerstone development and the insistence on the superiority of textonly games both led to Infocom’s demise, but both of these factors stem from computing and thus Infocom’s culture of extreme exclusion of women.

Interactive Fiction after Infocom As Infocom was the key player in IF’s commercialization, it has necessarily been the focus of this chapter. Infocom did not survive beyond the 1980s, but IF as a

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form has experienced a renaissance, though it is certainly less prominent than its commercial cousins of computer and console games. N. Katherine Hayles and Nick Montfort argue that IF may never have achieved Buckles’s literary maturity had its commercial market not collapsed (2012, 462); its transformation into an internet gift economy has afforded experimentation and variety that commercial structures often fail to engender. While IF, like the rest of computing, continues to be a male-dominated genre, it has certainly opened up more to historically marginalized communities and influences, arguably moreso than the triple-A games industry. Graham Nelson’s Inform (1993b), the open-access program for developing IF, and Emily Short’s influential work like Galatea (2000; cf. Stevens 2011, 363), along with enthusiasts-turned-designers like Andrew Plotkin and Sam Barlow, have sparked a “viral spiral” for IF, “in which freely created content, both in the form of tools and narratives, inspires further creation and cycles through the community” (Salter 2014, 101). This community opened various online portals for IF through the 1990s and 2000s, including the IF Database (IFDB.org), IF-Wiki (ifwiki.org), Planet IF (planet-if.com), and the intfiction forum (intfiction.org). The addition of other tools for IF, such as Twine and Game Maker, has also expanded the form, particularly as Twine was embraced specifically by marginalized communities for indie game development, thanks to Anna Anthropy’s (2012) and Porpentine’s (2012) (now Porpentine Charity Heartscape) adoption and endorsement. IF works are now of much more varied lengths thanks to community competitions that favor shorter games for ease of judging (Granade 2011), which makes them more accessible for women, and IF creators place narrative form and experimentation in the premier position, pushing their work into the literary realm. Buckles defined IF as a literary form in 1986, though with the caveat that it was as yet immature, lacking “depth of ideas and beauty of form and writing” (1986, 5). She envisioned a “democratization of computer use” that would aid in developing more sophistication and maturation in IF; Inform, Twine, and the distributed IF community have provided this democratization, allowing the genre to “[shed] some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game ‘should’ be” (Quinn 2015, n.p.). Just as she predicted, deeper and more thoughtful works of IF have emerged that switch the focus from high levels of player agency and “gamey” treasure hunts and combat (Fernández-Vara 2008, 212) in favor of twisting, perverting, or playing with reader expectations (Hayles and Montfort 2012, 464). Montfort compares the potentiality of IF to the Oulipo literary tradition (2011, 23); it has also found favor in the classroom thanks to



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tools like Inform (Montfort and Short 2012; Nelson 2011), which both expands its community and democratization, and pushes it into a more critical light. In a way, of course, IF does persist in the commercial market, though sometimes this requires a broader definition of “interactive fiction.” In 2008, Clara Fernández-Vara noted that new games were still being released every year by Péndulo Studios in Spain, and MC2-Microïds in France (2008, 225), and visual novels remain extremely popular in Japan and Korea, as well as on indie games marketplace itch.io (ibid.; Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020). Reed et al. also trace IF’s descendants to Telltale Games (2004–18),2 whose works artfully continued the IF tradition through the pleasurable illusion of choice in a largely prescriptive story (loc. 1320), to Twine’s “profusion of narrative games centering LGBTQ voices and stories” (loc. 467), to walking sims, queer games, and even Netflix’s interactive TV episode Black Mirror: “Bandersnatch” (Slade 2018) (loc. 1692). IF’s strong sense of nostalgia also aids its more recent forays into commerciality, as evidenced in the retro narrative of “Bandersnatch,” studio Double Fine’s 2012 crowdfunded IF project Broken Age (Schafer 2014) that raised US$3 million of a US$400,000 target (Salter 2014, 145), and even a work of text-only IF specifically developed to market the film Interstellar (Nolan 2014), the Interstellar Text Adventure (2014, now only available through the Internet Archive).

Conclusion What this very long tail of IF demonstrates is that its disappearance from commercial markets was not a failing of the form and not a sublimation into graphic games entirely, as the form persists in both its original text-only parser mode, and many other “adventure games” offshoots. Rather, commercial IF is more a victim of the computing—and now the games—industry’s rigidly defended culture of aggressive masculine colonization. These works were aimed at “heavy readers,” of which women are the majority; yet only one Infocom title attempted to reach this market. The failure to reach women had little to do with fear of technology; after all, women launched 50 Shades of Grey (James 2011) into the publishing stratosphere by adopting ereaders (Skains 2019b) (though Telltale Games as a studio has since reemerged; its resurrection, however, is in name only, as the trading name was sold, and none of the 2014–18 Telltale team have been retained (Roettgers 2019). 2

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it is unlikely that any woman would have vastly enjoyed adventuring through Plundered Hearts with the family computer set up in her husband/son/brother’s space). Instead, the preceding three decades had shaped computing into a technocracy, with white cis-het males fiercely defending their perch atop the bodies of all the female programmers they had to slay to get there. Relegating women to the position of outsider weakened the foundation of commercial IF and led to its downfall.

6

It’s Not a Book, It’s Not a Game: Literary Games

Unlike books, film, and television, wherein a singular technological innovation (printing press, film camera, television) resulted in a largely singular form, digital fiction (DF) originates from a convergence of multiple media into one (Jenkins 2006). As a result, DF forms and creators are incredibly diverse; our current digitally enabled and immersed culture has created a desire for participatory, interactive works with strong narratives. Thanks to this convergence, not only have new forms of narrative emerged, but “old” media forms also have been recombined and remediated (Bolter and Grusin 1999) in many different ways. This chapter examines four such categories—mobile storytelling apps, webcomics (including webtoons), visual novels (VNs), and walking sims—as examples at the convergence between print media and digital environments. Works in these categories are almost all part of mainstream or popular culture, rather than originating and circulating primarily within avant-garde and/or academic communities as many types of DF tend to do. Apps, webcomics, VNs, and walking sims all vie for attention on mainstream platforms, thus facing a double whammy of discoverability issues: they are attempting to compete with all other mainstream media, from books to streaming TV to games, while also attempting to forge paths as new genres without established niches and visibility in that same mainstream media. These early days for these upstart genres very much resemble the early days of software development, with studios and creators rising and falling, individual works and entire genres both succeeding and failing in the marketplace. A few communities—what I will call “circular DF economies”—have developed more dependable models with, to date, significant longevity, such as TADS/Inform, inkle, Choice of Games, and Twine. Thanks to both individual authorial efforts and those of these communities, these genres persist, and likely will continue to, until they have carved out a permanent niche in our media consciousness. I am terming these “literary games” for the purposes of this chapter, though this is a term that, technically, can be applied to all DF—indeed, that is how

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Astrid Ensslin uses it in defining works in “the creative interface between digital books that can be played and digital games that can be read” (2014, 1). Espen Aarseth terms these “ludoliterary hybrids” as “cybertexts,” a type of “ergodic fiction” (requiring nontrivial effort to traverse) (1997). Aaron Reed, John T. Murray, and Anastasia Salter consider some of them in their studies of adventure games (2020); the list of terms and the situations of application vary with almost every scholar. As nomenclature in electronic literature (elit) scholarship is so mercurial, and almost all the terms we use in academia are unknown or outright ignored in mainstream discourse, I use “literary games” here to describe these broad genres that combine print works with ludic digital environments in some way, rather than creating yet another term. Mobile apps, webcomics, VNs,1 and walking sims each partake of mainstream media infrastructures in different ways, using ubiquitous devices and platforms for creative purposes. And while webcomics and VNs are usually sole-authored, apps and walking sims typically depart from the realm of single creator and into a studio system, albeit much smaller and independent than triple-A game studios. While certain aspects place them firmly in their genre categories, each individual literary game “exhibits radically different medial and interactive features, which means we have to learn not only their rules but, more generally, how to work the game-text” (Ensslin 2014, 40). These distinctions, alongside subversion of platform and genre conventions, often pluck at a user’s cognitive processes to encourage them to question aspects of culture, society, media, and communities, such as racism, sexism, classism, capitalism, and so forth (Ensslin 2014, 39–40; Kagen 2017; Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020; Salter 2014). As commentaries in societal discourse, literary games thus expose issues even as they court controversy in doing so, placing them in perfect positions to spark debate in popular media and public domains, perhaps serving as proof of the adage that “all press is good press” in the modern melee of media properties clamoring for consumer attention. The following section explores the wider media issues of discoverability and platformization with specific focus on their effects on DF, with literary games as case study genres. The remainder of the chapter examines each genre—mobile storytelling apps, webcomics, VNs, and walking sims—in more depth as to their

VNs in Western cultures are a niche genre of games akin to IF or Twine games; in East Asian cultures, they are a significant, even dominant, games genre (see Chapter 3). Unless otherwise noted, I am referring in this chapter to Western VNs. 1



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strategies overcoming these issues, before looking more closely at specific models of circular DF economies that have flourished even in the flooded market of digital content.

The Market Ecology for Literary Games The modern media landscape is one of excess. The release of new entertainment properties outstrips our ability to consume them to an exponential degree, even if we consider only one type of media or stream (Goldhaber 1997). The democratization of digital creation tools, which have made content producers out of everyone with a mobile phone or laptop, has flooded media channels so thoroughly that for a consumer to find new content is almost as difficult as for a creator to find new audience members (Steiner 2018, 128). Further, unlike the heady days of the early internet and its pseudo-egalitarian California idealism (Barbrook and Cameron 1995), today’s digital content is highly concentrated into corporatized platforms that serve as de facto gatekeepers even as they enable many functions of the current digital sphere. Discoverability concerns both the ability for search engines to find (or “crawl”) sites and content on the web, as well as the ability for actual people to find content they may—or may not—be actively looking for. It applies to discussions of literary games in the first sense because search engines, whether of the web at large or of specific platforms and marketplaces, are the portals through which we access content. Web crawlers (the algorithms that search for new content) likely fail to discover 25 percent of web content (Dasgupta et al. 2007); the problem is exacerbated by search engine bias, as profit-driven search engines (i.e., Google) prioritize their own vertically integrated domains, advertisers, commercial sites, and those sites with higher numbers of incoming links and clicks (Goldman 2011; Rieder and Sire 2014). This bias, along with the “filter bubble” (Pariser 2011) formed by increasing personalization of web streams, results in a catch-22 for both producers and consumers: in order to capture attention, producers must create something new and original, yet search engine bias and filter bubbles will preclude them from consumer search results and streams. Media producers and consumers have to navigate a complex labyrinth of advertising, recommendations, personal networks, and algorithms in order to match up with one another (McKelvey and Hunt 2019, 2), competing with an ocean of others attempting to do the same. Independent practitioners

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and small studios generally lack sufficient agency over discoverability—the economic and cultural power—to connect with their target audience. This power relies more and more on a small group of digital platforms in the West: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 4276). From book publishing to mobile device applications to web content, the GAFAM platforms shape the cultural industries through their penetration into government, economic, and even infrastructural systems (ibid.; Steiner 2018). The Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) mobile operating systems (Oss) almost entirely encompass the global market for mobile applications, at 72.84 percent and 26.34 percent, respectively, as of June 2021 (Statista 2021). Google dominates search engines (Goldman 2011), and though they don’t actively publish books, Amazon, Google, and Apple nonetheless are highly influential in the book publishing industry thanks to their distribution of ebooks (Steiner 2018, 124–5). Amazon’s ebook format, Mobi, is not as open to enhanced features as the more open ePub format, and thus its marketplace includes no options whatsoever for literary games. Apple has very stringent requirements for mobile apps published in the App Store, particularly when compared to the Google Play Store, yet many developers choose Apple first because it is a smaller market (so discoverability is at least marginally better), with fewer devices to design for (Dredge 2013). In either development pathway, developers must “align their own business models and production and circulation philosophies with those of leading platforms” (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 4281)—another constraint on innovation leading to discoverability issues. Neither platform, for example, includes an obvious category for literary games to aid in their discoverability: on Android, options are “Books and Reference,” “Augmented Reality,” and various subcategories of “Games” (no subcategory conveys literariness, or focus on story and narrative). True to Steve Jobs’s well-known disdain for book-apps, the App Store does not have a “Books” category, and literary game developers opt for “Games.” Literary game developers have no clear outlet for the types of works they are creating, and consumers do not have a convenient place in which to look for this particular content. Further, the marketplaces for each of these platforms, like search engines, have their own inbuilt algorithms and thus biases. The overall effect of these is a “winner-take-all” effect, meaning that the most popular or biased properties will dominate the results to the exclusion of newer or more niche texts (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 4282). Not only does this effect reiterate the risk-aversiveness of books and games publishers, it is also a factor in these platforms’ widening



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hegemony beyond Western countries (Jin 2013). In order to sift through the glut of media entertainment properties available, the consumer cannot rely on platform or search engine algorithms to deliver novel content, and at this time, certainly not literary games (or DF). Thus the “fundamental action of our media environment is curation: the production, selection, filtering, annotation, or framing of content” (Thorson and Wells 2016, 310). In the “good news” section for DF creators, some surveys indicate that consumers rely far more on word of mouth from friends and family (including social media) for content discovery than they do algorithmic recommendations (McKelvey and Hunt 2019, 7). As a result, the literary games discussed in the following sections have carved out small yet lasting niches in a rather resistant market ecology.

Persistent Literary Games Marketplaces for literary games, these works emerging from the liminal space between digital books and digital games, have more to do with their creators’ backgrounds and affiliations than anything. Creative writers experimenting with narrative have a strong tendency to favor book publishing, as that is a familiar marketplace. Game developers who want to focus their storyworlds more on narrative will enter their attempts on Steam (and now itch.io) as the dominant distributor of digital games. Amazon as a publishing platform and its Mobi formatting, however, precludes almost all truly digital innovation;2 thus the more literarily oriented creators have little choice other than to create mobile apps, often termed “enhanced ebooks” or book-apps. Unfortunately for most of these creators, app development is outside their skillset, and most will need a third party to do so, an expensive and time-consuming prospect. On the game development side, the work is still expensive and time-consuming even when the skills are already in hand, so small indie studios are formed; because they have the ability to publish through Steam and itch.io, these studios’ efforts are often

I have published two hypertext ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system using Mobiformatting (see Chapter 7). While I had no difficulty gaining quality approval from the marketplace, Mobi is such a restrictive format that only the most creative digitality can force it to work as anything other than a linear print book. A few indie publishers have also published gamebooks; in order to do so they have to repeatedly instruct readers not to continue turning the pages at choice-points and to use the hyperlinked options instead—evidence of their surrender to the restrictiveness of the format. 2

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more easily discovered and thus the developers may have more longevity. In the middle are placed another genre, one on the peripheries of both books and games platforms: webcomics. Each of these forms—mobile apps, webcomics, and the more game-oriented VNs and walking sims—has specific affordances, markets, and consumers, and each has found a more or less successful path through those markets to their audiences. This section will also examine one model of literary games popularization that has proven workable for several groups: hybrid creation and publishing platforms like Choice of Games and inkle.

Mobile Apps Outside of the East Asian VN and webtoon market, mobile apps by far encompass the majority of literary games, primarily because they offer such diverse capabilities and the devices are so ubiquitous. Like digital media in general, apps are adaptable to any digital purpose, including email, streaming films and TV, navigation, and augmented reality. Thus, whether in stand-alone apps or aggregators, literary games appear in the mobile app marketplace as bookapps, enhanced ebooks, locative storytelling, augmented reality, and even some content development apps. Creating them requires an advanced level of digital skills, and unlike many forms of entertainment media they must be consistently maintained to keep up with device and OS updates lest they be removed from the marketplace. Mobile apps’ unique affordances in tech and marketplace make them a popular option for content creators despite these drawbacks: portability, location-based functionality, movement-based functionality, touch interaction, and a marketplace that, while vast, is nonetheless less vast than the internet as a whole, and that offers built-in monetization options. Mobile devices are, essentially, all-purpose reading machines, conveyances for all manner of digital storytelling or “small screen fictions” (Ensslin, Swanstrom, and Frelik 2017). Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba, and Kate Pullinger term mobile app literary games as ambient literature: “situated writing practices in which text is able to respond to the site of reading” (2021, 5). These are works that make use of the technological affordances of mobile devices: GPS systems, RFID and QR scanning, Bluetooth connectivity, accelerometers, compasses, cameras, microphones, and touchscreens. Locative stories (Hight 2006) are very prominent, using GPS positioning to link reader/player with the story depending on where they are and how they move, and are used frequently for the purposes of heritage and tourism. Chloe Anne Milligan argues that mobile touchscreens,



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“more than the computer monitor ever has, offer haptic and proprioceptive interaction as a primary—and distinct—way by which to create and experience digital narratives” (2018, 1). These haptic interactions—tapping, holding, tilting, pinching, spreading—enable embodiment, at least on some level, in the text, connecting reader/player to text, and, often, to location. Thus mobile app literary games include locative or place-based storytelling, enhanced ebooks through ePub reading or stand-alone hypermedia book-apps (Farkas 2017, n.p.; Ortega 2021, n.p.), text-message or cell phone novels (Goggin and Hamilton 2014, 225; Hjorth 2014, 238), and more narratively oriented games often produced for both web and mobile devices. Book-apps have been particularly prominent for adaptations of classic texts and works aimed at children, who have traditionally been a key audience for interactive toys (such as pop-up books). The path to market for mobile apps is, as noted, through Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store. The actual cost of entry to both is relatively small: US$99 per year for Apple, and a one-time US$25 fee for Google. Skillswise, both platforms offer significant aid in tutorials and guides, but advanced digital skills (programming, interface design, web design, cross-platform compatibility design, etc.) and long-term maintenance and updates are required. This is a significant barrier for many content creators and publishers: “Lisa McCloy-Kelley, head editor of the digital production group at Random House, commented, ‘we’re finding that the effort behind these types of book[-app]s is a magnitude of somewhere between seven and fifteen times as much effort as a typical illustrated ebook’ ” (Ortega 2021, n.p.); Iain Pears describes the process of writing his book-app Arcadia (Pears and TouchPress 2016) as “working my way through three publishers, two designers, four sets of coders and a lot of anguish” (2015, n.p.). Most book-apps, as a result, are the result of collaborations between content creators and app developers such as TouchPress (Young 2010, n.p.). These are stand-alone book-apps, purchased singly in the app stores. Attempts have been made to create native mobile storytelling apps that both provide a content creation platform and aggregate works in the same place, such as Oolipo (oolipo AG 2017), CYOA Factory (Morphosis Games 2021), and Kocho (Scandiacus LLC 2021). While stand-alone book-apps usually have a set purchase price (similar to any one-off book or game purchase), the platform apps often follow a “freemium” model, in which the app itself is free to download, but offers in-app purchases for additional functionality (such as removing ads or buying individual stories); as it intended to publish stories in episodic seasons Oolipo attempted an in-app credit-purchasing model, in which the first episode

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was free but users could exchange their purchase credits for more (The Literary Platform 2017, n.p.). Discovery for mobile book-apps and games is afforded through the search and recommendation algorithms of the individual app stores, and web search engines (most apps have a website for marketing that links to the app stores). Unlike games distributors Steam and itch.io, the app stores offer no tagging function for greater granularity of categorization, so discovery through browsing is less likely; users must know specific search phrases (“interactive stories,” “visual novels,” “gamebooks,” etc.) or titles to find these works. In terms of successful mobile app literary games, text message/cell phone novels (in Japanese: keitai shōsetsu) are by far the most lucrative and persistent form worldwide, as discussed in Chapter 3. Larissa Hjorth lists examples of this form’s stronghold on interactive reading culture: millions are produced yearly; many are adapted into other media such as film and manga; some of these adaptations are highly successful, such as the multimillion-dollar film version of Koizara; the form has proliferated into India, China, Taiwan, and Africa; and five of the top ten novels from 2013 (the year prior to Hjorth’s text) were adapted into keitai shōsetsu (2014, 240–6). Faber & Faber teamed up with TouchPress to produce numerous book-apps, including Arcadia, Solar System (Chown and TouchPress 2010), and the adapted The Waste Land (Eliot and TouchPress 2011), which were so successful it is something of a mystery that the publishing house didn’t continue with book-apps: The Waste Land earned out in six weeks (a year earlier than projected), similar to Solar System, which reportedly had over 60k downloads and generated around US$840,000 gross (Dredge 2011). Other publishers made entries in the app stores with A Clockwork Orange (Burgess, Heineman, and Popleaf 2012), Five Fables (Heaney and TouchPress 2014), On the Road (Kerouac and Penguin Books 2011), Frankenstein: Interactive (Shelley and inkle 2012), War Horse (Morpugo and TouchPress 2012), To Be or Not to Be (North 2015b), Sherlock (S. A. C. Doyle and HAAB 2014), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Shakespeare and TouchPress 2012), A Visit from the Goon Squad (Egan and Popleaf 2011), The Poe Macabre Collection (Poe and iClassics Productions, S.L. 2013), and more. Other successful apps include Alice for the iPad (Carroll and Oceanhouse Media 2010), which, as Anastasia Salter notes, was so well-received that it inspired similar book-apps for The Little Mermaid and War of the Worlds (2014, 170). Tender Claws’ PRY (2014) is one of the few book-apps that are neither adaptations nor aimed at children; the haptically navigated multimedia ebook was featured in the LA Times Festival of Books and SXSW in 2014, was a finalist at the 2014 Future of StoryTelling by Time Warner, and winner of the



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2015 Electronic Literature Organization’s Robert Coover Prize for a work of elit. Since the burst of book-apps accompanying the new wave of tablet tech in the early 2010s, most of the literary games on mobile devices have matriculated to the Games category, with choice-based narratives such as those from Choose Your Own Adventure and Choice of Games. While keitai shōsetsu continue in prominence and some games with strong narratives have been successful in app marketplaces, since the mid-2010s bookapps have declined. TouchPress re-branded as Amphio, focusing on apps for culture and tech (Cowdrey 2016)—though they maintain their book-apps under the umbrella studio The Red Green & Blue Co. The key publishers involved in book-app adaptations (Faber, Penguin, Random House) no longer even maintain the book-app websites and blog posts announcing them; all that remains of many of these apps are the newspaper, magazine, and blog reviews discussing them, and some cached versions of their entries on app stores. Google Creative Labs (in partnership with Visual Editions) made an attempt at the literary games market with its Editions at Play, releasing nine “books powered by the magic of the internet” for iOS and Android between 2016 and 2019 (2016). Authors Kate Pullinger and Joanna Walsh contributed two of these—Breathe (2018) and Seed (2017) (see Figure 10). Though Breathe and Seed both had good press (Dovey, Abba, and Pullinger 2021, 10), and other Edition at Play works received some notice in various blogs and book review sites, the endeavor as a whole didn’t garner much attention and there’s no indication that more are forthcoming.

Figure 10  Screenshots from Seed (Walsh 2017). The reader/player encounters a map (left) and can pan and zoom across to specific “seeds” (middle). Tapping/clicking further reveals segments of narrative (right).

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These works were created by known authors in collaboration with Creative Labs and Visual Editions, with no avenue for unsolicited submissions evident— perhaps the lukewarm reception (likely due to discovery issues and lackluster marketing on the platform’s part) and resource-intensive production process led this partnership, like others, to fade away. Nonetheless, it lasted longer than the much-touted Oolipo app from German publisher Baste Lübbe AG, which Kate Pullinger similarly contributed to with Jellybone (2017). Oolipo launched in March 2017, providing users both works from prominent digital authors like Pullinger, as well as the ability to create and publish their own in the in-app bookstore (Klaava 2017, n.p.). Baste Lübbe, however, gave it very little time to gain a foothold, pulling its support for the app only seven months after its launch (2017; oolipo 2017), and the works that were on it are, at least for now, lost. Lost, unfortunately, is the fate of many mobile literary games, as reliant as they are on frequent maintenance to ensure compatibility with OS updates and new device parameters. Perhaps this underlies publishers’ retreat from the book-apps boom, as they realized that keeping mobile apps on their backlists is far more expensive than print books (even considering the warehousing and remaindering expenses for hard copy texts). They’re also quite resourceintensive to create, so most works will require programmer partners. This is quite a lot of investment in “on spec” work in a newly evolving and as yet entirely unestablished media genre without clear pathways to consumer discovery. Thus risk-averse publishers have backed away, looking instead to focus their attention on innovative properties that already have established audiences. One of these areas is in webcomics.

Webcomics Comics, like film or TV, are a junior entry in the literary sphere. Their history as pulp stories, superhero sagas, and newspaper funnies has led the academic sphere to ignore them until very recently, despite their long-standing relationship with and contribution to society and culture. Their emergence in the elit sphere is not much different: webcomics creators have by and large gone about their business of regular publication on the internet with little fanfare from all but a few keen scholars. Pop culture, on the other hand, has eagerly seized upon the form, trading it as memes and jokes in the social sphere of the Web. Many of these works, of course, are no different from their print versions: electronic representations of comic strips and graphic novels (Batinic 2016, 81). Various



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apps have been developed for these ebook equivalents, just as they were for ebooks. What is more interesting for the purposes of DF studies, however, are born-digital webcomics, including webtoons, that take advantage of the unique affordances of their medium (ibid.; Goodbrey 2013), and how they maintain themselves in the attention economy. Webcomics, by and large, take the blog or serial publishing model, offering a strip or page on the author’s website (often cascading through social media accounts like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook) and/or by email subscription. Most have very little digital functionality apart from this directto-consumer publication method. Those that do, however, incorporate webenabled features like the infinite scroll (what Scott McCloud terms the “infinite canvas” (1993)), parallax effects, animations, Web 2.0 commenting and social functions, mouseover effects, location sensitivity, and reader interactivity (Antonini, Brooker, and Benatti 2020; Batinic 2016; Campbell 2006; Goodbrey 2013). Like many serial comics, they can extend for hundreds or thousands of issues (Antonini, Brooker, and Benatti 2020). Despite the relative lack of attention given to them in elit scholarship, likely due to their pop culture nature, webcomics may be a key entry point into DF in general, as they are a familiar form whose digitality can introduce readers to the more unfamiliar conventions of digital literature. Print comics had and have an established path to market that strongly resembles magazine publishing: most comics are produced by large studios with teams of editors, authors, and artists directing content from within (as opposed to book publishing, which relies for the most part on speculative submissions from aspiring writers). They publish using cheap “pulp” materials on a regular basis, often weekly, mostly to specialized comic shops (though prominent titles, particularly graphic novels, have worked their way into bookstores in recent decades). With the advent of digital, this publishing process has come to include electronic versions distributed through apps such as Comixology, the best known of these—and not coincidentally, owned by Amazon. Webcomics, on the other hand, are almost exclusively indie-published. Though studios like Marvel have introduced digital features in some of their works (Goodbrey 2013, 191), most webcomic creators use alternative publishing and financing means, including microfinancing (e.g., through Kickstarter and/or Patreon), pulling to publish (gaining royalty publishing contracts, then removing the content from the Web), donations, and merchandising (shirts, calendars, games, etc.) (Antonini, Brooker, and Benatti 2020). They may also employ subscription models, paid early access

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to new installments, premium paid content, or advertising (Walters 2009). These authors do not have the power to garner attention in the platformized comics publishing economy, so they rely on “a different communication circuit” (Antonini, Brooker, and Benatti 2020, 288), which includes word of mouth on social media and the community-run comic search engine “Oh No Robot” (Walters 2009, n.p.). The webcomic most frequently mentioned in the crossover between pop culture strips and born-digital webcomics is Randall Munroe’s xkcd (2006–), author-described as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Munroe publishes strips three times a week on his own site, and licenses them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which allows anyone to republish or use them as long as they credit him and don’t make money off them. This aids in spreadability, as it means readers feel free to share on social media with no ethical quandaries. The strips can be as simple as one panel and a bit of text, or an in-depth exploration on the history of the universe through the use of the infinite canvas (Batinic 2016, 83), and even crossing over into in-person interactivity (Walters 2009). All installments include mouseover text, an additional commentary or punchline offered in the tag. Munroe’s financial stream from the webcomic comes largely from merchandising (T-shirts), as well as speaking engagements and royalty-published books (Cohen 2008; Fernandez 2006). Another well-known born-digital webcomic (or “hypercomic,” as Daniel Goodbrey terms them (2007)) is Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck (2009–16). Homestuck incorporated almost every aspect of webcomic digitality: animated GIFs, Flash games, browser games, instant message logs, hypertext links, multilinearity, fan-directed plots (initially), and an extreme length of 800,000 words over 8,000 pages (Cavna 2018; Katz 2019; Veale 2019). Hussie was able to parlay the considerable attention he garnered with the text (more than 2.5 billion page views (Glennon 2018, n.p.)) into merchandising deals worth over US$10 million (ibid.), a US$2.5-million Kickstarter campaign for an adventure game version (Hussie 2012), and eventually a printed book version (Hussie 2018). All told, Homestuck was perhaps the most popular and lucrative work of DF yet created by a sole, independent author. In contrast to webcomics in English-language cultures, Korean webtoons are a significant component of the media entertainment industry in East Asia. Despite falling significantly behind nations like Japan and the United States in early mobile communications innovations, strong research and development



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commitments and collaborations between government and telecommunications companies have turned the nation around over the past twenty years; Korea has become a global leader in mobile technologies, with a mainstream culture that embraces the mobile device and accompanying “snack culture” offering small bites of entertainment (Jin 2018). Webtoons, a significant element of snack culture, are long-running serialized webcomics adapted specifically for mobile devices with vertical scrolling, animations, and other multimedia components (Jin 2019a, 2019b). Typically, they are part of expanding transmedia storyworlds, similar to the webcomics that accompanied the Heroes television show (Ruppel 2014, 207). As it does with the telecommunications industry, the Korean government provides significant support to webtoons authors (Jin 2019b, 2100), as do the nation’s two largest internet access providers, Daum and Naver (ibid.). Further, webtoons are often the basis for transmedia adaptations, rather than supplemental texts: Dal Yong Jin (2020, 8) notes more than fifty such works by 2015 alone, including 신과함께 /(Along with the Gods) (Joo 2010–12), which was adapted to film and TV (see Figure 11). The examples of webcomics in this section are exceptional in their extreme saturation in mainstream awareness and commercial success, but the webcomic genre of DF as a whole is incredibly popular, especially once Korean webtoons are considered. Other notable works include Hobo Lobo of Hamelin (Živadinović 2011–14), which deploys parallax effects in the rare horizontal scroll (Batinic 2016, 84); Ctrl-Alt-Del (Buckley 2002–), which intermittently responds to reader feedback with a gamebook-type story (Walters 2009, n.p.); and Nimona (Stevenson 2014), which was the author’s art school final project that garnered so many fan comments, parodies, and contributions that Stevenson parlayed these into a publishing contract with HarperCollins for the work (pulled to publish) and a deal with NBC and Netflix to develop, create, and executive produce the She-Ra: Princess of Power animated series (2016). While certainly there are many webcomics that never rise out of discoverability purgatory, the enormous success and variety of these works shows how firmly the genre is fixed in mainstream attention and awareness.

Visual Novels VNs originate in Japan, where they are known as bijuaru noberu and integrate closely with anime aesthetics and stories. They were inspired by interactive fiction (IF), after developer Yuki Horii read about them and created the first

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Figure 11  Screenshot from Along with the Gods (Joo 2010–12). Webtoons are vertically arranged for scrolling on mobile devices.



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notable VN, The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983) (Szczepaniak 2007, 76). VNs are multibranching and interactive, as the reader/player role-plays through “extensive text conversations complemented by lovingly depicted (and mainly stationary) generic backgrounds and dialogue boxes with character sprites determining the speaker superimposed upon them” (Cavallaro 2010, 8). In this, they are very similar to interactive drama (see Chapter 8) and the more dialoguedriven chat-bots and works of IF, such as Emily Short’s Galatea (2000). Like most computer games, VNs are dominated by male perspectives and consumers (termed bishoujo), though the growth of the women’s VN market (otome) in recent years has been significant, even as the sector for male consumers has dropped (Saito 2021). Unlike the IF arising in Western markets, however, East Asian VNs have been predominantly relationship-oriented, with genres focusing on friendship, romance, dating, and erotic and/or adult-themed interactions, with “dating sims” a highly popular genre. Even as late as 2006, when World of Warcraft, New Super Mario, and Gears of War were prominent in the West, VNs accounted for almost 70 percent of Japanese PC games (Ciesla 2019, 79–80). Dani Cavallaro argues that, despite the frequent “dating sims” moniker, VNs are “not simulations but rather role-playing games” (2010, 8), much like IF in both text-only and graphics forms. Rather than adventuring, however, VN players explore options related to dating and sexual relationships (see Figure 12)— romance, in other words—strong motivators for a nation less oriented to violence than US culture, where war themes and first-person shooters often dominate. The popularity of VNs is further aided by their mechanics. Unlike the manually created branching storylines of gamebooks and hypertexts, VN storylines are (at least partially) algorithmically generated, thanks to Hiroyuki Kanno and ELF Corporation’s innovation of the Auto Diverge Mapping System (ADMS) in 1996 (Sorlie 2011). The ADMS, and others like it, enable storylines greater flexibility and variety, boosting the long-term enjoyment and replayability of VNs. Likewise, VNs are produced by development studios rather than independent developers, which enables more investment in the “pictorial sumptuousness, vibrant palettes, meticulous devotion to plot depth and character design and development [that are] absolutely vital aspects of the medium” (Cavallaro 2010, 8). In the West, VNs do not enjoy the same level of mainstream awareness and commercial success as they do in Japan. While they are a niche genre of games, they are nonetheless growing in popularity, “with 2,272 VNs currently available for purchase on Steam within the US, and 27,140 VNs archived on community

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Figure 12  Screenshot from Doki Doki Literature Club! (Salvato 2017), a popular American visual novel that maintains the Japanese anime style and romance themes.

run websites such as VNDB that aim to document the production of VNs” (Camingue, Carstensdottir, and Melcer 2021, 1). They are available through the key games marketplaces, Steam, itch.io, and the various app stores, with specific tags for VNs, and can be played on many different platforms, devices, and consoles, including PC and mobile phones. Game engines like Ren’Py and Visual Novel Maker3 enable newcomers and independent developers to create VNs, enhancing the offerings in the niche, indie market. VNs have had significant popular success through these channels, including Kanon (Key 1999), the free Doki Doki Literature Club! garnering millions of downloads (Salvato 2017), and Clannad (Key 2004 in Japanese, 2015 in English) a best seller in Steam’s 2015 charts (Ciesla 2019).

Walking Sims Walking sims earned their name first as a derogatory term from gamers who felt these works weren’t really “games,” though they were created by games developers

Available at https://www.renpy.org/ and http://visua​lnov​elma​ker.com/, respectively. 3



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and marketed on games platforms. Their primary action is exploration through a 3D environment (Grabarczyk 2016), interacting with the setting and objects within it to reveal segments of story—essentially, IF with better graphics. The “walking simulators” comparison was used to indicate that these works had none of the challenges associated with games, such as puzzles, battles, missions, and reflex-dependent actions: a walking sim was “a nongame and, worse, one that duplicitously pretends to be a game” (Kagen 2017, 289; cf. Penabella 2015; Stuart 2016; Thier 2015). This backlash was part of the #GamerGate controversy, which perpetuators claimed was about ethics in journalism, but had a deep foundation in misogynistic cultural gatekeeping—a factor that Melissa Kagen (2017) explicitly notes, but which most male writers skirt by focusing on walking sims’ subversion of game conventions. Rather poetically, creators of these games have “taken back” the moniker and use it as an identifier for their works in a flooded marketplace; unlike most other works of DF, “walking simulator” is now an easily recognizable term used as a tag on Steam, giving them greater discoverability. The origins of walking sims have been likened to Myst (Cyan 1993) (Bozdog and Galloway 2020, 25; Penabella 2015, n.p.); Graham Relf ’s The Forest (1984) and Explorer (1987) (Graeme Mason in Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 2392); Minecraft (Mojang Studios 2011) (Sims 2016, n.p.); and “hub worlds” of larger games like first-person shooters, as players transition between tasks or locations (Grabarczyk 2016, 251; Kagen 2017, 278). Generally, however, the first walking sim is agreed to be Dear Esther (Pinchbeck and Morgan 2012), originally Dan Pinchbeck’s academic experiment in how minimalist a game could get, stripping back a first-person shooter—Half Life 2 (Valve 2004)—as much as possible (Grabarczyk 2016, 245; Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 2677). Dear Esther’s success, and its “slow gaming” that afforded a more contemplative, personal, and emotional connection to character and story (see Figure 13), inspired others: The Chinese Room’s follow-up Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), The Beginner’s Guide (Wreden and Nelson 2015), Gone Home (Nordhagen 2018), The Old City: Leviathan (PostMod SoftWorks 2014), Home Is Where One Starts (Wehle 2015), 9.03m (Space Budgie 2013), Ether One (White Paper Games 2014), Sunset (Tale of Tales 2015), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe 2011), Proteus (Key and Kanaga 2013), Firewatch (Campo Santo 2016), and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow 2017). The term has also been retrospectively applied to Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard (2008) and The Path (2009) (Barda 2014), which were perhaps spared a wrath like #GamerGate because they didn’t win quite as much critical attention as did Dear Esther, keeping them under the radar, as it were.

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Figure 13  Screenshot from Dear Esther (Pinchbeck and Morgan 2012). Playing the game involves wandering through the 3D landscape, encountering memories like this one that form a narrative.

Like VNs, walking sims have a straightforward path to market: Steam and itch.io. These game distribution portals are similar to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing or the app stores from Apple and Google. Steam, like Apple, has a review process for quality assurance that serves as something like a gatekeeper, ensuring the works published on their platform comply with guidelines and function as promised (Valve n.d.). Itch.io is much more open, using more of a YouTube or etsy model in that anyone with a (free) account can upload work, with options to restrict sharing or share publicly, to monetize or offer the game for free (itch.io n.d.). Users can employ their uploads in order to workshop them, beta-test, submit for school assignments, or simply to offer them for purchase. Both Steam and itch.io employ tagging systems for greater discoverability, along with typical filters for genre/platform/price and other relevant features, allowing the developer to choose their own price point (including none at all). While not all developers choose to implement the “walking simulator” tag, opting for others like “story rich,” many do: as of the date of this writing (late 2021), 1,497 games on Steam were tagged with “walking simulator” (a similar number to those for “interactive fiction,” “Choose Your Own Adventure,” “Dating Sim,” “Hidden Object,” and “Dungeon Crawler”); on itch.io the count is 3,607. The genre as a form of game has certainly been established by this point.



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It is difficult to rank games in terms of sales; unlike books, films, and music, there are no aggregator sales rankings that quantify earnings for games. Individual walking sims have performed well: Dear Esther earned back its investment within six hours of release (Yin-Poole 2012) and sold over 800,000 units (Stuart 2016). What Remains of Edith Finch was nominated for a slew of games awards the year it was released, winning Best Narrative from The Game Awards (Osborn 2017), Excellence in Narrative from the SXSW Gamer’s Voice Awards (IGN Studios 2018), and the BAFTA/British Academy Games Award for Best Game (Makedonski 2018). Firewatch, which sold 2.5 million units within two years of release (Walker 2018), was similarly nominated, winning various awards for narrative and writing, including the BAFTA/British Academy Games Award for Best Debut (BAFTA 2017). Gone Home and The Stanley Parable were both up for the 2014 BAFTA for Best Debut, Gone Home winning out (BAFTA 2014). Walking sims, despite their troubled beginnings, have nonetheless found critical acclaim and significant audiences, showing that there is a strong desire for interactive works that prioritize literary and narrative elements.

Circular Digital Fiction Economies Apart from these genre distinctions of literary games, it is worth highlighting several studios that have carved out niches for themselves as interactive digital narrative platforms. These platforms incorporate authoring tools, DF communities, user publishing avenues, and in-house studios—something of a circular economy for DF. These platforms (or communities) partake in a computer culture that has existed nearly as long as the computer itself: sharing, modding, and innovating. Its origins, like most computer games, can be seen in the age of ARPAnet, as programmers shared their code with one another openly, modified it, and shared on again, just as Will Crowther and Don Woods did in their asynchronous development of Colossal Cave Adventure (see Chapter 5). The second stage of this evolution lies in the end of the Infocom IF era, as keen fans of the genre sought to create their own. Infocom’s software (Z-machine) was proprietary, unavailable to the public. Thus Michael Roberts developed the Text Adventure Development System (TADS) and released it as shareware (a limited, proprietary version available for free, with full functionality offered at a cost) in 1987 (Montfort 2003, 197). Graham Nelson created Inform several years later (1993), becoming “both Gutenberg and Cervantes” (ibid., 201) for the IF community when he created and released the first Inform-built IF Curses

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(1993a); Inform was both freeware (later versions have been made open-source) and output to the same filetype as Infocom, and Curses was extremely wellreceived. TADS and Inform—along with Usenet forums, an online archive, and the IF Comp all dedicated to interactive fiction—created a strong community for IF that persists in multiple countries and languages today. The current phase of independent platform development is exemplified in inkle, Choice of Games, and, in a more devolved model, Twine. Inkle (n.d.) is the studio behind 80 Days (2014), an IF available both for computers and as a mobile app, as well as Sorcery! (2013) and Heaven’s Vault (2019),4 among others. The 2015 BAFTAs/British Academy Game Awards nominated 80 Days in four categories (though it won none) (2015), and Time Magazine named it to their list of top ten games of the year (Peckham 2014). Inkle made their authoring tool, a narrative scripting language called “ink,” available as open-source freeware, as well as a simplified tool, “inklewriter,” for students and beginners (Humfrey and Ingold 2011–; 2012–). They invite writers to share their work, which they include on their GitHub site along with various ink tools ([2018] 2021). This platform model—garnering attention through quality creative outputs and building community by openly sharing their authoring tool—has ensured a strong attention economy for inkle, very similar to that created by Graham Nelson and Inform. Inkle, however, has taken the platform one step further into commercialization by selling their literary games on established marketplaces (Steam, app stores, etc.), as well as maintaining a Patreon account for microfinancing. Whereas other prominent literary games developers with initial success (Tale of Tales, TouchPress, etc.) have failed, inkle remains a prominent studio in the literary games community thanks to its circular DF economy platform. Choice of Games (CoG) has had comparable longevity, though their titles have not amassed the same level of awards and accolades as inkle. Their platform model is much more strongly based on brand recognition and community production: their function as a games development studio is much closer to royalty publishing than other studios. They develop some literary games in-house, and solicit submissions from authors to create multiple-choice-based stories with their ChoiceScript (open-source and free) and submit to them for editing and release for the PC and mobile device markets (Choice of Games 2011). Inkle recently published an associated set of books based on Heaven’s Vault, expanding it into a transmedia tale (inkle 2021). 4



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They also provide a hybrid between royalty and indie published works through their “Hosted Games” program, where authors can submit their works to CoG (with certain requirements, such as completion and beta-testing); the studio will publish them on the various marketplaces (app stores, Kindle, Steam, and the CoG site) and return 25 percent royalties to the author (Choice of Games 2016). This model ensures that CoG has an influx of content to publish and keep their work active in the community; as the content is created with their program and guidelines, it also establishes brand recognition in the marketplace—a successful enough endeavor that “multiple-choice games” are almost synonymous with CoG games. As CoG has been releasing titles consistently since 2009, their model, like inkle’s, has proven successful thus far. Finally, Twine5 has something of a circular DF economy, though Twine’s model is much more loosely constructed—with much more hit-or-miss success. Chris Klimas initially released his Twine authoring tool for hypertext and hypermedia fiction in 2009, and though it was much simpler for beginners than most tools and predates others, it nearly failed to earn enough attention to thrive (Brey 2016; Ellison 2013; Friedhoff 2013); unlike Graham Nelson or Inkle Studios, Klimas did not produce an acclaimed title to garner attention for the tool. In 2012, however, indie game developer Anna Anthropy publicly posted about it and endorsed it in her Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012), Porpentine (another developer) created a manifesto and tutorial for it (2012), and Twine became the darling of the indie and queer gaming community.6 Closer to Inform in its philosophy, the Twine platform is very distributed: Twine neither hosts nor endorses works, nor does it act as a studio producing works for the marketplace. Rather, it is simply an author tool, free and open-source; Klimas has a Patreon account for microfinancing. While literary games made with Twine are often recognizable from its default style settings, Twine works are easily customizable; as Twine incorporates HTML, CSS, and Javascript, more advanced users can create incredibly unique texts, eliminating any particular branding effect. For example, Anna Anthropy’s very simple yet innovative Queers in Love at the End of the World (2013) uses the default Twine hypertext formatting and styles, but it includes a time-out function that presses the reader/player to make decisions I have previously described the history of Twine (Ensslin and Skains 2017), and Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop have recently published their essential text Twining, all about Twine (2021). 6 A Twine game was even more central to the misogynistic enmity of #GamerGate than walking sims: Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013). (False) claims made around her relationship with games journalists ignited that particular misogynistic spark (Massanari 2016, 314). 5

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Figure 14  Screenshot from Queers in Love at the End of the World (Anthropy 2013).

as if it were, truly, the end of the world (see Figure 14). In contrast, Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive (2014) uses color, visuals, sound, various customized macros, and even directs the reader/player to interact physically (drawing on their skin) in an incredibly emotionally affective work of fantasy and monsters. Anthropy and Porpentine’s 2012 burst of awareness and community adoption pushed the tool far enough into the attention economy that “Twine game” became an established genre, appearing as a tag on the Interactive Fiction Database, and more recently on itch.io, with even a few games (such as Depression Quest) published on Steam. It has proven a prominent teaching tool (Boom et al. 2020; Ensslin et al. 2016; Hahn 2016; Kervyn et al. 2020; Rudd, Horry, and Skains 2019; Skains 2019c; Thompson 2020), further cementing it in cultural awareness— also aided by its use to construct the interactive episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror, “Bandersnatch” (Rubin 2018; Slade 2018). While Twine’s platform is much more



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distributed among creators (as community members maintain elements of it, rather than solely Klimas himself), users, marketplaces, and uses, this looser model has nonetheless gained sufficient attention and recognition to mark its entry as a genre of literary games. These economies, however, are not without their faults. Perhaps most noticeable is in whom lies the power of the platforms: like GAFAM, all the platform creators discussed here are men in America or Britain.7 “While a number of indie game ‘auteurs’ have achieved name recognition and commercial acclaim, these success narratives are often reserved for white and cis men” (Reed, Murray, and Salter 2020, loc. 472). So are most of the creators of mobile apps and walking sims, such as TouchPress, while others have nominal diversity, including The Chinese Room, Annapurna Interactive, and Campo Santo. The minority, like the Fullbright Company and Editions at Play, have fairly inclusive teams and player-characters in terms of gender; others, like Popleaf, are not clear. Twine rose to prominence through game developers from historically marginalized groups, Choice of Games has a good gender mix of authors and is lauded for its accessibility (Musgrave 2015), and inkle likewise works with a variety of authors. Nelson’s Inform7 has enabled many new IF writers worldwide through its translated libraries. These platforms have demonstrated that they are useful, useable, and open to diverse community members; their foundations, however, still lie in the very male-dominated world of computing.

Conclusion Literary games, in the limited scope I’ve used for the term in this chapter, are already quite prominent in mainstream culture, and a significant proportion of the public have shown that they are very willing to pay for more literary- and narrative-focused interactive works. The primary issue for these works is finding their place in marketplaces already flooded with digital content, which fail to provide sufficient search and tagging functions to locate them. This is particularly the case for app stores and ebook sellers, as games markets like Steam and itch. While in recent years English-language scholarship has benefited from studies on DF and games in other parts of the world more broadly, there is as yet little offering us insights into DF studios and publishers specifically. It would be interesting to see what may have emerged, for example, in Singapore, whose history of computing did not privilege men to the exclusion of women (see Chapter 5). 7

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io at least provide a tagging system that can enable consumers to find niche products. The dominance of the major digital platforms—GAFAM—means that there is little room for innovation in form and genre in mainstream commercial markets, as there is little existing infrastructure (genre terms, tagging systems, community sharing) to accommodate novelty. Thus many creators are limited by the conventions of what these platforms are capable of handling. Nonetheless, within this digital corporatocracy, literary games have emerged as book-apps, stand-alone mobile apps, mobile app authoring tools and aggregators, webcomics, VNs, and walking sims—all of which have managed to carve niches in both the attention economy and the market economy. Unlike many other forms of DF, these literary games are traded in mainstream marketplaces and earn cash rather than mere accolades (although they earn accolades, too). Indie developers with strong platform integration have also held steady in a rocky and rapidly moving industry, building communities of author-readers (or prosumers) who both create and consume works within a particular branded ecosystem. While these ecosystems, by and large, are still impacted to an unfortunate degree by the paucity of diverse voices in computing, they show the beginnings of inclusive practices and texts. Hopefully, these entities will recognize the myriad benefits of more diverse teams and topics, not only for cultural clout but also for their bottom line, and continue making these improvements.

7

Everything Old Is New Again: Ergodic Literature

Because this book’s focus is the popular emergence of digital fiction (DF), much of the discussion to this point has centered on games or games-adjacent texts. While some elements of game culture have resisted the more narratively inclined works like walking sims (see Chapter 6), the games industry has been far more open to the wide array of digitally mediated genres than has the mainstream publishing industry. Many factors contribute here: in addition to the moral panic over the “death of the book,” by the time computer games appeared on the scene, the royalty publishing industry was already several hundred years old, and firmly ensconced in its practices and a desire to conserve them. Despite the conservative nature of mainstream publishing, however, artists and authors have always experimented with the form of both narrative and codex, from the earliest known fiction to manuscript illuminations, modernism, postmodernism, the Oulipo movement, artists’ books, and now hybrid print-digital texts. A survey of literary narrative shows us that as long as we have composed novels, we have been interested in how the written word can make us see our world and its denizens from a fresh, interactive perspective. Literary studies has framed this interactivity (which, in print literature, is usually of a more cognitive sort) as defamiliarization: presenting texts, concepts, words, structures, and the like in new and unconventional ways, constantly flipping the filters to give us a fresh lens on culture, society, and relationships. Interestingly, though we term high levels of defamiliarization in novels as experimental or avant-garde, authors have been using these techniques in their work as far back as we have novels, pushing the boundaries, offering us “difficult” texts (Bray, Gibbons, and McHale 2012, 2) that require us to shift expectations, mentally shuffle narrative structures, and/or question the text at a fundamental level. Espen Aarseth defines such texts as “ergodic,” in that they require nontrivial effort to traverse, noting that “ergodic textuality has been practiced

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as long as linear writing” (1997, 9). Of course, what is perceived as “difficult” or nontrivial changes over time: unheard-of uses of typography, mathematical generation, nonsequential structures, multimodality, and narrative techniques become conventionally accepted over time (such as the use of present tense or the second-person perspective in fiction). Even some Oulipo techniques— algorithmic-generated texts, authoring under constraints, inventing new forms of potentiality (Mathews 1976)—have become standards in children’s literature. “The Oulipo’s loopy experiments have indeed come to seem like reasonable literary experiments” (Elkin and Esposito 2013, n.p.). Nonetheless, thanks to the conformity of school texts and readers’ desire to “read for the plot” (Brooks 1992), difficulty and defamiliarization can seem renewed with every generation. As Brian McHale notes, “On the one hand, postmodernism is widely reputed to be ‘difficult’; on the other hand, nearly everything has been identified at one time or another as ‘postmodern’ ” (2012, 141–2). Postmodern texts are, as McHale points out, the go-to example of bewildering literature exposing the “truth” of life. Before that, the revolution was modernism, straining to break away from realism to express the truth of inner lives. We can find ergodic elements in texts as far back as Murasaki Shikibu’s 源氏物語 (The Tale of Genji) (c.1008), Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and even Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). In the twentieth century, modernism, postmodernism, avant-pop, post-postmodernism, post-humanism, futurism, Oulipo, and artists’ books have all contributed toward what many electronic literature (elit) scholars have termed “antecedents” or “proto-hypertexts”; Espen Aarseth applied the term “cybertext” for both print and digital ergodic texts. I have opted against using such terms in this chapter, as they carry an implicit bias: the notion that ergodic print works were somehow evolving toward a final form in digital media, that they were primitive forms of what the digital allows us to perfect. In fact, many ergodic print texts are defined by print, their function and meaning lost should they be remediated into digital media. The takeaway from a study of these works is that ergodic texts—print and digital— convey fundamentally human elements of cognition and communication. We process our environment and one another both holistically (with all senses, multimodally) and in fragments, piecing together interactions, observations, and events to draw conclusions about our individual roles in a complex social culture. When we create art, we do the same, essentially creating narrative in our (mind’s) own image, using whatever technology we have available to express our inner complexity.



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There is a conflict inherent in analyzing ergodic texts in a book about popular recognition of DF. While ergodic texts in games are commonplace, “nontrivial effort” serving as a feature in gameplay, in print they are far more often considered experimental: the opposite of mainstream or popular. Yet, as noted, over time what was once experimental can become conventional. The relatively few ergodic print texts I incorporate in this chapter were chosen to highlight this transition, and audiences’ increasing familiarity with “difficult” elements that are more often conventional in born-DF. Keen readers will also note that there is a theme in the texts I chose to highlight: as much as possible, I favored work by authors and artists from historically marginalized communities. Relying on established academic literature on the topic of experimental, avant-garde, and ergodic texts gives an unfortunately skewed perspective as to who creates them,1 as “for the most part, women experimental writers in the twentieth century were absent from surveys of innovative writing” (Friedman 2012, 155). The Oulipo group was and is mired in sexism, failing to incorporate a woman in their first decade and a half of existence; only five of the total forty-one members have been women, their work only recently translated into English (Coolidge 2017). Women, LGBTQIA+, and PoC are frequently “segmented off ” in literary studies, their work considered as separate identity-based genres, or not at all (Page 1999); the exclusion of these authors in related discourse has the effect of silencing entire communities (Retallack 2003). The resulting literary narrative is that the work of (predominantly white) men is singular; the subtext is that artistic genius lies with this privileged group, and this group alone. Thus I strove to locate and use texts that are not commonly considered in discussions of ergodic literature. In an effort to locate those also existing in the popular consciousness, I purposefully searched the reading-related social media site GoodReads for user-created lists of texts with keywords such as “experi­ mental,” “avant-garde,” “weird,” “alternate structures,” and “difficult.” These lists are dominated, unsurprisingly, by the same rota of names that dominate academic and pedagogical literature: Joyce, Nabokov, Calvino, Cortázar, Saporta, Johnson, Queneau. I focused on the less critically prominent names and titles, particularly those that repeatedly appeared on these lists, as this indicated they have at least a moderate presence in mainstream awareness. Some texts I discuss here are those that I am aware of as a reader, given that I seek out such nonstandard works in For example, in my literature review, I encountered multiple resources that included no primary texts by women. 1

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my own reading. Others are those reviewed in mainstream press or book blogs, those that appear on best-seller lists, and/or those that have won book awards, and that implement ergodic elements, regardless of whether or not they have ever been discussed in the academic literature. The resulting list of works in English, primarily from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and historically marginalized authors, is hundreds of titles long, and yet I still consider this to be only a perfunctory look into the rich ore of ergodic literature that has achieved a foothold in the popular realm.

Components of Ergodic Literature Defining ergodic literature as that which is “difficult” is something of a dodge; what is difficult to me may not be difficult to you. For the purposes of this chapter, I’m going to therefore draw a nonarbitrary line: “popular” ergodic literature is that which departs in some way from the highly familiar prose found in the average “popular fiction” novel, whether it be spy, mystery, romance, or science fiction. Open any airport-lounge bestseller, and it will contain chapters, a sequential story structure (with the caveat of the now-familiar flashback technique), firstor third-person narrative perspective, past tense (though present tense is now more acceptable), a focal main character (though in the case of romance and some horror, a dual perspective may be offered), and an Aristotelian dramatic structure including a clear denouement. Design elements such as typeface and layout are standardized, intended to make the text as readable as possible while fading into the background of the reader’s mind; the materiality of the text bows to the superiority of narrative.2 Ergodic literature departs from these conventions in ways that I have grouped into two broad categories: cognitive/conceptual and multiplicative. Cognitive/conceptual texts are, at their core, thought experiments. Science fiction, of course, is rich with imagined narrative forms, including the Holodeck of Star Trek fame, that we can only achieve with more advanced technology than is currently possible. The quintessential conceptual text for digital literature is Jorge Luis Borges’s oft-cited “The Garden of Forking Paths” ([1941] 1962), which is a relatively straightforward short story that nonetheless imagines a My personal classification of non-ergodic popular fiction is whether or not the experience of the print book, ebook, and audiobook versions are more or less equivalent. 2



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tale in which all possible permutations of its narrative can be read: in essence, a hypertext. In addition to these conceptual thought experiments, ergodic literature also includes explorations of qualia, or shared theory of mind, in texts that mimic the inner workings of human cognition: fragments of “cyborgian” identity (Haraway 1991), the inner self versus outer performance of self, the associative actions of memory, the instability of schizophrenia (a particular obsession of the 1950s and 1960s), and the experience of otherness, particularly as expressed through retellings and/or the carnivalesque (Friedman 2012). Many narrative techniques have been employed to mirror these cognitive effects for readers: stream of consciousness, interior monologue (or dialogue), unreliable narration, subverted language, invented language, mixed narrative structures, and open-ended structures. Examples can be found in Pamela Zoline’s short story “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in which a young mother’s inner chaos is expressed through a scientific reporting style documenting a descent into entropy; and in Harlan Ellison’s novella The Region Between (1970),3 in which an alien “soul merchant” harvests a human soul upon its body’s death, who then struggles to maintain his identity among a cacophony of similarly captured souls. This fragmented struggle is conveyed in a textual representation that readers of Danielewski would be familiar with: changing fonts, sideways and upside-down orientations, spiraling into circles, marching in verse, and bleeding into the gutters, as the human soul collides with alien souls and strains to reassert its sense of self (see Figure 15). The Region Between uses the visual presentation of text to mimic and effect its cognitive mosaic; as a result, it falls into both the cognitive/conceptual category of ergodic texts, as well as the multiplicative. Multiplicative works function by presenting their narrative in multiple, often conflicting, ways. Unlike the popfiction “airport” novel or beach read, multiplicative texts call attention to their constructedness, as Ellison’s novella does with its innovative typesetting (which was quite a task for a pulp magazine in 1970). A metafictional or “self-conscious” work “explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction” (Waugh 1984, While Harlan Ellison had a history of “making good trouble” on behalf of marginalized authors such as Octavia Butler, he also had a history of making bad trouble as well, as when he publicly sexually assaulted Connie Willis at the 2006 Hugo Awards (Neal 2006). Unfortunately, typographical and layout experiments of the sort Ellison created in The Region Between were a typesetting nightmare for pre-digital printing, and rare in mainstream/popular publishing, so I’ve included the example with the caveat that Ellison is Not Okay. 3

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Figure 15  A lorem ipsum version of a scanned page from Harlan Ellison’s The Region Between (1970).

3–4). A great many works of fiction, particularly those falling under the banners of modernism and postmodernism, employ linguistic, textual, and/or material techniques that reflect on their own situatedness, from the stream-of-consciousness cognitive mimicry of early modernists to Oulipian experiments to intermedial collages. In particular, ergodic print fictions share many characteristics with DFs, including prominent elements of multimodality, multiple or ambiguous narrative perspectives, and an explicit dialogism in the work. Multimodal works are rather easy to identify as multiplicative, and thus ergodic, typically employing a collage of print text, photographs, drawings, graphics, diagrams, handwritten letters, documents and forms, ephemera-like ticket stubs and newspaper clippings, and so forth (Gibbons 2012; Hallet 2009). The arrangement of these various representations and reproductions invites the reader to play: to choose an order of exploration, to draw meaning from nonverbal semiotics, and even to alter their physical relationship to the codex as they turn and flip and reorient the object to review the materials (Gibbons 2012; Meifert-Menhard 2013, 131). Such works have been increasing in recent years (Hallet 2009; Meifert-Menhard 2013), likely because digital design and printing technology has made it far easier to create them. The temptation is always to point to the influence of media and technology for such trends,



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as though multimodality were rare prior to television and computer. Human communication media, however, have always merged different semiotic forms and intermedial techniques as technology advances: note the illuminated manuscripts of medieval codices, or the mixing of print and handwriting in “hybrid books” of the early print age (Nyström 2014). Alison Gibbons notes that multimodal texts are “close cousins to artists’ books” (2012, n.p.), which take their multimodal and self-conscious construction one step further into questioning the physical form and role of the book (codex) itself (Drucker 2004). These may also fall into the realm of what Gibbons terms “tactile fictions”: “books that play with form in a way that both emphasises their materiality and makes readers engage with them in notably physical ways … epistolary multimodal novels, cardshuffle novels or ‘model kits,’ and cut-outs” (Gibbons 2012, n.p.). Multimodality is by no means the sole property of digital media (Ryan 2016, 342). Multiplicity also expresses through narrative perspective and narrative closure (or lack thereof). A classic example is the Japanese film Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950) and its source text “In a Grove” (Akutagawa 1922): both are segmented into sections from the various narrative perspectives of people involved in a robbery-murder, telling the court their accounting of the crime. The narrative is left open-ended: what really happened? Whose version is the “true” version? The effect is a questioning of narrative, of perspective, of the structures that we rely on to form our picture of the world; if everyone’s accounting of the same event varies so drastically, how can we ever reach a universal “truth”? This is the metafictional self-consciousness that multiple perspectives and ambiguous endings offer, leaving the reader to puzzle out and decide on their accepted version of the narrative. It also introduces a concept of multiple selves, the layering of identities, the patchwork of inner and outer lives that we experience, hide, and perform in different contexts. An extension of this multiplicity in perspective is dialogism. “Ultimately,” argues Gibbons, “altered books and collage fictions are dialogic. They bring about an exchange of ideas” (2012, n.p.). More than that, perhaps, deeply dialogic texts expose the reality—through fiction—of interior lives. Epistolary texts, whether documenting the exchange of letters, emails, or instant messages, are both dialogic (in that they are literally a dialogue between two or more characters) and extremely revealing. They represent the direct thoughts and words of characters, not through narration or description, but through their own “hand,” as it were. Further, they are an intimate conversation that the reader is somehow privy to; missives between individuals are private, intimate. It is

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unsurprising that the epistolary form is used so often in works by and about women, who in most cultures and languages have historically been more concretely divided between private selves and the public performance of their gender. The reader of these texts has an active cognitive role, puzzling together references and ellipses and slipping into the fictional minds of the characters. On the other hand, Bronwen Thomas points out: “It is no coincidence that experimentation with the representation of speech and interaction in the early decades of the twentieth century came about at the same time as the emergence of several key new technologies and the ‘talk explosion’ ” (2012, 131). As a society we become both habituated and fascinated by the disembodied voices and words expressed in each new technology, from recorded audio to emojis, and how these communications bring us together over vast distances. Thus a work presented as dialogue between characters, personas, and/or selves invites us to travel both to the innermost experiences of individuals, and over great expanses to engender new connections. Given these qualities of ergodic texts, it is ironic that most of the examples trotted out in academic literature are composed by men of European descent. Hilary P. Dannenberg argues that “men’s plots are goal oriented and are idealistically represented as reaching a final point of closure and telos; women’s plots are located within a system of divergent or alternate worlds in which closure, convergence, and happiness are eternally deferred” (2008, 228). This argument echoes Joan Retallack’s 2003 exploration of modernist and postmodernist characteristics and techniques as feminine: collage and multimodality are akin to feminine-coded crafts like scrapbooking and quilting; women are stereotypically steeped in dialogism, in gossip and chat and social sharing; and the contrast between cyborgian identities is cast from a feminist understanding of self. Nonetheless, women and the work of women and PoC in particular are silenced, as both Retallack and Coolidge note, by lack of citation, analysis, curriculum assignation, and review. “The idea of creating literature within certain constraints—why, women have been doing that for centuries … Women writers are virtuosos at operating within constrained circumstances” (Elkin and Esposito 2013, n.p.). Hélène Cixous’s l’écriture feminine is “non-hierarchical, nonlinear, polyphonic, open-ended, and has multiple climaxes”; disrupting narrative conventions is a method of disrupting social structures and “opens a space for the culturally repressed, for the feminine to erupt into consciousness” (Friedman 2012, 156). It is pushing back at hegemonic power—how can we, as readers and critics, realistically expect to experience the “truths” underlying



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these forms if we only examine works by those within the hegemony? This is the question that has in no small way directed my selection of sample texts in the remaining discussion of ergodic texts emerging in the popular zeitgeist.

Mainstream Ergodic Literature The works examined in this chapter all relate in some fashion to the technology of the printing press and/or its resulting conventional text: the codex. In particular, I primarily focus on the book—the novel—with forays into short fiction, artists’ books, ebooks, and other forms that play with the notion of print fiction. As a form, print fiction is rather venerable: the pool of possible examples of ergodic literature in book form is galactic, even if we restrict ourselves to mostly works in English. The texts discussed in this section are few in comparison, representing key elements of playfulness, defamiliarization, and influence on the popular consciousness. Print novels are the focus of the first section, followed by a specific yet highly influential subset: gamebooks. Finally, I examine a newly emerging hybrid form of the book, whether print or electronic, that maintains a semblance of the codex while integrating fundamental elements of the digital: hyperbooks.

Ergodic Print Ergodic elements have been present in print fiction from the very beginning. In English fiction, we consider modernism, postmodernism, and the avantgarde to be experimental and somehow fresh, but these are simply the latest in a chain of responses to the realism of the nineteenth century (which itself was a reaction to the extravagance of Romanticism)—in a nutshell, of course. Despite the supposed delineation of these movements, conceptual explorations, introspections, multimodality, multiplicity, and dialogic texts have persisted through each in the form of varying perspectives, illuminations, handwriting, counterfactuals, multiple endings, bifurcations, footnoting, mutually exclusive narratives and depictions of alternity (consider Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, and Mary Shelley) (Meifert-Menhard 2013, 62). The first of these we can point to predates even the printing press: Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (c.1008). The earliest known novel, written by a Japanese noblewoman, “possesses what Jorge Luis Borges called an ‘astonishing naturalness.’ (Borges recommended the book to readers of his own fiction.)”

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(Phillips 2010, 373). A work of epic length, Murasaki’s tale of a prince hidden among ordinary nobility (natch) incorporates epistolary exchanges, multiple perspectives in multiple stories, poetic verses, shifting identities, lack of closure, and deep dives into the minds of many different characters. The work was translated into English just in time to influence the modernists, including Virginia Woolf, who reviewed Genji for British Vogue in July 1925 (Woolf [1925] 1994). “Genji in English translation is virtually a manual in the literary representation of consciousness” (Phillips 2010, 380), with monologues, soliloquies, interior monologues, and stream of consciousness. Woolf points out that Murasaki naturally uses the “medium of other women’s minds” ([1925] 1994, 267). In terms of closure, the prince (Genji) dies three-quarters of the way through the tale: “His death is not depicted but is marked by a blank chapter. When we turn the page, eight years have passed, and Genji is gone” (Phillips 2010, 388). Throughout the seven volumes (English translation), Murasaki presents a complex narrative of the inner and outer workings of an intricate society one thousand years old and yet still deeply resembling the so-called modern novel. Even at the height of the nineteenth century’s realism movement we can find ergodic elements in print literature. George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans) oft-studied Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876) are both excellent examples of “difficult” novels. Thérèse Benzon, reviewing the former, complained that it was “a flagrant offense against the essential rules of art … made up of a succession of unconnected chapters, following each other at random—with the result that the final effect is one of an incoherence which nothing can justify” ([1873] 1972, 59). Narrative focus alternates between two characters (Dorothea and Lydgate) to such an extent that the chapters of each could be extricated from one another to form separate texts, creating “an unbalanced, peculiarly shaped novel, dominant in a very unreal way … by an idealistic girl” (Hornback 1966, 169). Woolf called it “one of the few English novels for grown-up people” (1925b, n.p.) (high praise from Woolf). Daniel Deronda takes alterity fully into multiple possible worlds, as its heroine contemplates a roulette wheel of life, positing the various futures she could inhabit: a significant departure from realism as it “foregrounds the subjective virtual character worlds in combination with the actual” (Dannenberg 2008, 131). Dannenberg notes that Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy all used elements of multiplicity and alternate worlds to portray dissonance and discord, with Daniel Deronda splitting the patterns of plots by the gender of the protagonist (ibid., 138).



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With steam trains and factories and war came the modernist movement, with its rejection of realism in favor of stream of consciousness, parody, and revisionism. These works are episodic, vignettes of plot as they affect individual characters, formed primarily by imagination and internal thought processes (Simion 2014, 121). While realism was eschewed, modernist authors deliberately mined the ordinary in order to lay bare the internal as well as the external (Olson 2009, 65). Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), modernist and multi-genre, was a classic of the Harlem Renaissance and largely ignored outside African American circles; it presented a series of vignettes of the African American experience in prose and verse, and segments of pure dialogue resembling scripts (Nielsen 2012). Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925a) was her take on the “day in the life” novel,4 “where nothing happens twice, but much that happens presumably has happened before” (Olson 2009, 66), making use of mythic reference, flashback and memory, repetition, stream of consciousness, and dreamlike and fragmented prose in multiple narrative viewpoints without a plot (Simion 2014, 122–3). Orlando (1928) brought Woolf fully into the mainstream, selling 8,104 books in its first six months (Watson 2005, 315). A mock biography, Orlando follows a character through time, social movements, and even gender changes that suggest an inherent instability in the role of “woman” versus that of “man” (ibid., 295). Woolf incorporated a scholarly style complete with acknowledgments, a rather granular index, and captioned photos of the protagonist: a multimodal work of a “noticeably fluid consciousness, elongated, immaterial and migratory” (ibid., 286). By the end of the Second World War, art and literature were preparing to dispatch the modernist obsession with the ordinary. Latin American Spanishlanguage literature stood on the shoulders of the modernists and launched their own highly influential experimental works, including Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones (1944). Ficciones included numerous conceptual thought experiments on books, time, chance, and metafiction: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” as discussed above, “frame[s]‌fundamental questions about the limits of narrative as a representation of time” (Moulthrop 1994, 119). “The Library of Babel” imagines a library containing every possible iteration of letters and punctuation but lacking order that permits its librarians to locate the few with meaning. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” presents a fantasy world in which reality is formed not from physical materials, but from ideas. “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” is a Ms. Woolf would, perhaps, take umbrage at being compared to Ulysses, which she reviewed as “adolescent” and “conscious and calculated indecency” (Olson 2009, 60). 4

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mirrored hall of fictional reviews for a fictional text, mixing fiction and reality in a manner that Italo Calvino’s later Oulipian work would echo. Borges presented not only stories but ideas of stories, philosophies of stories, ways stories could be told that called for some element of “magic”—magic that we now find digital media can provide (even if partially). Equally influential in Spanish literature is Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), foundational for Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. Rulfo took the Euro-American concepts and styles of modernism and positioned it within Mexican traditions and reality. Set in the world of the dead, the novel obviates concerns of place and time, placing the living and the dead next to each other in a continuum of life and death (Cohn 1996, 257). Themes of time and memory intertwined with regional history and culture, the duality of life and death, and the fusion of bleak reality with mythology cemented Pedro Páramo as an era-defining work for Spanish literature and the spark of magical realism. The roller coaster of ergodic print literature has, to this point, merely been steadily chugging uphill toward the apex of postmodernism, a movement whose entire raison d’être is to be “difficult,” self-conscious, and multiplicative. Post1960, we plummet at high speed into the midst of experimental works from the obscure to the mega-popular (the latter of which, of course, is my focus). Nobel laureate Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) has a fragmented structure that “foregrounds its textuality” (Bentley 2009, 47), repeatedly opening new potentialities (Draine 1980, 32) to demonstrate how consciousness works through its very constructedness (Marder 1980, 49). Ursula Le Guin was a master of cognitive ergodicity: In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin subverted the traditional binary concept of gender identity, to promote an anarchy of gender. In The Lathe of Heaven (1971), she told the story of a psychiatric patient whose dreams literally redesigned the world, thus creating the possibility of an ontological anarchy. And in her 1974 masterpiece The Dispossessed, Le Guin made two major contributions to the philosophy of postmodern anarchism. She created a fictional anarchist language called Pravic, which underscores the importance of linguistics for any contemporary anarchist project. And she developed an equally radical concept of time, creating the possibility of a chronosophic anarchism. (Call 2007, 88; emphasis original)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982), while autobiography rather than fiction, nonetheless works its poetic exploration of the female Korean experience through fragmented presentations of documents, multiple



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voices, and mythologies in a structure that mimics the workings (and missed connections) of memory (Cheng 1998). Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1978) is an avant-pop pastiche of dream-maps, drawings, nonlinear text, folktales, borrowed texts, and repetitive loops deconstructing American politics and the devastation of human trafficking (Muth 2011). Toni Morrison, a Nobel and Pulitzer winner, integrated ergodic techniques into her work, particularly the Beloved trilogy: Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997). Her work integrates history, African and African American mythology, displacement and isolation, cognitive representation, philosophies of memory, magical realism, multiple narrative perspectives, and structures inspired by improvisational jazz (Friedman 2012). Margaret Atwood’s Man Booker Prize winner The Blind Assassin (2000) is multimodal, multivocal and deeply mentally intimate, palimpsestic in structure, with multiple stories forming mysteries and narrative puzzles to engage the reader (Dancygier 2007; Dvorak 2002; Reed 2009). Numerous scholars (Gibbons 2012; Hallet 2009; Meifert-Menhard 2013) have pointed to the increased cascade of ergodic texts in recent years, which is likely a culmination of several factors: the influence of digital media leading to reader familiarity with nonlinearity and multiplicity in texts; digital printing technology enabling printing multimodal works much more easily and affordably; and, I would argue, readers simply becoming familiar with (formerly) avant-garde techniques after half a century of postmodernism. Whatever the reason, ergodic texts have gone from experimental prize-winners with occasional breakthroughs to the mainstream, to unprecedented popularity. Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, launched with The Eyre Affair (2001), is surreal metafictional satire on English literature as a whole: the central concept is literal intertextuality, in which both people and literary characters can travel into books, interact with one another, and even alter their stories (Berninger and Thomas 2007; Otmani and Bouregbi 2020). Other works have similarly implemented transmediality, such as Cathy’s Book (Stewart, Weisman, and Brigg 2006), now a series, a multimodal text with physical ephemera in the form of documents, pictures, letters, and notes, and extensions into characters’ social media accounts (Danuta 2016) (see Figure 16). Much better known even than Cathy’s Book (which was a New York Times bestseller) is S. (Abrams and Dorst 2013), a multimodal text-within-a-text with physical ephemera, character notes in the margins, and additional puzzles and social media accounts online (ibid.; Gibbons 2017). Kate Atkinson’s multiaward-winning and widely popular Life After Life (2013) uses a looping structure

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Figure 16  Cathy’s Book (Stewart, Weisman, and Brigg 2006), a print novel that incorporates physical paratexts like letters, cards, and notes, as well as drawings and clues in the text.

akin to videogames, as her heroine encounters the many forms of death and trauma (particularly for women) likely in the early twentieth century, goes back, and restarts from a “save point” (cf. Norquay 2017). Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) echoes Middlemarch in its use of two narratives and voices, but takes it one step further in that half its print run leads with one and half with the other (Lea 2017, 61). The NYT Bestseller Illuminae (Kaufman and Kristoff 2015), first in a series, is a multimodal text consisting entirely of digital documentation, dialogue in instant messaging, characters’ journals and sketchpads, news broadcasts, and military reports. Kristin Cashore’s Jane Unlimited (2017), also a NYT Bestseller, introduces its readers and characters to multiple parallel storyworlds and incorporates multiple endings in a similar fashion to Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, letting the heroine explore all the possible narrative options available. I also want to call attention to Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces (2021), a fantastical tale set on a train full of interconnected characters, which “lurches in and out of time and memory, accumulating symbols and backstories like clues to a grand whodunnit”



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(Silcox 2021, n.p.), and uses a structure akin to alternating centrifugal and centripetal force.5 Finally, no accounting of ergodic works in print would be complete (not that this section has been completionist in any way) without mention of artists’ books. Johanna Drucker points out that the artist’s book evidences our long and rich history of experimenting not just with the content of books, but with the material form, detailing the history of the intrinsically self-conscious art form from the nineteenth century onward (2004). While most of these are limited in reproducibility and thus scope for significant mainstream awareness, as an artform and a genre they are nonetheless of interest, given the current culture of “bookishness” (Pressman 2020) that places nostalgic value on the materiality of the book, as well as the influence such works can have. For example, Marcel Duchamp, a cofounder of the Oulipo group, published The Green Box (1934) containing “loose leaves of notes for his ‘Large Glass’ project reproduced in facsimile” (Drucker 2004, 98)—a clear forerunner to recent books like Cathy’s Book and S. Further, as document reproduction technology (such as the photocopier) became more ubiquitous, they could be used for low-fi print runs, exemplified by Your Co-Worker Could Be a Space Alien (Kellner and Kalmbach 1985), a Xerox-produced work that played into its low production values by presenting itself as a darkly satirical guide to recognizing space aliens—a commentary on homophobia-inspired moral panic (Drucker 2004, 86). This work reflects dialogism and discourse, as well as our urge toward viral reproducibility that manifests in social media and memes in today’s digital culture. The history of ergodic texts in print is enormously rich. I should say, moreover, “ergodic texts in print for adults,” since books for children abound in playfulness and interactivity, with pop-up structures, physical textures and toys, illustrations, and dialogism. It’s no coincidence that the book-app design companies mentioned in Chapter 6 were founded in and turned back toward creating interactive story apps or digital “toybooks” for children when the bookapp never quite took hold of the adult market. Likewise, many of the more recent ergodic novels in print are for children or young adult (YA) markets, like Jane Unlimited, Cathy’s Book, and Illuminae. As the next section illustrates, the children’s and YA markets are where the most dominant form of ergodic literature emerged: gamebooks. Honorable mentions: Anna Kavan, Christine Brooks-Rose, Ann Quin, Leonora Carrington, Joanna Russ, Eva Figes, Angela Carter, Harmony Korine, Vanessa Place, Reza Negarestani, Lily Hoang, Jonathan Foer, Iain Banks, Ann Leckie, and Stephen Dunn. 5

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Gamebooks and Path-Literature Novels incorporating multiple possible endings, such as Mansfield Park and Daniel Deronda, and open-ended works, such as The Tale of Genji, leave the reader with cognitive choices, allowing them to select the version that suits them. Raymond Queneau of the Oulipo group took this notion one step further when he ostensibly created the first (print, Euro-American) “path-literature” in 1963s “A Story as You Like It” ([1963] 1998): a story that, at key points in the plot, offers the reader multiple options as to where it goes next. Other members of the group duplicated it in one way or another, but it was Edward Packard’s (supposedly) independent invention of the form that led to what we know today as “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) stories, or gamebooks, in a tale quite similar to that of Will Crowther and Adventure: he was telling stories to his two daughters,6 and they were directing where the stories would go, so he decided it would be interesting to try in book form (Hendrix 2011). Some publishing mix-arounds later, and the CYOA series would launch with Bantam Publishers in 1979 (ibid.). Over the next twenty years, the series would encompass 184 different books, selling over 250 million copies worldwide, and translated into 38 languages (Chooseco n.d.).The model was also put into use by Which Way books from Simon & Schuster’s Archway imprint, and the Fighting Fantasy books from Puffin, Wizard, and Scholastic, with the latter incorporating a rudimentary RPG system (Costikyan 2007). The Bantam collection ended in 1999, but R. A. Montgomery, the original editor and author of many of the books, and author Shannon Gilligan reinvigorated it in 2005 from their independent publishing company Chooseco; since then, they have sold sixteen million books and claim CYOA is the fourth bestselling children’s series of all time (Chooseco n.d.). While all of these, as path-literature, were ergodic, one outdid the rest, as the “winning” end of Packard’s Inside UFO 54-40 (1982) could only be located by breaking the CYOA rules and reading ahead (Hendrix 2011). In addition to the revival of the CYOA books, numerous gamebooks— most for adults—have recently become incredibly popular. Emma Campbell Webster’s Lost in Austen (2007) creates a gamebook of Lizzie Bennet’s trials and tribulations in Pride and Prejudice, including role-playing elements, in which

The parallel is also quite similar to interactive fiction in that, despite their origins as stories for two girls, popular gamebooks were entirely written by men and aimed almost exclusively at boys. 6



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“bettering one’s character is the precondition for succeeding” (Meifert-Menhard 2013, 120). Heather McElhatton’s Pretty Little Mistakes (2007) and its follow-up A Million Little Mistakes (2010) are both gamebooks in contemporary women’s fiction, as is Caroline Smailes’s 99 Reasons Why (2012). Ryan North’s wildly successful To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure (2015c), a retelling of Hamlet as a gamebook, garnered US$580,905 on Kickstarter, prompting Riverhead Books to reprint it and publish Romeo and/or Juliet (2015a) as well; the latter went on to become a NYT Bestseller (Skains 2019b, 35–6). More recently, Kory M. Shrum has published a series of horror gamebooks starting with Welcome to Castle Cove (2018), and Zachary Sergi’s Major Detours (2021) is a YA take on a tarot-directed gamebook (a technique Italo Calvino previously experimented with). The year 2022 also sees the publication of Simon Brew’s Could You Survive Midsomer?, an official gamebook tie-in to the ever-popular British TV show Midsomer Murders. Gamebooks are highly popular in children’s books and in anime- and mangarelated publications; they’re numerous enough that it’s impossible to pull out any one example or exemplar, but that they proliferate for younger ages is no surprise, given that these markets are where publishers and authors tend to pioneer intermedial approaches (Davis 2018, 8). In adult genres, a steady trickle has emerged in the indie publishing sphere, thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, most in the genres of romance, mystery, or horror. The digital medium has afforded not only a nostalgic revival of the form but also an expansion, including a significant number of gamebooks written by women, for women and girls—something the CYOA and Fighting Fantasy franchises largely neglected.

Hybrid “Hyper” Books Digital media have also afforded a new kind of hybrid book in the overlap of print and digital cultures. Just as hybrids of handwriting and type persisted as print gradually replaced manuscripts as the dominant production of the codex, a hybrid form has emerged “somewhere between the order and solidity of print and the disorder and dynamism of the digital” (Davis 2018, 3). Chapter 6 explored one aspect of this hybridity in the form of book-apps, which sought to reimagine print texts as entirely digital interfaces, often departing significantly from any simulation of the codex. In a way, book-apps can be seen as an attempt to inject print fiction into a digital space. The other side of that coin draws the

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digital into the space of the codex. These hybrids take the form of augmented books, in which a print codex is somehow endowed with benefits of the digital, such as in-text QR codes and/or links that can offer additional paratexts online. Others, which I term “hyperbooks,” retain the form of the codex either in print or electronic form, while engaging digital media in their creation and some in their navigation. Augmented books have had a mixed reception, and Rhett Davis notes that, as with book-apps, publisher interest in them has waned (2018, 12). Nonetheless, prominent examples remain, not the least of which is Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), which has a chapter composed of PowerPoint slides, and a follow-up short story in the form of Twitter fiction: “Black Box” (2012). The third installment of Fforde’s Thursday Next series, The Well of Lost Plots (2004), includes wordplay and an in-text game that leads readers to his website, which at the height of the series’ popularity was a fully interactive site with additional texts, games, and reader-submitted elements (Skains 2010). A fully designed and implemented augmented novel, however, is exemplified in Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) (Ryan 2016, 346). The mystery thriller received mixed critical reviews but hit the NYT Bestsellers list and was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson award. The novel incorporates images (a bird symbol) and a “Night Film Decoder” app to scan them, unlocking additional text, PDF, video, and audio files from the web (see Figure 17). Similarly, Patrick Carman’s Skeleton Creek (2009) YA series offers QR codes at the end of each chapter leading to a website with videos related to the story. The books have been used in middle-grade classrooms to increase student engagement in texts, with studies showing the additional materials provide both motivation to keep reading and content to help lower-level readers make better sense of the text (Benway 2011; Letcher et al. 2011). Hyperbooks are a much smaller and still emerging form of print-digital hybrids. Those attempting to enter the mainstream sphere include the The Amanda Project (Amanda Project LLC 2011), an interactive, collaborative website for YA readers that was live from 2009 to 2012 (Danuta 2016, 84). Participants were urged to discuss the characters and contribute character traits and plot points to the story of Amanda Valentino, a missing teen. The project garnered sufficient interest that HarperCollins published a series of books starting in 2011 (Rich 2009): “a different Young Adult author wrote each novel; reader creativity contributed to the resolutions and complexities of various plot



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Figure 17  Pages from Night Film (Pessl 2013). The novel incorporates multiple images of websites, as well as the figure of a bird (lower right); scanning the bird with the accompanying mobile app enables more content.

points” (Zeldman and Dubois 2016, n.p.).7 Aaron A. Reed and Jacob Garbe’s The Ice-Bound Concordance (2016) is a more integrated, top-down approach, an augmented reality game consisting of two elements: an interactive narrative game (“The Ice-Bound Concordance”) and an accompanying art book (“The Ice-Bound Compendium”). “When viewed through the game’s camera, the [Compendium’s] pages change, revealing a new layer of story and changing how the [Concordance] game’s narrative unfolds” (ibid., n.p.). The content of the work is deeply bookish, a mystery surrounding an artificial intelligence composing a moving and emotional work of literature (Pressman 2020, 103). Reed has continued his hyperbook experimentation with Subcutanean (2020a) using a digital creation method he calls “quantum authoring”: he wrote the book’s master text, which “occasionally split[s]‌into alternate versions and variants at

This “multiplatform book” project had questionable success, as discussed in Chapter 9. 7

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the level of words, sentences, or even whole scenes”; he also wrote a program that “renders” all the choices, creating a unique story for each print-on-demand or ebook (Reed 2020b, n.p.). Essentially, he created a hypertext novel and an automated system that reduces each possible story choice to one, with the end result a cohesive narrative that is, nonetheless, unique from tens of thousands of other permutations of the same story. He successfully funded the hyperbook on Indiegogo (Reed 2019), and listed several permutations (“seeds”) on Amazon, where it has received very positive reviews. Porpentine (now Porpentine Charity Heartscape), a well-known indie game developer, has also written and designed a hyperbook commissioned by Rhizome: PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE (2016). Heartscape describes the work as “a post-anime sapphic gurowave trauma-romance. A multimedia survival kit for another dimension” (ibid., n.p.); it includes both a print book and an ebook, computer-generated poetry, hyperpoetry, stickers, and an online portal for additional content unlocked with keywords from the book (see Figure 18). While the work is not available on Amazon, it is listed on itch.io, GoodReads, and Rhizome.org. My own endeavors into hyperbooks are in a similar, if less artful vein: an ongoing practice-based research project on writing and publishing hyperbooks in mainstream markets. To date, this includes two shorter texts, The Futographer (2016) and The Pyxis Memo: On Resurrecting the Free Web (2017); both are experiments in creating hypertext novels for release on the dominant book publishing platform, Amazon. The difficulty posed by Amazon is that ebooks for Kindle use the Mobi format, which is much less multimedia- and nonlinearity-friendly than ePub. The culmination of this experiment will be a full hypernovel, Seven Sisters Unmet (forthcoming, expected 2023). The broad field of hyperbooks is very likely to grow over the next few decades. In the UK, a GBP£1.17-million “Next Generation Paper” project has been funded to explore, collaborate, and “enhance the meaning of text” through hybrid print and digital technology (Corrigan-Kavanagh 2019, 2). Publishers such as Picador have produced versions of best-selling novels in “dwarsligger” forms: “tiny, pocket-size, horizontal flipbacks” that enable reading and turning their onion-skin-thin pages with one hand (Alter 2018, n.p.). ePub3, the latest version of the ebook packaging format, has expanded to include “complex layouts, rich media and interactivity, and global typography features” (Garrish and Cramer 2019, n.p.). Far from heralding the death of the book, digital media are renewing and reimagining it in new forms, instigating a “secondary literacy” that builds on metafictional self-consciousness (Moulthrop 1991, 11) and



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Figure 18  Images from components of PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE (Heartscape 2016). The ebook can be purchased as either PDF or ePub; keywords gleaned from the text can be used online to access more content and poetry.

enables a wide range of play with the material codex that was previously only available in limited editions (Pressman 2020, 18). These changes will take time, as both authors and publishers are typically lacking the advanced digital skills necessary for computer-aided authoring and publishing; nonetheless, as with hypertexts and digital publishing, user-friendly platforms are likely to emerge that will push hyperbooks out of a small and niche form (cf. Davis 2018, 12).

Conclusion The rallying cry for experimental fiction could be expressed as “truth through constraint,” as authors and designers attempt to communicate with readers and with one another through defamiliarizing the fundamentally human artefact

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of narrativity. Part of this desire to illuminate the truth is a deep and abiding personal need to convey the inner qualities of the individual—emotions, mind, memory, experience—to other people. Lacking the ease of telepathy, we resort to art through language, and language through many different semiotic systems. Person to person, we speak, we gesture, we mimic, we act, we change our faces and our voices to best portray our “truth.” In fiction, we have established patterns of written language, but when technology permits (and sometimes even when it doesn’t), we push our communication of truth to alternate means. The further we push those conventions, the more difficulty our readers have translating our art into something they can understand. This, then, is the core of ergodic literature.

8

Hunting the Holodeck: Interactive, Alternative, and Immersive Realities

For centuries artists, writers, scientists, and psychologists have pondered the liminal space that emerges as the human consciousness transitions from waking to sleeping, in which hallucinatory events and lucid dreaming, and even physical sensations such as falling or flying, may occur: hypnagogia (Mavromatis 1983). Hypnagogia describes the surreal1 overlap of the actual and the imaginary where we are often very aware that whatever we dream is just that: a dream. Our minds and our bodies exist on two different planes in this state, both the very real and the entirely hallucinatory, with our awareness and consent. While this may occasionally be frightening—particularly for those who experience sleep paralysis, the sensation of falling, or nightmares—it is usually a rather enjoyable experience of mental and physical suspension that is extremely difficult to duplicate without pharmacological intervention. Narrative experiences delivered through immersive media are arguably the closest we have yet come to reproducing hypnagogia through technological means. The mixing of the actual with worlds, events, and actants that are entirely virtual duplicates that transitional phase between awake and asleep: we know what is “real” and what is not, and we take pleasure from interacting with the imaginary made concrete enough to see, hear, and even touch. Janet Murray argues that we have moved on from having only a singular version of the world, that we have normalized multiplicity in realities and perspectives ([1997] 2016, loc. 2993), and that “enacted events have a transformative power that exceeds both narrated and conventionally dramatized events because we assimilate them as personal experiences” (ibid., loc. 3138). We perform and embody these experiences, and they are written on us, through us, and within us.

Indeed, Andreas Mavromatis’s 1983 thesis on hypnagogia begins with the image of Salvador Dali’s 1944 surrealist painting “Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate one second before waking up.” 1

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It is fitting that Murray calls upon the Star Trek franchise’s Holodeck as the concept model for digital fiction (DF). The Holodeck, James Tiptree Jr.’s “plugging in,” William Gibson’s Sprawl, Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse, the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix: all imagine the merging of the physical human body with virtual objects, characters, events, and worlds. While truly immersive virtual reality (VR) comparable to Janeway’s romantic getaways in the Holodeck are yet to be realized, a number of DF forms achieve in various ways the surreal mixing of the actual and the imagined that echoes the pleasurable experience of hypnagogia. This chapter examines these forms: interactive cinema, TV, and drama; alternate realities in social media storytelling, role-playing, and Augmented Reality (AR) games; and immersive experiences in heritage and theater. Many of these forms are perfected only in their fictional representations, their technologies primarily used for non-entertainment, educational, or commercial activities. Nonetheless, numerous examples of DF in these genres have emerged into popular consciousness at one time or another as we chase an on-demand experience of the magical, liminal state of hypnagogia.

Interactive Cinema, TV, and Drama Though film, television, and drama are extremely divergent forms, once they enter the interactive sphere of digital media they begin to converge once more; it is often rather difficult to draw the line between interactive movies, shows, and drama. Interactive cinema usually refers to in-cinema branching films that are directed by audience votes, whereas interactive movies (and their close cousin movie-games) refer to branching storygames that utilize full-motion video (FMV) and/or animation—essentially, gamebooks in film. Interactive drama (similar to visual novels) is typically animated but places the viewer/player into the text in more of a participatory role, and is often built using more complex programming such as artificial intelligence; interactive movies and drama could be seen as two ends of a continuum between choosing where an observed FMV story will go next, and participating and interacting in that FMV story. Many works fall in the middle of that continuum, and thus are labeled as interactive movies or drama, or movie-games. Interactive TV as a term encompasses a very wide range of internet- and smart-TV-enabled functions; here I will use it to primarily refer to television shows or episodes that function as interactive movies.



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Like the more literary ancestry of other genres of DF, we can point to ergodic works outside digital media for interactive movies/TV/drama, primarily in film, since that is the form these works most resemble. Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950) presents multiple perspectives on the same event, leaving it to the audience to deem whom to believe or not; Blade Runner (Scott 1982) uses its mise-en-scène to ask the audience questions about the humanity of its characters; Memento (Nolan 2000) resequences the chronology of its scenes to let the audience discover the mystery just as its memory-disabled protagonist does; Sliding Doors (Howitt 1998) diverges its narrative into parallel stories before reconverging them; and Primer (Carruth 2004) creates a puzzle out of its repeated time-travel loops (cf. Buckland 2009; Kiss and Willemsen 2017; Murray [1997] 2016; Weiberg 2002). Charlie Kaufman has made a career out of cognitively puzzling scripts (Daly 2010, 93), as has M. Night Shyamalan; Janet Murray includes the alt-world storyline of It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra 1946) and the game-like looping of Groundhog Day (Ramis 1993) in her accounting of “multiform stories.” That so many seem centered around the 1990s and early 2000s is not coincidental: computer games were coming into their own, rising to become the dominant media form they are today, and the VHS tape gave way to laserdiscs and then DVDs, enabling interactive menus and breaking films up into discrete sequences that could be presented in alternative orders. The DVD of Memento, for example, allowed viewers to watch the film in a different order from the theatrical release (Daly 2010, 91).

Interactive Cinema and Movies True interactive cinema is rather rare, as it is a group experience in voting and directing on a film’s narrative choices. KinoAutomat, an in-cinema voting system, was introduced in Montreal at Expo ’67 to direct the outcomes of One Man and His House (Cincera 1967): buttons on every seat conveyed audience votes to the projectionist, who played the winning option on one of two projectors set up in advance (Davenport 2014; Hales 2005; Weiberg 2002). While the KinoAutomat was a hit at the Expo, it was not repeated, and later attempts to mimic it, such as the joystick system used for I’m Your Man (Bejan 1992), largely failed. For the most part, interactive cinema has remained a novelty or an art installation (Davenport 2014, 281), although the concept has certainly been successfully utilized for nonnarrative entertainment shows, such as live audience voting on talent competitions and game shows (e.g., American Idol (2002–); Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (1998–2018)).

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Interactive movies (hereafter: imovies), however, emerged widely in the 1990s as games for the small screen, taking advantage of the greater space afforded by CD-ROMs to include FMV sequences (Perron 2003, 327; Veale 2012, 2). Many were tie-ins to existing film and/or TV franchises, such as The X-Files Game (Roach 1998), Star Trek: Borg (Simon and Schuster 1996), and Star Wars: Rebel Assault (LucasArts 1993). Imovies have a lot in common with interactive fiction (IF) or adventure games, and many are referred to as “point-and-click adventure games,” as they incorporate graphics through the FMV and interactivity through branching or menu-based storylines (Perron 2003, 238). Thus the IF/adventure game studios familiar from the 1980s naturally produced imovies with the new CD-ROM tech. As noted, LucasArts expanded their Star Wars franchise through imovies. Roberta Williams and Sierra Online produced Phantasmagoria (1995): though the game was unprecedented in its development costs—budgeted at US$800,000, it eventually cost more than two years, US$4 million, and an entirely new-built studio to make (Macklin 1997, n.p.)—it sold 300,000 units and grossed US$12 million in its first week of release, and raked in awards as Games Magazine’s Best Adventure Game of the Year, PC Gamer’s Editor’s Choice Award, Computer Game Review’s Golden Triad Award, Windows Magazine’s Game of the Month (Dec 1995), and one of PC Computing’s three nominees for Game of the Year (Business Wire 1995, n.p.). Despite their substantial costs (Davenport 2014, 278), imovies have been and continue to be a strong genre of commercial DF (though, obviously, sold as games). Janet Murray points to The Last Express (Mechner [1997] 2011), L.A. Noire (McNamara 2011), and even Bioshock (Levine 2007) as prominent examples of popular imovies, or at least games that make extensive use of FMV and playerdirected branching narratives ([1997] 2016, loc. 1200). John Murray specifically examines the “cinematic choice-based adventure games” (2018, 3) created by Telltale Games, who purposely set out to create games that affect viewer/players on as deep an emotional level as TV or film: “We are an interactive HBO or an interactive Netflix” (Job Stauer in Murray 2018, 13). Their The Walking Dead series (2012–18) earned a cavalcade of awards in 2012 and 2013, including numerous Game of the Year titles and a BAFTA; it earned US$40 million in its first year (Lynley 2013, n.p.), and the first three “seasons” (of five) sold 28 million units by 2014 (Ohannessian 2014, n.p.). The Wolf Among Us (Telltale Games 2013), similarly adapted from a comic book series, also garnered strong critical and popular reception, though not quite as strong as The Walking Dead. While Telltale Games folded in 2018, other studios such as Eko and Wales Interactive



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Figure 19  Screenshot from Her Story (Barlow 2014). The game mimics a mid-1990s computer, as reader/players sift through video evidence on a cold case.

continue to produce imovies, as do much smaller producers. Sam Barlow’s Her Story (2014), an imovie in which the player digs into a cold case murder file of witness statements (see Figure 19), was a critical and popular success with over 100,000 units sold in its first year (Hillier 2015, n.p.) (significant for an original, sole-authored imovie), and multiple awards including Polygon’s Game of the Year (Kollar 2015, n.p.). While gamebooks have largely been denigrated as simplistic and only interesting for children, the FMV equivalents, interactive movies, have largely been embraced by the gaming critics and community as both entertaining and often deeply meaningful and affective.

Interactive TV As film and TV have become more and more digitized, the imovie form has begun to merge with interactive TV. The medium of television, far more than cinema, has long been flirting with participation and interactivity. Anthony Enns notes that “the idea of television as a two­way communication medium actually predates the invention of television itself ” (2021, 932), as exemplified by Nineteen Eighty-Four’s (Orwell 1949) panopticon-enabling two-way TVs and Fahrenheit 451’s (Bradbury 1953) participatory TV programs. He also describes the US children’s show Winky Dink and You (1953–7) that offered a kit including

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an adherent transparency page and an erasable wax pencil for audience members to stick to their TV and draw along with the show; interactive videotext services in the 1980s (Indax, Teletext, Viewtron, Gateway) that acted like an early internet with games, news, banking, and shopping; and early internet television providers Digital Entertainment Network and WireBreak Entertainment, who offered interactive programs. For the most part, however, interactivity in television until recently has focused on content delivery and personalization, with electronic program guides, interactive graphic overlays, on-demand programming, TV-based internet access, customized advertising, home shopping, games, and the use of “second screens” (laptops, mobile phones) to create a feedback loop with viewers (Jensen 2014). Interactive TV of the sort we imagine when we casually use the term (i.e., television narratives where the viewer has some form of agency in developing or directing the content) has been growing as more programming is accessed online, including through internet-enabled smart TVs and streaming services. An early effort in Denmark saw four different films by four different directors— collectively called D-Dag (D-Day) (Kragh-Jacobsen et al. 2000)—aired concurrently on several different television channels; viewers used their remote controls to switch between channels and thus films, “editing” them together into uniquely realized stories (Weiberg 2002, 5). Akvaario (Aquarium) (Pellinen 2000) integrated a fictional narrative with voting by telephone, as viewers collectively directed the main character’s actions (Enns 2021, 938). Similarly, in 2006–7, Finnish network YLE broadcast Sydän Kierroksella (Accidental Lovers), in which viewers used second screens and social media to direct the (romantically inclined) actions of the characters (Tuomola 2006). South Korean broadcaster MBC produced 마이 리틀 텔레비전 (My Little Television) (2015–20) featuring “channels,” each hosted by a celebrity and enabling live chats with viewers in a most-viewers-wins competition (Kang 2016); its popularity inspired similar shows in Taiwan and the United States (White 2020). Streaming giant Netflix has become what Telltale Games hoped to be: a producer of television shows and films with branching narratives directed by the viewer.2 They began quietly (perhaps moreso for viewers without children) to introduce interactive episodes of several children’s shows: Buddy

Netflix was set to partner with Telltale to produce at least two shows, prior to Telltale’s dissolution in 2018 (Good 2018; Patches 2018). The name of the studio has been purchased, and the collaboration with Netflix is set to continue, but without any of the original Telltale team (Roettgers 2019). 2



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Thunderstruck: “The Maybe Pile” (Chaskin 2017); Puss in Book: “Trapped in an Epic Tale” (Burdine and Castuciano 2017); Stretch Armstrong: “The Breakout” (Cook 2018), and Minecraft: Story Mode (2018). Their interactive episode of Black Mirror: “Bandersnatch” (Slade 2018) was released in December 2018, the first interactive show in Netflix’s adult programming. While experienced imovie and IF audiences found it rather old hat, with its gamebook-equivalent options and its nostalgic 1980s gaming storyline, it garnered a great deal of attention with the wider public, and even earned two Primetime Emmys (Outstanding Television Movie, and Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media within a Scripted Program) (Hussey 2019).3 Netflix continues in this vein to the date of this writing (late 2021), with more interactive children’s programming: Captain Underpants: “Epic Choice-o-Rama” (Grimes 2020); Carmen Sandiego: “To Steal or Not to Steal” (Park and West 2020); The Boss Baby: “Get That Baby!” (Forgione, Jacobs, and Whitlock 2020); Spirit Riding Free: “Ride Along Adventure” (Jacobsen, Sleven, and Wotton 2020); Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: “Kimmy vs. The Reverend” (Scanlon 2020); The Last Kids on Earth: “Happy Apocalypse to You” (Rolston 2021); Johnny Test’s Ultimate Meatloaf Quest (Miller and Stulby 2021); Escape the Undertaker (Simms 2021); and an entire reality series where the viewers vote on Bear Grylls’s survivor actions in You vs. Wild (2019). It’s difficult to determine exactly how popular these shows are, since Netflix doesn’t necessarily release viewer numbers or average ratings, but as they are continuing to expand their interactive content in various properties and genres—and knowing that interactive TV is more expensive to produce—it’s safe to say their efforts have had success, however that may be measured (Enns 2021, 939). Given Netflix’s paradigm-changing influence on home film distribution and the streaming industry in general, it’s likely we are seeing a new, interactive genre of television programming.

Interactive Drama Interactive drama (hereafter: idrama), as noted, is much more closely related to interactive movies than theatrical productions, in that it presents an audiovisual narrative that the viewer/player can interact with. What distinguishes

Interestingly, the holiday season release and the media hype around “Bandersnatch” resulted— anecdotally, based on social media discourse—in many people viewing the episode in groups, effectively recreating the KinoAutomat voting system in their living rooms. 3

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idrama from imovie is the viewer/player’s role, and the complexity of their agency: idrama “seeks to empower a user in a story to have meaningful impacts on its progression and outcome, just like the decisions of a fictional character do in a standard drama” (Magerko 2014, 285). When they created the genredefining Façade (Mateas and Stern 2005), Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern wanted to appeal to adults more inclined toward the cinema and the theater than the keyboard or console (Ryan 2006, 172). Façade uses artificial intelligence to coproduce an emergent narrative with the viewer/player, shaping and evolving the relationship between two characters, very similar to visual novels—unlike imovies of the One Man and His House or “Bandersnatch” variety, Façade’s endings are not predefined, resulting in a much more collaborative humancomputer narrative interaction. Idramas typically center on human relationships, usually through dialogue (thus their relation to theatrical drama, akin to a small number of characters speaking to one another on a stage). Works from Quantic Dream—for example, Fahrenheit (Cage 2005), Heavy Rain (Cage 2010), and Detroit: Become Human (Cage 2018)—follow this mode, relying on dialogue to convey narrative and interactivity, though the branching narratives are closer to imovie structures than Façade’s (Murray 2018, 15). Games that are more open-ended, use FMV, and whose primary interactivity directs characters in actions and dialogue may also fall in the idrama realm, such as L.A. Noire, Until Dawn (Byles and Bowen 2015), and Life Is Strange (Dont Nod Entertainment and Deck Nine 2015) (see Figure 20). Like imovies, idramas can be expensive to produce, and they may have the additional onus of more complex programming for their more emergent narrative model. Live action film and television are the narrative forms in which audiences expect the highest appearance of realism. Whether the story is about the devastation of a marriage ending, or a young girl traveling through space and time to save the world, we are only willing to suspend our disbelief so long as the moving images on screen are photorealistic. Theater, on the other hand, enjoys an enormous margin for that same suspension, perhaps even moreso than the written word alone.4 In interactive forms on the digital small screen (VR and immersive theater discussed separately, below), however, drama drifts far more

Compare Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman play version of Fleabag (2013) to its television adaptation (2016–19): the latter requires a full cast, filming on multiple locations, props, etc.; the former is Waller-Bridge sitting onstage, and nothing more. 4



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Figure 20  Screenshot from Life Is Strange (Dont Nod Entertainment and Deck Nine 2015). The player-character’s (“Max/Maxine”) goal is to save this character’s life (“Chloe”).

toward the filmic end of the spectrum, calling for more “believable” realism. Audiovisual narratives—film and TV—are deeply emotional, and audiences expect to experience immersion. When they become interactive, they, like gamebooks and hypertexts, run the risk of alienating viewers because of the disruption to the imaginative immersion. As they have primarily been promoted as games (or, in the case of Netflix’s interactive TV so far, novelties), players have been content to embrace them as such. Of all the genres examined in this chapter, these are the least likely to induce a parallel sensation to hypnagogia, as the interactivity is conducted through mouse, keyboard, or remote control, and not usually tied to the player’s own persona, location, or embodiment. The following sections examine DFs that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, rather than presenting photorealistic media (i.e., FMV) through clearly fictional conventions.

Alternative Realities “Alternate universe” (AU) is a frequent fanfiction setting, placing characters from one work into the storyworld of another. Of course, this is only a recent sobriquet for a very human urge to explore, to pretend, to make-believe;

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imagining alternate scenarios and potential behavior helps us to navigate the complexities of human society (Boyd 2009; Dautenhahn 1999). Humans have always engaged in pretend play such as this—it is the basis of narrative and drama. The internet has enabled an extension of such play through many different channels, including MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), MOOs (MUD, object-oriented), social media, and even spaces of the web never intended for fictional discourse. This playful activity results in what I will term alternative realities, bubbles of AUs that emerge from online role-play, myth-making, and subversion of nonfictional spaces for fictional story creation. While the great bulk of these alt-realities are noncommercial, they are nonetheless products of the public community, for the public, and have entered into the public consciousness as a result of their popularity, in terms of either participation or reception. Alt-reality DF is present from the very instigation of the World Wide Web, as role-playing activities found their way into the cybersphere. Janet Murray calls role-playing such as LARPing (live action role-playing) and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) sessions the “most active form of audience engagement” ([1997] 2016, loc. 820). As we have seen with the history of IF (Chapter 5), computer scientists were and are often enthusiastic role-players; thus the history of role-playing online dates back at least to 1978 when Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created the first MUD (Bartle 2010, 24; cf. Caïra and Tosca 2014; Mortensen 2014; Murray [1997] 2016; Ryan 2015). MUDs create altrealities through text-based virtual worlds as players construct characters and progress them through storyworlds in D&D-type play online. MUDs were popular enough to play a significant role in the public implementation of the internet: just as IF was bundled with computers, internet providers like CompuNet (UK) and CompuServe (the United States), and eventually AOL included MUDs with their services (Bartle 2010). MUDs eventually branched (essentially) into MOOs beginning in 1990, which were more open worlds that could be modded by players. Both were extremely popular: “A large MUD would have 200–300 users logged on a good day” (Mortensen 2014, 342), which Richard Bartle notes in 1993 might have comprised 10 percent of traffic on the National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) (2010, 27). Text-based MUDs and MOOs evolved with increasing processing speeds and memory capabilities into graphics-based games and 3D role-playing worlds such as World of Warcraft (Pardo, Kaplan, and Chilton 2004–) and Second Life (Linden Lab 2003).



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Other forms of online role-playing occur on social media as well as portions of the web open for commenting and discourse but not intended for fictional play. Rob Wittig and Mark Marino term such activities as “netprov” (networked improvised narrative)—online, collaborative, real-time, carnivalesque performances that introduce “a disruption innovation into the social advertising market, a new source of value: creative satire” (2012, 45). They and their performative collaborators conduct netprovs in spaces like Twitter, Facebook, and Discord, aiming for “disruptive innovation,” such as reporting technology “cleanses” on the very sites purported to be avoided (#1WkNoTech); taking the unique conventions of social media such as likes and shares as economics of labor (I Work for the Web); and role-playing by swapping Facebook accounts (Trading Faces). I have also described a more emergent form of netprov, dissonant fabulations, wherein narratives emerge in nonfictional spaces of the web, such as social media and e-commerce sites, specifically responding to issues in cultural discourse (Skains 2018). Users role-play to subvert these spaces for sociocultural commentary: the reviews on Amazon.com’s “BIC for Her” pens offer fictional reviews to expose the inherent sexism of such a product (BIC n.d.), parodic Twitter accounts like @BPGlobalPR role-play as corporations to call attention to their irresponsibility (@BPGlobalPR n.d.), and cleverly created Facebook accounts (momentarily) enter well-known brands like Target into the culture wars (Nudd 2015). Facebook is also bristling with groups for the specific purpose of netprov-like role-playing across the wide social, cultural, and political spectra: the more innocuous of these are comedic, such as “A Group Where We Pretend to be Boomers” (see Figure 21), but many create communities of harm leading to aggressive actions, bigotry, and immoral action (Trice, Potts, and Small 2020). The former tend to persist, while the latter are more prone to “Zucking” (getting removed from the site for violating the terms of use), though it’s usually not an immediate effect and the groups often spring back up like hydra of lore—thankfully, they usually don’t go viral as the lighter fare does. A great many works of DF on social media are much more straightforward performances. Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” (2012), her follow-up to A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), emerged as a series of tweets (unfortunately not hashtagged) before being collected into The New Yorker magazine proper. Neil Gaiman collaborated with his Twitter community (dubbed “Twitterverse”) to write “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry,” which was then produced as an audiobook (Gaiman and Twitterverse 2009; see also Chapter 9); Meg Cabot did the same with “Fashionably Undead” (Cabot and Twitterverse 2010). On Facebook,

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Figure 21  Example of social media narratives (“A Group Where We Pretend to Be Boomers” n.d.), as Facebook users role-play as older generations for comedic purposes.



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Tachina Eva turned Covid-19-pandemic downtime into the DF magic Broken Horseshoe Ranch (2020–), arranging toys into scenarios, capturing them with SnapChat-like overlays and captions, and arranging them into photo album “episodes” of comic-like sequential storytelling. In broader social media, blogs, vlogs, and fanfiction have long been sites of fictional storytelling and roleplaying, creating communities of participation and publication (Croxall 2014; Hellekson 2014; Murray [1997] 2016; Page 2014). While these result in more traditional, linear narratives than most DF, they are notable as one of the few genres dominated by women (Page 2014, 43). In terms of role-playing, Facebook is more restrictive than Twitter in its requirement that users be “real” people/companies using their actual names (Facebook n.d.; Twitter n.d.), but both have served as stages for “theatrical” productions. The Birmingham, Alabama-based Sloss Performing Arts Company, for example, invited Facebook followers into its rehearsal process for their 2010 production of Romeo and Juliet through character-profile accounts; in the UK that same year, the Royal Shakespeare Company performed an adaptation of the same play entitled Such Tweet Sorrow (2010) entirely through the medium of Twitter (Way 2011). While the former was more of a one-way performance, with minimal interaction with Facebook followers, the latter encouraged in-character dialogue and interaction for the six weeks of the Twitter play’s engagement (see Figure 22). These are instances with clear distinction between performance and the actual, but others in the same spaces blur the lines significantly: Kirsten Rutter examines a selection of Twitter fictions that purport to be actual events reported by real people, which she calls “alternate reality stories” (ARSes) (2020), such as the viral Dear David (2017), a series of tweets from Adam Ellis (former Buzzfeed editor) relaying his supposed haunting by the eponymous David in text, image, and video. Another ARS was the subject of a great deal of internet curiosity in 2016, the Reddit tale known as “u_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9” or The Interface Series (see Figure 23): a new user account (often abbreviated to “9M9H9E9”) had posted numerous replies in different SubReddits, at first seeming somewhat off-topic but sober, and eventually diving headfirst into an alien conspiracy story (“SubReddit: The Interface Series” 2016–). No author has been identified, and Redditors were initially split between whether the work was fiction (possibly an attempt at viral marketing) or posted from a user with genuine mental health issues. This type of netprov or ARS is often referred to as “creepypasta,” referring to a website where users post scary stories under the

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Figure 22  Screenshot of tweets from Such Tweet Sorrow (Royal Shakespeare Company 2010).



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Figure 23  Screenshot of the first Reddit comment composing The Interface Series (“SubReddit: The Interface Series” 2016–). Seeded as non sequitur comments on multiple SubReddits, the work captured attention and sparked its own SubReddit with community-contributed narrative additions.

guise of “this really happened to me” (“Creepypasta” n.d.). It also expands to collaborative online alternate reality creation such as that of the SCP Foundation (2008–) and Psychic High School (2014–) where website members contribute stories, characters, and other elements of alternate storyworlds in yet another evolutionary branch of MUDs and MOOs. (See also Chapter 9 for discussion of creepypastas and collaborative stories.) Any discussion of alt-realities would be incomplete without alternate reality games (ARGs). ARGs take the hypnagogic experience of actual and digital world overlaps out of the computer and into real-world interactions. The first recognized ARG was Microsoft’s The Beast (2001), released as transmedial advertising for the film A.I. (Spielberg 2001); players were tasked with solving a murder mystery, requiring online role-playing and following both online and real-world clues (Labitzke 2014, 5; Ryan 2015, 253). Given their scope and size, most ARGs are tie-ins to media properties, advertising for games, movies, and even cars (Labitzke 2014, 5), though more culturally conscious indie ARGs have been produced, such as the post-peak oil cautionary experience World Without Oil (Eklund and McGonigal 2007; Labitzke 2014; Murray [1997] 2016). Such experiences are highly engaging, and Janet Murray notes that well-designed and

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consistent ARGs foster immersion ([1997] 2016, loc. 2348), even without the technology we now so frequently term “immersive”: augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. ARGs bring digital storytelling out of the computer and into the actual world; the next section looks at extended reality (XR), in which technology brings the actual into the digital.

Extended Reality XR is a group of digital technologies that has been at the forefront of the popular imagination for decades, much like flying cars and hoverboards. While XR as a means of mainstream storytelling is yet to reach its full fruition, elements of it have emerged in different cultural spaces for very worthwhile and specific purposes: the UK’s Blast Theory has been experimenting with XR since the early 1990s (Pirandello 2021, 138; Tronstad 2014), and AR games like Pokémon Go (Nomura 2016) (in which players “catch” anime fantasy characters in the actual world), and iButterfly (Dentsu 2011) (catching virtual butterflies) (Pirandello 2021). Meanwhile big tech companies continue to invest in these technologies for commerce and entertainment, most notably Facebook’s rebranding as “Meta” and Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for its VR future as “Metaverse” (Newton 2021). This section looks at augmented reality (AR), which works through digital devices to place digital (or “virtual”) objects in the user’s actual environment, and VR, which equips the user with a head-mounted system to immerse them entirely in a 3D digital scape. Collectively, AR and VR have been termed both “mixed” and “extended” reality; as current popular discourse tends to favor the latter, that is what I have used here. As XR development requires advanced programming capabilities, equipment, and expense, most applications thus far have been nonnarrative. Medical applications have invested quite heavily in XR educational systems and visualizations, from 3D VR visualizations of anatomical structures for surgical procedures to simulations across a wide array of situations and health practices (Rokhsaritalemi, Sadeghi-Niaraki, and Choi 2020), and treatment for pain relief and post-traumatic stress disorder (Rubin 2020). AR has been implemented similarly for education and learning, as well as for commercial applications such as “previewing” furniture and design layouts in a given space and trying on clothes, glasses, and/or makeup. For the general public, these applications introduce people to the technology, enabling familiarity with its uses and



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conventions. In terms of DF, however, these applications pale in comparison to the enormous tourism industry, including heritage sites—as a US$6-trillion industry, “tourism has a huge market to facilitate new innovation” (Nóbrega et al. 2017, 1; cf. Rokhsaritalemi, Sadeghi-Niaraki, and Choi 2020). AR used for tourism and heritage is an example of location-based (Ryan 2015, 254) or ambient (Abba, Dovey, and Pullinger 2021) storytelling, in which stories are distinctively tied to location or landscape, and incorporate virtual objects and/or actants. For tourism and heritage, it can help visitors understand the places they are visiting in a much more embodied and interactive way (Nóbrega et al. 2017, 2), and specific, contextually aware AR systems have been created for cultural and archaeological sites and museums (Shakouri and Tian 2019, 40). Indigenous oral narratives, strongly tied to significant cultural locales and in danger of being lost, can be renewed through AR storytelling, as the Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand have done. They have implemented AR to overlay meaningful sites with audiovisual narratives to “simulate people’s imagination of a hidden past” (Marques, McIntosh, and Carson 2019, 194). AR has been used for storytelling and sharing based on historical locations and events (Gironacci, McCall, and Tamisier 2018), for artistic exhibitions like Acute Art’s Unreal City lining the river Thames with art (Acute Art and Dazed Media 2020), and for immersion and education in nature like The Deep Listener’s (Steensen 2020) journey through London’s Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. It’s been used for city tours all over the world, and some cities have incorporated AR games to increase tourist interest (Nóbrega et al. 2017; Shakouri and Tian 2019; Tronstad 2014). AR apps have also been implemented to allow people outside specific locales access to knowledge and storytelling. The BBC’s Civilisations AR app (Nexus Studios 2020) let users bring significant artifacts from world history into their homes, and New York’s New Museum and Apple, along with seven prominent artists, created the [AR]T exhibit (2019) that users could experience for free in cities worldwide. As discussed in Chapter 6, books incorporating AR are becoming increasingly frequent, particularly in children’s genres—a digital version of pop-up books. In terms of mainstream popularity, most fictional AR apps are game-oriented, though some are emerging in elit communities from authors such as Caitlin Fisher (2014) and Reham Hosny (2019). The most prominent AR app that leans toward fiction more than game, however, is Niantic’s Ingress Prime (2013–), which it created prior to Pokémon Go. Ingress integrates a science fiction narrative with AR “portals” that reveal items of art, culture,

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heritage, and geography. It remains popular: as of 2018, Niantic reported “more than 20 million downloads later, Agents [players] in more than 200+ countries have participated in more than 2,000 real-world events and visited more than 1.2 billion Portals” (The Niantic Team 2018). While not nearly as popular and wellknown as Pokémon Go, Ingress Prime nonetheless demonstrates that AR fiction has had, and continues to have, significant success with mainstream audiences. VR, with its greater expense and technological requirements, remains aspirational in terms of truly mainstream narrative, with far more narrative works about VR than in VR. As Peter Rubin notes, “VR is either going to upend our lives in a way nothing has since the smartphone, or it’s the technological equivalent of trying to make ‘fetch’ happen”5 (2020, n.p.). Apart from its nonfictional uses, many artists and elit authors have experimented with the form, including Char Davies’s work in the 1990s on Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998), which explore the interplay between self, breath, and world (Baker 2017; Doyle 2017); Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder (1992), integrating the human body in a multi-person narrative (Ryan 2015, 230); and Mez Breeze’s V[R]‌ignettes (2018–), short VR stories that call for reader action to make choices about the direction of the “kinetic” narratives (see Figure 24). One-off works of VR have come in live performance cultural contexts, including Theatre for Robots Only, Bjork, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as virtual museums (Doyle 2017, 1). Tender Claws’s The Under Presents (Gorman and Cannizzaro 2019), a VR performance collaboration with Piehole, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for SXSW’s XR Game of the Year (Baur 2021; Watkins 2020). The Royal Opera House in London produced a VR opera, Current, Rising, which received rave reviews. San Francisco-based VR film studio Penrose Studios garnered US$10 million in investment capital in 2018 (Matney 2018) thanks to its well-received VR films like Allumette (2016) and Arden’s Wake ([2018] 2021). Even big studios like Warner Bros. are starting to produce VR experiences related to their films, just as they did with interactive movies—for example, The Dunkirk VR Experience (Nolan 2017). Thus far, VR narrative experiences are largely singular, as they are expensive to produce and implement, and the form has not yet reached critical mass in terms of popular audience figures to determine if it is, indeed, the next iPhone or the next flash in the pan. Nonetheless, the artists, writers, and producers who have been testing these waters for over thirty years A reference to the film Mean Girls (Waters 2004b), in which the substitution of “fetch” for “cool” never catches on. 5



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Figure 24  Screenshot from microstory “The Thing Tableau” from V[R]‌ignettes (Breeze 2018–). Reader/players explore the 3D environment and art, accessing segments of narrative by selecting circled numbers.

and the wealth of imaginative stories that integrate VR all show us that this is a technology with a great deal of fascination and potential, making it more than likely that it will continue to develop in the public consciousness.

Immersive Theater Immersive theater experiences are, by contrast, designed to be singular events. Josephine Machon defines immersive theater as “diverse events that blend a variety of forms and seek to exploit all that is experiential in performance, placing the audience at the heart of the work” (Machon 2016a, 29). Immersive theater that incorporates digital media can be termed “multimedia performance” (Biggin 2017, 60) or “immersive mixed reality theater (IMRT)” (Gochfeld et al. 2018). For the sake of neutrality and consistency, I’ll term it immersive XR, or IXR. Worlds created in immersive experiences “hover in-between the felt sensation of the ‘reality’ and the ‘unreality’ of the experience,” creating a “blurring of external and internal space”

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(Machon 2016b, 46, 43): a real-world instance of hypnagogia, hovering between a waking world and a dreaming virtuality. IXRs prioritize the collective experience, the ability to share the exhilaration of hypnagogic experiences with others who have journeyed through the same space and story. Embodiment is key to feeling the imagined reality created by the performance, and haptic experiences—touch, sensation, movement—are crucial (Machon 2016a, 34). IXRs and immersive theater in general can be small, intimate productions such as the “largely rural” sensory labyrinth theater that strives to illuminate place and experience through all senses (Howson-Griffiths 2020), to the nowmassive film-based experiences that UK group Secret Cinema produces (Secret Cinema n.d.). The form is becoming increasingly popular (Baker 2017; HowsonGriffiths 2020); though not all incorporate digital media in anything other than their marketing and organization, many do, making immersive theater a particularly interesting aspect of DF by pairing the virtuality of the digital with the actuality of human embodiment and interaction. IXR, like AR and VR, has a strong history in history and heritage education. For example: Olion (Traces) (yello brick, The National Museum of Wales, and Cardiff University 2016) creates an immersive journey through the St. Fagans National History Museum in Wales, connecting body, emotions, and site through storytelling and movement (Kidd 2018, 6); The Lost Palace (Historic Royal Palaces et al. 2016) recreates the destroyed Palace of Whitehall, largest palace in Europe and once the royal residence. Beyond heritage applications, multiple theatrical companies produce IXRs; some of the best known are Ontroerend Goed, Adrian Howells, dreamthinkspeak, and Punchdrunk (Howson-Griffiths 2020, 191). Punchdrunk has produced significant works of immersive theater and IXRs worldwide, including New York, London, and Shanghai (Biggin 2017, 2)—Janet Murray calls them “a kind of holodeck experience in real space” ([1997] 2016, loc. 1218). Like traditional theatrical productions, these are evanescent productions, embedded in a particular space during a particular time; the cost of producing such immersive experiences is high, however, and so the runs are often sustained for months or years (Murray [1997] 2016, loc. 1209). Their specific IXRs to date are Believe Your Eyes (Punchdrunk International and Samsung 2016), a ghost story that won a Silver Lion at Cannes 2017, and Immersive Dickens (Punchdrunk and V&A Museum 2019), a museum-based IXR that brought teenagers into a contemporary experience of Charles Dickens. More is certainly to come, as in 2020 Punchdrunk announced a collaborative partnership with Niantic, the creators of Ingress Prime and Pokémon Go (Punchdrunk 2020).



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Across the pond, Lance Weiler and the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab have been producing IXRs less from the background of theater, and more from film and digital game. His Pandemic 1.0 IXR (2011) screened a short film at Sundance but also incorporated an AR game, mobile phones seeded throughout the festival, social media feeds, props, and more, as film festival attendees and online players both worked to solve puzzles and progress the narrative incited by the film (Andersen 2011; Weiler 2018). Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things (2014) is a modern-day MOOC (massive open online course), combining collaborative storytelling and physical objects (of the Internet of Things) to construct crime scene puzzles—a massive project in which 1,200 people from more than sixty different countries applied to take part (Columbia DSL 2014). The multi-year project Frankenstein A.I. (Weiler, Fortugno, and Ginsberg 2018) trained an artificial intelligence using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as a corpus, then created an installation space where visitors can interact, speak, and even have dinner with the result (with the A.I. learning all the while). My favorite IXR comes from my home state of New Mexico, in a former bowling-alley-turned-alternate world: the artists collective Meow Wolf ’s House of Eternal Return (2016–). House of Eternal Return is a maximalist, immersive, interactive art installation with deeply embedded narrative (see Figure 25). The experience begins in a house—a house inside the cavernous space of the building—belonging to a now-disappeared family. Visitors explore the innocuous-seeming house, including its kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom, and bedrooms. “Portals” lead out of the house, through the fireplace, the refrigerator, the washing machine, and into a massive interactive dreamscape. On my visits there, I have played musical plumbing, clambered through (and played) a mammoth’s skeleton, traveled in a spaceship to holiday destinations, crawled through an enormous fairy forest, and lounged inside a mushroom of carpet and cushions—just a few of the alien spaces that I can actually describe. The dreamscape is a regularly oscillating art installation from the hundreds of artists in the collective, and is popular particularly with children, who enjoy the interactive spaces for what they are: an enormous, magical playground. Regular visitors, however, begin to dig deeper into the narrative underlying the work: hidden all around the installation are pockets of narrative in digital, film, print, and audio forms. Narrative-seekers build up the story of the disappeared family from files on their computer, the kids’ research homework, journals, a short film, recorded audio clips, and solve puzzles to find yet more narrative. The installation’s openness to photography and online discourse mean that visitors

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Figure 25  Images from within House of Eternal Return (Meow Wolf 2016–). Clockwise from top left: a “portal” from the house to a fantasy realm through the clothes dryer; a caravan-turned-otherworldly-vacation-spot; a path through a mammoth skeleton (whose ribs can be played as a musical instrument); a cozy pocket of the fairy forestland; a spaceship corridor; the house’s office desk, with its interactive computer, books, and notebooks full of narrative segments.

have a community even if they traverse the experience alone. Season tickets are sold for the purposes of repeated play and narrative discovery alike. House of Eternal Return has been such a resounding success that Meow Wolf has opened other IXRs: Omega Mart (2021b–) in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Convergence Station (2021a–) in Denver, Colorado.

Conclusion The Holodeck, the Metaverse, the Wardrobe, Diagon Alley, even conspiracy theories and creepypasta—they all show us that we are endlessly thrilled at the prospect of the real mixing with the fantastic. That frisson of dissonance as we



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encounter something magically virtual in the ordinary spaces of our lives is a deep-seated source of pleasure, whether that magic comes from a Pokémon in your backyard or a ghost story on your Twitter feed. Regardless of whether or not the technology was ever intended for narrative purposes, we will and have used it as such, from commercial spaces online to long-lost sites of architecture and archaeology. Far from being experimental and avant-garde, imovies, social media stories, netprovs, AR, VR, and IXR experiences have a strong presence in popular media, likely due to the hype surrounding them built from decades of imaginative stories, films, and games. Social media storytelling like netprovs, ARSes, creepypasta, and dissonant fabulations demonstrate that the line between actual and virtual is becoming increasingly blurry, even, and perhaps most particularly, among ordinary Netizens—much to everyone’s delight.

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Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Archontic Fiction

While each chapter of this book has explored some aspect of digital fiction (DF) in the popular consciousness at some level or another, the works discussed in this chapter are the most popular by far. These works are often created first and foremost as popular commercial works—films, TV shows, music albums— that provide a foundation for varied and distributed activities expanding their storyworlds. Others, no less popular though less extravagantly funded, rise like wildfires from lowly sparks on forums or social media. This chapter presents a wide range of popular texts with porous boundaries in terms of media, form, authorship, participation, and objectives—storyworlds and characters that “flow into each other … into everyday life” (Fiske [1989] 2011, 101). These works are a continuation of narrative traditions from oral storytelling to print culture, in that they mix media, invite and thrive on collaboration, and spread easily from person to person, community to community; they are also an evolution in these narrative traditions, as the multimodal and networked capabilities of digital media enable innovative approaches and geographically and culturally diverse participation. These works include both the biggest commercial juggernauts in fictional storytelling, as well as those vehemently against creativity-for-profit, though they share elements of transmedia narrative and participatory culture: franchises such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Marvel Studios 2008–), The Matrix franchise (The Wachowski Sisters 1999–), Star Wars (Lucas 1977–), and Star Trek (Roddenberry 1966–); online communities like MUDs (multiuser dungeons), MOOs (MUD, object-oriented), collaborative storyworlds, and fandoms; and music-driven texts such as visual albums from Beyoncé, Janel Monáe, and Rosalie.1 Additionally, this chapter includes discussion of Some works discussed in Chapter 8, such as alternate reality games (ARG) and alternate reality stories (ARSes), netprovs, and (some) dissonant fabulations overlap here, and are included in the discussion. 1

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Figure 26  The photoshopped images and original forum post that launched the online creepypasta folktale of Slender Man (Knudsen 2009–).

the collaborative storyworld SCP Foundation (2008–), a conspiracy-theorylaced wiki composed of community contributions; Slender Man (Knudsen 2009–), a creepypasta “digital campfire” horror story about a disturbingly tall thin man who steals children (see Figure 26); _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 or The Interface Series (2016–), a Reddit-based fiction arising from one user’s subversive posts in various SubReddits that grew to a collaborative community with its own SubReddit; “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry” (Gaiman and Twitterverse 2009), a collaborative Twitter fiction edited by the BBC and Neil Gaiman into an audio short story; The Amanda Project (Amanda Project LLC 2011–14), a multiplatform book series that purported to integrate elements from its online community in the print books; A Million Penguins (Mason and Thomas 2008), a Penguin Books-De Montfort University effort to crowdsource a novel using a wiki; dōjinshi, Japanese anime fanfics that have developed their own market economy and are now sold side by side with their source texts; and the dissonant fabulation that emerged on Amazon’s product sales page in parodic, role-playing reviews for the unnecessarily gendered “BIC for Her” pens (BIC n.d.). Collectively, popular works that span multiple media, invite participation, and create narrative storyworlds that continue



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to expand and evolve indefinitely (neverending stories, indeed) are the past, present, and future of storytelling. I term these works, wherein popular narrative meets participatory culture through digital networks, archontic fiction, drawing from Abigail Derecho’s definition of archontic literature: texts that build on previously existing text(s), simultaneously adding to and becoming part of the overall archive, ever expanding and never closed, “works that generate variations that explicitly announce themselves as variations” (2006, 65). Archontic fiction is, by nature, hypertextual, in that it contains a wealth of potential narratives, and enables them to be actualized, to resonate together for a highly invested audience who takes pleasure from their discourse and the frisson of dissonance created in their differences (Derecho 2006, 73–4). I consider these the narrative equivalent of shantytowns: the haphazard, ungoverned, ad hoc architectures arising where humans must create shelter and community quickly (and yet, over time) from whatever materials they have to hand. Some, like American mining camp “Hoovervilles,” have space but few materials, creating sprawls of tiny boxed sheds in meandering rows, while others, like the former Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, grow granularly to fill a limited space, leaning into and building on top of what came before. Some last only a season, while others persist, as Kowloon did, as independent entities with internal structures, rules, and cultures distinct from everything else. Many, of course, are not actual “shantytowns,” but “ad hoc architecture,” carefully designed to appear naturally anarchic, yet heavily produced and curated. Judy Malloy approaches the shantytown metaphor in describing LambdaMOO as “an intellectual equivalent of Home Depot, [where] building materials are always within reach … [with] potential for complex information delivery and for an infinite variety of narrative structures” (1999, n.p.). Some see archontic fictions, from franchise to fanfic, as literary “slums,” a disingenuous take that denies the excitement of exploring labyrinths of pedestrian passages and alleys, hidden spaces and unexpected engineering, farms on rooftops and pulley systems of message and goods transports. As discussed in Chapter 5, that which is created and beloved by nondominant groups in a culture—the poor, the “masses,” and particularly women and people of color (PoC)—is delegitimized, regarded as lesser-than. This is certainly true of fanfiction, wherein “professional” creative activity that is seen as a masculine domain (speculative TV episodes for aspiring writers, for example) is legitimized, while that practiced primarily by women (fanfic through zines or

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websites) is not (Fathallah 2017). Derecho notes that women creators are drawn to archontic creativity, tracing fanfic back at least four hundred years in English literature, adding their work to the male-dominated archives, “possibly sensing an opportunity to highlight the inequalities of women’s and men’s situations in their culture by creating new versions of earlier stories and producing a contrast between the old and new tales” (2006, 68). The quality of these works, highly variable both across and within them, is highly subjective, judged not by bourgeoisie standards of art but by the standards of the community in which they arise, for a wide array of objectives (not all of which are to appeal to aesthetic tastes). The most popular archontic works do display indicators of artistic merit, such as stylistic diversity, lexical richness, and varied language use (Girouard and Rubin 2013); more indicatively, however, the work’s community often develops its own “conception of aesthetics emphasizing borrowing and recombination as much or more as original creation and artistic innovation” (Jenkins [1992] 2013, 224). The history of archontic narrative is, more or less, the history of narrative. Oral storytelling, by nature, is archontic, as stories are cocreated in both ordinary conversations (Gabriel and Connell 2010, 508) and in the construction of folktale and mythology (March-Russell 2009, 3; Thon 2016, xvii). Only the very recent advent of print culture created stories that were fixed in terms of content, and owned in terms of authorship (Eisenstein 1980; Ong 1982). Alexandra Edwards, countering the notion that media fandoms and fanfic emerged from the editor-reader interchanges in science fiction pulps in the 1920s and 1930s, echoes Derecho in tracing it much further back than that, noting that the prominence of this supposed origin “erases crucial contributions made by women and people of color” (2018, 52). In addition to traditions of letter writing and private narrative exchanges, as well as the dialogism present in women’s fiction, she points toward the literary mags and pulps of the late nineteenth and early twentieth (particularly the 1910s) centuries, where fan interest was a key method of marketing literature, including fan exchanges, parody, pastiche, gossip, reader contributions, genre crossovers, and even penpal exchanges, in Westerns, mysteries, romance, sports, and all other genres available (ibid.). This fan activity tied into other forms of popular media, particularly radio (ibid., 61), establishing a popular transmedial practice that has come into full blossom in the era of digital media, “a powerful archive of memory that narrates history through a collective process” (Haynes 2019, 105). Further, Edwards separately makes the case that Orlando (Woolf 1928) is an archontic text, noting its purpose



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as a gift, its retelling of English literatures—engagement with the “archive”—and its parodic resistance of the male-dominated literary establishment (2021). This chapter presents the popular culture, producerly activities, and narrative worlds that reconfigure the long-existing practice of archontic storytelling into one that is finally challenging the dominance of the top-down publishing and print culture through the digital medium.

Archontic Culture Archontic fiction emerges from the intersection of popular, participatory, and producerly culture, enabled anew by the networking features of computing and the internet. It encompasses enormous transmedia properties perpetuated across films, games, TV, streaming, theaters, theme parks, and merchandising, as well as much smaller grassroots narratives with no ambition to rake in a penny, much less billions. Importantly, though the academic and avant-garde practitioners occasionally make forays into collaborative and/or transmedia storytelling, archontic fiction is primarily a popular practice, made by and/or for popular audiences in communities of participatory practice.

Popular Culture Popular culture is often used synonymously with mass culture: the notion that culture is somehow created from the endless churning and repetition of products and content created from the top-down. Yet this assumes that audiences are passive and accepting, a faceless and featureless blur of flesh, the live equivalent of digitally duplicated images of crowds. It assumes that culture is unified and uniform. This assumption is another method of delegitimizing texts and art in the popular and mainstream sphere, pasting those who create or enjoy it with the image of a fool, slaved to the dominant regime of poor-quality mass production. John Fiske, however, constructs a conception of popular culture as powerful, if not quite revolutionary, in that it is “the art of making do with what the system provides” ([1989] 2011, 21), a constant process of making meaning and taking pleasure from repeating and continuing texts so that they are always evolving with new reflections. Just as individuals have many facets to their social identities and relations, they find these allegiances relevant to aspects of popular texts, realizing the many potentialities that these open worlds provide. For instance,

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the transmedia narrative created in Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) (a visual album incorporating music, film, art, book, and performance) can be experienced from the perspective of music lover, woman, and African American, with threads appealing to interests in Black history and social relations, family drama, and romance. As a particularly intimate expression of the artist’s own heartbreak and healing, it also provides an incredible emotional connection and insight into one of the most popular figures in creative industry, connecting not only for artistic and entertainment pleasure but also that of fannish adoration. Of course, Beyoncé does not offer her art for free; one of the other arguments delegitimizing works of art for popular consumption is that they are just that: products mass-produced for mass consumption. Unlike plastic widgets churned out on factory machines, however, narrative and art composed for popular culture has to appeal to a large number of people, and is always made by people: artists and collaborators contributing to a creative project.2 While collaborations can always fail, and there are no shortages of projects that were diminished by “suits” prioritizing marketing over content, archontic fiction arises because of a collective belief that acknowledges it as a work of art (Bourdieu 1983, 35). On the other hand, many archontic fictions operate outside of capitalistic structures entirely. Fanfic is the most obvious of these, though collaborative storytelling in creepypastas, netprovs, and dissonant fabulations (see Chapter 8) similarly participate solely in gift economies. For some, this is the result of delegitimization effects; fanfic communities, castigated for decades as “derivative” and as copyright theft, have developed an inferiority complex leading them to police themselves stringently against any commercial gain (Hellekson 2014, 190; Skains 2019b). While many fanfic, creepypasta, and collaborative writers certainly “file the serial numbers off ” (change details identifying the work as based on another) to enter into paid writing, others participate in these communities for other reasons: to seek deeper enjoyment in the extension of a text they love, to form social bonds through creative activities, and simply to engage in creative play (Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins [1992] 2013). Though various corporations, including Amazon, have attempted to convert the massively popular practice of fanfic into a commercial enterprise (e.g., FanLib, Kindle Worlds), none have succeeded beyond one or two outlying examples

Here I will trot out the cliché that is William Shakespeare, who wrote to sell tickets, and was popular, until his works were collectively deemed “art” and forced upon teenagers. And yet, still remains popular, despite the baffling existence of A Comedy of Errors. 2



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(De Kosnik 2009; Hellekson 2015), apart from dōjinshi, Japanese fan-created comics. Dōjinshi are sold at massive conventions and at retail shops (both online and offline), sometimes side by side with the source texts they’re based on (De Kosnik 2009, 120; Roh 2015). Even in gift economies, however, these practices still feed into the popular commercial economy, as they serve as grassroots discourse and advertising for source texts (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, n.p.), or become popular enough to warrant adaptation, as frequently occurs (De Kosnik 2009, 124).3 Popular culture contributes significantly to the economy, whether directly or indirectly, but what is less frequently discussed is its role in progressive discourse. Fiske describes popular culture as progressive (though not revolutionary or radical), and “essentially optimistic” ([1989] 2011, 18). The radical is often presumed to be closer to art, of more aesthetic value, that which makes us question our world and our place within it; yet art that is not part of popular culture only enters its discourse into a small circle—among the niche, the avant-garde—Bourdieu’s bourgeoisie. Fiske, in fact, claims: “There is little historical evidence to suggest that any form of radical art has produced a discernible political or social effectivity” ([1989] 2011, 134); Beyoncé’s transmedia take on Black American history and continued systemic racism, given its reach and accessibility, may be more valuable as a tool of resistance than a work critically deemed to be high art that nonetheless fails to find a significant audience. Resistance can also be found in dissonant fabulations (see Chapter 8) like the parodic Amazon “BIC for Her” pen reviews that pushed back at the casual misogyny of commercial industry, in The Matrix’s transgender themes, and the ecological message of ARG World Without Oil (Eklund and McGonigal 2007). Further, as popular culture enacts a shantytown vibe of “making do with what’s available,” it uses the very same texts and materials it’s given to resist the hegemonic forces providing them (Fiske [1989] 2011, 46): the “BIC for Her” reviews take place on its product page on Amazon, and fanfiction “fills in the gaps” from popular texts with elements fandom wishes were there, including greater diversity, alternate storylines, and deepened character relationships (Pugh 2005, 19). Janelle Monáe’s conceptual work in the overarching storyworld

For example, the ARS Dear David (Ellis 2017) has been optioned as a movie (Remley 2021), the creepypasta Slender Man (Knudsen 2009–) was adapted into two games and a film (Asimos 2021), and Supernatural (Kripke 2005–20) fans found their own work contributing to later seasons of the show in an exchange that would come to be known as “Kripke-ing” (Wilkinson 2013, n.p.). 3

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“Wondaland,” including the transmedial visual album Dirty Computer (2018) and book The Memory Librarian (2022), creates paradoxical tension not only between past, present, and future, between her identity as Janelle Monáe versus her cyberpunk alter-ego Cindi Mayweather, but also between her role as both a resistor to the dominant hegemony and her participation within it as a popular entertainer (Hassler-Forest 2014, 296). Thus popular culture is created by the people, and not by the studios and conglomerations pumping out mass-produced products. Audiences— particularly the heavily invested participatory audiences—must have a connection to a work to make it part of their culture, to not only buy it but buy into it, to expand it and expound upon it. These audiences absorb the work and transform it, from quoting lines on Twitter4 or Instagramming a fan doodle, to composing entire feature films from crowdsourced scenes as in Star Wars Uncut (Pugh 2010). Popular culture is carnivalesque, a pop-up shantytown of play that anyone can enter, exploring “a second world and a second life outside officialdom” (Fiske [1989] 2011, 66). Imposing texts and practices from without is an effort doomed to fail, as seen with FanLib and Kindle Worlds (attempts to commercialize fan writing) and Authonomy (HarperCollins’ attempt to build a self-publishing imprint) (Ramdarshan Bold 2016, 2). Popular culture has and will always continue making and remaking itself, continually remixing and re-presenting building materials into new structures and habitats. Digital media hasn’t created this process, only made it faster and more visible.

Participatory Culture Calling any aspect of culture “participatory” is somewhat redundant, as culture ceases to exist if no one is participating in it; likewise, in terms of narrative, culture has always been participatory to some extent, from oral storytelling cultures to print-based dialogism to the current digital evolution of interaction and secondary orality. Nonetheless, the term “participatory culture” has come to refer to “cultural communities and practices that actively (rather than passively) A small moment in the archontic Marvel Universe became a significant popular culture touchstone in Covid-ravaged 2020/21. In episode 8 of WandaVision, “Previously On” (Shakman 2021), Wanda is reliving memories of loss in the enormously powerful (and harmful) bubble of grief she has created. Comforting her, Vision asks “What is grief, if not love persevering?” The line provided some level of comfort and meaning not only to Wanda, but to a world reeling from pandemic loss (Dietz 2021; Miller 2021; Switzer 2021). 4



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engage with popular culture, such as fan cultures that remix … or produce their own content in response to, or in dialogue with, mass media content” (Brough 2014, 382; cf. Jenkins [1992] 2013). While we often think of participatory culture in terms of fandoms, games, and the dialectic functions of Web 2.0, Melissa Brough points out that its recent, pre-digital history particularly includes African American storytelling and music traditions, exemplified by collaborative and improvisational jazz music (2014, 384). As the study of participatory culture in general, and fandoms in particular, has largely failed to encompass the intersectional activities of PoC (Stanfill 2018), it is increasingly important to recognize their contributions and traditions. Specifically, archontic texts arise from a popular, participatory, writerly culture. Thanks to new technologies and networked computing, those with even minimal digital access and literacy are part of a new generation in which writing is as heavily weighted an activity (if not moreso) than reading: a “mass writing culture” (Brandt 2015). Fanfic communities preceded digital writing cultures, of course, as they developed APAs (amateur press associations) to create and distribute zines for their work (Hellekson 2014, 189; Pugh 2005, 116). Camille Bacon-Smith argues: “Fan fiction at its most basic structural level constitutes the writerly text: ever changing, ever growing, ever entwining the creative lives of its writers in the interwoven process of communicating through narrative the life of the community” (1992, 67). Its open-ended quality also invites “a greater sense of involvement and participation” (Thomas 2010, 149). Beyond fanfic, we can see this same sense of community, literacy, and engagement in collaborative texts like MUDs/MOOs, Slender Man, and the SCP Foundation. In these works, like fanfic, anyone can read, review, remix, and write new chapters in the everdeveloping storyworlds—what Fiske terms “producerly” ([1989] 2011, 83) and Lawrence Lessig calls “read/write culture” (2008, 46), in which audiences are encouraged to actively receive and re-envision a text, rather than merely consume it (ibid., 104).5 Deborah Brandt notes that this writerly culture could aid in rearranging power dynamics (2015, 116), as was certainly the case in the Arab Spring of the early 2010s (social media–aided protests against oppressive governments throughout much of the Arab World). An active, dialectic writerly culture reflects a popular culture in which citizens have more power from

Lessig specifically compares American consumerist culture to Japan’s read/write culture; while it’s a bit of an oversimplification, the perception of fanfic versus dōjinshi lends credence to the generalization. 5

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personal relations to political movements—more power to be progressive, whatever that may look like.

The Nature of Archontic Fiction As I am defining it in this chapter, archontic fiction encompasses a wide range of works, from media franchises to memes. They are typified by several qualities: transmedia, collaborative, and spreadable, in varying degrees. Their purposes range from massive commercial earnings to parodic sociocultural discourse to simple individual pleasure. This section will examine these qualities in depth, noting key popular texts.

Transmedia “Transmedia” is a very fuzzy term, used to describe everything from franchises to communications to multimodal works. Christy Dena defines them as polymorphic fictions, “expressed across multiple forms” of “unmixed media” (2010, 185; 2009, 87); as opposed to multimodal fictions that mix multiple communication modes, the media channels of transmedia texts remain distinct. These may include films, TV series, comics, novels, artwork, games, stage plays, and more, creating a “distributed experience” (McGonigal 2006, 43) of the storyworld and its characters. They may be designed from the start to be transmedia, as with ARGs, or they may simply emerge that way over time based on creator preferences or new markets, as with Slender Man and other creepypastas. Dena includes adaptations in her discussion, as they are necessarily transformative, and notes that they may be tiered, with different levels of content for different audiences (such as children vs. adults) (2009, 237). In her extensive work on transmedia fictions and practice, Dena also provides a significant framework by which to categorize transmedia digital fictions, including intraversus intercompositional, top-down versus bottom-up, and commercial versus independent (2009; 2010). Intracompositional works are polymorphic fictions wherein the narrative or storyworld can only be comprehended by engaging with all of the varying media iterations. ARGs are excellent examples of intracompositional transmedia fictions, as the game can only be played if one experiences each of the segments. Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Good Squad (2010) is intracompositional,



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with one chapter online as a PowerPoint presentation (see Chapter 8). The SCP Foundation—an original, wiki-based collaborative Men-in-Black type storyworld comprised primarily of investigatory reports regarding “Special Containment Procedures” for various unexplained, alien, and supernatural phenomena—is also intracompositional, as contributed texts can be in any medium, and each is a segment of the whole. Intercompositional texts, however, are transmedia fictions whose parts can be experienced in full, separately, such as The Matrix, wherein each film, game, and animated text encompasses a fully complete narrative storyline. Most large commercial franchises are intercompositional, enabling segmented sales of individual texts to wider audiences without necessitating familiarity with the entire transmedia storyworld (e.g., the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.). In a contrast to most commercial transmedia texts, music-based transmedia fictions, such as Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer visual albums, are more intracompositional than most, integrating album music, film, characters, and performance to craft an overall narrative and/or storyworld (Sedeño-Valdellós 2019). Likewise, transmedia fictions can be top-down or bottom-up, with abovethe-line6 contributions influencing canon (as with the large production teams that create media franchises) and below-the-line contributions restricted to fannish activity (though all have a role in meaning-making) (Dena 2009, 123). Top-down may be more familiar, and certainly dominates popular media, from comics-based superhero universes to The Matrix, Star Wars, and Star Trek franchises, as well as visual albums in music. The Amanda Project was a topdown archontic fiction or “multiplatform book” created by Fourth Story Media and (later) HarperCollins, intended to result in a series of young adult (YA) novels (Martens 2016); unlike most franchises, The Amanda Project actively sought below-the-line contributions for the novels (with limited success, and questionable use of contributions). In addition to massive franchises, top-down can also include independent transmedia fictions, like Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Douglas Adams’s many different media iterations of his Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978–2005). Bottom-up transmedia fictions are highly participatory and collaborative, only taking shape because of audience engagement and authorship—essentially, with no distinction between above- or

The “line” is that of copyright or permission to create commercial content. Jon Favreau creates “approved” or above-the-line content for the Marvel and Star Wars franchises. Star Wars Uncut, a collaborative fan remaking of the film, is below-the-line creativity. 6

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below-the-line contributions. Examples include MUDs and MOOs, Slender Man, “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry,” and the SCP Foundation. The latter two have elements of both top-down and bottom-up archontic fiction, as Neil Gaiman and the BBC had editorial control over the final story, and contributions to the SCP Foundation are quality-controlled by moderators. ソードアート・ オンライン (Sword Art Online) (Kawahara 2012) is also mixed: while it is certainly a media franchise (novels, anime, film) based on a series of novels, each adaptation is free to interpret the storyworld without an overarching top-down approach (Hillan 2020, 79). On a more grassroots level, the Reddit archontic fiction _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 or The Interface Series began as a top-down work, with one user (_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9) posting narrative segments as replies to various threads. It continues as a bottom-up SubReddit, however, as thousands of Redditors forensically collect the segments in an effort to understand them, and contribute to the storyworld with fanfictype contributions of their own. As noted, many transmedia fictions are franchises, top-down storyworlds created by a commercial studio system. Transmedia franchises are growing in number and size, as studios seek to increase revenues by marketing and offering content on as many media channels as possible. Many works besides the known franchises are transmedia, often as they incorporate marketing efforts in other channels; most ARGs, for example, are marketing for films or film franchises (Dena 2009, 45). Most commercial works are consumer-based, permitting little actual participation from the audiences—fans may play ARGs or create extensive fanfic based on the media property, but their activities are kept expressly separate from the “canonical” texts of the franchise. Independent transmedia texts, however, are far more open to collaboration with audiences—Sarah Haynes’s The Memory Store (2019) centered on her original narrative, but deliberately sought to incorporate audience contributions, even building core storyworld elements from them. Prior to being “pulled to publish,” Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona (2014) webcomic gathered audience contributions on each page in the form of memes, poetry, songs, artwork, and more; sadly, upon publication by HarperCollins (2015), all archontic elements were removed along with the original webcomic.

Collaborative While not all transmedia fictions are participatory, most are the result of some form of collaboration, whether explicit or implicit, above-the-line or below-the-line.



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Certainly, however, all archontic fictions are collaborative. Collaborative fiction is nothing new—as noted above, oral storytelling and zines produce cooperative narratives, as do media texts like film, TV shows, and games. Digital networking, of course, facilitates a wider array of narrative-based interaction for socially and geographically disparate contributors (Nunes 2014, 357). In addition to digitally enabled archontic fictions like SCP Foundation, Slender Man, and MUDs and MOOs, platforms have arisen (and almost all, fallen) specifically for collaborative stories. Isabell Klaiber examines several—One Million Monkeys, Protagonize, StoryPassers, and WEBook—as communities of collaborative writing practice (2014). She describes the stories produced as of “amateurish quality” and largely abandoned at one point or another, but notes that the platforms were rather popular (ibid., 125); unfortunately, they weren’t popular enough, as none of them currently exist as collaborative writing platforms. Other collaborative communities of practice persist, however, in less explicitly purposed archontic fictions. Haynes presents the practice of collaborative writing as symphonic; in her work The Memory Store, she acted as the composer and conductor, deftly eliciting individual texts and arranging them to create a cohesive, harmonic whole. The moderators of SCP Foundation similarly conduct community contributions to merge harmoniously with the existing narrative and storyworld, as did the editors of “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry.” Other symphonies are more discordant, such as netprovs, creepypastas, and dissonant fabulations; grassroots, bottom-up, entirely below-the-line archontic fictions take shape not based on a centripetal “conductor”-like force, but based on what elements of the contributed narrative the community collectively chooses to incorporate into the growing structure and build upon. In this way, they are less symphony and more improvisational jazz—jam sessions. All forms of collaboration, whether symphonic structure or improvised shantytown, require the release of authority and ownership: any primary author of a collaborative work will “quickly lose control over their own version of the text and expose it to the creative appropriations not only by their subsequent co-authors but by the readers’ individual hypertextual reading processes as well” (Klaiber 2014, 129). For authors like Sarah Haynes, or the creators of Slender Man or SCP Foundation, this loss of control is known, accepted, and even embraced, for the sake of the pleasure of collaborating on an as-yet-undeveloped work. For others, the loss of control is disturbing. Many authors have expressed their disdain and upset at fanfic of their work; some have even sought to have it removed. The online power of fan communities has shown its might in these

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cases, as publishers and studios are often then pressured to reverse course: for example, Bloomsbury acquiesced to Harry Potter fan activity, and AMC relented on Twitter accounts portraying Mad Men characters (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013; Kafka 2008; Waters 2004a). The Amanda Project, even while purporting to desire collaborative authorship, maintained explicit editorial control over all the text to the point that it was impossible to tell if any community contributions made it into the novels at all (Martens 2016, 140). Grassroots practices may be inclined to “open source literature” or “commons-based poetics” (Voyce 2011, 407), but established publishers and studios are nonetheless still very invested in creator control and copyright. Both these elements are, however, eroding under the weight of increasingly popular communities of collaborative practice.

Spreadable Like a great deal of theory related to participatory and fan culture, the term “spreadable” has been popularized by work from Henry Jenkins, along with Sam Ford and Joshua Green: “ ‘Spreadability’ refers to the potential—both technical and cultural—for audiences to share content for their own purposes, sometimes with the permission of rights holders, sometimes against their wishes” (2013, n.p.). Colloquially, spreadable media is referred to as “viral,” which not only captures the speed of content spreading on the internet but also accounts for the rapid pile-up of duplications and replications; the term was first applied to the email service Hotmail’s default signature on all user messages, which marketed itself to new users, garnering millions within the first few months (ibid.). I choose “spreadable” here as opposed to “viral” because of the marketing connotations conveyed by the latter, as well as the tendency to see viral media as necessarily highly visible. While many archontic texts, particularly the larger franchises, are extremely popular and visible, some are more niche, spreading within specific cultures, environments, and/or practices. “Spreadability,” as discussed by Jenkins, Ford, and Green, also encompasses “drillable texts [that] become spreadable through fans’ collective intelligence-gathering and meaningmaking processes” (ibid.): those texts that reward forensic audiences who are highly active and seeking to make ever-deepening connections to the work and its community. Community is a key aspect of spreadable media. Sharing texts along social connections activates “strong-tie relationships,” helping the individual to feel meaningfully connected (Aral and Walker 2011, 1624). If that text is a well-known



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franchise, sharing helps to identify fellow members of that community, increasing social bonding. If it is more of a grassroots, bottom-up text, sharing expands both the community and the text, creating new social connections while increasing the potential for new additions to the archontic text itself. Thus archontic texts can both extend existing social relationships and form new ones, as in the case with “pop cosmopolitans” who embrace cultures outside their own (Hosny 2018; Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, n.p.). Sharing texts among trusted connections is even more important to grassroots archontic texts, as modern internet audiences are wary of “astroturfing,” or fake grassroots media texts created for a variety of reasons (Lee 2010). Often, these are subversive marketing efforts, which, when discovered, lead to further distrust in the originators. Others are performance texts or self-promotion, such as the case of @horse_ ebooks (a supposedly algorithmically generated Twitter feed that turned out to be merely human) (Orlean 2013) and LonelyGirl15 (a college student’s YouTube vlog that was found to be entirely fictional) (Heffernan and Zeller 2006). More insidious and less obvious than astroturfing, archontic texts, created as they are within our current culture, are subjected to the downsides of that self-same culture, including aspects of systemic bias and inequalities. Participation in gift economies such as archontic texts requires motivation, effort, access, and time, all of which are affected by bias and inequalities as expressed through disposable income as well as invisible work (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013; Seiter 2008).

Archontic Fiction: Communities of (Transmedia) Practice No one person creates a shantytown in isolation; these ad hoc structures arise not because one person needs shelter, but because an entire community does. Humans, at our core, whether ancient or modern, urban or rural, in highrises or walled cities, are social—we depend upon one another for resources, skills, and survival. Over time, we evolved to take pleasure from anything that helps us improve our social capabilities, because these aid our survivability, and storytelling is a significant component of those skills. Creating stories collaboratively is thus a double whammy of pleasure. So collaborative storytelling, whether as individual productions all set in the same storyworld or as additive pieces of an ever-expanding narrative, is a “profoundly social enterprise … best understood in relationship to the social event that he or she is in the process of accomplishing” (Brandt 1986, 152). Bourdieu claims that writers write “for a

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public of equals who are also competitors” (1971, 116), but active participants in archontic fiction are collaborative rather than competitive, practice-oriented and working toward a common goal (creating/expanding interesting and pleasurable storyworlds, characters, and relationships), creating a “community of practice” (Cao, Klamma, and Martini 2008, 2). Digital media have expanded the social practices of creativity, enabling development of friendships and communities at all levels from local to international (Black 2009, 420) on the basis of shared interests (frequently, fandom, either of existing media texts, or emerging collaborative storyworlds). Further, by participating in these acts of creativity within the community, archontic creators are also collaborating in developing, sharing, and reinforcing the social norms and patterns for their highly diverse audience (Bacon-Smith 1992, 48). These communities create for one another, for an insider audience, in an almost entirely gift economy. Their motivations are social, related to their relationships, social reciprocity, and shared enjoyment and appreciation of the archontic text (Jenkins [1992] 2013, xxx; Knobel 2017, 43). MUDs and MOOs are, like RPGs, online co-creation through conversation and textual interaction; fanfic is frequently the exploration and evolution of character relationships. Because their goals are nonmonetary, archontic contributors sidestep many industry-imposed conventions in terms of content, style, length, genre, copyright, and even societal norms,7 enjoying significant freedom in terms of creativity. On the other hand, the communities can be extremely protective, as seen with fanfic sites exerting “considerable control over the fanon” (Thomas 2007, n.p.), the SCP Foundation moderators’ “ruthless quality-control policy” (Baker-Whitelaw 2014, n.p.), and even the tendency for communities to effectively exile members for removing their work in order to place it in a commercial setting (Brennan and Large 2014). By its very nature, archontic work is a resistant practice. That these fictions primarily exist in a gift economy resists the capitalist hierarchy: contributors spend a significant amount of time, energy, and expertise in activities where not only do they have no expectation of recompense, but they may not even receive artistic credit. Memes, for instance, carry no signature, and are widely shared, duplicated, transformed, and reshared. Derecho defines fanfic as an ethical practice, as not only is it “philosophically opposed to hierarchy, property, For example, the popularity of sexual relations between brothers Sam and Dean Winchester in Supernatural fanfic, knowingly labeled “Wincest.” 7



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and the dominance of one variant of a series over another variant” but also the means by which creators (mostly women creators) “write against the media corporations whose products they consume” (2006, 77, 71–2, emphasis original), as they seek to fill in the gaps, to seek more of or more from the media they are given (Pugh 2005, 19). Dissonant fabulations, those collaborative, parodic activities prompted by high-profile blunders related to corporate dominance and capitalist extremes, are acts of deliberate resistance to call attention to societal inequalities and problematic behavior, Brechtian performances intended to cause dissonance and discourse (Skains 2018). Dōjinshi push back against commercial hierarchies and the creativity-limiting aspects of copyright law, openly engaging in a commercial market for fanfic alongside the established royalty publishing market. Archontic resistance represents an “open challenge to the ‘naturalness’ and desirability of dominant cultural hierarchies, a refusal of authorial authority and a violation of intellectual property” (Jenkins [1992] 2013, 18), resulting in shifts in media power, as even the most protective of media properties (e.g., Warner Brothers and the Harry Potter universe) have found quiet complacence and even active encouragement (e.g., Supernatural’s frequent episodes incorporating fan elements) a necessary acquiescence to the growing power of communities of practice. What also falls to the wayside in these very social, communal, and collaborative texts is narrative cohesiveness. Depending on the text and how it is constructed, the overall archontic fiction may be almost impenetrable to newcomers. Highly controlled, high-budget transmedia properties like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or even Beyoncé or Janelle Monáe’s visual albums, have a much higher level of narrative cohesion than grassroots texts like creepypastas and memes, because their aim is to monetize their properties as much as possible. Even so, they may grow to be quite substantial, and sacrifice overall cohesiveness to cater to an already established loyal fan/customer base: with twenty-seven films and seven streaming series to date, not to mention decades of comics, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is difficult to encompass even for casual fans, much less newcomers. Memes evolve so rapidly, through so many people and channels that they’re often unrecognizable within hours of emergence. Fanfic can be both highly intertextual and yet highly individual, and rarely stands on its own apart from the source text and many other fan texts constructed upon it. Collaborative works are typically focused on process rather than product, inviting participant play instead of coherence and linearity in a finished text (Meifert-Menhard 2013, 14); A Million Penguins, the Penguin Books-DeMontfort University effort

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to cooperatively write a novel through the medium of a wiki, famously resulted in a mess of a novel, but a singular experience for the participants (Douglas 2008; Mason and Thomas 2008). Those with either editing or moderation, such as “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry” and the SCP Foundation, are often far more cohesive. Other works with more distributed authorship and looser control develop cohesiveness through a slower evolution and majority preference for some contributions over others, such as the Slender Man creepypasta. Overall, however, most archontic fiction favors participation and discourse over cohesiveness. This discourse occurs both within the archontic text and without. Some archontic fiction, like MUDs and MOOs, are themselves created through online conversations. Most, however, incorporate discourse within the text as intertextuality and intratextuality. Fanfics draw on their source texts, other media texts, fan texts, titles, references, allusions, and even other fandoms and storyworlds (Pugh 2005, 43). Large transmedia properties (Star Wars, Marvel, The Matrix, etc.) often engage in intratextuality, embedding “Easter eggs” or clues that cater to highly active, “forensic fandoms” who take on a “detective mentality” to suss them out and discuss on social media and forums (Mittell 2006; Veale 2019). Memes often become layered and combined with other memes, building new meaning through their intertextuality. “Similar to the Marvel cinematic universe, [webtoon] The Journey [to the West] is a radically intertextual story world that appears in forms as diverse as TV series, comics, novels, animated cartoons, plays, roof ornaments, pagoda reliefs, and a mask dance” (Wall 2020, 17). Bronwen Thomas notes that fan contributions occasionally make their way into ongoing media properties’ canon (2007, n.p.), as has repeatedly occurred with Supernatural (Wilkinson 2013). This intertextuality deepens individual participation within their archontic community, indicating familiarity with the overarching work and mastery with the community and its practices.

Responsive “Success” With such a wide array of textual types, audiences, and economic purposes, it is difficult to point to any one archontic fiction and evaluate it with regard to its quality or success. Not all are commercial with measures of revenue and income; most do not enter into the more aesthetically oriented realms of literature or high art. We can certainly point toward those that seem least successful: The Amanda Project that descended into online chaos, and whose planned eight-book series



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was curtailed after only four books. A Million Penguins, whose collaborative wikinovel was better known as a failed experiment than a community of practice. Even the DC Extended Universe (DC Films 2013–), which, while monetarily successful, is considered far less cohesive, structured, and loyal to the original comic book characters and storyworld than the competing Marvel Cinematic Universe. The key to evaluating the relative success of an archontic fiction lies not in standards of income or quality, but in examining the resulting shantytown structures as compared to the community’s objectives. For large franchises, economic success is the significant measure, such as box office, unit purchases, TV ratings, and streaming subscriptions. For grassroots and independent texts, success is rooted in the enjoyment and continuation of the community contributing to the text. SCP Foundation and Slender Man continue to grow both community and text at fourteen and thirteen years old, respectively—practically ancient in internet years. The Amanda Project likely failed because its creators’ purpose was in conflict with its community’s purpose; it attempted to impose a top-down culture to reproduce the bottom-up fan engagement the publishers observed with another popular text, the Twilight series, as described by Marianne Martens (2016). Instead of starting with a popular book series that already had an established fandom, Fourth Story Studios devised an entirely new series—which didn’t actually have very good reader feedback. They hosted the fan forums, but moderated them poorly, resulting in bullying. Worse, the promise of the following books in the series being composed of characters and situations submitted by fans on the site was a bit of a shell game: books two through four of the series have appendices thanking the users (by username only) for their “contributions,” but no indication of what those contributions were. Despite attempts at marketing merchandise and the series to users on the site, the project was a commercial failure, as were, apparently, the various imprints publishers created for multiplatform books that Martens names in her 2016 book: Scholastic’s Storia has converted to a teaching and reading comprehension imprint, and Bloomsbury’s Spark no longer exists. Interestingly, not long after The Amanda Project shuttered, HarperCollins (who partnered on The Amanda Project) published Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona (2015), which drew their attention specifically because the author and the webcomic had an incredibly strong online following. As a webcomic, Nimona was posted on Tumblr (Hicks 2015), enabling reblogging, comments, and additional community practices on each published page, including poetry, artwork, songs,

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discourse, and more. Rather than creating a multiplatform project, HarperCollins simply published the webcomic as a graphic novel, requiring its removal from Tumblr for copyright purposes; not only was the Nimona webcomic lost to its community, but so were all the community contributions. Stevenson has since gone on to significant successes, earning Eisner awards, helming the comic series Lumberjanes, and creating and producing the latest She-Ra animated series. It may have been their8 choice to take a traditional royalty publishing route with Nimona, but given her large, self-built archontic fiction community and continued presence in social media afterward, it seems far-fetched to think that he would have refused a multiplatform project had HarperCollins been keen to attempt it again. In the realm of collaborative fiction, it is interesting that so much of elit discourse points to A Million Penguins as an example of the “failure” of collaborative writing, when so many archontic fictions demonstrate the practice’s success. Of course, A Million Penguins’ aim was specifically a novel, essentially crowd-sourced, yet the experiment included little top-down moderation. Topdown moderation and/or editing of bottom-up, crowd-sourced projects has been shown highly effective, from small one-off projects like “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry” to massive, ongoing archontic storyworlds like SCP Foundation. The aim of a short story for the former was a more reasonable goal than A Million Penguins’ novel, easier to create some level of cohesion with only one day’s worth of crowd-sourced tweets than five weeks’ worth of wiki entries; further, tweets are not subject to edits by others as wikis are, a “vandalism” problem that plagued A Million Penguins (Mason and Thomas 2008). SCP Foundation has the benefit of an established storyworld with firm guidelines for contributions; for an archontic fiction, its initiators created a relatively stable and gridded foundation that maintains a consistent shape (more of a campground than a shantytown, perhaps). Alternatively, Slender Man’s entirely bottom-up approach has no moderation whatsoever—all contributions are canon, but also none are. Parodic memes presenting alternatives to Slender Man (Trender Man, Splendor Man) have entered into the “family,” despite their obvious humorous origins conflicting with the creepypasta’s default horror genre. For truly bottom-up archontic fictions like this, “the minute a story is posted, or an image shared, the narrative is no longer related to author, but is ultimately the property of the community” (Asimos 2021, 71). The aim of the Slender Man community was Noelle Stevenson’s pronouns are she/they/he. 8



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never to produce a single, cohesive work, but rather simply to participate in the community of practice. By that aim, it has been and continues to be highly successful.

Conclusion At its core, all fiction is archontic: intertextual, filtering culture, and participatory in its dialogism. Digital networked media have, however, unbound the codex, enabling archontic fictions to stretch to their full potential and often opening up communities of practice to a much wider field of creatorship. The emphasis in these works is on recombination, borrowing, and repetition, practices that are so often diminished in fan (women’s) work as “derivative” and “unoriginal.” Yet what is Ulysses if not The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet if not Tristan and Isolde, Paradise Lost if not Genesis? It is the same intertextuality and renewal driving archontic fictions, the desire to reflect anew with a fresh syuzhet on a beloved (or otherwise emotionally connective) fabula, whether the fabula is an established media text or a nascent storyworld. To date, media corporations from book publisher to film studio have held tightly to their top-down control of creative content. Recent decades have witnessed the shift from shutting down fan activities to ignoring them, to some half-hearted attempts to encourage them, recognizing that the bottom-up, belowthe-line contributions are coming from those who are the most dedicated to the media property, and are, in essence, an ideal form of advertising. Yet creators do not have to rely on mega-conglomerates to produce their expandable storyworlds for them; for some archontic fictions, all that is needed is a photo-edited image, a compelling post on a forum, or a misguided product falling far short of the cultural zeitgeist. Digital media have not only afforded a more open medium for archontic storytelling—they have also provided new landscapes upon which strange and wondrous new shantytowns can take shape, in delightful contrast to the tightly gatekept top-down structures of film, TV, and publishing industries. Archontic fiction, in fact, specifically arises to resist cultural gatekeeping. It is a popular resistance, as these communities of practice consume, participate in, and push back against mainstream media and culture all at once. These sprawling, transmedia, collaborative and spreadable works are the means by which the recipients of popular culture respond, filling in the gaps, creating new perspectives that they cannot find across all of the many media channels we

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now have at our fingertips. It is no surprise, then, that so much archontic fiction is created by historically marginalized people, with content like slash fiction (usually sexual relationships between male characters) and nontraditional romance, stronger narratives for women and characters of color, exploration and inclusion of characters with disabilities, alternate universes with gender and sexuality continua, and many other topics that can be considered taboo by mainstream entertainment media as it attempts to draw the widest (blandest) audience possible. Even mainstream entertainers like Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe have created archontic works in an effort to elevate their voices, convey their histories, and reimagine their worlds as women of color. Archontic fictions arise in part because of the stories—filling in the gaps in culture and media—but also because of the connections they afford for extended communities, developing emotional connections and relationships to people with similar experiences and desires. Regardless of whether or not commercial media corporations ever come to understand and even utilize these communities well, archontic fiction will remain the past, present, and future of storytelling, and a significant genre of digital literature.

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Conclusion

“Digital fiction,” once released from the artificial bounds placed upon it by historically exclusive industries and academic traditions, can be found wherever anyone with a creative urge has access to digital devices and networks. As with every other communications-capable technology humankind has invented, we have used the computer and digital media to express our narrative impulses, both remediating previous works and conventions, and inventing new structures and forms. Digital fiction is found in Twitter threads, Facebook pages, SubReddits, product page reviews, blogs, computer games, mobile apps, ebooks, wikis, interactive movies, augmented and virtual reality, immersive performance, transmedia franchises, fanfic, creepypasta, discussion forums, and anywhere users can customize and/or subvert the contents or activities of the web. The lamentation that digital fiction has gained no mainstream traction is thus revealed to be a solipsistic and hidebound perspective—digital fiction has, in fact, been part of popular culture from the very origins of computing. Scholars and avant-garde practitioners are not the only creators who can innovate, who can produce new and thoughtful work in emerging media. The human drive for play—that natural tendency to learn and practice through pleasurable social behaviors—is inherent in all of us. It impels us to create sports and art and stories, plays and novels and films and computer games. When we, as mainstream citizens, are afforded the means of production—as we are through digital devices and networks—we will not only use them to produce intentional objects of narrative and communication, but we will also subvert components to our playful purposes when we see the opportunity. And there are many, many opportunities. The computer may have originally been simply that: a device for calculating figures. It took us no time at all to transform it into a versatile machine for computing and for communication. Likewise, the internet was created for the purposes of communication—both for nationalistic purposes, and for the purpose of streamlining and providing access to scientific knowledge

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(Gitelman 2006, 115)—and, for better or for worse, we use it for every method of communication that we can possibly think of, including creating narratives in every corner and in every conceivable manner. Technological infrastructures, language, narrative traditions, laws, socioeconomic factors, and popular culture all influence the shape of the digital fiction we create. Computing advances in the United States and the UK meant that technology proliferated in Anglo-American cultures slightly earlier than most other nations, and the dominance of English language in coding software resulted in fewer opportunities for non-English-speaking communities and individuals to innovate in the early consumer days of computing (the 1970s and 1980s). Interactive fictions (IFs) (or adventure games) emerged from the West; though they were quickly taken up around the globe, particularly in Japan, leapfrogging technological advances and gaps in content for other languages meant that they were much more short-lived elsewhere. Much-delayed technological infrastructure throughout most of India and Africa has resulted in limited access; the digital fiction (DF) emerging from these locales is primarily social media–based and performative, as netizens use mobile devices to create blog fiction, cell phone novels, and social media narratives. In China, where technological, linguistic, and governmental barriers were and are also present, DF is nonetheless an enormous publishing industry, as creators use social media and discussion forum platforms to create webnovels that are then remediated into a significant print publishing market. In the absence of Western discourse that romanticizes the book and tips the interpretation of copyright more toward the capitalist notions of ownership, Japan and Korea have developed highly influential and commercial DF genres in cell phone novels, webtoons, and visual novels (which have also made their way into Anglo-American culture, albeit as a niche genre of games), as well as the adjacent “fanfic”-type practice of dōjinshi. In the West, the shared ancestor of DF and computer/videogames is IF, or text adventure games. While games have gone on to utterly dominate every other sphere of entertainment media combined, the more literary side of IF stumbled after technology advanced enough to permit graphic games to flourish. A combination of factors contributed to DF becoming more of a cult or niche culture at this point. A moral panic over the “death of the book” due to causes related to the computer-overtook literary and book discourse, resulting in a rejection of interactivity or digital presentation in prose fiction—even the simple ebook was rejected by readerly culture until the late 2000s. In addition, the historical rejection of women in computing at every level from engineering

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to programming to consumption meant that “heavy readers,” the majority of whom were and are women, were not only not interested in the crossover between narrative and computer, but they had also been enculturated against any use of the computer at all. As the publishing industry is made up of a large proportion of women in commissioning roles, and a majority female authors and readers, they had no incentive in exploring products that an entire culture had established were for men and boys only. Computing, as the foundation for gaming culture, reinforced that exclusion in full, rarely if ever considering women and girls as creators or consumers. The cycle continued, and an artificial wall rose between the feminized practice of reading and the masculinized culture of computing and gaming. Such was the culture in which Infocom and its IF rose and fell. For a time in the 1980s, Infocom’s products were computer gaming. Yet the company was formed solely by (white, cis) men, producing works only for boys and men, save one: the late entry Plundered Hearts from Amy Briggs (1987) as the company spiraled. In a way, Infocom epitomized the cultural exclusion of women from computing and games: the company purported its customer base to be “heavy readers,” yet never considered catering to the majority of that market (women) ostensibly because they were all men. Once they had achieved their success, rather than continuing to develop on their successes in the feminized notion of “popular culture,” they chose to overextend the company into a “serious” field of computing: business software. In doing so, they took enormous risks, ignoring all indications they were moving in the wrong direction—behavior that can be linked to masculine behavior toward risks. IF would continue, not only having a significant influence in games and DF all over the world, but also as an internetbased community of practice trading works largely in a gift economy. Infocom, however, would not. Unlike games, which enjoy a media genre–based platform to ease issues of discoverability, post-Infocom DF spread into a plethora of forms and niches. Indeed, the notion of “digital fiction” as a genre is an academic one, rather than a mainstream classification. Rather, DF as we have defined it—these works of narrative that incorporate interactivity, multimodality, and/or participation necessitating the digital as an intermediary and even co-constructor—can be seen in experimental and emergent forms in many different traditions, industries, communities, and practices. “Literary games,” as I use the phrase in this book, refers to works that have emerged on the peripheries of existing entertainment media practices and industries: mobile apps such as book-apps and narrative

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games, walking sims, visual novels, and webcomics. Not only do these works place DF firmly in mainstream culture, they also demonstrate that DF does not have to be relegated solely to gift economies; with the appropriate framing and context, audiences are more than willing to pay for text-rich narratives “disrupted” by digital media. Nonetheless, issues of attention on platforms that make no concessions for works that are neither wholly books or wholly games, and the corporate platforms now dominating digital environments and economies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) offer little in the way of solutions for indie and niche cultures of practice in their enormous commercial infrastructures. Like the apps and authoring tools edging their way into mainstream commercial channels, the “producerly” elements of digital media have become more prominent in prose fiction, in both print and electronic formats. Experimentation is as old as print fiction itself, going back a thousand years to the first known print novel, The Tale of Genji (Murasaki c.1008), continuing in books that played with words and with form, offered contrasting perspectives and impossible storyworlds. Writing from women, LGBTQIA+ and people of color frequently employs experimental techniques, pushing back against the dominant popular culture that privileges perspectives from patriarchal hegemonies. For these authors to express their condition, to offer a truth about their overlooked worlds and relationships, means laying bare inner worlds of experience, memory, and emotions, as well as the hidden discourses and communities through subversive and innovative use of language, structure, and form. Rather than merely introducing constraints to the work as a form of experimentation and play, these authors work with constraints in their writing as an artistic metaphor for the constraints of everyday life brought about by their identities and related roles in society. Ergodic fiction is thus strongly rooted in the “feminine” as it represents otherness. Rather than being put off by the “non-trivial” effort required to traverse these narratives, we actively seek them out. We take particular pleasure in works that cause us to question, even if momentarily, the reality of our own world. DF that mixes reality with fantasy, waking with dream, induces a hypnagogic joy, as we delight in the lucid dream-like storyworlds that are made possible by alternate realities in games, stories, and mixed reality experiences. The world was delighted to find strange creatures hiding in their backyards, their schoolhouses, their parking lots, embracing Pokémon Go as a shared dream. Ghost stories on Twitter, digital campfire creepypastas, netprovs, interactive

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movies, and dissonant fabulations all combine a “real-world” feel, that of supposedly nonfictional spaces and activities, with fictional tales, like children playing make-believe. Extended reality (XR)—augmented, virtual, mixed— take this effect one step further, blending the real with the digital. The magic of games of pretend is no longer lost to long-ago childhoods; even as adults our technology can help our imagination-starved minds to immerse our selves and our bodies in liminal experiences. We have not achieved (and likely never will) the perfect immersive experience represented by the Holodeck, but its promise is sufficient to propel technological innovation in that direction. At the time of writing, XR is more of a potential form for DF; significant investments and advances are on the horizon. Meanwhile, a significant evolution in narrative has already been underway for many years, merging ancient practices of storytelling with the (somewhat) democratic functions of digital media. Where space is provided—and on the web, space is everywhere—humans will come together to create structures of necessity, paths of desire. Archontic fiction, these electronic shantytowns that we construct to fill in gaps in mainstream media narratives, is Ong’s secondary orality as expressed through narrative. It is dialogic, cooperative, intertextual, and recombinatory. It ranges from fanfic to major transmedia franchises, with a variety of purposes, conventions, and markets. Communities of practice arise based on archontic fictions, enabling social connections and activities through the creation of transmedia, collaborative, and spreadable works. Often, these communities arise in resistance to the creative industries’ attempts to maintain their death grip on copyright and intellectual property, pushing back not only on the notion that stories (fabulas) and characters can be owned but also on the idea that “below-the-line” creativity and contributions are derivative, theft, and generally lesser-than. Many of these dialogic works in and of themselves resist the hegemonic representation of culture and society offered by the creative industries, reimagining these media storyworlds with alternative character relationships and story arcs, attempting to shift the vision of our world to include those historically excluded through patriarchal dominance. Others create new storyworlds entirely, pushing back against the notion that all cohesive narrative must be controlled and commodified, releasing them into the “wilds” of the web to evolve. That these archontic fictions are so popular and so widespread indicates a significant popular urge for narrative participation in real and meaningful ways—a trend that is increasing, and likely to increase as younger generations who have only ever

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known participatory media age and create new ways for all media to welcome and include cooperative storytelling. Digital fiction has been a part of our culture for far longer than we recognize, from the ergodicity of the 易經 (I Ching) (late ninth century bc) to crowdsourced oral stories to the playful experimentation with language and form in print ergodic novels. Upon inventing the computer and the programming codes that direct it, we almost immediately subverted its uses toward those of narrative, creating civilization simulators and dungeon crawlers. Once we all had access to a machine and a network, digital fiction bloomed in every corner, from commercial computer games to book-apps to social media. Despite avant-garde and scholarly discourse continuing in its historical vein of classism and othering, digital fiction has emerged as a significant practice of popular culture, with new forms regularly rising (and, of course, others falling). As new technology emerges, we will continue to use it for narrative purposes, whether the tech is intended for storytelling or not. The big corporations dominating digital media (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) may continue to gatekeep and control the major platforms for the creative industries, but our history shows that artificial creativity boundaries only last so long before they are subverted, resisted, and even collapsed. Like graffiti artists using the walls of industry and government to comment on and protest those very structures, popular culture and communities of practice employ the ordinary spaces (including ecommerce) of the web to create, comment, and resist. Far from being lower quality, or mere trolling, elit emerging “in the wild” is reflective of and resistant to our dominant culture, and its popularity and spreadability give it far more weight and efficacy toward sociocultural change than any experimental work of the bourgeoisie whose only audience is the bourgeoisie. Ignoring “popular” digital fiction thus denies the bulk of it, to our extreme detriment. This is an exciting era to create and study narrative, as technology has introduced so many mutagenic factors into its practice, and at such a rapid rate. Many of us who remember writing in longhand, typing up manuscripts, and querying publishers with snail mail now compose in HTML, aided by artificial intelligence. Where once the cry of “the President is on—he’s on every channel!” meant no TV for the evening, we can now watch almost anything ever recorded at any time with just a couple of button presses. We can walk through

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virtual environments and connect with others doing the same from all over the world. These are the narrative possibilities that have opened to us over only the past eighty years—what more will come in the next century of invention and interaction? Certainly new ways of sharing and experiencing stories. Hopefully, we will also find more inclusive stories, practices, and industries, so that the stories and the people we have to this point excluded can share their time in the sun as well.

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Mediography This section contains all of the relevant works of digital fiction I have referred to in this book, which can also be found by creator name in the following Works Cited section. Here, however, I have broken them down by type or genre (roughly), alphabetized within each section by the title of the work. Some works may be listed in multiple categories.

Alternate Reality Games The Beast. 2001. Microsoft. [alternate reality game]. Microsoft. I Love Bees. 2004. 42 Entertainment. [alternate reality game]. 42 Entertainment. World Without Oil. 2007. Ken Eklund, and Jane McGonigal. [alternate reality game]. Independent Television Service (ITVS), Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Alternate Reality Stories “Creepypasta.” n.d. [netprov; alternate reality stories]. Creepypasta – Scary Stories and Original Horror Fiction. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.cree​pypa​ sta.com/. “Dear David.” 2017. Adam Ellis. [Twitter fiction; alternate reality story]. Wakelet. 2017. https://wake​let.com/wake/e6275​d03-7bce-4789-9961-f3a04​723c​c71. “Psychic High School.” 2014–. [netprov, alternate reality story, collaborative web fiction]. Psychic High School. 2014–. https://www.psyh​igh.com/. “SCP Foundation.” 2008–. [netprov, alternate reality story, collaborative web fiction]. SCP Foundation. 2008–. http://www.scpw​iki.com/. “SubReddit: The Interface Series.” 2016–. [alternate reality story, netprov, archontic fiction]. Reddit.Com. 2016–. https://www.red​dit.com/r/9M9H​9E9.

Archontic Fiction: Collaborative and Transmedia #1WkNoTech. 2014, 2015. [netprov]. Twitter.

198 Mediography The Amanda Project. 2011. Amanda Project LLC. [multiplatform book; collaborative story; archontic fiction]. Amanda Project LLC. http://web.arch​ive.org/web/201​1012​ 9072​448/http://www.theam​anda​proj​ect.com/. “BIC Cristal for Her Ball Pen, 1.0 mm, Black, 16 ct (MSLP16-Blk).” n.d. BIC. [dissonant fabulation; archontic fiction]. Amazon.Com. Accessed June 16, 2016. https://www. ama​zon.com/BIC-Cris​tal-1-0mm-Black-MSL​P16-Blk/dp/B00​4F9Q​BE6. “Black Box.” 2012. Jennifer Egan. [Twitter fiction; archontic fiction]. The New Yorker via Twitter, May 25, 2012. https://www.newyor​ker.com/magaz​ine/2012/06/04/ black-box. “Creepypasta.” n.d. [netprov; alternate reality stories]. Creepypasta—Scary Stories and Original Horror Fiction. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.cree​pypa​ sta.com/. DC Extended Universe. 2013–. DC Films. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. Warner Brothers. Dirty Computer. 2018. Janelle Monáe. [visual album, archontic fiction]. Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY: Wondaland, Bad Boy, Atlantic. “Fashionably Undead.” 2010. Meg Cabot and Twitterverse. [Twitter fiction; collaborative story; archontic fiction]. BBC Audiobooks America, SFF Audio. 2010. https://www. sffau​dio.com/bbc-aud​iobo​oks-amer​ica-fash​iona​bly-und​ead-by-meg-cabot-and-thetwitt​erve​rse/. “A Group Where We Pretend to Be Boomers.” n.d. [netprov; social media fiction]. Facebook. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.faceb​ook.com/gro​ups/20858​ 3495​8392​701/. “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry.” 2009. Neil Gaiman and Twitterverse. [Twitter fiction; collaborative story; archontic fiction]. BBC Audio, SFF Audio. 2009. https://www. sffau​dio.com/bbc-audio-hea​rts-keys-and-puppe​try-by-neil-gai​man-and-the-twitt​ erve​rse/. Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 1978–2005. Douglas Adams. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/pro​gram​mes/artic​les/1g84​m0sX​pnNC​ v84G​pN2P​LZG/the-game-30th-anni​vers​ary-edit​ion. I Work for the Web—It’s Almost Like a Job Except It’s Too Much Fun! 2015. Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig. [netprov]. http://rob​wit.net/iwfw. Lemonade. 2016. Beyoncé. [visual album, archontic narrative]. Los Angeles, CA; New York: Parkwood, Columbia. Marvel Cinematic Universe. 2008–. Marvel Studios. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. The Walt Disney Company. The Matrix. 1999–. The Wachowski Sisters. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. Warner Brothers. Nimona. 2014. Noelle Stevenson. [webcomic, archontic fiction]. http://www.gin​gerh​aze. com/nim​ona.

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“Previously On.” 2021. Matt Shakman. [transmedia franchise element]. WandaVision. Disney+. “Psychic High School.” 2014–. [netprov, alternate reality story, collaborative web fiction]. Psychic High School. 2014–. https://www.psyh​igh.com/. Roman. 1995. Leibov. [collaborative web fiction]. Russia. https://kodu.ut.ee/~roma​n_l/ hyper​fict​ion/. “SCP Foundation.” 2008–. [netprov, alternate reality story, collaborative web fiction]. SCP Foundation. 2008–. http://www.scpw​iki.com/. Slender Man. 2009–. Eric Knudsen. [creepypasta; archontic fiction]. Something Awful. Star Trek. 1966–. Gene Roddenberry. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. ViacomCBS. Star Wars. 1977–. George Lucas. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. Lucasfilm, Ltd. Star Wars Uncut. 2010. Casey Pugh. [crowdsourced film; archontic fiction]. YouTube. “SubReddit: The Interface Series.” 2016–. [alternate reality story, netprov, archontic fiction]. Reddit.Com. 2016–. https://www.red​dit.com/r/9M9H​9E9. Supernatural. 2005–20. Eric Kripke. [TV show; archontic fiction]. The WB; The CW. ソードアート・オンライン [Sword Art Online]. 2012. Reki Kawahara. [transmedia franchise; archontic fiction]. Japan: ASCII Media Works, NA Yen Press. Trading Faces. 2015. Mark C. Marino, and Claire Donato. [netprov]. Facebook.

Artists’ Books The Green Box. 1934. Marcel Duchamp. [artist’s book]. Your Co-Worker Could Be a Space Alien. 1985. Tatana Kellner and Ann Kalmbach. [artist’s book]. Rosendale, NY: KaKe Productions.

Augmented Books Al-Barrah. 2019. Reham Hosny. [augmented reality fiction, augmented book]. Egypt. https://albarr​ahno​vel.com/albar​rah-shop/. The Ice-Bound Concordance. 2016. Aaron A. Reed, and Jacob Garbe. [augmented book/ game]. http://www.ice-bound.com/. Night Film. 2013. Marisha Pessl. [augmented book]. New York: Random House. Skeleton Creek. 2009. Patrick Carman. [augmented book]. New York: Scholastic Press.

200 Mediography

Augmented Reality Works 200 Castles. 2014. Caitlin Fisher. [augmented reality fiction]. http://caitli​nfis​her.ca/200cast​les/. Al-Barrah. 2019. Reham Hosny. [augmented reality fiction, augmented book]. Egypt. https://albarr​ahno​vel.com/albar​rah-shop/. [AR]T. 2019. New Museum and Apple. [augmented reality art exhibit]. http://www. newmus​eum.org/pages/view/ar-t. Civilisations AR. 2020. Nexus Studios. [augmented reality app]. BBC. https://www.bbc. co.uk/tas​ter/pil​ots/civili​sati​ons-ar. The Deep Listener. 2020. Jakob Kudsk Steensen. [augmented reality experience]. London: Serpentine Augmented Architecture. http://www.jakobs​teen​sen.com/ the-deep-liste​ner. iButterfly. 2011. Dentsu. [augmented reality game]. Japan: Dentsu. https://www.den​tsu. co.jp/en/busin​ess/showc​ase/ibu​tter​fly.html. Ingress Prime. 2013–. Niantic. [augmented reality game]. Niantic. https://www.ingr​ ess.com/. Pokémon Go. 2016. Tatsuo Nomura. [augmented reality game]. Niantic, Nintendo, The Pokémon Company. “Unreal City Live.” 2020. Acute Art and Dazed Media. [augmented reality art exhibit]. Acute Art (blog). December 9, 2020. https://acute​art.com/you-are-invi​ted-to-unr​ eal-city-live/.

Authoring Tools ChoiceScript. 2011–. Choice of Games. [authoring tool]. Choice of Games. https://git​ hub.com/dfabul​ich/choic​escr​ipt. CYOA Factory. 2021. Morphosis Games. [mobile storytelling platform app]. Morphosis Games. https://mor​phos​isga​mes.itch.io/cyoa-fact​ory. Inform. 1993b. Graham Nelson. [interactive fiction authoring tool]. Oxford, UK. http:// info​rm7.com/. ink. 2011–. Joseph Humfrey, and Jon Ingold. [hypermedia authoring tool]. Inkle Studios. https://www.inkle​stud​ios.com/ink/. inklewriter. 2012–. Joseph Humfrey, and Jon Ingold. [hypermedia authoring tool]. Inkle Studios. https://www.inkl​ewri​ter.com/. Kocho – Play & Make Visual Novels. 2021. Scandiacus LLC. [mobile storytelling platform app]. Scandiacus LLC. https://www.kocho.io/. oolipo. 2017. oolipo AG. [mobile storytelling platform app]. Bastei Lübbe. https://play. goo​gle.com/store/apps/deta​ils?id=com.ool​ipo&hl=en_GB&gl=US.

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StorySpace. 1987–. Jay David Bolter, John B. Smith, and Michael Joyce. [hypertext authoring tool]. Eastgate Systems. Twine. 2009–. Chris Klimas. [hypermedia authoring tool]. http://twin​ery.org.

Blog Fiction “Diary of a Zulu Girl.” 2013–20. Mike Maphoto. [blog]. 2013–20. http://www.diary​ofaz​ ulug​irl.co.za.

Book-Apps A Clockwork Orange. 2012. Anthony Burgess, William Heineman, and Popleaf. [bookapp]. Random House. Alice for the IPad. 2010. Lewis Carroll, and Oceanhouse Media. [book-app]. Oceanhouse Media. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alice-for-the-ipad/id35​4537​426. Arcadia. 2016. Iain Pears and TouchPress. [book-app]. Faber & Faber. https://apps. apple.com/gb/app/arca​dia-by-iain-pears/id100​3843​523. Breathe. 2018. Kate Pullinger. [book-app]. Editions At Play with Visual Editions. https:// edi​tion​satp​lay.wit​hgoo​gle.com/#!/det​ail/free-brea​t he#%2F. Five Fables. 2014. Seamus Heaney and TouchPress. [book-app]. Red Green & Blue. Frankenstein: Interactive. 2012. Mary Shelley, and inkle. IOS (iPad). [book-app]. inkle. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/frank​enst​ein-inte​ract​ive/id51​6047​066. On the Road. 2011. Jack Kerouac and Penguin Books. [book-app]. Penguin. The Poe Macabre Collection – Edgar Allan Poe Interactive & Illustrated Tales. 2013. Edgar Allen Poe, and iClassics Productions, S.L. [book-app]. iClassics Productions, S.L. https://apps.apple.com/lc/app-bun​dle/the-poe-maca​bre-col​lect​ion-edgar-allan-poe/ id133​3116​332. PRY. 2014. Tender Claws. [book-app]. Tender Claws LLC. https://apps.apple.com/gb/ app/pry/id84​6195​114. Seed. 2017. Joanna Walsh. [book-app]. Editions At Play with Visual Editions. https://edi​ tion​satp​lay.wit​hgoo​gle.com/#!/det​ail/free-seed#%2F. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 2012. William Shakespeare, and TouchPress. [book-app]. Red Green & Blue. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/shake​spea​res-sonn​ets/id52​8646​395. Sherlock: Interactive Adventure. 2014. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and HAAB. [bookapp]. HAAB. Solar System. 2010. Marcus Chown and TouchPress. [book-app]. Faber & Faber, Red Green & Blue. https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/solar-sys​tem/id40​6795​422.

202 Mediography To Be or Not to Be. 2015b. Ryan North. [gamebook, book-app]. Tin Man Games. http:// gam​eboo​kadv​entu​res.com/gamebo​oks/to-be-or-not-to-be/. A Visit from the Goon Squad. 2011. Jennifer Egan and Popleaf. [book-app]. Constable & Robinson. War Horse. 2012. Michael Morpugo, and TouchPress. [book-app]. Red Green & Blue. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/war-horse/id55​7865​146. The Waste Land. 2011. T. S. Eliot, and TouchPress. [book-app]. Faber & Faber, Red Green & Blue. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-waste-land/id42​7434​046.

Civilization Simulators The Sumerian Game. 1964. Mabel Addis, and William McKay. [civilization simulator; educational game]. Westchester, NY: IBM.

Dissonant Fabulations “@BPGlobalPR: Wayback Machine Archive.” n.d. @BPGlobalPR. [Twitter parody; netprov]. Wayback Machine. Accessed June 17, 2016. http://web.arch​ive.org/web/*/ https://twit​ter.com/bpg​loba​lpr. “BIC Cristal for Her Ball Pen, 1.0mm, Black, 16ct (MSLP16-Blk).” n.d. BIC. [dissonant fabulation; archontic fiction]. Amazon.Com. Accessed June 16, 2016. https://www. ama​zon.com/BIC-Cris​tal-1-0mm-Black-MSL​P16-Blk/dp/B00​4F9Q​BE6.

Ergodic Films Blade Runner. 1982. Ridley Scott. [feature film; ergodic film]. The Ladd Company. Groundhog Day. 1993. Harold Ramis. [feature film; ergodic film]. Columbia Pictures. It’s a Wonderful Life. 1946. Frank Capra. [feature film; ergodic film]. RKO Radio Pictures. Memento. 2000. Christopher Nolan. [feature film; ergodic film]. Newmarket. Primer. 2004. Shane Carruth. [feature film; ergodic film]. THINKFilm; IFC Films. 羅生門 [Rashomon]. 1950. Akira Kurosawa. [feature film; ergodic film]. Daiei Film. Sliding Doors. 1998. Peter Howitt. [feature film; ergodic film]. Miramax; Paramount.

Mediography

203

Ergodic Print Works Æ. 1991, 1996. Robert Szczerbowski. [ergodic novel; hypertext fiction]. Poland: Publishing House Empty Cloud. Beloved. 1987. Toni Morrison. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. The Blind Assassin. 2000. Margaret Atwood. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: N.A. Talese. Blood and Guts in High School. 1978. Kathy Acker. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York, NY: Grove Press. Cane. 1923. Jean Toomer. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Boni and Liveright. Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650 266-8233). 2006. Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman, and Cathy Brigg. [print novel; ergodic novel]. Philadelphia: Running Press. Composition No. 1, Roman. 1962. Marc Saporta. [ergodic novel]. Paris: Seuil. Daniel Deronda. 1876. George Eliot. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: William Blackwood and Sons. Dictée. 1982. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. [print literature; ergodic literature]. New York: Tanam Press. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. 1974. Ursula K. Le Guin. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Harper & Row. Finnegans Wake. 1939. James Joyce. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Faber and Faber. The Eyre Affair. 2001. Jasper Fforde. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Hodder & Stoughton. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” (1941) 1962. Jorge Luis Borges. [short story; ergodic fiction]. In Ficciones, translated by Emecé Editores, 89–104. New York: Grove Press. The Golden Notebook. 1962. Doris Lessing. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Michael Joseph. “The Heat Death of the Universe.” 1967. Pamela Zoline. [short story; ergodic fiction]. New Worlds 51 (173): 32–9. Hopscotch. 1966. Julio Cortázar. [ergodic novel]. New York: Pantheon Books. House of Leaves. 2000. Mark Z. Danielewski. [ergodic novel]. New York: Pantheon Books. How to Be Both. 2014. Ali Smith. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Pantheon Books. 易經 [I Ching: The Book of Changes]. Late ninth century bc. [ergodic text]. Zhou Dynasty, China. Illuminae. 2015. Amie Kaufman, and Jay Kristoff. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

204 Mediography “藪の中 [In a Grove].” 1922. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. [ergodic short story]. Shinchō, 1922. Jane, Unlimited. 2017. Kristin Cashore. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York, NY: Kathy Dawson Books. Jazz. 1992. Toni Morrison. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. The Lathe of Heaven. 1971. Ursula K. Le Guin. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Scribner. The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. Ursula K. Le Guin. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Ace Books. Life After Life. 2013. Kate Atkinson. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Reagan Arthur Books; Little, Brown and Company. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759–67. Lawrence Sterne. [print novel; ergodic novel]. Great Britain: Ann Ward; Doddsley; Becket & DeHondt. Mansfield Park. 1814. Jane Austen. [print novel; ergodic novel]. United Kingdom: Thomas Egerton. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1871. George Eliot. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: William Blackwood and Sons. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Virginia Woolf. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Hogarth Press. One Thousand and One Nights. Eighth to fourteenth century ad. [ergodic literature]. Arabia. Orlando. 1928. Virginia Woolf. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Hogarth Press. Paradise. 1997. Toni Morrison. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Peaces. 2021. Helen Oyeyemi. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Faber & Faber. “The Region Between.” 1970. Harlan Ellison. [print novella; ergodic novella]. Galaxy 29 (6): 4–85. S. 2013. J. J. Abrams, and Doug Dorst. [print novel; ergodic novel]. Canongate Books Ltd. 源氏物語 [The Tale of Genji]. c.1008. Shikibu Murasaki. [orihon manuscript; ergodic manuscript]. Japan. To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure. 2015c. Ryan North. [ergodic book]. Reprint. New York: Riverhead Books. Ulysses. 1922. James Joyce. [print novel; ergodic novel]. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books in association with the Bodley Head. The Unfortunates. 1969. B. S. Johnson. [ergodic novel]. London: Panther. A Visit from the Goon Squad. 2010. Jennifer Egan. [print novel; ergodic novel; transmedia novel]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. The Waves. 1931. Virginia Woolf. [print novel; ergodic novel]. London: Hogarth Press.

Mediography

205

The Well of Lost Plots. 2004. Jasper Fforde. [print novel; ergodic novel]. New York: Viking.

Gamebooks 99 Reasons Why. 2012. Caroline Smailes. [gamebook]. http://rbdigi​tal.onec​lick​digi​ tal.com. Could You Survive Midsomer? 2022. Simon Brew. [gamebook]. S.l.: Cassell. Inside UFO 54-40. 1982. Edward Packard. [gamebook]. Toronto: Bantam. Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure. 2007. Emma Campbell Webster, and Jane Austen. [gamebook]. New York: Riverhead Books. Major Detours. 2021. Zachary Sergi. [gamebook]. New York, NY: Running Press Kids. A Million Little Mistakes. 2010. Heather McElhatton. [gamebook]. London: Headline Review. Pretty Little Mistakes: A Do-over Novel. 2007. Heather McElhatton. [gamebook]. New York: Harper. Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable Path Adventure. 2015a. Ryan North. [gamebook]. New York: Riverhead Books. “A Story as You Like It.” (1963) 1998. Raymond Queneau. [gamestory]. In Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren F. Motte, 1st Dalkey Archive ed, 156–8. Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive Press. To Be or Not To Be. 2015b. Ryan North. [gamebook, book-app]. Tin Man Games. http:// gam​eboo​kadv​entu​res.com/gamebo​oks/to-be-or-not-to-be/. Welcome to Castle Cove. 2018. Kory M. Shrum. [gamebook]. Timberlane Press.

Graphic Adventure Games Broken Age. 2014. Tim Schafer. [point-and-click adventure game]. San Francisco, CA: Double Fine. Explorer. 1987. Graham Relf. [graphic adventure game]. The Ramjam Corporation. Heaven’s Vault. 2019. Inkle. [graphic adventure game]. Inkle Studios. The Forest. 1984. Graham Relf. [graphic adventure game]. Phipps Associates. King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. 1988. Roberta Williams. [graphic adventure game]. Oakhurst, CA: Sierra Online. Myst. 1993. Cyan. [graphic adventure game]. Cyan.

206 Mediography The Oregon Trail. 1971. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. [adventure game; educational game]. Minneapolis, MN. Sorcery! 2013. Inkle. [adventure game]. Inkle Studios.

Hyperbooks The Futographer: A Hyperstory. 2016. Lyle Skains. [hyperbook]. Wonderbox. PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE. 2016. Porpentine Charity Heartscape. [hyperbook]. 2016. https://slimed​augh​ter.com/nymph/. The Pyxis Memo: On Resurrecting the Free Web. 2017. Lyle Skains. [hyperbook]. Wonderbox. Seven Sisters Unmet. forthcoming. Lyle Skains. [hyperbook]. Wonderbox. Subcutanean. 2020. Aaron A. Reed. [procedurally generated novel; hyperbook]. Aaron A. Reed. https://aar​onar​eed.net/subc​utan​ean-book/.

Hyperfiction 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future. 2017. John Bois. [hyperfiction]. SB Nation. https://www.sbnat​ion.com/a/17776-footb​all. StoryFace. 2018. Serge Bouchardon, Frank Davoine, and Alexandra Saemmer. [hyperfiction]. https://bouch​ard.pers.utc.fr/storyf​ace/. Uncle Roger (version 2011). 1986. Judy Malloy. [hyperfiction]. Art Com Electronic Network. http://www.well.com/user/jmal​loy/unc​lero​ger/uncle​rog.html. With Those We Love Alive. 2014. Porpentine, and Brenda Neotenomie. [Twine game; hyperfiction]. http://aliend​ovec​ote.com/uplo​ads/twine/empr​ess/empr​ess.html.

Hypertext Fiction Æ. 1991, 1996. Robert Szczerbowski. [ergodic book; hypertext fiction]. Poland: Publishing House Empty Cloud. afternoon: a story. 1987. Michael Joyce. [hypertext fiction]. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Condiciones Extremas (version 1). 1998. Juan B. Gutiérrez. [hypertext fiction]. Bogota, Colombia: Repository of Artistic Projects of the Institute of Culture of Bogota. http://www.litera​tron​ica.com/conde​x_ve​r_1/index.htm.

Mediography

207

Depression Quest. 2013. Zoe Quinn. [Twine game; hypertext fiction]. http://www.depr​ essi​onqu​est.com/. Dolor y Viceversa. 2002. Blas Valdez. [hypertext fiction]. Mexico. Gabriella Infinita. 1999. Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez. [hypertext fiction]. Colombia. https://www.javeri​ana.edu.co/gab​riel​la_i​nfin​ita/princi​pal.htm. My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. 1996. Olia Lialina. [hypertext fiction]. Russia. http://www.telep​orta​cia.org/war/. Participant’s Capability to Interfere [Iaktagarens’ Förmåga Att Ingripa]. 1992. Karl-Erik Tallmo. [hypertext fiction]. Sweden. Patchwork Girl, or, A Modern Monster a Graveyard, a Journal, a Quilt, a Story & Broken Accents. 1995. Shelley. Jackson. [hypertext fiction]. Eastgate Systems. Queers in Love at the End of the World. 2013. Anna Anthropy. [Twine game; hypertext fiction]. https://w.itch.io/end-of-the-world. Ra-Dio. 1993. Lorenzo Miglioli. [hypertext fiction]. Italy. Uncle Roger (version 2011). 1986. Judy Malloy. [hyperfiction]. Art Com Electronic Network. http://www.well.com/user/jmal​loy/unc​lero​ger/uncle​rog.html. Victory Garden. 1992. Stuart Moulthrop. [hypertext fiction]. Eastgate Systems. With Those We Love Alive. 2014. Porpentine, and Brenda Neotenomie. [Twine game]. http://aliend​ovec​ote.com/uplo​ads/twine/empr​ess/empr​ess.html.

Immersive Experiences Believe Your Eyes. 2016. Punchdrunk International and Samsung. [immersive extended reality experience]. Cannes, Miami, New York, Montreal, Venice: Punchdrunk. https://www.pun​chdr​unk.com/proj​ect/beli​eve-your-eyes/. Convergence Station. 2021–. Meow Wolf. [immersive extended reality experience]. Denver, CO: Meow Wolf. Frankenstein AI – a Monster Made by Many. 2018. Lance Weiler, Nick Fortugno, and Rachel Ginsberg. [immersive extended reality experience, artificial intelligence]. Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab. http://frank​enst​ein.ai/. House of Eternal Return. 2016–. Meow Wolf. [immersive extended reality experience]. Santa Fe, NM: Meow Wolf. Immersive Dickens. 2019. Punchdrunk and V&A Museum. [immersive extended reality experience]. London: Punchdrunk. https://www.punch​drun​kenr​ichm​ent.org.uk/ proj​ect/immers​ive-dick​ens/. The Lost Palace. 2016. Historic Royal Palaces, Chomko & Rosier, Calvium Ltd., and Uninvited Guests. [immersive extended reality experience]. Whitehall Palace, London.

208 Mediography Olion [Traces]. 2016. yello brick, The National Museum of Wales, and Cardiff University. [immersive extended reality experience]. Wales. https://apps.apple.com/ us/app/tra​ces-olion/id122​1327​363. Omega Mart. 2021–. Meow Wolf. [immersive extended reality experience]. Las Vegas, NV: Meow Wolf. Pandemic 1.0. 2011. Lance Weiler. [immersive extended reality experience]. Sundance Film Festival. “Secret Cinema.” n.d. Secret Cinema. [immersive theater company]. Secret Cinema. Accessed November 29, 2021. https://www.secre​tcin​ema.org. Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things. 2014. Lance Weiler. [immersive extended reality experience]. Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab. http://she​rloc​khol​mes.io/.

Interactive Cinema I’m Your Man. 1992. Bob Bejan. [interactive cinema short]. Interfilm Technologies; Sony Pictures Entertainment; Loews Theatres. One Man and His House. 1967. Radusz Cincera. [interactive cinema]. Expo ‘67, Montreal.

Interactive Drama Detroit: Become Human. 2018. David Cage. [interactive drama]. Quantic Dream. Façade. 2005. Michael Mateas, and Andrew Stern. [interactive drama]. Procedural Arts. Fahrenheit. 2005. David Cage. [interactive drama]. Quantic Dream. Heavy Rain. 2010. David Cage. [interactive drama]. Quantic Dream. Life Is Strange. 2015. Dont Nod Entertainment and Deck Nine. [interactive drama]. Square Enix. Until Dawn. 2015. Will Byles, and Nik Bowen. [interactive drama]. Supermassive Games.

Interactive Fiction Avventure Nel Castello [Castle Adventure]. 1982. Enrico Colombini. [interactive fiction]. Italy. 80 Days. 2014. inkle. [interactive fiction; mobile storytelling app]. Inkle Studios.

Mediography

209

Beyond Zork. 1987. Brian Moriarty. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom. Colossal Cave Adventure. 1975–7. Will Crowther, and Don Woods. [interactive fiction]. Curses. 1993a. Graham Nelson. [interactive fiction]. Galatea. 2000. Emily Short. [interactive fiction]. https://col​lect​ion.elit​erat​ure.org/1/ works/sho​rt__​gala​tea.html. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 1984. Douglas Adams, and Steve Meretzky. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom. Hollywood Hijinx. 1986. Dave Anderson, and Liz Cyr-Jones. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom. Interstellar Text Adventure. 2014. [interactive fiction]. https://web.arch​ive.org/web/201​ 5040​2013​153/http://www.inters​tell​armo​vie.com/advent​ure/. A Mind Forever Voyaging. 1985. Steve Meretzky. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom. The Oregon Trail. 1971. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. [adventure game; educational game]. Minneapolis, MN. Plundered Hearts. 1987. Amy Briggs. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom. Sorcery! 2013. inkle. [adventure game]. Inkle Studios. The Sumerian Game. 1964. Mabel Addis, and William McKay. [civilization simulator; educational game]. Westchester, NY: IBM. Trinity. 1986. Brian Moriarty. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom. Zork. 1977. Tim Anderson, Mark Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling. [interactive fiction]. Cambridge, MA: Infocom.

Interactive Movies Bioshock. 2007. Ken Levine. [interactive movie]. 2K Games. Her Story. 2014. Sam Barlow. [interactive movie]. http://www.herst​oryg​ame.com/. L.A. Noire. 2011. Brian McNamara. [interactive movie]. Rockstar Games. The Last Express. (1997) 2011. Jordan Mechner. [interactive movie]. Smoking Car Productions. Phantasmagoria. 1995. Roberta Williams. [interactive movie]. Sierra Online. Star Trek: Borg. 1996. Simon & Schuster. [interactive movie]. Simon & Schuster. Star Wars: Rebel Assault. 1993. LucasArts. [interactive movie]. LucasArts. The Walking Dead. 2012–18. Telltale Games. [interactive movie]. Telltale Games. The Wolf Among Us. 2013. Telltale Games. [interactive movie]. Telltale Games. The X-Files Game. 1998. Greg Roach. [interactive movie]. HyperBole Studios.

210 Mediography

Interactive Novels The Breathing Wall. 2004. Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat, and Chris Joseph. [interactive novel]. https://www.thebr​eath​ingw​all.com/. Zilal al-Wahed [One’s Own Shadows]. 2001. Muhammad Sanajilah. [interactive novel]. Jordan.

Interactive TV Akvaario [Aquarium]. 2000. Teijo Pellinen. [interactive TV]. Finland: YLE; The Finnish Broadcasting Company. American Idol. 2002–. [interactive TV (reality)]. Fox; ABC. “Bandersnatch.” 2018. David Slade. [interactive TV]. Black Mirror. Netflix. “The Breakout.” 2018. Victor Cook. [interactive TV]. Stretch Armstrong. Netflix. D-Dag [D-Day]. 2000. Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Kristian Levring, Thomas Vinterberg, and Lars von Trier. [interactive TV]. Denmark: various. “Epic Choice-o-Rama.” 2020. Todd Grimes. [interactive TV]. Captain Underpants. Netflix. Escape the Undertaker. 2021. Ben Simms. [interactive TV]. Netflix. “Get That Baby!” 2020. Dan Forgione, Pete Jacobs, and Matt Whitlock. [interactive TV]. The Boss Baby. Netflix. “Happy Apocalypse to You.” 2021. Steve Rolston. [interactive TV]. The Last Kids on Earth. Netflix. “Johnny Test’s Ultimate Meatloaf Quest.” 2021. Jim Miller, and Tim Stulby. [interactive TV]. Johnny Test’s Ultimate Meatloaf Quest. Netflix. “Kimmy vs. The Reverend.” 2020. Claire Scanlon. [interactive TV]. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Netflix. “The Maybe Pile.” 2017. Harry Chaskin. [interactive TV]. Buddy Thunderstruck. Netflix. Minecraft: Story Mode. 2018. [interactive TV]. Netflix. 마이 리틀 텔레비전 [My Little Television]. 2015–20. [interactive TV]. South Korea: MBC, KakaoTV. “Ride Along Adventure.” 2020. Allen Jacobsen, Beth Sleven, and Kevin Wotton. [interactive TV]. Spirit Riding Free. Netflix. Sydän Kierroksella [Accidental Lovers]. 2006–7. Mika Lumi Tuomola. [interactive TV]. Finland: YLE. “To Steal or Not to Steal.” 2020. Kenny Park, and Mike West. [interactive TV]. Carmen Sandiego. Netflix. “Trapped in an Epic Tale.” 2017. Roy Burdine, and Johnny Castuciano. [interactive TV]. Puss in Book. Netflix.

Mediography

211

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 1998–2018. [interactive TV (gameshow)]. Sony Pictures Television. Winky Dink and You. 1953. [interactive TV]. CBS. You vs. Wild. 2019. [interactive TV]. Netflix.

Mobile Interactive Digital Narratives 80 Days. 2014. Inkle. [interactive fiction; mobile storytelling app]. Inkle Studios. CYOA Factory. 2021. Morphosis Games. [mobile storytelling platform app]. Morphosis Games. https://mor​phos​isga​mes.itch.io/cyoa-fact​ory. Florence. 2018. Ken Wong. [mobile interactive story]. West Hollywood, CA: Annapurna Interactive. Jellybone. 2017. Kate Pullinger. [mobile interactive story]. Berlin: oolipo. https://www. ool​ipo.com/stor​ies/jellyb​one.

Publishers “Choice of Games LLC.” n.d. Choice of Games. [interactive narrative developer/ publisher]. Accessed June 23, 2021. https://www.choice​ofga​mes.com/. “Eastgate: Serious Hypertext.” n.d. Eastgate Systems, Inc. [hypertext fiction publisher]. Accessed March 10, 2015. http://www.eastg​ate.com/Hypert​ext.html. “inkle.” n.d. inkle. [interactive narrative developer/publisher]. Accessed June 23, 2021. https://www.inkle​stud​ios.com/. oolipo. 2017. oolipo AG. [mobile storytelling platform app]. Bastei Lübbe. https://play. goo​gle.com/store/apps/deta​ils?id=com.ool​ipo&hl=en_GB&gl=US.

Social Media Narratives #1WkNoTech. 2014, 2015. [netprov]. Twitter. “@BPGlobalPR: Wayback Machine Archive.” n.d. @BPGlobalPR. [Twitter parody; netprov]. Wayback Machine. Accessed June 17, 2016. http://web.arch​ive.org/web/*/ https://twit​ter.com/bpg​loba​lpr. “Black Box.” 2012. Jennifer Egan. [Twitter fiction; archontic fiction]. The New Yorker via Twitter, May 25, 2012. https://www.newyor​ker.com/magaz​ine/2012/06/04/ black-box.

212 Mediography “Broken Horseshoe Ranch.” 2020–. Tachina Eva. [social media narrative]. Facebook. 2020–. https://www.faceb​ook.com/broke​nhor​sesh​oera​nch/posts/1089​2171​4080​596. “Fashionably Undead.” 2010. Meg Cabot and Twitterverse. [Twitter fiction; collaborative story; archontic fiction]. BBC Audiobooks America, SFF Audio. 2010. https://www. sffau​dio.com/bbc-aud​iobo​oks-amer​ica-fash​iona​bly-und​ead-by-meg-cabot-and-thetwitt​erve​rse/ “A Group Where We Pretend to Be Boomers.” n.d. [netprov; social media fiction]. Facebook. Accessed November 26, 2021. https://www.faceb​ook.com/gro​ups/20858​ 3495​8392​701/. “Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry.” 2009. Neil Gaiman and Twitterverse. [Twitter fiction; collaborative story; archontic fiction]. BBC Audio, SFF Audio. 2009. https://www. sffau​dio.com/bbc-audio-hea​rts-keys-and-puppe​try-by-neil-gai​man-and-the-twitt​ erve​rse/ I Work for the Web—It’s Almost Like a Job Except It’s Too Much Fun! 2015. Mark C. Marino, and Rob Wittig. [netprov]. http://rob​wit.net/iwfw. Jungle Jim Magazine. 2011–16. Jungle Jim Magazine. [social media fiction]. Cape Town, South Africa. https://www.faceb​ook.com/jungl​ejim​mag/. “SubReddit: The Interface Series.” 2016–. [alternate reality story, netprov, archontic fiction]. Reddit.Com. 2016–. https://www.red​dit.com/r/9M9H​9E9. Such Tweet Sorrow. 2010. Royal Shakespeare Company. [Twitter fiction]. https://twit​ter. com/Suc​h_Tw​eet. Trading Faces. 2015. Mark C. Marino, and Claire Donato. [netprov]. Facebook.

Text Message Novels / Cell Phone Novels Cloak Room. 2004. Ro Gue. [text message novel]. India: 3825Media. http://cloakr​oom. blogs​pot.com/. Yoza Project. 2010–16. Steve Vosloo. [m-novels]. South Africa. https://m4lit.wordpr​ ess.com/.

Twine games Depression Quest. 2013. Zoe Quinn. [Twine game; hypertext fiction]. http://www.depr​ essi​onqu​est.com/. Queers in Love at the End of the World. 2013. Anna Anthropy. [Twine game; hypertext fiction]. https://w.itch.io/end-of-the-world. With Those We Love Alive. 2014. Porpentine, and Brenda Neotenomie. [Twine game; hyperfiction]. http://aliend​ovec​ote.com/uplo​ads/twine/empr​ess/empr​ess.html.

Mediography

213

Video Games Half Life 2. 2004. Valve. [videogame; first person shooter]. Valve. Minecraft. 2011. Mojang Studios. PC. [sandbox game]. Mojang Studios. Spacewar! 1962. Steve Russell. [computer game]. MIT. World of Warcraft. 2004–. Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan, and Tom Chilton. [MMORPG]. Blizzard Entertainment.

Virtual Reality Works Allumette. 2016. Penrose Studios. [virtual reality film]. San Francisco, CA: Penrose Studios. Arden’s Wake. (2018) 2021. Penrose Studios. [virtual reality film]. San Francisco, CA: Penrose Studios. The Dunkirk VR Experience. 2017. Christopher Nolan. [virtual reality film]. Dneg, Practical Magic, Warner Bros. Ephémère. 1998. Char Davies. [virtual reality experience]. http://imm​erse​nce.com/ ephem​ere. Osmose. 1995. Char Davies. [virtual reality experience]. http://imm​erse​nce.com/ osm​ose. Placeholder. 1992. Brenda Laurel, and Rachel Strickland. [virtual reality fiction]. Interval Research Corporation and The Banff Centre for The Performing Arts. http://tauz​ero.com/Brenda​_Lau​rel/Plac​ehol​der/Plac​ehol​der.html. Second Life. 2003. Linden Lab. [online virtual world]. San Francisco, CA: Linden Labs. http://sec​ondl​ife.com/. The Under Presents. 2019. Samantha Gorman, and Danny Cannizzaro. [virtual reality performance]. Tender Claws, Piehole. https://tend​ercl​aws.com/theun​derp​rese​nts. V[R]‌Ignettes: A Microstory Series. 2018–. Mez Breeze. [virtual reality fiction]. https:// www.mezb​reez​edes​ign.com/vr-lit​erat​ure/vri​gnet​tes/.

Visual Albums Dirty Computer. 2018. Janelle Monáe. [visual album, archontic fiction]. Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY: Wondaland, Bad Boy, Atlantic. Lemonade. 2016. Beyoncé. [visual album, archontic narrative]. Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY: Parkwood, Columbia.

214 Mediography

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Walking Sims 9.03m. 2013. Space Budgie. [walking sim]. Space Budgie. The Beginner’s Guide. 2015. Davey Wreden, and Lydia Nelson. [walking sim]. Everything Unlimited Ltd. Dear Esther. 2012. Dan Pinchbeck, and Jack Morgan. [walking sim]. The Chinese Room. Ether One. 2014. White Paper Games. [walking sim]. White Paper Games. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. 2015. Jessica Curry. [walking sim]. The Chinese Room. Firewatch. 2016. Campo Santo. [walking sim]. Campo Santo. Gone Home. 2018. Johnnemann Nordhagen. [walking sim]. The Fullbright Company. The Graveyard. 2008. Tale of Tales. [walking sim]. Tale of Tales. Home Is Where One Starts. 2015. David Wehle. [walking sim]. The Old City: Leviathan. 2014. PostMod SoftWorks. [walking sim]. PostMod SoftWorks. The Path. 2009. Tale of Tales. [walking sim]. Tale of Tales. Proteus. 2013. Ed Key, and David Kanaga. [walking sim]. Twisted Tree Games. Somewhere (Expanded Storyworld). 2017–. Studio Oleomingus. [walking sim]. India: Studio Oleomingus. https://ole​omin​gus.com. The Stanley Parable. 2011. Galactic Cafe. [walking sim]. Galactic Cafe. Sunset. 2015. Tale of Tales. [walking sim]. Tale of Tales. What Remains of Edith Finch. 2017. Giant Sparrow. [walking sim]. Annapurna Interactive.

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Webcomics/toons 신과함께 [Along with the Gods]. 2010–12. Ho-min Joo. [webtoon]. South Korea: Naver Webtoon. Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic. 2002–. Tim Buckley. [webcomic]. https://cad-comic.com/. Hobo Lobo of Hamelin. 2011–14. Stevan Živadinović. [webcomic]. http://hobol​obo.net/. Homestuck. 2009–16. Andrew Hussie. [webcomic]. http://www.mspain​tadv​entu​res. com/?view​log=6&logor​der=olde​stfi​rst. Nimona. 2014. Noelle Stevenson. [webcomic, archontic fiction]. http://www.gin​gerh​aze. com/nim​ona. Xkcd. 2006–. Randall Munroe. [webcomic]. https://xkcd.com/.

Webnovels Diary of Death. 2000. Lu Youqing. [webnovel]. Shanghai, China: Banyan Tree. http:// www.ron​gshu​xia.com. 第一次的親密接觸 [First Intimate Contact]. 1998. Cai Zhiheng. [webnovel]. Taiwan. https://web.arch​ive.org/web/202​1041​3103​525/http://www.jht.idv.tw/.

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Index @horse_ebooks 181 #1WkNoTech 153 #GamerGate 72, 84, 113 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future 2 360° films 7 50 Shades of Grey (James 2011) 95 80 Days 116 9.03m 113 99 Reasons Why 137 AAA development studios 4 Aarseth, Espen 98, 121, 122 Abba, Tom 102 Abbate, Janet 92 Accidental Lovers 148 Acker, Kathy 133 Acornsoft 48 Activision 67, 87, 91 Acute Art 159 Adams, Douglas 31, 177 Addis, Mabel 27, 28, 67, 85 Adventure 88, 89, 92, 136 Adventure Games (2020) 85 adventure games (text/graphic) 3, 7, 13, 29, 31, 36, 42, 48, 50, 64, 77, 85, 86, 89, 98, 108, 146, 190 Æ 50 African and Arabian DF 52–3 afternoon: a story (1987) 71 Akpos stories 53 Akvaario 148 Alice for the iPad (2010) 2, 104 Allende, Isabel 132 Allumette 160 All Your Time-Tossed Selves 30 Along with the Gods 109, 110 alternate reality game (ARG) 3, 14, 157, 158, 173, 176, 178 alternate reality story (ARS) 12, 42, 65, 155, 165 alternate universe (AU) 151–2

alternative realities ARGs 157–8 ARS 155 AU 151, 152 creepypasta 155 dissonant fabulations 153 MOOs 152 MUDs 152 netprov 153 role-playing 155 social media narratives 153, 154 Amanda Project, The 138, 168, 177, 180, 184, 185 Amazing Stories 31 Amazon 20, 25, 32, 68, 100, 101, 107, 140 Amazon reviews for “Bic for Her” pen 65, 153, 168, 173 ambient literature 102 American Idol 145 Amphio 105 anathema 26 Android (Google) 100, 105 Andromeda Strain (1969) 8 Angry Birds 68 antecedents 14, 42, 45, 51, 55, 59, 73, 77, 122 Anthropy, Anna 5, 94, 117, 118 Apple 26, 68, 100, 114 Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, The 131 App Store (Apple) 14, 68, 100, 103 Arcadia 103, 104 archontic fiction 15, 176–87, 193 archontic narratives collaborative 178–80 culture 171–6 fiction 176–87 literature, definition of 169 nature of 176–81 participatory culture 174–6 popular culture 171–4 responsive success 184–7

262 Index spreadable 180–1 transmedia 176–8 Arden’s Wake 160 aristocracy 23 Arnold, Matthew 33 ARPAnet 85, 86, 89 [AR]T 159 artistic movement, principle of 39 artists’ books 121, 122, 127, 135 Asian DF China 55–7 Hong Kong and Taiwan 58–9 India 54, 55 Japan 57–8 Korea 58 VNs 57, 58 webnovels 56, 57 Asimov, Isaac 31 astroturfing 181 Atkinson, Kate 133 attention economy 69, 72, 73, 107, 116, 118, 120 Atwood, Margaret 133 augmented books 138 augmented reality (AR) 14, 42, 100, 102, 139, 144, 158–60, 162, 163, 165 Austen, Jane 8, 122 Authonomy 174 Auto Diverge Mapping System (ADMS) 58, 111 Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, IBM 81 avant-garde driving progress 10 Aventuras AD 87 Avventura nel Castello 87 Bach 23 Bacon-Smith, Camille 175 BAFTA/British Academy Games Award 115, 116 Bakhshi, Hasan 23 Bantam Books 42 Banyan Tree 56, 68 Barbosa, Pedro 50 Barbrook, Richard 62, 65 Barlow, Sam 94, 147 Barnard, Tim 6 Bartle, Richard 152

Bastei Lübbe AG. 106 Beast, The 157 Beginner’s Guide, The 113 Believe Your Eyes 162 Bell, Alice 3 Beloved 133 Bennet, Lizzie 136 Benzon, Thérèse 130 Berez, Joel 92 Beyoncé 10, 11, 167, 172, 173, 177, 183, 188 Beyond Zork 89 Bieber, Justin 68 Big Bang Theory 77 bijuaru noberu 109 Bioshock 146 bishoujo 58 Bizarre Internet Things 1 Black Box 138, 153 Black Mirror/“Bandersnatch” 2, 77, 95, 118, 149 Blade Runner 145 Blast Theory 158 Blind Assassin, The 133 Blog fictions 190 Blood and Guts in High School 133 board games 27, 31 Bolter, Jay David 6 book-apps 3, 14, 100, 101, 103–106, 120, 135, 137, 138, 191, 194 Bootz, Philippe 50 Borges, Jorge Luis 23, 45, 124, 129, 131, 132 born-digital literature (born-DF) 41, 47, 123 Boss Baby: “Get That Baby!,” The 149 Bouchardon, Serge 49 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 23, 61, 70, 181 bourgeois’ taste 10 Brainstorm Enterprise 48 Brandt, Deborah 64, 175 Breathe 105 Breathing Wall, The (2004) 42 Breeze, Mez 160 Brew, Simon 137 Briggs, Amy 89, 91, 191 British Vogue 130 brogrammer culture 85 Broken Age 95 Broken Horseshoe Ranch (2020–) 65, 155

Index Brough, Melissa 175 Buckles, Mary 85, 92, 94 Buddy Thunderstruck: “The Maybe Pile” 148–149 bulletin board system (BBS) 56 Burgess, Jean 63 Byron, Lord 23 Cabot, Meg 153 California Ideal 13 California idealism 99 Californian Ideology 62, 65 California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing 91 Call of Duty: Black Ops III 58 Cameron, Andy 62, 65 Cane 131 Canon 2, 5, 6, 32, 33, 34, 177, 184, 186 Captain Underpants: “Epic Choice-oRama” 149 Carman, Patrick 138 Carmen Sandiego: “To Steal or Not to Steal” 149 Cashore, Kristin 134 Cathy’s Book 133, 134, 135 Cavallaro, Dani 111 cell phone novels 3, 7, 57, 58, 103, 104, 190 Centipede 92 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 132 Chandler, Raymond 31 Chess, Shira 92 Chitra Kavi (Tamil picture poetry) 54 choice-based narrative novels 27 Choice of Games (CoG) 14, 29, 68, 97, 102, 105, 116, 117, 119 ChoiceScript 29, 46, 68, 116 Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) 42, 77, 103, 105, 114, 136, 137 chronosophic anarchism 132 circular DF economies 14, 97, 99, 115–19 Civilisations AR 159 Cixous, Hélene 128 Clannad 58, 112 Cloak Room 54, 55 Clockwork Orange, A 104 code-breaking 4, 80, 81 cognitive dissonance 15 cognitive ergodicity 132

263

collaborative (fiction/stories) 15, 157, 178–80, 186 Colombini, Enrico 87 Colossal Cave Adventure 27, 28, 48, 67, 85, 115 Colossus computers 81 Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab, the 163 Columbia University 28 Comixology 107 commercialization 25, 26, 66, 81, 85, 93, 116 communications revolution, fifteenthcentury 27 communities of practice 2, 4, 12, 15, 179, 183, 187, 193, 194 Composition No. 1 32, 45 CompuNet 152 CompuServe 152 Computations, Inc., 92 Computer Game Review ’s Golden Triad Award 146 computer games 12, 27, 28, 30, 32–5, 46, 77, 88, 111, 115, 121, 145, 189, 194 computing 7, 80–5, 191 Condiciones Extremas 51 consignment 68 constraints 44, 45, 69, 100, 122, 128, 141, 192 Convergence Station 164 Coolidge, Sarah 128 Coover, Robert 71 corporate capitalism 62 Could You Survive Midsomer? 137 covid-19 pandemic 155 creative and technological innovation 12 Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial license 108 Creative Commons copyright system 63 creepypasta 12, 155, 157, 165, 168, 172, 176, 179, 183, 184, 186, 189, 192 Crichton, Michael 8 Crowther, Patricia 88, 89, 91 Crowther, Will 27, 28, 29, 48, 67, 85, 88, 136 Ctrl-Alt-Del 109 cult adoption 24 cultural cycles of art and industry 12 cultural hegemony 4–5

264 Index cultural series 6, 26 cultural trends 6 Currah, Andrew 66 Current, Rising 160 Curses 115, 116 cybertext 98, 122 cyborgian identity 125 CYOA Factory 103 Cyr-Jones, Liz 89 Daniel Deronda 130, 136 Dannenberg, Hilary P. 128, 130 Darwin, Charles 23 dastangoi 45, 54 Daum 58, 109 Davies, Char 160 da Vinci 78 Davis, Rhett 138 D-Day 148 Dear David 65, 155 Dear Esther 72, 113–115 death of the book (discourse) 33, 34 Deep Listener, The 159 defamiliarization 35, 40, 44, 70, 121, 122, 129 democracy 62–6 Dena, Christy 176 Depression Quest (Quinn 2013) 35, 72, 118 Derecho, Abigail 15, 169, 170, 182 desire paths 24, 29, 30 Detroit: Become Human 150 devaluation, women’s work 78–80 dialogism 126–128, 135, 170, 174, 187 Diary of a Zulu Girl (2013–20) 53 Diary of Death 56 Dickens, Charles 162 Dictée 132 digital creativity and capitalism 70–2 DF and free enterprise 66–70 internet as democracy 62–6 Digital Entertainment Network 148 digital fiction (DF) 1–2, 9, 12 African and Arabian 52–3 Asian 53–9 creative and technological innovation 12 definition 2–4, 40–4 (re)emergence 36–7

evolutionary pressures 44–7 and free enterprise 66–70 innovation 27–36 internet 13 multiplicity 1–2 state 3–8 variations of 12 Western 48–52 digitally enabled performances 14 digital media 3, 6, 14, 15, 21, 36, 40, 42, 54, 61–3, 71, 102, 122, 127, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 161, 162, 167, 170, 174, 182, 187, 189, 192–4 digital narrative 9, 29, 46, 48, 57, 103, 115 digital plenitude 2, 6 digital technology 6, 36, 43, 46, 48, 51, 52, 53, 140, 158 Dillenberger, Paul 27 Dinamic Software 48 Dirty Computer 174, 177 Discord 153 Dispossessed, The 132 dissonant fabulations 65, 153, 165, 168, 172, 173, 179, 183 Di-yi ci de qinmi jiechu 56 dōjinshi 58, 71, 173, 190 Doki Doki Literature Club! 58, 112 Dolor y Viceversa 51 Dovey, Jonathan 102 Dracula (1897) 8, 9 Drucker, Johanna 135 Duchamp, Marcel 135 Dungeons & Dragons 31, 77, 85, 88, 89, 152 Dunkirk VR Experience, The 160 dwarsligger 140 Eastgate hypertexts 54 Eastgate Systems 26, 29, 48, 67 eBay 64 ebook 14, 20, 30, 32, 34, 41, 44, 51, 100, 103, 104, 107, 119, 140, 141, 190 Edison 23, 24 Editions at Play 105, 119 edutainment game 28 Edwards, Alexandra 170 Egan, Jennifer 138, 153 eInk 20

Index Eisenstein, Elizabeth 27 Eko 146 electronic book review 34 electronic literature (elit) 2, 39, 85, 98, 105, 122 Electronic Literature Collection 7, 64 Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) 34, 105 ELF Corporation 57 ELF Corporation’s innovation 111 Eliot, George 130 Eliot, T.S. 33 elitism 6, 10, 35 Ellis, Adam 155 Ellison, Harlan 125, 126 Elsie Shutt’s Computations, Inc. 92 English literature (study of) 31, 32 enhanced books 3, 34 enhanced ebooks 101–3 ENIAC 81 Enns, Anthony 147 Ensslin, Astrid 14, 98 Ephémère 160 epistolary texts 127 epoetry 52 ePub3 140 equal pay laws 82 ergodic fiction 98 ergodic literature 124 cognitive/conceptual texts 124–5 cognitive ergodicity 132 components of 124–9 defamiliarization 121 dialogism 127, 128, 135 ergodic print 129–35 gamebooks and path-literature 136–7 hybrid hyper books 137–41 mainstream 129–41 multimodality 126–8 multiplicity 127 postmodernism 122 textuality 121–2 ergodic print literature 16, 129–35 Escape the Undertaker 149 Eskelinen, Markku 5 Ether One 113 Etsy 64 Eva, Tachina 155

265

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture 113 Explorer 113 Expo ’67 145 extended reality (XR) 15, 158–161, 193 Eyre Affair, The 133 Faber & Faber 104 Façade 150 Facebook 26, 53, 64, 68, 153, 155, 158, 189 Fahrenheit 150 Fahrenheit 451 147 fanfiction 3, 15, 24, 26, 42, 43, 50, 57, 66, 67, 69, 71, 151, 155, 169, 173 FanLib 67, 172, 174 Fashionably Undead 153 Fedorova, Natalia 50 Fernández-Vara, Clara 85, 95 Fforde, Jasper 133 Ficciones 131 Fighting Fantasy books 136 Finnegan’s Wake 32 Firewatch 113, 115 First Intimate Contact 56 first-to-air-on-TV interracial kiss 11 Fisher, Allen 84 Fisher, Caitlin 159 Fiske, John 8, 10–11, 171, 173 Five Fables 104 Flash works (fiction) 30 Flickr 63 Ford, Sam 23, 180 Forest, The 113 FORTRAN programming language 81, 85 Frankenstein (1818) 1–2, 8, 9 Frankenstein A.I. 163 Frankenstein: Interactive 104 Franklin, Rosalind 80 Freelance Programmers Ltd. 92 free market web-based democracy 13 Fullbright Company, the 119 full-motion video (FMV) 144, 146, 147, 150, 151 Futographer, The 140 Future of the Book, The (1996) 33 Gabriella Infinita 51 Gaiman, Neil 153, 178

266 Index Galatea 94, 111 Galpin, Vashti 84 game awards 115 gamebooks 14, 42, 69, 77, 104, 109, 111, 129, 135–137, 144, 147, 149, 151 Game Maker 94 games adventure 3, 7, 13, 29, 31, 36, 42, 48, 50, 64, 77, 85, 86, 89, 98, 108, 146, 190 alternate reality 3, 14, 157, 158, 173, 176, 178 literary 97–120 movie 144 narrative 3, 27, 95, 139 simulation 9, 28 wandering 5 Games Magazine 146 Garbe, Jacob 139 Garden of Forking Paths, The 124, 131 Gates, Bill 23 Gaudreault, André 6 Gears of War 111 gender disparity 84 equality 10 ideology 81 General Public License (GPL) 63 Get Lamp (2011) 85, 88 Gibbons, Alison 127 Gibson, William 145 gift economy/internet gift economy 12–13, 62–4, 66, 71, 72, 94, 182, 191 Gilligan, Shannon 136 Gita Govinda (epic poetry and performance) 54 Gitelman, Lisa 24 Golden Notebook, The 132 Goldhaber, Michael H. 69 Gone Home 2, 68, 113, 115 GoodReads 140 Google 26, 33, 68, 100, 103, 105, 114 Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) platforms 100 Google Creative Labs 105 Google Play 14, 68 Google Play Store 100, 103

Grand Theft Auto V 58 Graphic Interchange Formats (GIFs) 70 Graveyard, The 113 Green, Joshua 180 Green Box, The 135 Groundhog Day 145 Group Where We Pretend to be Boomers, A 153, 154 Gu, Ming Dong 55 Gue, Ro 54 Guo, Jinghua 56 Gutenberg, Johannes 23, 27 Gutenberg Galaxy, The (1962) 33 Gutiérrez, Juan B. 51 Half Life 2 113 Hamlet 32, 69, 137 Harlem Renaissance 131 HarperCollins 109, 138, 177, 186 Hayles, N. Katherine 94 Haynes, Sarah 178, 179 Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry 153, 168, 178, 179, 184, 186 Heat Death of the Universe, The 125 Heaven’s Vault 116 Heavy Rain 150 hegemonic power 128 Heinemann, Bill 27 heritage 159 Heroes television show 109 Her Story 147 Hicks, Mar 82, 83, 88 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams and Meretzky 1984) 31 Hjorth, Larissa 104 Hobo Lobo of Hamelin 109 Hockx, Michel 56 Holberton, Betty 81 Hollywood Hijinx 89 Holodeck 124, 143, 193 alternative realities 151–8 extended reality 158–61 immersive theater 161–4 interactive cinema and movies 144–7 interactive drama 149–51 interactive TV 147–9 Home Is Where One Starts 113

Index Homestuck (2009–16) 2, 108 Hopper, Grace 81 Hopscotch 32, 45 Horii, Yuji 57, 87, 109 Hosny, Reham 52, 159 House of Eternal Return 163, 164 House of Leaves 32 Howey, Hugh 68, 71 How to Be Both 134 How to Suppress Women’s Writing 79 humanism 20 Husárová, Zuzana 50 Hussie, Andrew 108 hybrid books 127, 137–141 economy 69 hyper books 137–41 print-digital texts 121 Hyde Park 159 hyperbooks 14, 129, 137–41 hypertext (fictions) 1, 5, 72 hypnagogic effect 15, 143, 157, 162, 192 Iaktagarens’ förmåga att ingripa 50 IBM Corporation 28, 67 iButterfly 158 Ice-Bound Concordance, The 139 I Ching 45, 55, 194 idea-generation, art 22 IF Theory Reader 88 IF-Wiki 94 Ikeda, Ryan 6 Illuminae 134, 135 Immersive Dickens 162 immersive extended reality (IXR) 161–165 immersive mixed reality theater (IMRT) 161 immersive theater 161–4 I’m Your Man 145 In a Grove 127 indie games 29 indigenous oral narratives 159 individual ingenuity 22–4 individualism 62 Industrial Revolution 4 infinite canvas 107, 108

267

Infocom 13, 29, 31, 48, 64, 67, 71, 73, 77, 78, 85, 115, 116, 191 audience 92 Cornerstone, business application 86–7 demise 91, 93 games 86, 88, 89, 91, 92 IF 87, 88, 93–5 implementor 89, 91 Plundered Hearts 89 Inform software 29, 31, 46, 64, 95, 97 Ingress Prime 159, 160, 162 ink (authoring language) 29, 46, 116 inkle 14, 29, 97, 102, 104, 116, 117, 119 inklewriter 116 innovation cycles 20–7 definition 23 DF 27–30 diffusion 21 (re)emergence, DF 36–7 individual ingenuity 22–4 mainstream adoption 24–7 mainstream games and niche DF 30–6 necessity 21, 23–4 Inside UFO 54-40 (1982) 136 Instagram 26, 69 interactive cinema and movies 144–7 drama (idrama) 111, 144, 149–151 movie (imovie) 3, 14, 144–147, 149, 150, 160, 165, 189 storytelling 3 TV 147–9 interactive digital narrative (IDN) 3, 41 interactive fiction (IF) 13, 24, 29, 34, 35, 36, 42, 46, 48, 50, 57, 64, 71, 73, 109, 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 146, 149, 152, 190, 191 definition 94 Infocom 77, 78, 85–9, 91–5 reframing history 87–93 women in computing 80–5 women’s work, historical devaluation of 78–80 Interactive Fiction (IF) Database 64, 94, 118 interactivity 3, 12, 14, 15, 41–2, 59, 107, 108, 121, 135, 140, 146–148, 150, 151, 190, 191

268 Index Interface Series, The 65, 155, 157, 168, 178 International Computers Limited (ICL) 83, 92 internet as democracy dissonant fabulations 65 gift economy 62, 63 read/write culture 63–4 vernacular creativity 63 writing-based literacy 64 Internet Literature 56 Interstellar Text Adventure 95 intfiction forum 94 iOS (Apple) mobile operating systems 100, 105 itch.io 44, 95, 101, 104, 112, 114, 118, 140 It’s a Wonderful Life 145 I Work for the Web 153 Jackson, Shelley 1, 71 James, E.L. 71 Jane Unlimited 134, 135 Japanese RPGs (JRPGs) 58 Jazz 133 Jellybone 106 Jenkins, Henry 43, 180 Jerz, Dennis 85 Jin, Dal Yong 109 Jobs, Steve 23, 100 Johnny Test’s Ultimate Meatloaf Quest 149 Journey to the West, The 184 Joyce, Michael 71 Jungle Jim 53 Kagen, Melissa 113 Kanno, Hiroyuki 57, 111 Kanon (1999) 58, 112 Katha stories 45, 54 Kaufman, Charlie 145 Keats 23 keitai shōsetsu 57, 105 Kenney, Martin 68 Key 58 Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon 68, 137 Kindle Worlds 25, 67, 172, 174 King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988) 89, 90 KinoAutomat 145 Klaiber, Isabell 179

Klimas, Chris 72, 117 Kocho 103 Koizara 104 Labyrinth 86 LambdaMOO 169 Landow, George 41 L.A. Noire 146, 150 Larsen, Deena 5 Last Express, The 146 Last Kids on Earth: “Happy Apocalypse to You,” The 149 Lathe of Heaven, The 132 LA Times Festival of Books 104 Laurel, Brenda 160 l’écriture feminine 128 Left Hand of Darkness, The 32, 132 legitimacy (specific/bourgeois/popular) 61 Le Guin, Ursula K. 31, 132 Lemonade (2016) 11, 172, 177 Lessig, Lawrence 63, 69, 175 Lessing, Doris 132 Lialina, Olia 50 Library of Babel, The 131 Life After Life 133, 134 Life Is Strange 150, 151 Light, Jennifer S. 80 literal intertextuality 133 literary games 14, 191 circular digital fiction economies 115–19 market ecology 99–101 mobile apps 102–6 persistent 101–19 VNs 109–12 walking sims 112–15 webcomics 106–9 literary gaming 14 Little Mermaid, The 104 live action role-playing (LARPing) 152 locative stories 102 London’s Kensington Gardens 159 LonelyGir l15, 181 López, Dolores Romero 51 Lost in Austen 136 Lost Palace, The 162 Lovelace, Ada 25 Lu, Youquing 56 LucasArts 77, 86, 146

Index ludoliterary hybrids 98 Lumberjanes 186 MacGyvering 24 machinists 82 Mad Men 180 mainstream adoption Amazon and Netflix 25 commercialization 25 and cult adoption 24 failure 25–6 S-curve 25, 26 Major Detours 137 Malloy, Judy 5, 48, 169 Mansfield Park 122, 136 Maphoto, Mike 53 Margolis, Jane 84 Marino, Mark 153 Marion, Philippe 6 market ecology, literary games 99–101 Márquez, Gabriel García 132 Martens, Marianne 185 Marvel Cinematic Universe 167, 177, 183–185 massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) 42 Mateas, Michael 150 Matilda effect 79, 88 Matrix, The 144, 167, 173, 177, 184 Mayweather, Cindi 174 MC2-Microids 95 McCloy-Kelley, Lisa 103 McElhatton, Heather 137 McHale, Brian 122 McKay, William 27, 67, 85 McLuhan, Marshall 33 McVittie, Eric 23 Memento 145 memes 1, 2, 15, 21, 70, 106, 135, 176, 178, 182, 183, 184, 186 Memory Librarian, The 174 Memory Store, The 178, 179 Menon, Nirmala 54 Meow Wolf 163 Metaverse 144, 158, 164 microfinancing 116 microstory 161 Middlemarch 130, 134

269

Midsomer Murders 137 Milligan, Chloe Anne 102 Million Little Mistakes, A 137 Million Penguins, A 168, 183, 185, 186 Mind Forever Voyaging, A 31 Minecraft: Story Mode 149 Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) 67 mixed reality (MR) 14, 158, 192 m-novels 53 Mobi 100, 101, 140 mobile apps 14, 97, 98, 102–6 mock biography 131 Monáe, Janelle 167, 173, 174, 177, 183, 188 Montfort, Nick 85, 94 Montgomery, R.A. 136 Morrison, Toni 133 Moulthrop, Stuart 5, 9, 71 movie-games 144 Mrs Dalloway 131 Ms. Pac Man 92 MUD, Object-Oriented (MOO) 14, 152, 157, 163, 167, 175, 178, 179, 182, 184 Mukherjee, Souvik 45, 54 multiform stories 145 multimedia 12, 29, 41, 43, 58, 104, 109, 140, 161 multimodality 3, 43, 45, 59, 122, 126–129, 191 multimodal texts 127 multiplatform (book/project) 167, 177, 185, 186 multi-user dungeons (MUDs) 14, 42, 152, 157, 167, 175, 178, 179, 182, 184 Mumford, Lewis 28, 36 Munroe, Randall 108 Murray, Janet 143, 144, 145, 146, 157, 162 Murray, John T. 85, 98 Murray, Simone 66 My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) 50, 51 My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Faust 2010–19) 11 My Little Television 148 Myst 113 Mystery House 86

270 Index narrabases 5 narrative-based fiction 3 narrative games 3, 27, 95, 139 narrative technologies 3 National Health Service (NHS) 83 National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet) 152 natural narrative 3, 42, 55 Naver 58, 109 Nelson, Graham 29, 31, 94, 115, 116, 117, 119 Netflix 10, 25, 95, 109, 118, 146, 148, 149, 151 networked improvised narrative (netprov) 15, 42, 153, 155, 165, 172, 179, 192 Netzliterature 50 New Super Mario 111 New Yorker, The 153 Next Generation Paper project 140 Ngram Viewer, Google 33 niche DF 30–6 niche subculture 24 Nichols, Nichelle 11 Night Film 138, 139 Nimona 109, 178, 185, 186 Nineteen Eighty-Four 147 Nochlin, Linda 78 North, Ryan 32, 69, 137 novelty 21 Nunberg, Geoffrey 33 Oh No Robot 108 Old City: Leviathan, The 113 Omega Mart 164 One Man and His House 145, 150 One Million Monkeys 179 One Thousand and One Nights 45 On the Road 104 Ontroerend Goed 162 Oolipo app 103, 106 Opoku-Agyemang, Kwabena 53 Oregon Trail, The 27, 28, 48, 67, 85 O’Reilly, Tim 64 Orlando 131, 170 Osmose 160 otome 58, 111 Oulipo 32, 42, 45, 47, 50, 94, 121, 122, 123, 135, 136 Oyeyemi, Helen 134

Packard, Edward 136 Pajak, Andrzej 50 Pandemic 1.0 163 Paradise 133, 187 Parallax 107, 109 parser-based adventure games 29, 42 participation 2, 12, 41, 42, 45, 59, 64, 66, 70, 147, 152, 155, 167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 181, 184, 191, 193 participatory culture 167, 169, 174–176 exchange 42–3 web 64 Patchwork Girl (1995) 1, 67, 71 Path, The 103, 113 Patta Chitra (narrative scroll paintings) 54 PC Gamer ’s Editor’s Choice Award 146 Peaces 134 Pears, Iain 103 Pedro Páramo 132 Péndulo Studios 95 Penrose Studios 160 Pessl, Marisha 138 Phantasmagoria 146 phonograph 24 Picador 140 Pinchbeck, Dan 113 Placeholder 160 Planet IF 94 platform-mediated content creation 68, 103 playful innovations 28 Plotkin, Andrew 94 plugging in 144 Plundered Hearts 86, 89, 91, 96, 191 Poe Macabre Collection, The 104 Pokémon Go 158–160, 162, 192 Polygon 147 polymorphic fictions 176 Pong 27 popular culture 10–11, 171–4, 191 Porpentine/Porpentine Charity Heartscape 5, 94, 117, 118, 140 Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken 87 Portopia Serial Murder Case, The 57, 87, 111 post-institutionalization 6 Pretty Little Mistakes 137

Index Pride and Prejudice (1813) 8, 136 Primer 145 principles of legitimacy 9–10 print media 14 prosumer 58, 61, 63, 120 Protagonize 179 Proteus 113 proto-ebook 51 proto-hypertexts 45, 122 PRY 104 Psychic High School 65, 157 PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE 140, 141 publishing industry 5, 31, 36, 43, 63, 69, 79, 100, 121, 187, 190, 191 Pullinger, Kate 102, 105, 106 Punchdrunk 162 Puss in Book: “Trapped in an Epic Tale” 149 Pyxis Memo: On Resurrecting the Free Web, The 140 qualia 125 Quantic Dream 150 quantum authoring 139 Queers in Love at the End of the World 117, 118 Queneau, Raymond 136 Quinn, Zoë 35, 84 Ra-Dio (Miglioli 1993) 50 Rashomon 127, 145 Rawitsch, Don 27, 48, 85 read/write culture 64, 175 Reddit 64, 65, 155 Red Green & Blue Co, The 105 Reed, Aaron 85, 95, 98, 139 Region Between, The 125, 126 Ren’Py 112 Retallack, Joan 128 RetroGamer 85 Rise of the Videogame Zinesters 117 Riverhead Books 137 Robbins, Frieda Robscheit 80 Roberts, Michael 115 Robles, Ángela Ruíz 51 Rogers, Everett M. 25, 30 role-playing games (RPGs) 27, 31, 36, 42, 58, 72, 77, 85, 111, 182 Roman 50

Romeo and/or Juliet 137, 155, 187 Rosalie 167 Rossiter, Margaret 79, 88 Roy, Samya Brata 54 Royal Opera House, The 160 Royal Shakespeare Company, the 155, 160 Rubin, Peter 160 Ruiz, Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez 51 Rulfo, Juan 132 RuNet 50 Russ, Joanna 79 Rutter, Kirsten 155 Ryan, Marie-Laure 9 S. 133 Salter, Anastasia 85, 89, 98, 104 samizdat 50 Sanajilah, Muhammad 52 Santana, Stephanie Bosch 53 Sarkeesian, Anita 84 Schmidt, Henrike 50 Scott, Jason 85 SCP Foundation 65, 157, 168, 175, 177–179, 182, 184–186 Second Life 152 second screens 148 Secret Cinema 162 Seed 105 self-actualization goals 12 Sergi, Zachary 137 Seven Sisters Unmet 140 Shakespeare’s Sonnets 104 Shanmugapriya, T. 54 Shatner, William 11 Shelley, Mary 1, 8, 163 She-Ra: Princess of Power 109 Sherlock 104 Sherlock Holmes and the Internet of Things 163 Shikibu, Murasaki 122, 129, 130 Shirley, Stephanie 92, 93 Short, Emily 85, 111 Shrum, Kory M. 137 Shutt, Elsie 92, 93 Shyamalan, M. Night 145 Sierra Online 77, 89, 146 Silicon Valley 62

271

272 Index Simmie, James 23 simulation games 9, 28 Skeleton Creek 138 Slender Man 2, 168, 175, 176, 178, 179, 184–186 Sliding Doors 145 Smailes, Caroline 137 Smith, Ali 134 SMS novels 54 SnapChat 155 social changes 10, 11 social media fictions 7, 14, 42, 54 narratives 15, 46, 154, 190 Solar System 104 Somewhere 54 Sorcery! 116 SoundCloud 44 SourceForge 63 Spacewar! 27 Spirit Riding Free: “Ride Along Adventure” 149 Sprawl 144, 169 spreadable (culture/media) 15, 180–1 Stallman, Richard 63 stand-alone book-apps 103 Stanley Parable, The 113, 115 Star Trek 31, 124, 144, 167, 177 Star Trek: Borg 146 Star Wars 146, 167, 177, 184 Star Wars: Rebel Assault 146 Star Wars Uncut 174 Steam 14, 68, 101, 104, 111, 114 Stephanie Shirley’s Freelance Programmers Ltd. 92 Stephenson, Neal 145 Stern, Andrew 150 Sterne, Lawrence 122 Stevenson, Noelle 178, 185 Stoker, Bram 8 Story as You Like It, A 136 storygames 3 StoryPassers 179 StorySpace software 26, 29, 67 Stretch Armstrong: “The Breakout” 149 Strickland, Rachel 160 Studio Oleomingus 54 Subcutanean 139

SubReddits 155, 168, 189 Such Tweet Sorrow 155, 156 Sumerian Game, The 27, 28, 48, 67, 85 Sundance Film Festival 160 Sunset 113 Supernatural 183, 184 Suter, Beat 47, 50 Sword Art Online 178 SXSW Gamer’s Voice Awards, the 115 Sydän Kierroksella 148 syuzhet 41 Szczerbowski, Robert 50 tactile fictions 127 Tale of Genji, The 122, 129, 130, 136, 192 talk explosion 128 Team Salvato 58 Techsty 50 Telltale Games 95, 146, 148 Tender Claws 104, 160 Teneta literary competition 50 Tesla 23 Text Adventure Development System (TADS) 64, 97, 115, 116 Thomas, Bronwen 128, 184 Time Warner 104 thumb novel 57 Time Magazine 116 Tiptree, James Jr. 145 Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 131 To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure 32, 69, 70, 104, 137 Todd, Anna 71 Toomer, Jean 131 TouchPress 103–105, 116, 119 tourism 159 traces 12, 44, 49, 50, 51, 95 Traces 162 Trading Faces 153 transmedia (fiction/franchises) 2, 15, 176–178, 189, 193 Trinity (Moriarty 1986) 31 triple-A development studios 4 Tristram Shandy (1759–67) 122 Trubshaw, Roy 152 Tumblr 185 Turing, Alan 23 Twilight series 185

Index Twine 14, 29, 46, 72, 73, 94, 95, 97, 116–19 Twine games 3, 4, 43, 72, 118 Twine Revolution 5 Twitter 153, 174, 180, 181, 189 bots 30 fiction 3, 12, 42, 54, 65, 138, 155, 168 Ulysses 9, 32, 187 Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: “Kimmy vs. The Reverend” 149 Uncle Roger 48, 49 uncompensated UGC 68 unconscious bias 79 Under Presents, The 160 Unfortunates, The 32, 45 University of Baltimore 29 unmixed media 15 Unreal City 159 Until Dawn 150 U.S. Department of Commerce 25 user-generated content (UGC) 63 Valdez, Blas 51 vandalism 186 van Gogh 78 vernacular creativity 63 Victory Garden 67, 71 virtual reality (VR) 3, 14, 42, 144, 150, 158, 160–162, 165, 189 Visit from the Goon Squad, A 104, 176, 177 Visual Editions 105, 106 visual novel (VN) 3, 7, 14, 48, 57, 58, 72, 73, 87, 95, 97, 98, 102, 104, 109–112, 144, 150, 190, 192 Visual Novel Maker 112 vooks 3, 34 V[R]‌ignettes 160, 161 Wachowski sisters 145 Wales Interactive 146 Walking Dead, The 146 walking sims 3–5, 14, 54, 72, 95, 97, 98, 102, 112–115, 119–121, 192 Walsh, Joanna 105 wandering games 5 wangluo wenxue 56 War Horse 104 war-necessitated code-breakers 4

273

War of the Worlds 104 Waste Land, The 104 Wattpad 56, 57, 68 Web 2.0 41, 64, 107, 175 webcomics 3, 14, 24, 58, 97, 98, 102, 106– 109, 120, 178, 185, 186 web fiction 34 webnovels 3, 7, 42, 43, 56–58, 68, 72, 73, 190 WEBook 179 Webster, Emma Campbell 136 webtoons 3, 7, 58, 73, 97, 102, 107, 108, 109, 184, 190 Weiler, Lance 163 Welcome to Castle Cove 137 Well of Lost Plots, The 138 Wells, H.G. 31 West Coast politics 62 Western DF French language 49–50 German-language 50 Portuguese-language works 50 Russian-language 50 Spanish-language 50, 51 Uncle Roger 48, 49 What Football Will Look Like in the Future (2017) 2 What Remains of Edith Finch 113, 115 WhatsApp 26 Which Way books 136 Whipple, George Hoyt 80 Whitney, Eli 23 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 145 Williams, Roberta 86, 89, 90, 146 Windows Magazine 146 Winky Dink and You 147 WireBreak Entertainment 148 With Those We Love Alive 118 Wittig, Rob 153 Wolf Among Us, The 146 women in computing 80–5 work, historical devaluation of 78–80 Wondaland 174 Woods, Don 27, 48, 67, 85, 88 Woolf, Virginia 130, 131 workplace harassment 10 World of Warcraft 111

274 Index World Wide Web 1, 46, 48, 61, 62, 63, 71, 152 World Without Oil 157, 173 Wozniak 23 Writerly culture 175

YouTube 63, 64, 68, 69 You vs. Wild 149 Yoza Project 53 YU-NO: A Girl Who Chats Love at the Bound of This World 57

X-Files Game, The 146 xkcd 108

Zilal al-Wahed 52 Zoline, Pamela 125 Zork 2, 86, 89, 91 Zuckerberg, Mark 158 Zysman, John 68

young adult (YA) markets 135 Younis, Eman 52 Your Co-Worker Could Be a Space Alien 135