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Just discovered an interesting group blog concerning digital textuality and literature, run by Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Andrew Stern, Noah Wardrip-Fruin -- I've met most of these folks, Noah having participated in the Mini Digi Po event here in New York, and Nick and Stuart hosting their own events which I've attended.
Some good, detailed and cogent discussion for those interested in the field, though as usual I have reservations about a horse-before-the-carriage aspect to approaches to digital literature (in this case, mostly fiction) -- there seems to be this agreement that there has not been a truly successful (or universally applauded, i.e. outside of the immediate electronic lit culture) hyperlink-based work (i.e. successful in the way Hemingway was successful), but that it must be possible to use the link and higher forms of "interactivity" -- such as user influenced plot outcomes -- simply because the technology is available. My tendency is to think of it this way: yes, it's possible, but it's also possible that people speaking English could decide not to use case forms simply because they are superfluous, or invent new verb tenses simply because they use them in other cultures--so we know its supportable by our language faculty--but we've not found a need to do so and forcing such switches has never been successful in the past.
Perhaps it's possible that literature will never find room for user-influenced textual adventures -- perhaps, in fact, one reads specifically because it is the one time in one's life when one is not having to make choices involving the outcome of a narrative -- the one time an individual is not a writer. Of course game worlds would seem to contradict this, but that's why they are called "games." Well, this is all clumsily phrased -- I don't want to write off a venture with which in fact I have great sympathy. Certainly, I'm interested in "interactive" literature of this sort, but I think that the focus should not be on the presence of loops and control structures in a fictional work--or whatever it is a machine adds--but how one can (for example) inject ethical dimensions to the choices one makes in such a work, hence raising the art to the level that, say, Dostoyevsky did when he asked us to imagine murder as the solution to some existential puzzle. Maybe a more fruitful approach would be to think of all the added elements of interactive textuality as flaws and detriments--it's a bug not a feature approach.
I discovered the blog by looking at the new module from Stephen's Web ~ Referrer System which shows all the places from which people have followed links to get here. (Scroll down below my archives lists to see it.) I recommend it to you bloggers out there if you want to know whose visiting and how.
Posted by Brian Stefans at June 7, 2003 09:43 PM