If you’re seriously interested in hyperfiction, point your browser immediately to the download site for “Architecture, Authorial Idioms and Early Observations of the Interactive Drama Façade.” The Façade project — a collaboration between Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern — is one of the most interesting things happening in the hyperfiction field. This new CMU CS tech report is the best available overview of the project. Here’s their abstract:

Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative — an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we are completing a three year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we are building a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the user experiences a story from a first-person perspective. Façade will be publicly released as a free download in 2003.

This is the telling title of an article by Greg M. Smith in the new issue of Game Studies. It’s amazing how much people don’t think of computer games as a textual medium — as something that people called writers are involved in creating.

This has come up recently because I’m teaching electronic writing next semester. In connection with this a number of people have asked me something like, “Is it possible to make a living as an electronic writer?” My answer is, “Of course.” Electronic poets subsist the way print poets do (day jobs, teaching, grants, readings for the well-known) and electronic writers in popular genres can make a quite healthy income. They say, “Popular electronic writing?” And I say, “Yes: computer games.” Sometimes they understand what I mean immediately, but more often I have to talk about things like our SIGGRAPH 2003 panel where James Leach discussed the tens of thousands of lines of human-authored dialogue that went into making Black & White the experience it is.

Of course, despite my spin on the situation, it’s also worth noting that the Game Studies article names a director, character designer, and producer for the game on which it focuses (Final Fantasy VII) — but not a writer. (Unfortunately, it also mis-spells Hironobu Sakaguchi’s name.) And, well, it’s also the case that the dialogue in FF7 isn’t usually held up as a shining example of the writer’s craft (but then, neither is that in many popular entertainments).

I think the most valuable contribution of Smith’s article for electronic writers will be its discussion of writing problems particular to RPG-style games, such as the “requirement of using very terse dialogue lines to reveal complicated backstory” with relatively little requirement for text to move the plot forward (which happens through the gameplay). Smith discusses the use of “[m]eetings, informants, news reports, discussing information already known by the characters, terms of address, embedding history in character attitudes and using outsiders to prompt questions” in FF7 and how these both follow and diverge from standard practices in writing for film and television.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation struck me as a somewhat conservative group in the mid-1990s, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable aligning myself with them. Now of course the Republican party, and with it the U.S. government, is in the hands of people who aren’t true conservatives at all (though they may try to wear the name). It’s increasingly clear that those who are running the U.S. government are Right-wing in the Pinochet sense, complete with arrests without evidence, detention camps, secret tribunals, and now a plan for unlimited surveillance of U.S. citizens (Total Information Awareness).

As the Republican Right have shown their true colors the gap between their beliefs and those of real conservatives has become increasingly clear. And the EFF now finds itself, in a effect, a resistance group — and, given its ideological position, a good point for coalition-building (as many an organizer has said, “If you’re comfortable in your coalition, it isn’t broad enough”). Given this, I urge everyone to take a few minutes to support the EFF’s campaign against TIA, and for U.S. citizens to start by signing the EFF’s letter Orrin Hatch (likely next Chair of the Judiciary Committee), urging public hearings on the TIA issue.

I’ve been asked to write a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. So far its discussion of immersion seems detailed and interesting, deserving of a place at the table when we discuss the immersion ideas in Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Manovich’s The Language of New Media. I’m not as positive on the material on interactivity, but I haven’t finished the book either.

What prompts this post, however, is an error in Ryan’s book that’s so common as to probably not be worth mentioning in the review—the error of thinking that pre-Web writers on hypertext were writing about Web-like hypertext. We see this as early as page 8, where Ryan talks about 1980s and 90s hypertext theorists (Landow, Joyce, Bolter, and Moulthrop are lumped together in her argument) who talked of linking leading to a blurring between the roles of reader and author. Ryan’s discussion proceeds as though these theorists were talking purely about link following as creating this blurring. The argument seems developed without awareness of the fact that in the hypertext systems these authors used (e.g., Intermedia) or helped develop (e.g., Storyspace) one could move smoothly between activities of reading and writing—adding one’s own material to the network and creating links to it in pre-existing material. That is, these systems were perhaps more like today’s wikis that today’s garden-variety Web pages. And this smooth movement has long been part of hypertext’s history—going back through the work of hypertext originators Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart (whose names, by the way, are absent from Ryan’s index and bibliography, despite the fact that hypertext is a primary subject of more than one of her chapters—also a sadly common occurrence).

Of course, pre-Web hypertext theorists didn’t always make this dual nature of linking clear enough. Storyspace hypertexts, after all, are only “constructive” (to use Joyce’s term) when they are encountered in the full Storyspace program. When they are encountered in stand-alone form they are essentially Web-like and “exploratory.” The fact that theorists (who tended to own the Storyspace program) and average readers (who tended not to own it) would have a quite different experience of the “same” hypertext should have been made clear more often. There should have been more notes like the one added by the editor to J. Yellowlees Douglas’s “Understanding the Act of Reading: the WOE Beginners’ Guide to Dissection”:

The copies of WOE and IzmePass on the accompanying disk exist in a stand-alone or “reader” format which displays the text’s structure in only one of the several modes Douglas mentions. The complete Storyspace program is available from Eastgate Systems.

Had that happened, maybe we wouldn’t keep running into this error now.

If you’re interested in genre fiction—it’s what I learned to read on, and I’ve been finding my way back to it for the last couple years—then I suspect Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (Conjunctions site, Booksense link) is something not to miss. It’s on the newsstands now. I say my feeling is a suspicion because I’ve only read the first three pieces so far: a table of contents with a great list of names, the first story (”The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” by John Crowley), and the guest editor’s note. The editor’s note talks of those who “approach horror from the inside out, with the understanding that it is above all a point of view” and calls Crowley’s story and another in the volume “remarkably mature examples of that particular point of view, which has literally no points in common with the genre’s conventional definitions.” The guest editor is Peter Straub, and he ought to know.

Of course, I read that paragraph in the editor’s note only after reading Crowley’s story—continually looking for those points in common, expecting them always around the turn of the next page, until there were only a few pages left and I realized they would not appear. I’ve spent the morning since wondering about genre, and it feels like it’s going to be an interesting wonder. So, for your own dose, pick up Conjuctions.

The next story, where my bookmark rests now, is by Kelly Link, the author of “The Girl Detective”—a story I seem to be recommending to everyone I talk with these days. It can usually be found online at Event Horzion—though the page appears down right now (hopefully temporarily).

The Segue reading was a pleasure, and Brian Stefans has sent out pictures. Here’s a nice blurry one of me in action:

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out Brian’s The Dreamlife of Letters. It’s also worth a moment to consider the absence of some of his work and how the right to parody doesn’t matter much if you don’t have cash available for a lawyer.

I read from The Impermanence Agent. As I tend to do, I pulled out the altered texts I read from live Agent sessions in the hours leading up to the performance. I’m still surprised and pleased by what I find. I like the way that things like this:

Bathroom with Grandma’s green soaps, Grandma’s glass perfumes, Grandma’s dried flowers still on the shelves. Fingers of the shower. Remembering the house with her whole body.

become things like this:

Bathroom with my friend, the shelves. Fingers of the shower. Remembering the first wave, looking grim, and her whole body.

and this:

Bathroom with this corporate benefit scheme: A quick look at the shelves. Fingers of the shower. Remembering the reflection of our belief in her whole body.

and this:

Bathroom with enron at the shelves. Fingers of the shower. Remembering the partnerships to hide $1 billion in her whole body.