An interview with Stuart Moulthrop, page 2
NWF: Would you say that, in Pax,the way text builds up (rather than one
chunk replacing another) is an example of conjunctive practice?
SM: Actually, the accretive nature of the text has more to do with instrumentality. What I'm trying to do is provide the player or reader with more of a stake in the process. And, yes, also escape that disjunctiveness of moving from node to node.
This started in thoughts about a text that I haven't yet taken on, and maybe never will. The idea was to create a stretchtext in which, say, if you stretched a point two thirds of the way through, changes would happen above that. So you'd have to do this constant scrolling up and down to see what was happening as you pulled text in or pushed text out. The idea was to create a body of text that people could hold in their eyes as well as their minds, so it wouldn't be so much of an "and now this" experience (thinking of Neil Postman's famous remark about the grammar of television).
NWF: Back to instruments, I remember you saying recently that instrumental texts offer readers a means of discovering their affordances, and I was wondering what you meant by that.
SM: Well, one of the things that impresses me about computer games is the way they are able to embed learning structures within them. And this also reverberates with some of my literary critical training. I remember discussing certain long poems, and learning how they teach the reader to read them. This is a famous approach, for example, to the early books of Paradise Lost. It's always interesting when you see that kind of dynamic happening in a creative work. To change back to a hypertextual context, it would be nice to have a structure that's less forbidding, that's less likely to be perceived as destructive if it needs to be disjunctive. I suppose I've taken to heart the early 1990s criticism of the late 1980s hypertexts in which people would accuse us of making purely random connections. I think by inviting people to more deeply understand the conjunctive process, rather than simply confronting them with disjunction, we might build more intimacy with the text. And what I have in mind here is the immersiveness of computer games—even though in the late 80s I thought games were the devil.
The two turning points for me were the MaxisSim games—not The Sims, but its ancestors SimCity and a wonderful game called SimLife which was an ecological simulator—and, on the quest side of things, Myst. Oddly enough, games like Myst and 7th Guest did a lot to change my thinking about gaming, even though they were all derivations of the Infocom model (or the Adventure model) that was very familiar in the 80s and which we deeply distrusted.
NWF: So when you were thinking of your hypertext literary work as being 'not a game' the kind of game you were thinking of was more like Leather Goddesses of Phobos than it was like Centipede.
SM: Certainly. I didn't have arcade games in my sights. The turf battle we were picking—'we' here including John McDaid, Michael Joyce, Terry Harpold, and to some extent Jane Douglas—was really with the Infocom folks. There was an element of rank professional jealousy, for sure. They had a market, after all. We were stuck in the garage. In retrospect our allergy to games looks incredibly foolish, both because Infocom's market experience didn't end all that happily, and more important because there was so much good work coming out of that community, and still is.
I suppose what really changed my mind on this was one of the reception hypertext has sometimes got from the literary community: "How dare you? You have no place at this club." The notion that we could have gotten similarly clubby, trying to exclude someone else's work in new media, now seems repulsive.
NWF: Although I'd say that your work, even as you become more interested in games, retains some of the characteristics that would differentiate it from the Infocom work (as well as its predecessors and descendants). The reader is never the "main character"—however much hypertext may have been compared to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventurebooks, in fact Infocom's stuff was much closer to those books—and there's no focus on puzzle-solving, which I think is central to the enjoyment many people get out of the Infocom-style work.
SM: Actually, Hegirascope was an attempt to do some puzzle-building. It's a textual maze, though perhaps a poorly-designed one. In the initial scheme there were two link options on each screen, and the choices were essentially "extend the current narrative line, retain as much local coherence as possible" or "spin out." In the revision I took the link count up to four on most nodes, and in most cases two of those four are going to keep you close by, or prolong the reading track. I suppose another way of thinking about it is as my first attempt at a Cayley instrument. I was hoping that people would come back into this thing and attempt extended runs through it. I haven't spoken to a lot of readers of that text, but I don't think many people engage it in that way. But I thought of Hegirascope as a maze that you would have to solve to get from beginning to extended end, let's say. There are premature ending points in that text—four or five—including a multiple choice quiz where most of the choices are invisible.
Of course, the other aspect of this anxious relationship to computer games probably parallels the way novelists have felt about cinema. The competition looks awfully impressive. Computer games are corporate products created by large teams of extremely talented and intelligent people. I think this is the golden age for computer games. The talent is so good, and so untrammeled, right now, but I don't think the good times will last. The game industry will look more and more like Hollywood (which is already happening) and as a result the creativity will fall off in the mainstream. Hopefully when that happens there will be new avenues for independents. And maybe some of those indies will find themselves in a space that's not too different from the old homestead of hypertext.
NWF: But it will get to the point where the costs of production are such, and the genres are considered well-known enough, that people will only take games from pitch through completion if the pitch is, "This is like Pretty Woman meets Out of Africa."
SM: Exactly. The Ten Commandments meets Lolita. Still, it's hard not to feel that, right now, the real heroes are in the game realm, while what we do in this curiously electronified literary space is of less importance to society and less impressive than a masterpiece like Myst or Black and White. Not to say there aren't some wonderful achievements in electronic literature, but I guess I would understand their value better if they weren't so much in the shadow of the literary. I may be partially to blame for this, since I spent ten years trying very hard to keep us inside a literary fold. I think I still believe in a literary identity to some extent, but it's certainly the case that the graphic interactive imagination seems to have more vitality at the moment, at least for me.
NWF: But I think part of what makes us electronic writers, rather than electronic artists, is that we do love language. Myst-like games are basically language-free, in The Sims the characters speak gibberish—Black and White is something of an exception, but do you think there's the potential for games to move in a direction more satisfying for literary people?
SM: Of course. Right now I'm teaching a course with a game developer here in Baltimore, Chris Clark, who created a commando simulation where the way that a character's dialogue was voiced would change depending on physical state, emotional state, and recent history. So if this character was buddied up with a character who had just been killed, you'd hear in her line readings that she'd just lost a friend. This blew people's minds in the development community—and it came from a sensitivity to language. There were ten thousand lines of dialogue in this game, which by the way was never released. The company lost interest.
There's certainly always room for complexity even in so-called popular forms. Alan Moore, who wrote Watchmen, made a curious remark in an interview once about the "underlanguage" of comics. He seems to be talking about the interplay between his verbal text and the visuals. If you know Watchmen, it's full of puns and ironies. What's in the character dialogue will be echoed or twisted in some way by what you're seeing.
Maybe something like that coming to new media would be very interesting. And maybe cybertext is the way to get to that. When I think of Cayley's What We Will—the QuickTime VR work he collaborated on—I think that's a pretty strong indication that cybertext could begin to open up those visual-verbal resonances. >>