An interview with Stuart Moulthrop, page 3

NWF: Well, we have to decide who's definition of hypertext we're using, but I don't think What We Will would fall outside Nelson's definition. Nelson talks about node-link hypertext as just one of the types he's interested in, even if it's the one he wrote the most about. Often I think this cybertext/hypertext distinction is unnecessary. Unless Nelson is Marx and we're Trotskyites.

SM: Oh I think we're sometimes more like Stalinists. But then Tim Berners-Lee would have to be Uncle Joe, or maybe Mao, and that doesn't work. He's far too nice and wouldn't look at all good in khaki.

I've always thought of cybertext as a bigger tent. Cybertext is a major formulation, which I've said from early on, and Aarseth has always seen further down the road than I have. This is especially true with his interest in games, where he was one of the first to sight land.

Game Studies as Vinland, now that's a thought...

Anyway, I don't think that sectarian distinction, "this is hypertext, this is cybertext" works very well. All hypertext is cybertext.

NWF: Though Aarseth has made the argument, for example, that afternoon is cybertext and not hypertext because there are guard fields on the links. To his credit, this was a decade ago, when us hypertext folks probably needed our noses tweaked—but this sort of thing reminds me of Toril Moi's observation that when people come up with a definition of the feminist novel that leaves out Virginia Woolf's work, you can only think there's something wrong with their definition.

SM: I've never much liked the game of categorizing and defining.Which isn't to say I haven't tried to play. The joy of putting books on just the right library shelf has just never gotten to me. The more I find myself engaged as a practitioner the less I find taxonomies interesting.

NWF: Let me ask you one more question about instrumental texts, then. I'd like to ask it in two ways. First, theoretically, what do you see as the relationship between instrumental texts and notions of narrative? Second, to put it in practitioners' terms, what sorts of stories are you interested in telling in your current work?

SM: What's interesting to me about telling stories in an instrumental context is to see how the stories change. And I don't proceed top-down with these things. I don't tend to come in with a preconceived notion. It's been improvisational all the way along.

With Reagan Library I built the visual world first. In a way it was painted. "Pax" has a bunch of human figures, and in a way it's sculpted—literally speaking, modeled. It's those faces and those bodies that really are primary for me, and the stories come along in the process. The stories came with Reagan Library in fits and starts, there were a couple of broken attempts that didn't quite come together, but in the end the stories were there because they needed to be there — in that space. I felt they were anchored to that visual world in plausible ways.

I'm wondering if what happens in the new work will be less obsessively connective than the stories in Victory Garden. For that project I had a tool with which it was very easy to build connections. The linking process, from the writer's perspective, is both a joy and an addiction. It's a great delight to say to yourself, "Oh yes! This bit here can be connected with that bit over there." So the odd thing about disjunctive hypertext is that to the writer it doesn't seem disjunctive at all. Because the writer is carrying around that network of connections inside her head. It doesn't look to the writer the way it does to the reader. I think where I'm going now—more of that conjunctive aesthetic—may be less about "linking this to that" than "placing these things together."

NWF: So will the conjunctive text—the instrument—be more satisfying to players and readers?

SM: Some will, some won't. Maybe some instruments will be hard to play. They may require practice. Or not. As a teacher once said to me about the guitar, "After five or ten minutes you'll make sounds that are almost musical. That's what the frets are for." And that's a great virtue of folk instruments. They do allow you to get in touch with a productive vocabulary very quickly. I think a good instrument would do that. It would stimulate engagement. It should make people want to get in their and interact, and to repeat the experience.

NWF: Now, there's another sense of instrument, implicit in what you've said about the guitar, which is the sense of a tool. There's the sense that people might make many things with instruments once they become practiced at using them.

SM: That's definitely a decent goal. When we can design things that people apply to their daily informational lives in ways that they find enlightening or diabolically funny or something then I think we'll have begun to make a difference. Maybe then we'll be able to class with the game developers.

NWF: So how does "Pax" function as a tool?

SM: Maybe it helps us think about other tools, or about interfaces. In terms of interface, I've been interested in non-binary control structures, something Michael Joyce and I both picked up from Peter Bogh Anderson. In the eighties he deliberately tried to subvert Apple's human interface guidelines by creating buttons with non-binary function. These were buttons you had to caress, rub, and scratch—and you'd get different results from the software by depending on how you treated the interaction device.

Among the things I'm happiest with in the current piece are mechanisms of contiguity. The sprites respond to proximity of the cursor. There are click points. You can move to things and click on them to elicit action. But the process of approaching a sprite changes various states. In future works I'd like to remove the clicks and just work with a grammar of approach.

NWF: But "Pax" is about more than interface tricks...

SM: The departure point, in many respects, was four and half hours I spent at Dallas/Ft. Worth—much of it standing in the rain—because the terminal was cleared for "security" reasons that were never explained. Maybe someone jumped a checkpoint. Maybe there was a phone threat. I did see a guardsman going down a line of trash bins, probing each one with the business end of his M-16.

We never knew the reason. There was the usual litany, "An announcement will be made in the general concourse. Please clear the area." Then in the concourse, "If you come here you'll have to go outside, because we can't let you gather here." So we're standing outside in the rain, facing off with these very young soldiers in a way that wasn't entirely unfriendly, though it's hard to think of someone who's holding an automatic weapon as just another citizen.

Finally, enough of us got so fed up that we walked over to the troopers and said, "What do you do if thirty of us decide we want to come in?" And they looked at each other and said, "You can go talk to our C.O."

There was nothing in the press about this—this has just become unreported news. Terminals being shut down, hundreds of people being introduced to a new way of thinking.

NWF: It's training.

SM: Yes it is. I had that crowd experience. Finding yourself standing in a crowd, knowing who you want to listen to, who you want to talk to. Looking at the body language. All that. There's clearly a set of instinctual programs that take over and run. You know who the reliable people are, who are the ones who are going to panic and cause trouble.

NWF: And so what you're turning to is writing about situations. Something like that isn't plot driven.

SM: I guess you're right. That's the answer to the earlier question. I am a lot less creatively invested in the grand architecture of print fiction, much as I still respect and value it. Or even the architecture of cinematic storytelling, at least in some of its forms. I'm more interested in incident, though that's not the only way to go. Maybe there are enough plots in play right now.

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