On Mania:

In ‘The Wind and the Willows’, the eccentric Mr. Toad was prone to flights of rabid and obsessive interest in very specific things: motorcars being the chief example. In the story, these “manias” are usually portrayed as being reviled by Mr. Toad’s friends and neighbors, typically because Toad’s peculiar hobbies tend to cause strife in the quiet Thames river valley - though by the end, Toad’s eccentricities are reconciled, and his anthropomorphic animal friends accept his peculiarities on the condition that he try to keep them somewhat in check.

As a child, I can distinctly remember going through various “manias” or “phases” of my own:

3rd grade: ‘I am a Gypsy’
4th grade: ‘I am a Jedi’
5th grade: ‘I am a Butler’
6th grade: ‘I am a Royal Vizier’
7th grade: ‘I am a Space-faring Super Soldier Artificial Intelligence Artifact Robot’

And so on. Somewhere around 8th or 9th grade, my “phases” planed out a little more evenly, generally encompassing things slightly less goofy - but by college, I was pretty sure that I was a well-rounded individual with varied and malleable INTERESTS.

During my stint at Beloit, I had the fantastic opportunity to explore radio, and worked as a text-book Reader. I played Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 for the first time, and watched Carnivàle and Glee. I could listen to MGMT and Katy Perry, or Old Crow Medicine Show and Chopin. When I graduated, I moved out West to Portland, flipped burgers, wrote stories, listened to the pub regulars talk about their lives - and I figured that I had things pretty well worked-out, life-wise.

But then, one fateful Spring, my friends started to investigate a recurrent phrase, whispered in IRCs, or mentioned in foot-notes of Comic-Con cos-play albums across the internet:

 Homestuck. 

We were curious, and after a cursory Google, chalked it up to being a strange meme, that had probably happened eight or nine years ago.

But it kept cropping up.

So we looked again.

And that, was when everything changed.

Homestuck is, for all intents, and normal parlance’s purposes, a web-comic.

It is, however, unlike all other web-comics that exist.

If Homestuck is to be considered on these terms, however, it is in a tier (a God-Tier, if you will) of its own.

As a webcomic, it is literally the longest running webcomic, ever. In terms of pages, (currently ringing in at well over 4,400 [not including any of the multitudinous sub-comics that lay nestled inside of Homestuck’s bodice]), the incomparable author, Andrew Hussie, usually churns-out over 20 pages of new content daily (not including the [yes] hours of flash animations, games, soundboards, and cinematics that dot HS’ epic girth).

If HS is a webcomic, it is also one of the youngest, ringing-in at only almost 3 years old, (it was begun on April 13th, 2009) and was actually preceded by three other comics on Hussie’s MSPaintAdventures website (which are constantly and consistently referenced throughout HS).

If HS is a webcomic, it is one of the most significant ever, because of the indescribably vast network of artists and musicians and writers and psychology-enthusists and everything else besides, that have bought into the HS universe. While it may not obvious at first, how thoroughly HS has permeated the internet - I can only say, that standing on *this* side of the “Current Page”, I feel like I’ve taken off the tinted glasses in the Emerald City, and can see everything. And my God, is it beautiful.

Perhaps most significantly, is that if HS is a webcomic, it is the best webcomic there is - and I don’t dish that distinction out, lightly. After all (as mentioned), Homestuck isn’t really a web-comic, at all. :P 

Sure, movie-marketing, and alternate-reality gaming have spanned multiple multimedia platforms. Yes, spin-off games and movies and shows and novelizations and graphic novels exist for many fantastically diverse and well-suited universes. Verily, yea, fandoms will appear so long as there are geeks to hold vigil. But for a story, from the the very start, to wholly embrace the complex mechanisms of the entire internet; to routinely feature scores of animate panels of content; to weave a narrative of this complexity (more on that in a moment) in the modern era, for a modern audience - I am either supremely ignorant, or know of no other such thing.

Frankly, the only thing, that I can even think to compare Homestuck to, is Homer’s The Odyssey. To be sure, there is an incredible volume of work in Hussie’s 4400 page epic (which is, I might add, only now, as of this writing, half-complete) - for it is frought with tumult and anguish, calm and contemplation, Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark, circumstance and morality, ethics and philosophy, and all the (hemo)spectrum of human experience in between -- but there is more to it than the weight of a dusty, singular, epic.

It is a story about four very real friends, and their desire to play a game together.

And it is in that, that I now stake my “mania.”

We Have Arrived

We Have Arrived

Alexis and the Plague

When I had my first taste of Interactive Fiction, I became consumed with the idea of creating an autonomous story that a reader could approach and explore entirely on their own terms. I had grown up with the stunted inevitability of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and craved the potential of a text-adventure’s completely open-ended prompt, in the context of a larger epic.

I attempted writing a couple of “adventures” on my own, but due to either lack of honest interest, or the technical learning curve for the software I tried, I never got much beyond the first three or four rooms (for the discerning IF writers, I tried both Inform 7, and QUEST, and had greater luck with Inform’s “Natural Language” programming) – and while great things can be accomplished in a confined or microscopic space, I wanted to produce a sprawling labyrinth of explorable locations, a varied cast of complex characters, and an automated world system that would give the impression of life, ticking along beneath the surface of some three act magnum opus.

(A tangential notice: if you would be interested in trying out some IFs, or one of the partial games I attempted, give ol’ Gargoyle a d/l and have a try!)

Finally, I hit upon an idea that really interested me: sort of a fantastic Renaissance, inhabited by strange animals and humanoids, centered around a virulent plague, and a single girl.

A girl named Alexis.

I started writing pages of copy, describing glittering cities, and dark wharf-master's huts. Owlish crime-lords, and leech-toting doctors. Kidnapper flamingos, and Da Vincian machines bearing entire sky-scrapers aloft. In an ideal world, the story would be delivered in tutto finito as a genuine Interactive Fiction, but at every turn, I became obsessed with extrapolating the quantum minutia within the fabric of the story, which was rapidly becoming more complex than my imagination could manage, and even further beyond my technical ability to execute. I started pacing, racking my brain, trying to understand how a person could write a text adventure without knowing what the player wanted to do.

And I got stuck.

Now, whenever I’ve played or orchestrated a role-playing game, the player and the creator have an open exchange - permitting the player ultimate (or at least thoroughly perceived) freedom, and the creator receiving instant feedback on what's going on. It is a dialog, not just a unidirectional torrent of information – and without the element of response, I just didn't know how to proceed.

Because of this, it became evident that a participant should tread these paths at least once, live, to see what they could see, and force me to render a suitably complete plot.

I enlisted the help of one of my college colleagues, (non other than the esteemed Ms. Hilary Dixon), and in a round-robin sort of way, we began to delve into Alexis' world.

I presented Hilary with a prompt - (on the wiki, all sections printed in a Serif font are from me, Sans Serif vice versa) - and Hilary would reply in kind, navigating her character (the eponymous Alexis) through various locations and scenarios as the drama unfolded.

What I did not expect, was how her responses ended up informing the story we experienced!

Rather than give terse statements re: her actions (like “Go north.” etc.), Hilary wrote whole monologues, informing me of her character’s mental state, desires, and observations - and from these concrete remarks, her actions as a player willed brand-new content into the story, things that I could never have imagined on my own.

We proceeded in this fashion quite regularly for several months - though in recent days it’s been trickier and trickier to find the time to continue. However, when the story had all of our undivided attention, I could not even hope to describe the euphoric pleasure of co-writing in this way.

Hilary made a particularly cunning remark in our out-of-game discussions on the subject, comparing the enterprise to the use of a dollhouse,

“I imagine two consciousnesses coming to a mansion only when the other isn't there, poofing things into existence, moving dolls around, leaving signs saying what they did, and waiting for the other to move.”

And it is precisely that give-and-take that made the entire experience so worthwhile.

I’ll let that be enough of an introduction to the project - and present for your leisurely reading pleasure,

(link)

Obscurity

Obscurity

IF

Alright.

So, there’s been some beating around the bush, but basically, this is what’s going to go down:

As stated, the primary aim of this blog-o-space, is to define a new kind of literature. We’ve (briefly) discussed some of the core tenants of story, and kicked around some ideas about delivery methods.

I have one more little lecture to deliver here, before we get into the meat and potatoes of this enterprise - so bear with me for a moment as I describe IFs, or Interactive Fictions.

Interactivity in storytelling has a long history. It seems as though most everyone in our age bracket (modern twenty-somethings) read at least one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books during middle school. Where, by turning to page 36 or 75, you could elect to save the robot, or not - thereby embarking on a separate series of choices that would ultimately lead to your death, or your success (arbitrarily). This tradition (concurrently) was also the origin of video-games - though not in the mainstream, graphical form we know them as, today.

Games on the computer, were originally just words. Like an ink-and-paper book, there were characters and situations and conflicts, but distinctly unlike said books, these stories were interactive. You were given a prompt, and as the player, you would input some kind of command (usually very free-form) in order to affect change in this artificial scenario.

One of the hallmark examples, is the text-epic, Zork. At the start, you are informed of a mailbox's presence - which you could then "Open the mailbox" and "You discover the mailbox to be bare." You could “Go North” to the forest, or you could enter the basement of the house, and (without the aid of a flashlight) almost certainly be “eaten by a Grue.”

(This format of game-meets-story could no doubt be linked to tabletop Role-Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons, but I’ll leave that for now, or for a different writer’s pen.)

But oh my goodness, were these ever popular. As networking came into prominence, it became possible for multiple people to enter the same “game” (MUDs: Multi-User Dungeons) and by using the same textual interface, introduce novel characters to other players, and solve massive complicated puzzles together as a team.

This is significant: there was no other in-game avatar, than what you, the player, could imagine and describe. In many ways, these games relied on the literary talents of their players to bring original life into these worlds - and ala the eponymous artifact featured in The Diamond Age -or- A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson, these stories - at their most advanced - could be created on the fly, by the game-makers themselves.

Interactive Fiction is perhaps the best example of the literary game crossover - Galatea being one such exquisite example of this - thusfar. And the sorts of items we’ll be exploring, are variations and evolutions on that theme.

*wipes brow*

Alright. Alright? I think we can proceed, now.

Mugsy's Slippers

Mugsy's Slippers

The Epistles:

Prior to the second century BCE, a particular Roman citizen took up quill & ink, and in a series of letters, devoted copious thought and meditation to the subject of the divine. Able to mull on these ideas for pages and pages at a time, with nought but himself to censor from - the singular act of addressing these notions and distributing them made that citizen largely responsible for spreading Christianity across the Roman Empire, and informed much of Martin Luther’s “Faith” over “Works” doctrine, and the Reformation.

The citizen in question was Paul (the Apostle [also Saint]), author of what has become one of the (if not the) most important correspondence of the following 21 centuries.

Now, while faith is not our main concern, the central conceit of this blog is to explore the grey areas between fiction and reality - and at least a nod to metaphysical conversations is par for the course.

Letters are a well-honored tradition of writing. No one can deny the delight of finding (mixed-in with the garbage and bills that pass for mail these days) an envelope addressed to them, and a note or letter carefully prepared for the eyes of the recipient. It is a multi-sensory experience: at once mental, given the concepts or content discussed in the document, and tactile in its inherent physicality.

Unfortunately, we’ve lost about half of that experience in the move to digital communication, but collections of letters still make for good reading.

Collated collections of correspondences are also curious things. In literature, the entire epistolary genre is composed of works-presumed to be conversational in nature, and often presented as (ostensibly factual) strings of letters. Pride and Prejudice is sort of a loose example, though Frankenstein and the original Dracula do so more concretely. (It should be noted, inclusion of ancillary documents not necessarily letters is also considered epistolary: bankers notes, interview transcripts, theater ticket stubs, etc.)

Nick Bantok's Griffin & Sabine is of particular note. The book (series) is typically filed under the "Art Books and Books About Art" category because each page is an original, individual post-card, plucked from a specific alternate universe for the reader's consumption. On one side is a post-card's oilette, and on the reverse - its handwritten contents. The exchanged cards slowly reveal the connection between the two writers, and as things get more and more complicated, the book itself complexifies - soon offering whole envelopes crammed with the written mail of these two characters.

Now, there's sort of a sick vicarious-ness to all this, (in a similar vein to PostSecret - the "real-life" anonymous secret revealing repository,) but I would argue that the verisimilitude of these collections is often more true than some non-fiction novel of similar topic.

Where this figures into modern-day literature is of some interest to me. With tools like email and Twitter, much of the art inherent to written dialog has been clipped, and in many cases, lost. Perhaps it is the Luddite in me, (perhaps it is my sick devotion to the study of words and their use), but I don’t think that we’ve fully explored the potentials of the postal system.