The Convergent Evolution of Hypertext

The Convergent Evolution of Hypertext:

Copyright Era

Primary Oral Culture

(Ong 2005[1982])

• No copyright
• No commercial rights
• Barriers to entry:
• Skills, experience, exposure

Democratizing effects of open-source platforms and marginalized communities

Print Culture

(Ong 2005[1982])

• Copyright
• Commercial rights
• Creativity(?)
• Barriers to entry:
• Technology/money (printing)
• Gatekeepers

Hypertexts & Interactive Fiction

Commons Era

~1975/6

Colossal Cave Adventure (Jerz 2007)

• Non-commercial; commons

Secondary Oral Culture

(Ong 2005[1982])

1979-89

Infocom era (Briceno, et al. 2000)

• Commercial; proprietary

(Currah 2007)

1987...

Eastgate Systems: Engine & Publisher

• Commercial; proprietary

• Copyright -> Commons
• Commercial rights -> Internet gift economy
• Effects on creativity
• Copyright "theft"
• Flooded spaces
• Asymmetric participation
• Barriers to entry:
• Technology (digital access)
• Money (tech, software)
• Skills
• Copyright (resources, software)

1994

Freeware IF (Stevens 2011)

• Non-commercial; commons

2009/2012

Twine, et al.

• Non-commercial; commons

Copyright vs. Commons

R. Lyle Skains

• Effects of copyright on creativity & discourse

• Copyright & gatekeepers

• Barriers to creator entry into form & market

r.l.skains@bangor.ac.uk | @lskains

School of Creative Studies & Media

Bangor University

Cultural Capital

Publishers (Book, Hypertext, Game)

Cultural Gatekeepers

• Capital investment
• Distribution
• Marketing
• Editorial selections

Software Developers

Introduction

• Proprietary systems
• Price points
• Accessibility (platform, device)

"no wonder hypertext fiction had a lull - they hid behind middle-upper class literary pretensions, acting like it was some kind of avant-garde science. I’m seeing academic essays on hypertext buried behind passwords, I’m seeing a hypertext editor like Twine for $300, I’m seeing stories selling for $30. How many people are buying those?"

"Our world where the average person is separated from their natural creativity and artistic agency isn’t an accident. It’s been carefully, deliberately engineered that way, not just by Apple, but by our entire capitalist society."

Content Creators

• Proprietary works
• Source code hidden

• (Brief) History of Hypertext/IF
• Copyright/DRM vs. Commons
• Cultural Capital
• Democratization of Games & Hypertext/IF
• Future Research: Commercial Implications

(Porpentine 2012, n.p.)

Democratization of IF/Games

http://tinyurl.com/SkainsELO17

Indie game developers

"Makers"

"By side-stepping the barriers to entry formed by academic gatekeepers and pricey software platforms, Twine games have democratized the hypertext form" (Ensslin & Skains 2017).

"Underserved" populations

Twine's low-tech form enables “games whose purpose is to explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma that mainstream games rarely touch on” (Hudson 2014: n.p.).

(cf. Ensslin & Skains 2017; Anthropy 2012; Friedhoff 2013; Harvey 2014; Salter 2015)

Independent Style: "type of humble 'lo-fi' DIY culture that emphasizes participation and personality rather than skill...[also] a place where developers can demonstrate their technical skills and their perfected craft" (Juul 2014, 7; emphasis mine).

Students/classrooms

Davis 2017; Einstein & Vetter 2015; Ensslin, et al. 2016; Hahn 2016; Kussman 2017; Mejeur 2016; Ruggiero & Green 2016; Skains, et al. 2016; Tarsa 2014; Tran 2016.

Future Research

Commercial Implications

"Makers"

Electronic Literature Organization

Conference

18-23 July 2017

Porto, Portugal

Oral Storytelling

(Ong 2005[1982])

• Extension of natural narration

(Fludernik 1996)

• Hypertext & Twine games as published, mainstream products
• Pay-to-play games
• "Hyperbooks" for e-book market
• Build on existing communities & markets (IF, e-books)
• Practice-based research

Prose Fiction

• Open source (if not open access) art, discourse
• Skillset (reading & writing) = core education

Hypertexts & Interactive Fiction

http://wonderboxpublishing.com

(Porpentine 2012)

References

http://tinyurl.com/SkainsELO17

Hypertext & IF "Makers"

Inform7, TADS

• Open source/access
• Strong community

• Offline
• Compatibility
• Mod-High Skill

Briceno, H., et al., 2000. Down from the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. [undergraduate class project, “6.933J/STS.420J: The Structure of Engineering Revolutions”] [online] MIT. Available at: <http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/infocom-paper.pdf> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Davis, V., 2017. Game Based Learning and Twine. [online] The Cool Cat Teacher Blog Available at: <http://www.coolcatteacher.com/game-based-learning-twine/> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Ensslin, A., et al., 2016. Exploring Digital Fiction as a Tool for Teenage Body Image Bibliotherapy. Digital Creativity, 27(3).

Ensslin, A., and Skains, L., 2017 (forthcoming). Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine. In: J. Tabbi, ed., Bloomsbury Handbook: Electronic Literature. Bloomsbury, pp.293–307.

Einstein, S., and Vetter, M., 2015. Women Writing in Digital Spaces: Engaging #Gamergate and Twine in the Gender Studies-Composition Course. Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. [online] 7 May. Available at: <http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2015/05/07/women-writing-in-digital-spaces-engaging-gamergate-and-twine-in-the-gender-studies-composition-course/> [Accessed 4 Sep 2015].

Fludernik, M., 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge.

Hahn, R., 2016. Collaborative Creative Writing in the L2 Classroom Using the Software Twine. In: Pixel, ed., Conference Proceedings. The Future of Education - Google Books. [online] Florence, Italy: libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni, pp.137–142. Available at: <https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=6rppDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA137&dq=twine+games&ots=yyirfBvfdj&sig=11DkYtBR-99vFCwiFWG8rpO_Im0#v=onepage&q=twine games&f=false> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Harvey, A., 2014. Twine’s Revolution: Democratization, Depoliticization, and the Queering of Game Design. G|A|M|E Games as Art, Media, Entertainment, [online] 1(3). Available at: <http://www.gamejournal.it/3_harvey/#.VeW_BNNViko> [Accessed 1 Sep 2015].

Hudson, L., 2014. Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All. The New York Times Magazine. [online] Available at: <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/magazine/twine-the-video-game-technology-for-all.html> [Accessed 1 Sep 2015].

Jackson-Mead, K. and Wheeler, J.R. eds., 2011. IF Theory Reader. Boston, MA: Transcript On Press.

Jerz, D.G., 2007. Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky. Digital Humanities Quarterly, [online] 1(2). Available at: <http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html>

Juul, J., 2014. High-Tech Low-Tech Authenticity: The Creation of Independent Style at the Independent Games Festival. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. [online] Available at: <http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/independentstyle/> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Kussmaul, C., 2017. An extended series of assignments in CS2 involving a text adventure game. [online] Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges. Available at: <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3069664> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Mejeur, C., 2016. A Narrative of One’s Own: Twine and Community in the Classroom (Panel D). In: Network Detroit: Digital Humanities Theory and Practice. [online] Detroit. Available at: <http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/networkdetroit/2016/Sept30/26> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Ong, W., 2005 (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge.

Porpentine, 2012. Creation Under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution. Nightmare Mode. [online] Available at: <http://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2012/11/25/creation-under-capitalism/> [Accessed 1 Sep 2015].

Ruggiero, D., and Green, L., 2016. Make Good Choices: Exploring Narrative Game Design with Young People in Prison. In: Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children - IDC ’16. [online] New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, pp.175–180. Available at: <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2930674.2930707> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Skains, L.,, Bell, A., and Ensslin, A., 2016. Gaming the Composition: An Ethnographic Study on Composing Ergodic Fiction. In: International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature, 6-9 July 2016. Chicago, IL.

Stevens, D., 2011. 10 Years of IF: 1994–2004. In: K. Jackson-Mead and J.R. Wheeler, eds., IF Theory Reader, 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Transcript On Press, pp.359–378.

Tarsa, B., 2014. Teaching with Video Games. Digital Rhetoric Collaborative. [online] 6 May. Available at: <http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2014/05/06/digital-lessons-teaching-with-video-games/> [Accessed 4 Sep 2015].

Tran, K.M., 2016. “Her Story Was Complex”: A Twine Workshop for Ten- to Twelve-Year-Old Girls. E-Learning and Digital Media, [online] 13(5–6), pp.212–226. Available at: <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2042753016689635> [Accessed 17 Jul 2017].

Ren'Py, Novelty

• Open source/access
• Strong community

• Offline
• Compatibility
• Mod-High Skill

Twine (& now, Texture, Choice of Games, etc.)

• Open source/access
• Strong community
• Online
• V. Low Skill