#cybertext

I am in the greenhouse room, and I clutch at my heart. What I see before me is a person in black latex receiving a drug on their tongue like holy communion. There are only two characters in the room: Kampe, and their dealer. But what I experience is much greater, because I can hear the music echoing: the music signalling that on the other side of the city, a city has fallen and a princess is dead, hanging up above, bare-chested and bloodied for all to see.

I remember her. It was her birthday, we danced with her, she stumbled into the arms of her lover.

I know this from an hour ago, before time reset.

I am in the flower shop, and I gasp. A tango is playing through the tinny speaker of the radio. The shopkeeper picks up a bouquet - her bouquet - and he twirls around, holding it in his arms, dancing a tango with a prop that is the start of Persephone's story, to the music that is the near-climax of her story.

I know this from months before, because I have been here before but it was different. It's different every time. There's so much to take in, and I have to choose who I see and what I focus on, and the context I bring with me is constantly developing.

That's a familiar criticism. Too many choices, no coherent story.

But Pope (2009) isn't a criticism of a Punchdrunk masked show - it's a criticism of a HTML novella, These Waves of Girls, hypertext, a story that you wade into by clicking through links. A story that leads you down many different paths, depending on how you choose to follow them.

Don't worry if you get lost - you're already lost. Embrace your curiosity. Turn your fear into desire. Fortune favours the bold.

The link is the most important new form of punctuation since the comma... Links make manifest the way texts relate to other texts, the way they structure themselves, and the way they restructure our thinking.

A reference to another scene, a repeated movement hearkens back to something you witnessed minutes ago, hours ago, weeks ago. A prop moves across buildings, touched by many hands along the way. Characters intersect, and you take a different path, thrown into another story before you reunite for a finale.

You ever gone down a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Clicking link after link, opening up a dozen new tabs, somehow finding your way from Scooby-Doo to Leukemia to learning the Yupik word for bread?

Her Story is an FMV video game where you uncover the story by searching a database of video clips for keywords. As you search for clues, things that don't make sense stick in your mind, because they might be important later. A new piece of information can cast something you've already seen in a completely new light.

You can stay with one thread, or you can let your curiosity guide you, bouncing around from one storyline to the next. It might not make sense at first, seeing everything out of order - but then as you make sense of it, you will form those connections, perhaps even more strongly than you would have done if you had watched a linear story that you didn't have to work for.

...the spaces of reading and writing shift in a hypertextual environment and the reader is required to adopt a mode of engagement in terms of an unstable textual terrain, which involves them in productive and creative processes as well as receptive ones...

"Because everything is constructed, everything becomes significant, in the artistic context everything ordinary becomes extraordinary." - Sam Booth

Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse is a collection of digital and physical ephemera - notes, photos, lyrics, scribbles, all telling the story of this man you knew as Uncle Buddy, who has now died. You leaf through them, choosing what to pay attention to, taking away what you deem significant, building an image based on what he left behind.

 It does have an option to spell out the answer to the riddle if you want to skip that, but the significance might be lost in the process. ...

Description of Tamara, an example of theatre dubbed 'hyperdrama', theatrical hypertext.

"Punchdrunk's Sleep No More is an astonishing production that does nearly everything I had imagined hyperdrama could achieve, and much that I had assumed it could not." ... "The experience works here, but it is going to be different for everyone. How many people get to see Mrs. DeWinter’s scene? Of those, how many are in the bar when the band strikes up Paper Moon ? How many get the Woyzeck allusion the next day, or ever? This is the nature of the medium."

Seriously, read this article by Mark Bernstein.

 It’s not a game. Nothing you (or they) can do can prevent the fall of Troy or its terrible aftermath. Yet your choices (and chance) matter, and your reading of Those Trojan Girls is likely to differ from any other reading.

(hypertext is also, sadly, ephemeral, linked to its time and place. The above linked work is less than a decade old but I doubt I'd find what I need to read it, the right software and the right hardware of the right version with all the right features. Digital rot everywhere. Who has a floppy drive anymore? Who has Flash anymore? Just like nobody will experience The Burnt City anymore. Just like, soon, nobody will experience the McKittrick Hotel anymore.)

My first show: I see a man swinging upside down, hanging from the ceiling. The image haunts me. I do not know him, nor do I know the two onlookers. But it stays with me.

Many months later, I see him again, and he is an old friend - his name is Laocoön, a seer, and he is burdened with a prophecy from Apollo. Cassandra looks on, distraught, while the vengeful god puppets him. He is showing her the fate of her sister.

I remember her. It was her birthday. We danced with her. I watched her die, over and over and over. I remember every moment, every branching path, every intersection, and she isn't here, but she's all around us.

"There is no longer one author but two, as reader joins the author in the making of the text" - Jay David Bolter, "Literature in the Electronic Writing Space" "Go back into the light. Remember what you've seen... We love you so deeply. It's nothing without you." - Lily Jo Ockwell as Persephone, September 24, 2023

Not sure, but it's real? Tanjiro is a descendant of the Sun?

According to this myth (Japanese Mythology) or something, Emperors or Empresses in Japan are said to be a descendant of the Sun goddess, Amaterasu.

And yeah, everyone started presenting ch 200-201 about him turning into the King of Demons

When I was working on my BA presentation in 2009 I read Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) and wrote a short story based on what I thought was the most interesting thing about Aarseth's text, and how they used the language of programming as an integral part of the key theme of their own short story.

This was much more interesting than branching narratives, and the first time I encountered the idea that coding could be expressive as an element of storytelling.

Coming on my own again after a 15-year-old long career writing more or less very linear stories for games (with many important detailing alterations based on context) (and the linearity was of course perfectly justified by multitudes of reasons) it was like my brain threw itself back to 2010 and suddenly I found myself thinking about Espen Aarseth and expressive coding again.

In order to bolster my portfolio (work in progress) I started to doodle a new digital short story, The Valley of Birds, after a 15 year break. It's set in unknown woods (which are inspired simultaneously by Southern Finnish woods as well as a bird on Galápagos islands) where two characters of opposite mind sets are hiking in late August.

I started working on it with Twine, but then one of my excellent testers pointed out that since this is a story about differing points of view, it would be nice to see both characters' stories on the screen at the same time, I had to abandon Twine, go back to JavaScript after quite a long break, relearn CSS as well, and now I'm slowly digging at creating a story of alternating points of view that you can read side-by-side.

The language of an interactive digital short story

The story was more or less finished months ago but the coding part itself is changing the story in details (which is where god resides) and I find myself thinking often when I'm not working on it about how minimal and utilitarian language is in video games, and how much poetic freedom of expression this format is giving me.

A screenshot of an early version of The Valley of Birds.

The first version of this story had a very "video game" writing style; Follow Ulla [...] or Follow Tove [...] - which are no longer needed since now making a branching choice is gone, and you can see both characters' points of view simultaneously.

Because I'm still in the process of coding it (with my brain questioning things like; how much help would I get from functions, if so many events are unique; and oh no do I need to have a cancel choice -button [that feels like something that might benefit from a function] the text keeps on living.

Because I'm stylistically making a choice to make it feel like a printed story (for which I also received very positive feedback from my test readers at Arbis where I wrote the first version of the story in their Twine course) GUI elements also feel risky and out of place.

Branches and expressions in the story and in the woods

This is not a branching narrative in the sense people are used to thinking about them. The story has a meta level of points of view also given to the participant, who can click on interactive things in the text that change the text body, bringing the reader closer to the characters, and so they are changing their own relationship (emotional distance) to the story.

The expressiveness of coding here isn't about possibilities of different outcomes, but highlighting how differently one can read into something by knowing more about the; and about synthesizing two different points of view in a story.

Essentially it's still a short story.

But it's not a short story you could tell with printed text.

Inspirations

The story is also a gift to my dear hiking friend Anna, inspired by our past and hopefully future hikes together.

In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts on how we can implement cybertext. #GameDesign

As a passionate gamer and avid reader, I’ve always been fascinated by the potential of storytelling in video games. The concept of cybertext, although sounding complex, is actually quite intriguing and relevant in today’s gaming world. In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts on how we can implement cybertext. First off, let’s break down what cybertext mean. Cybertext refers to texts that…