After last week’s group supervision, and engaging with the interactive story that one of the groups created for the World of Story project, I’ve found myself drawn more toward interactive storytelling, and torn between a more game-like mode versus a more short fiction-like mode for my project. I’ve also found that ideas of layering, editing, and revision have come up multiple times in recent days, both in the group supervision and in the readings I’m doing for this week’s elective, Narrative and Computational Text Analysis. Today’s blog post is my attempt to make sense of some of these pieces.
Last week, one of my classmates raised the question of how my scholar character’s interaction with AI would be conveyed to the reader: explicitly through narration, implicitly through inferences drawn from the scholar’s diegetic work, or through an interactive model where readers themselves can control some aspects of the character’s relationship with AI. This made me wonder whether there is potential to use some principles of game design here — to tap into that fine balance that many well-designed games require of taking risks (and thus increasing tension), but not risking so much that you “crash and burn.” Is there a sense in which the reader might control the scholar’s fate — might push them “too hard” toward AI, resulting in paratext that becomes increasingly garbled and/or non-empathetic? With that said, though, I’m not sure yet to what extent I want to push a “right” answer (i.e., a “right” amount of AI intervention), as opposed to letting readers decide for themselves during and after their experience of the story; perhaps something to consider.
This idea of incorporating more game-like elements made me wonder what that would mean for the reader’s role. In a way, this mechanic would give the reader the role of a god, which begs the question of how they would fit into the world of the story, and the thematic implications of introducing a higher power within the world. Additionally, introducing these elements might necessitate a particular structure for the narrative; I’m particularly thinking of the “training grounds” that many video games have to allow players to get accustomed to the game mechanics and in-game equipment before moving onto higher-stakes challenges. I would want to give readers an on-ramp to help them situate themselves within a mode of reading and interacting with the text that they may find unfamiliar.
I can also envision some possible impacts on style, and on the writing process and methods themselves. With this reader-controlled mechanic, there would be a spectrum along which the scholar character falls in terms of their hybridization with AI, which would correspond with changes in style and voice. Perhaps I would personally write all of the paratext for one extreme (when the scholar is fully human and unhybridized), and then rely increasingly on AI- or algorithmically-generated material as the scholar’s level of hybridization increases. I could even incorporate text that is algorithmically generated in the moment of reading, so no two tellings are ever quite the same as long as there is some element of AI interaction involved. Along the spectrum of hybridization, changes could range from single words to entire approaches, types of texts, and languages (human vs machine languages, whatever that means). There might also be times, toward the middle of the spectrum, when the human scholar and the AI are not fully integrated or not entirely in agreement about their goals, so traces of the practices of one or the other might remain in subsequent versions of the text. (This brings me back to the idea of digital palimpsests, and making legible the versions of a text.)
Also on the topic of reader interaction: One of my classmates suggested that I could introduce a mechanic for audiences of my project to interact with the work by adding different layers, much like how users interact with Stable Diffusion. I found this idea particularly fascinating to consider in conjunction with the readings I did for Narrative and Computational Text Analysis, my elective this week. One paper by Ryan Cordell focused on “reauthorship,” i.e., the often unauthorized editing and recontextualization of texts by people like newspaper editors who wanted to make the text fit their ideological and commercial agendas. This made me consider for the first time the possibility that my scholar character might not only be creating paratexts and studying the evolution of a story, but also potentially editing the story itself. As Cordell highlights, different conceptions of authorship and ownership (for instance, in the antebellum period) lead to different accepted practices around reprinting and reauthorship; I’ve been thinking about how these concepts could be influenced by AI (would the rise of AI mean that we value different things in creativity? Not the words themselves, because words can be so easily generated, but perhaps how the words sit within time and place and context)? Alternatively, as the scholar hybridizes themself more and more with AI, maybe their own ideas of ownership change — because insofar as AI can be said to “have ideas,” its idea of ownership and the use/revision/collation of texts is quite different from traditional human standards (or, rather, the moral universe in which companies want it to operate has these different ideas).
As I considered interactivity this week, I began, very briefly, to poke around in Neurocracy. I went in without much context, and had assumed (through my own personal biases) that it was an interactive short story (or novel), when in fact, according to Wikipedia, it is more often classified as a video game. Perhaps because of this mistaken framing, I initially found myself a bit confused, and unsure of the “point” of the story. Reframing the work as a video game not only helped me enjoy it in a more exploratory fashion, but also brought to mind an important consideration for my own project: Because my current aim is to create a piece more similar to short fiction than to a video game, it is important to offer audiences some more robust scaffolding, rather than simply giving them a sandbox and telling them to play. My instinct would be to do this through segments of more traditional narration interspersed with the iterations of the story and its paratexts — probably focusing closely on the experiences of the scholar character — but I would like to consider other approaches as well. In addition, I think the question of how much scaffolding is really necessary is still open; after all, I’ve read some very memorable and powerful stories that are entirely epistolary (Alix E. Harrow’s “The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly” comes to mind) — so perhaps this indicates that centering the narrative on the scholar character will give enough focus. It seems I still need to do more thinking about the relative emphasis I’d like to give to social/cultural/technological evolutions and events as compared to personal arcs in the project.
Works Cited:
Cordell, Ryan. “‘Taken Possession of’: The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Antebellum Religious Press.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/taken-possession-reprinting-reauthorship/docview/2555208384/se-2.
Harrow, Alix E. “The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly.” Fireside, July 2020, https://firesidefiction.com/the-ransom-of-miss-coraline-connelly.
“Neurocracy.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, 1 Oct. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurocracy. Accessed 28 Oct. 2023.
Truyens, Joannes, Matei Stanca, and Younès Rabii. Neurocracy. Playthroughline, 2021. https://omnipedia.app/wiki/2049/09/28/Main_Page.
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