As I try to solidify more of the specifics of my project, I find myself returning to the idea of interactivity, as it feels like a pivotal part of the overall themes and trajectory of my project. First, I was reflecting on the Twine game Ostrich by Jonathan Laury, which was mentioned in the final group supervision last semester. Pretty much from the outset, it implicates the player in ethical decisions, giving the sense that there’s a “right” answer. There are also stakes if you choose “wrong”; players can’t simply go back and explore different options. This makes it feel less exploratory overall, and more like a puzzle where you try to find the right answer.

Though I enjoyed Ostrich, it solidified my feeling that I don’t want my project to create a clear dichotomy between right/wrong or win/lose. I’d like my interactive elements to be more the sort that create emergent meanings, not through separate and distinct branches, but through multiple “paths” to explore while en route. Overall, I don’t necessarily want to create the sense that readers must “play” through the story multiple times in order to fully experience it, as (in my experience) this can make people feel that they’re missing things or closing off paths/sections through their choices.

However, this doesn’t mean that reader interaction at one point in the story can’t have an impact on later points. In fact, I also want to avoid the type of interactivity that feels purely decorative, and not intertwined with the plot or themes. Treading the fine line between these two versions of interactivity may be difficult, but it is certainly possible for a decision at one point — such as a user-entered value — to be stored in a variable and then used later. I wonder if user decisions could even impact visual elements of the story, as Alexa suggested to me at one point. This might be a good way of controlling mood without creating branching narratives, but it also runs the risk of seeming merely decorative. Also, truly interactive visuals would likely be too ambitious, as I have no experience with digital graphics.

I’ve done some brainstorming about potential approaches to the interactive element, which inevitably overlap with and impact the computational elements of both creation and reader experience. Some of my favorite possibilities are outline below, though I want to continue refining and adding/removing different pieces:

Computational elements of the writing/creation process:

• Randomly determine which parts of the in-universe story are consumed by the “worm” and when
• Use machine methods to evolve the story from one iteration to the next — some possibilities include choosing x words to replace with synonyms, or choosing x random sentences and having GPT rephrase them 
  • This would have the effect of pushing the story more toward (a certain version of) collective understanding/experience, which is something discussed in the materials for the AI and Storytelling elective
• When the scholar begins hybridizing increasingly with AI, I want to hide (censor?) some of their notes/analyses that could be deemed too emotional or subjective, and therefore not academic/scientific enough; I could make this determination with NLP tools after creating the scholar’s notes

Interactive elements of the reader experience:

The goal with these elements is to encourage readers to engage in futures thinking and get them to help imagine a “lived” future beyond the hegemonic ways in which technological futures are often envisioned. I also want to encourage reader agency in encountering the story and push them to think about nonlinear/non-inevitable ways of thinking about time.

• Layering/hidden elements — reader can show/hide and move through these according to their whim
  • Scholar’s rough drafts/personal notes that are “unacademic” (but give insight into who the scholar is and their own story)
  • Places where the scholar jumps to conclusions or doesn’t entirely follow best practices (OR evidence that would reveal bad practices in some of the published work)
  • The pieces that had been deemed too emotional/subjective (see above)
• Occasional interludes that jump back to one of the scholar’s memories from a random age/time, or even jump forward to a future prediction (whether framed as set-in-stone or still mutable)
  • These memories and “future memories” would gradually piece together a story that fleshes out the scholar
  • Would also show how the scholar is beginning to engage with time in a nonlinear fashion as they lose their sense of age and linear progression through life
• Perhaps there are chances for the reader to interact with the text by cycling through and choosing specific phrases — or perhaps there is randomization of certain phrases so that no two read-throughs are exactly the same 
  • I’m still thinking about Pamela Mishkin’s “Nothing Breaks Like AI Heart” and am inspired by Mishkin’s subtle but satisfying use of interactive and computational elements in the story
  • I wonder if these functions could support the idea of gentle and supportive randomness (in contrast to cruel randomness) that I’d like to develop throughout the story
• Finally, at the end, readers will have a chance to create their own version of the in-universe story that they’ve been studying alongside the scholar — filling in gaps created by the “worm”; making a critical choice at the end of the story that reflects on the themes and big questions they’ve been exploring. I’d like to offer different options for how they fill this in: 
  • multiple choice (a more scaffolded with guardrails, pre-selected)
  • ask AI or program to generate something (scaffolded, but without pre-selection; more seemingly random or weird)
  • free response (no scaffolding, no inspiration provided)

Chapter 10: Returning again to interactivity / Anja Hendrikse Liu by is licensed under a