I find myself circling back again to the question of interactivity (probably should take a hint that it’s important to this project). I’ve begun doing some technical experiments with Nuxt (a JavaScript framework), which seems like a good option that would hypothetically allow me to build most of the interactive elements that I’ve been envisioning. But now to make the decision I’ve been putting off: which interactive elements I actually want to incorporate.
Jane’s idea of allowing readers to align themselves with the worm has stuck with me, and feels thematically relevant in the sense that it gives readers agency in how exactly they engage with the story-within-the-story, rather than forcing them to only engage with it with the purpose of analysis or of recreating lost portions. There is the difficulty, however, of making sure that the story/characters seem to respond in meaningful ways to readers’ choices, which could have infinite variation. I don’t feel it is ethically or artistically sound practice to have GPT or another pre-trained LLM create responses to unique reader actions, particularly without the ability to vet them before presenting them to the reader, even though this would be one way of offering meaningful and in-the-moment responses. So perhaps the choice I offer to readers needs to be more constrained: They can either act in alignment with the worm, act in alignment with the scholar, or do nothing — but the precise nature of what each of these actions entails would be pre-determined.
This brings up the question of how to present these choices to readers. It feels potentially odd to offer them the option of aligning with the worm up front, given that the scholar (as I’ve currently imagined them) is presented as the protagonist, and their thoughts/reactions will be most visible via their writings. Perhaps readers must then uncover the option of aligning with the worm by digging deeper into hidden content beyond the default that is presented.
This idea of digging deeper makes me wonder if there should also be an option of aligning with the AI — although I’m not sure what that would actually look like, since the AI’s role in the story mainly comes through hybridizing with the scholar and thereby enabling reflection on the boundaries of self (whether expanding the boundaries, or highlighting their importance, or casting doubt on whether they’re actually meaningful). So perhaps I must first decide whether the AI will actually act independently of the scholar at any point, or whether its actions/agency (?) will always be expressed by way of how it interacts with and influences the scholar.
On this tack, I’m now wondering whether the worm might, in some way, hybridize with the scholar as well — perhaps not consciously, but in the sense that its actions are somehow indirectly catalyzed or guided by those of the scholar, so that their choices and actions become inseparable: In studying and/or trying to reconstruct the story, the scholar is also somehow driving its evolution. The implication of this would be that readers’ choices to align with the scholar or the worm, which would initially seem like diametrically opposed options, would turn out to be more intertwined than they think. I like how this sense of intertwining also reflects and plays together with the intertwining of time and the memories and “future memories” I was considering bringing into the piece.
So what I’m envisioning now, in terms of interactivity, is something like this:
- On a structural level, there is an overarching interactive mechanism where readers choose how much of the initially hidden content they’d like to uncover and read.
- If the hidden content can be imagined as layers, the first and most readily apparent layer gives options for interactivity that align reader with scholar. This might mostly have to do with uncovering more private notes, drafts, and reflections that don’t strictly relate to the story they’re studying. There could also be the option of (attempting to) reconstruct parts of the story that the worm has consumed.
- Then, if they dig deeper, they come upon the worm itself, which has hidden itself somewhere within the scholar’s notes/consciousness/digital space, but in such a way that the scholar doesn’t consciously perceive it. At this stage, readers get the option of enacting more changes/deletions in the story — which they might do while simultaneously also reconstructing other parts.
- How can I make it clear that not engaging with the interactive elements is a valid choice?
- Depending on how many “scholar” actions vs. “worm” actions the reader takes, I could make subtle changes to the visual experience of the story, perhaps highlighting certain colors, styles, or visual motifs that align with one or the other.
- Finally, when they reach the end of the framing narrative, readers — having spent the entire piece interacting (or choosing not to interact) with these different forces — will have the choice of how they’d like to close their engagement with the story-within-the-story. This will be a critical choice that reflects on the themes and big questions they’ve been exploring.
This outline, however, still doesn’t capture the idea of gentle randomness that I’d wanted to explore in the piece. One additional interactive element to explore this aspect might be having an option for readers, at any time, to “randomize” the experience — so certain phrases might be shuffled/replaced, or the location of certain memories/future memories might change, or the aesthetic experience might be reset to a random point along the scholar/worm spectrum. The idea behind this would be to give readers some control over introducing random variations, which might prompt them to see unexpected connections between different pieces of the story (much like how shuffling Scrabble letters helps a player see new and different words).
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