An immersive digital reading experience
Digital fictions have been living in the shadowland since the beginning of the internet in the late 1970s. Fictions on floppy disks; fictions read and followed on email – Rob Wittig’s fabulous Blue Company, 2002; blogs – Matthew Baldwin’s super fun The Live Journal of Zachary Marsh, 2004; drip fed in bite-sized suspense – Jennifer’s Egan’s artful Black Box, 2012 via Twitter. And in computer code.
Of course hypertext opens new portals for fictions, the obvious wander being into choose-your-own-adventure territory which in turn leads onto consequence of choice. Then we start to tread the fine line of story and game – an ongoing subject of debate. Stake your territory. Moreover, let’s not get into the well hashed over discussion of internet self-publishing. In this Tiktok era ‘chat’ (aka textstory) stories abound, ones that read like you’re receiving text messages. It is said that digital fictions are immersive. One could argue so are books, perhaps more so. Whatever the case, the idea is to write to the medium, even appropriate it for your story telling purposes.
In 2009 Chris Klimas created Twine an open source software platform that anyone could use to write or create games – or that blurred ‘in-between’ such as the profound With Those We Love Alive, 2014 by Porpentine. Twine is useful for teaching students about the possibilities of digital fiction, for experiencing the places you can go with it, the types of stories suited to this medium. We teach it at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka-University of Otago in our Creative Writing paper.
When I got the chance between work and life, over a period of two years, I wrote my Twine fiction. It’s not a game, you’ll see consequences to your choices, but like the character you inhabit, they are inner questions and learning experiences. In essence the story goes on, like the characters drawn to their destiny you have a destination. This story of mine reimagines characters from history and literature. The story world is in the land of Phantastes and time is a fluid realm. My imagined characters take from their originals. One of the delights of this type of fiction is the ability to ‘pop out’ sideways which I do to explanation pages, although in digital fiction there are no pages, but rather interlinking ‘nodes’ or passages.
Another creative option is the multi-media facet, images, sound and dynamic text. This dynamic text means reader interaction. Clicked-on links move the story along and provides the options. I say ‘reader’, some say ‘player’, either way it is your ‘human’. Therefore like any artwork, it is human to human. You might say, ‘well an AI can create an artwork’. I’d respond, ‘yeah that sucks. Anyway, a human had to ask it’. Because human to human is where signification, initiation and expression lies. Because people are over it, over false oracles of the internet, we want humanity. But that drifts into another of my planned posts.
So, may I humbly, human to human, introduce you to Where Scorpions Fear to Tread.
Housed on a site called Itch.io this story is a free download and instructions for the uninitiated are included.
Bice Grace Lapin 