A Festival of Narrative Automata

Hypertext research has been deeply interested a narrative, and literary hypertext fiction has enjoyed a long and happy relationship to this conference. The literature of Critical Theory, on the other hand, is famously opaque, and our Balkanized technical literature on new media storytelling has grown provincial. Daring yet accessible experiments in non-sequential interactive narrative have appeared in unexpected places – in theaters, in experimental novels, and especially in narrativist role-playing games. Narrative automata exhibit considerable sophistication in the frame of simple models of computation. Much of this work is a lot of fun while demonstrating remarkable theoretical depth. In contrast to the cheery hero journeys through depopulated landscapes that long dominated computer games, this work is notably dark, emotionally complex, and introspective. CCS Concepts • CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering➝Software creation and management➝Designing Software • Applied Computing➝ Computers in other domains. anywhere, but most of the time they carry us to the home page or to clickbait listicles. Even in our unfrequented academic backwaters, we have few guides to light the linked path or to explain what writers have attempted and to demonstrate how they have succeeded or failed. Hypertext’s friends and critics alike assume, for example, that hypertext is incapable of narrative coherence[3], though this is demonstrably untrue[4]. 2. CRITICAL THEORY FOR FUN A widespread assumption among software engineers holds that writing is a sort of information transfer protocol. Suppose I have an idea in mind; perhaps I have discovered a new algorithm, and I want you to know about it. You are not here, so I write it down on the page, encoding it, and I mail you the text. You read the text, decode it, and that reading recreates a mental state or representation that corresponds to what I wanted to explain. Every year, I read student papers motivated by this model. It underpins much of our rhetoric and almost all of our evaluations. It is fundamentally wrong.[5] Many rewarding and fruitful ideas developed by Critical and Literary Theory in the late 20th century [20] have found their way into an odd literary backwater situated on the fringes of literary publishing, commercial publishing, and the game industry. These works have received almost no attention beyond their immediate community, and indeed have seldom sought a wider audience. Most are published by very small presses, and their concerns often appear esoteric or even childish. Yet, in these works we find embodied the key results of Critical Theory of greatest interest to hypertext writers and to designers of hypertext systems and tools. These works are themselves hypertext narratives or, rather, hypertextual engines for generating narratives. Some of these are frivolous, some somber. Many are capable of surprising range and subtlety. 3. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR As late as the early 20th century, people who thought about literature were confident that stories and plays meant something, and that meaning could be found in the text. History had meaning, too, and again close study of the evidence by a reasonable observer would reveal the right interpretation. The Second World War shattered this belief in the inviolate text and the master narrative, and by 1968 it had become evident that master narratives chiefly served the master. Poststructuralism rejected the textual horizons of new criticism; meaning isn’t found in the text alone, but equally in the way we interpret the text. To accept the author’s intention would be invidious, in exactly the same way that to accept every interpretation of the village priest (or the local political commissar) would be antithetical to freedom. Even beloved writers, after all, were deeply complicit in the mythologies and economies of their time; Jane Austen’s heroines live off revenues