Miscommunication in Interactive Fictions

Bryan Alexander (19) explains interactive fiction as similar to hypertext fiction, but designed to be used with simple prompts like "walk" and "get." In this way readers feel more entangled in the created environment.

My Struggle with Struggle
The balance tips from any kind of plot points toward struggling through an environment. There are many gamers who love this kind of ergodic fiction just as many readers love deciphering Emily Dickinson poems or reading Ulysses by James Joyce. I love a challenge at first, but I'm not very adept at the language of games so I usually end up stuck in a dead end, which occurred for me here reading Colossal Cave Adventure by Willie Crowther (converted, adapted, standardized and essentially preserved by six other people). I got stuck in the cave unable to figure out what to do between a snake and a dwarf.  In my final minutes I tried every word I could think of to further the story. I kept encountering obstacles in communication, such as,

And my heart sank every time I read that. And I read that a lot. My words cannot be applied. So sad. Game stories seem more attractive to closed system thinkers versus open system thinkers. Closed system thinkers are really good at working within systems, memorizing the rules and figuring out how the virtual world works very quickly. It's a valuable skill. I don't have it. These folks tend to be good at math, music and science. Open system thinkers struggle with limited parameters and prefer to make endless synonym guesses and proposing preposterous actions like "bottle the mist" and "cage the snake" which seemed reasonable to me but I simply received an explanation about what mist was and the admonishment, "You can't be serious."

Differences from Traditional Paper Novels
Interactive fictions like this are very literal versus figurative. Navigating the story requires very literal descriptions of the environment, which you would never read in a paper novel. Imagine a trip to intercept a network of spies that began, "Reilly woke up in a bedroom. Reilly got out of bed and walked to the door. There was a door to the kitchen and a door to the outside. Reilly went outside." Interactive fiction is more in-the-moment and so there is less time or room for much more than grabbing, moving around and encountering things. So normally this kind of reader has a higher tolerance for piles of physical detail.

Differences from Hypertext
I know it limits my choices, but for branching stories I prefer hypertext stories like Quing's Quest, The Death of Videogames. 

I have a sense that all branching stories (hypertext or prompt-based) are finitely limited by design. Programmers must anticipate and write scenarios for each possibility. Prompt-based fictions just give us the illusion of endless choice. I know there are only a few real options at the end of each prompt of text. Why should I have to guess what those options are?

Works Cited

Alexander, Bryan. The New Digital Storytelling. Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2017.

Crowther, Willie. “Colossal Cave Adventure.” Halt and Catch Fire, https://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/exclusives/colossal-cave-adventure. Accessed 21 February 2019.

"Open vs. Closed Thinking Systems." 11 November 2014. Unidentified author. uBeme Blog, https://ubeme.com/brainstormcafe/2014/11/11/open-vs-closed-thinking-modes. Accessed 21 February 2019.

Squinkifer, Dietrich. "Quing's Quest, The Death of Videogames." Electric Literature Organization, http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=quings-quest-vii. Accessed 21 February 2019.

Handling Suspense in Blog Stories

Scary Stories & Conflict

I’ll be comparing two online blog stories, The Dionea House, a haunted house story by Eric Heisserer, and The Sick Land, a science fiction horror story by Jon Hills. Both use the blogging medium for their tales. In The Dionea House, a group of individuals fall prey to an evil house and their stories are told either through postings of emails in blog format or on blogs themselves. Each post builds up tension as characters, one by one, decide to enter the evil house(es). As each blogger succumbs to the house, they either stop posting or the house takes over their missives. Various comments are left on posts by various interested parties, some possibly some by the evil house itself.

The Sick Land is the story of one single blogger on a field study to a remote and abandoned area consumed by illness, destruction, and gory ends for many researchers. You follow one blog writer, Alex, for the entire story and his blog presumably ends with his death after a series of adventures out in the field and in various research facilities.

While reading the second story, I started to think about the use of suspense in the blog format. Suspense is a literary sub-concept of conflict. Conflict can be defined as the challenge or struggles characters face against other characters, situations, or nature. Suspense is an element of a story that introduces anxiety or uncertainty pertaining to that conflict. Suspense brings conflict to life and entices the reader to keep going, to resolve the anxiety. Suspense works on our natural desire to reach conclusion and equilibrium from the ongoing conflict.

In both of these stories, the conflict involves characters struggling against the supernatural. Suspense is created around irrational behaviors, unexplainable events, plot points where a character is about to do something risky or brave.

Here are two examples form The Dionea House. In this first example, Eric ends his first post by saying "I am profoundly sorry." That simple statement is meant to create anxiety for the reader.

What is he so "profoundly sorry" about? What could possibly have happened to warrant such a dire tone? The next example occurs at the end of a post and is stated much more matter-of-factly:

from post 9.20.2004

"I have to go to the police now, don't I" is presented as an uncomfortable statement, not a question. We can feel the anxiety in the character's voice and we're also primed to want to find out what will happen when police get involved. This is a classic cliff hanger: "tomorrow I will do something risky."

In The Sick Land. Hills leads many of his blog posts with a suspense sentence, like the one below:

"Something killed Saul." Very understated but a very alarming way to begin a daily post. What killed Saul! You are compelled to read on to find out.

Suspense in a Blog versus a Physical Book

In online blogs it would seem most logical to place cliff hangers at the beginning and ends of blog posts. Or in the case of The Sick Land, at the end of a grouping of blog posts, the final post in a monthly roll up.

But there are challenges to pacing suspense in a blog versus a physical book. In a physical book, ends of chapters are logical stopping points for readers. Rarely will someone stop in the middle of a chapter. So you place your cliff hangers at the ends of chapters. But in blog posts, there are no logical places to stop reading, other than at the ends of posts. So it's very difficult to predict where suspense is needed. It's a new structural paradigm and might take a reconsideration of narrative timing. For example, you can't overload a reader with suspense in every single post. That would be too fatiguing and your tactics would lose their effectiveness. 

Hills used segments of months (see right) like chapters and created suspense in the posts at the end of months. Alternatively, Heisserer's story was a collection of multiple blogs and suspense was created in the final posts of each blog, where characters had a climactic encounter with the haunted house.

Blogs do have affordances that work to aid suspense. Both authors here used common blog functionality to place uncanny tension in their post titles or late-night date stamps. Blogs also seem more real and immediate due to their accessibility online. You make assumptions that blog writers are out there in the real world self publishing their scary experiences in the here and now. Whereas, once you start reading a physical book, the fact of that book's production, having been vetted through a publisher, creates more emotional distance. You assume that story already has a resolution, the writer probably isn't dead or they couldn't have published this book. None of those assurances are available to a blog story.

Ultimately, whether or not the suspenseful tactics of these two stories works on you will depend on your particular threshold of fear. Both authors created multiple suspenseful moments within the allowances of the blogging form. Real cliffhangers were placed in logical locations but you would still encounter them somewhat randomly due to the structure of blogs. However, the form does have an inherent aura of suddenly encountering a "lost diary" and that works well for creating general suspense in a story.  


Works Cited 
Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

u/HIGHzurrer. “Information I'm dumping here for safekeeping.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2hi7e6/information_im_dumping_here_for_safekeeping/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Hills, Jon. “The Sick Land.” Blogger, http://thesickland.blogspot.com/. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Point of View in "The Dionaea House"

I just spent two days reading The Dionaea House by Eric Heisserer and loved it! Here’s some of my thoughts around Point of View:

There are Many Interlocking POVs

This novel contains a large cast of characters, especially if you count the real and fake comment profiles. There’s some disagreement around which is which. I believe most are fiction. When you click profiles links, most have very meta profiles and even though some blogs seem open for comments (I didn’t take the plunge), those on Eric’s blog, A Quiet Space, are missing date stamps and in general sound too eloquent even when trying to be colloquial. Even the trolling comments seem too kind (considering modern vitriol). Characters (and commenters) interlock throughout the blogs by links and communities surrounding posts.

Most of the main characters have distinct points of view but in one comment board from Eric’s final post in A Quiet Space, hundreds of comments including spam posts become a cacophony of noise, sprinkled with real plot points. There are also POV variations with the moniker Anonymous.

Eric's blog

Some characters are even suppressed on boards where posts have been removed. On Jennifer Levin’s blog, posts have been removed by “the author,” but on Eric’s blog, posts have been removed by “a blog administrator.” And since this is a ghost story and Eric is purportedly dead, his postmortem comments allude to either the meta nature of the novel's real author commenting on his own fiction or the house itself serving as the administrator.

Technology is a Vehicle for POV

There are various mediums where characters tell their stories: emails, mobile texts, various brands and styles of blogs, comment posts and online profiles. Some stories are pithy and strung over multiple comments posts (example: the anonymous troll posting cynicism that gradually turns into belief and aggression), and some stories are long diatribes within one comment.

In fact, complications occur with point of view where various commenters choose to identify as anonymous or, as online communication allows, misrepresent who they are. However, not all anonymous commenters are created equally. At least one of them is a recurring troll and you have to pay attention to each message to identify them.

Characters also present their point of view with the style of their blogs and the functionality they enable, for example the babysitter’s use of emoticons to express her mood after every post. Blog themes, font styles, subject lines, blog titles, what time of day they create posts all reveal possible character traits and POV. Some of this has been compromised now that parts of the novel has been taken down from the original domain and archived on Creepy Pasta (with part(s) missing).

The babysitter's blog

The journaling functionality of the blog elicits very confessional and intimate thoughts from the characters to varying degrees, the teen babysitter being the most divulging and Loreen the most guarded.

Loreen's blog

Blogs Are Naturally Meta

Characters comment on the medium as they email, text or blog. Bryan Alexander calls

this self-awareness (50). Point of view is also revealed as the characters reveal their comfort levels with the technologies they use to tell their stories. Their distancing from technology also places their view points within an earlier era of the Internet when people were still acclimating to the internet’s tools. “I don't know how to do HTML,” Connie says. Not something someone says with easy WYSYWG interfaces today.

POV is also confused by the fact that the character of Eric, who disappears in the story, has the same name as the author of the novel and the author uses his public persona years later to continue commenting on Reddit about this fictional house, as if it was true but not alluding to the complication of his own disappearance.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Some people blog to communicate their existence in a noisy world. This story takes that idea to the extreme: once these characters stop blogging, this indicates they have disappeared and might really have ceased to exist.

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Note: I found an error in the Alexander text on page 52. The last post on the babysitter’s blog, “found you,” does not link to Eric’s A Quiet Place blog, but instead to Jennifer Levin’s blog (empty except for a treasure of comments).

Jennifer's blog

Works Cited

The Novel (websites and blogs):

Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/.  Accessed 2 February 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/.  Accessed 2 February 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

u/HIGHzurrer. “Information I'm dumping here for safekeeping.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2hi7e6/information_im_dumping_here_for_safekeeping/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Commentary:

Alexander, Bryan. The New Digital Storytelling. Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2017.