not that you may remember time:
Interactive Fiction, Stream-Of-Consciousness Writing and Free Will
<P>
Mark Silcox
Philosophy Department, Auburn University
<P>

Janet Murrays book Hamlet on The Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
is a spirited and unrelentingly optimistic defense of new styles of interactive
storytelling made popular in the wake of the PC revolution of the early 1990s.
Most of the appeal of Murrays book lies in her lively and engaging descriptions
of her own experiences with stories written using these new, mostly digital
media. Murray should be applauded warmly for helping to make the attractions of
computer gaming, web design fan fiction and other pervasive contemporary
diversions attractive and intelligible to an audience that is often suspicious of
such prima facie purely pop-cultural marginalia. Occasionally in her book,
however, she waxes somewhat more theoretical, and tries to describe the appeal of
stories that provide the reader with a more extensive influence on the course of
events making up a narrative, by means of a comparison with the traditional aims
of storytellers in the western tradition going back as far back as the
pre-Gutenberg era. 
In this essay I shall focus my attention on some interesting but problematic
remarks that Murray makes about how we should understand the relationship between
aesthetics of interactive fiction (hereafter abbreviated IF) and the intentions
of writers from just one earlier tradition. Murray compares the artistic aims of
interactive storytellers to those of authors such as Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce and
others from the first half of the twentieth century who experimented with
non-traditional narrative methods in an effort to provide readers of fiction with
an extreme close-up of human consciousness itself. Her reason for making these
comparisons, and part of what seems to lie behind her considerable optimism about
the future of IF, is a belief that stories told through media like literary
hypertexts, the internet and computer games, at least partly by virtue of the new
interface that they generate between the author and his readers, can be expected
to deliver a higher level of psychological realism to the conventional reader of
fiction. 
I want to tell the story of how stream-of-consciousness writing compares to IF in
a somewhat different way than Murray tells it. I do not want to suggest that
Murrays diagnosis of the relationship between these two vastly different methods
of telling stories is simply false, but her approach makes me uncomfortable for a
couple of reasons. In the first place, to suggest that one style of narrative can
be valued to any extent over another by virtue of its capacity to give a true
picture of how the mind works betrays, I think, an approach to practical
criticism that relies more extensively upon evaluations of a works specifically
mimetic properties than many in the so-called post-modern era would be entirely
comfortable with. This approach influences her critical judgments in some rather
surprising ways  her preference for simulation-style computer games like SimCity
and Civilization over so called adventure games like Myst and Planetfall seem
strange given the sheer paucity of textual content in the former, and her
apparent willingness to posit a sort of continuity between the appeal of
interactive literature and passive media such as television is rather surprising
to those of us who have come to view interactive media as presenting a possible
salvation from the cultural penury imposed upon so many in our civilization by
the little blue box. 
More, significantly, though, I think that Murrays convictions about what it would
be for a story to achieve a desirable level of psychological realism in the
contemporary era betrays some important philosophical prejudices about the
relationship between literature and our understanding of the psychological
significance of free will that (while they might be almost automatically
appealing to many inhabitants of the contemporary scene) it is at least worth
bringing out into the open. The less antecedent philosophy we bring to the task
of comparing two historically separate and stylistically divergent traditions of
storytelling, the more we shall be able to appreciate each individual authors
efforts based upon a conception of his or her own peculiar artistic agenda.
As we shall see when we examine some of the remarks that Murray makes about what
she takes to be some of the distinctive appeals of interactive writing to the
contemporary imagination, she seems at least to think of different methods of
narrative as representing so many different strategies for making new kinds of
human experience available, in some sense of this term, to the reader. Like many
critics before her, Murray appears to regard the structural limitations imposed
by a narrative style upon how a particular author tells his tale as instruments
for, rather than as impediments to, the achievement of that particular sort of
communicative act between author and reader that distinguishes the literary from
other forms of expression. Now, my own critical antennae are attuned to a less
Aristotelian, and perhaps a more Freudian wavelength than Murrays. The poet, say
Aristotle, must be more the poet of his plots than of his verses, inasmuch as he
is a poet by virtue of the imitative element in his work, and it is actions that
he imitates. For the Freudian, on the other hand, narrative tropes and
conventions in a certain sense represent an impediment to literary communication;
the essential ars poetica, suggests Freud, in his famous essay on creative
writers and day-dreaming, is the set of strategies by which the writer bribes us
by the purely formal  that is, aesthetic  yield of pleasure which he offers us in
the presentation of his fantasies. These formal properties of a work of
literature, says Freud, work to some extent to conceal or to render less
accessible the features of a story that make possible the release of still
greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. 
It seems to me that there are some important insights about the relationship
between stream-of-consciousness fiction and interactive literature that can be
obtained from thinking of narrative structures as imposing a sort of purely
external constraint upon the extent to which genuine psychological realism is a
viable goal in the writing of fiction. As I shall try to show through an
examination of passages from certain key texts belonging to both  of these
traditions, the most successful works owe a considerable portion of their appeal
to the ways in which their authors actually place on exhibit their detachment
from the narrative conventions associated with each type of writing, and by so
doing allow their readers, if not to participate directly in the narrative
contrivance, then at the very least to peek behind the curtain.
<P>
The popularity of what Murray describes as multiform narratives  a category that
is meant to include not only IF but also the writings of authors as diverse as
Calvino, Borges and Delmore Schwartz,  Hollywood scriptwriters, and participants
in collaborative internet soap operas  arises from sources deep in our
contemporary understanding of the nature of human agency. Such works represent 
an effort to give expression to the characteristically twentieth-century
perception of life as composed of parallel possibilities. Multiform narrative
attempts to give a simultaneous form to these possibilities, to allow us to hold
in our minds at the same time multiple contradictory alternatives.
<P>
Murray speculates that this way of thinking about human lives as paths traced
through a space of conflicting possibilities might be a reflection of
post-Einsteinian physics, or perhaps of a secular society haunted by the
chanciness of life. 
Such hypotheses should perhaps not be dismissed entirely out of hand, but one
cannot help feeling that they perhaps represent a somewhat over-precise
explanation of what is surely a highly general feature of our human
self-understanding  a feature, moreover, whose origins are probably better
explained ahistorically. To say that a person recognizes her life as being
composed of parallel possibilities surely after all amounts to nothing more than
the claim that she recognizes her capacity for acting freely. Are the multiform
writers of twentieth century literature really the first group of literary
artists to have devised a way of telling stories that adequately represents the
influence of free will upon human self-understanding?
In one very provocative and engaging passage of her book, Murray describes the
psychological effect of watching a 3D IMAX film, Across the Sea of Time, which
tells the story of a young Russian boys visit to New York. Here, she suggests
that such media simultaneously proffer to and frustrate in their audiences a new
sort of empathetic involvement with the stories that they tell  something quite
different from the sort of vicarious identification with characters in a
narrative whose fates are determined by the structure of the story as it unfolds:
toward the end of the movie we are on a wonderfully realized street in Greenwich
villageA couple in what would ordinarily be the background crosses the street.
But there is no background. I am there. My attention is caught, and I want to
follow that couple and see what their story is. Instead, the camera relentlessly
drags me into a bar on a corner with the young boy. Again I see a wonderfully
detailed environmentI want to move closer, to lean into the shot to get a better
view, but the camera stays with the dramatic action of the scene, namely, Tomas
conversation with the bartender. I am uncomfortable at these moments because the
three-dimensional photography has put me in a virtual space and has thereby
awakened by desire to move though it autonomously, to walk away from the camera
and discover the world on my own.
<P>
What this passage suggests is that something much more subtle  and perhaps more
interesting  than the mere recognition that stories take place in environments
that are subject to change through the influence of human voluntarism may be
going on in the reception of works that demand such a high level of participation
from their audiences,. What Murray actually depicts herself as having experienced
here is a feeling of positive resistance to the flow of narrative in the film.
Rather than experiencing the development of a storys plot as an incentive bonus
or a fore-pleasure to the liberation of tensions in our minds, as Freud described
the plots of traditional romantic narratives, the audience is explicitly made
aware of its role a purely artificial constraint upon imagination and positive
empathy. 
Murray seems to believe that her response was an unintended side-effect of the
technology used in making the film. My own experience of 3D movies is that plots
are almost inevitably quite explicitly contrived and illogical, since they are
designed (albeit rarely with much subtlety or self-reflexivity) so as to provide
certain sorts of momentary and ephemeral experiential pay-offs  the bird that
flies over your head, the sword that seems to reach out dangerously toward you,
the curious objet-dart thrown into high relief against a backdrop of characters
who are merely talking. Would it be too paradoxical to suggest that the
deliberate use of such devices to inspire a felt resistance to the determinism of
narrative could in fact be a guiding principle in the determination of a literary
style? 
I think that the self-conscious adoption of this strategy is in fact a
distinguishing feature of twentieth-century literature, and is often what
contemporary critics are really talking about when they suggest (as one so
frequently hears) that the much broader phenomenon of irony is the dominant trope
of modern literary fiction. One finds many such examples of this sort of attempt
to distance ones readers from the determinism of narrative in the works of major
writers associated with the stream-of-consciousness movement. 
<P>
In order better to understand how the aim of psychological realism as pursued by
authors of this sort of fiction might lead them quite naturally to pursue a
strategy of self-reflexiveness and ironic detachment in the construction of
narratives, it will be useful to take a quick glimpse at the writings of William
James, the philosopher who first introduced the term stream-of-consciousness into
the lexicon of popular psychology. In The Principles of Psychology, James tried
to describe in terms as objective as possible the five most important
distinguishing characters of a sentient human beings stream of thought. These, he
suggested, were the following:
Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
It is interested in some parts of those objects to the exclusion of others, and
welcomes or rejects  chooses from among them, in a word  all the while.
<P>
Now, it would certainly be a clear mistake to deny that one of the principal aims
of many great writers of the early twentieth century who experimented openly with
stream-of-consciousness technique was to provide a more realistic depiction of
the minutiae of our everyday thought processes. The philosopher Henri Bergson, a
contemporary of James and a widely influential thinker during the earlier half of
this century, openly endorsed this view of the aims of narrative. The author, he
said, 
may multiply the traits of his heros character, may make him speak and act as
much as he pleases, but all this can never be equivalent to the simple and
indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were able for an instant to
identify myself with the person of the hero himself.
<P>
Some authors of this period may perhaps have even held themselves up to the
standard of accuracy set by psychologists and philosophers of the period such as
James, Bergson and others, who employed overtly introspective, phenomenological
methods of inquiry for what they took to be the purely scientific
characterization of how human beings think. Subsequent critics have pointed out,
however, that. To suppose that mere psychological realism was the exclusive aim
lying behind this sort of literary experimentation would be to attribute to these
authors an extraordinary navet about the most basic inherent limitations imposed
by the conventions of fiction writing, as well as the more general constraint
imposed upon the artist by the use of written language itself.  
One useful exercise we can perform to convince ourselves of this fact is to
reflect upon the plausibility of each of the five numbered statements given above
with the word narrative substituted for the expression personal consciousness (or
the initial pronoun in statements #4 and #5). I do not think it takes more than a
little reflection to conclude that under this transformation, the first three
statements of James characterization of the stream of consciousness would under
most circumstances clearly be false while the last two only would remain at least
relatively plausible. Elaborating upon the first characteristic listed above,
James remarked that each human mind  keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is
no giving or bartering between themAbsolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is
the law. But the deliverance of a narrative is always at the very least an act of
communication between two minds; when it aspires to psychological realism its
informational content is furthermore usually to do with a content of some mind
that is neither that of the teller not that of the hearer. If we accept
Aristotles characterization of narrative as requiring at least some probability
[or] necessity in the sequence of its episodes as being at the very least a rough
approximation of the truth then we must furthermore reject the re-interpreted
version of condition #2,  since according to James when accepted as a true
description of personal consciousness it clearly implies that no state once gone
can recur and be identical with what it was before, and hence that no
psychological state considered in abstraction from its objects can be thought of
as related probabilistically in any way at all to any other state that an
individual might happen to enter into. Statement #3 is a little more tricky,
since it is less than clear precisely what James means by describing thought as
continuous in character. He might on the one hand be referring to the fact that
much of everyday conscious reflection is of a non-linguistic character  an
intuitively appealing, but philosophically rather controversial claim to make
about how we experience the flow of our own thoughts. Or he might be making the
more challenging claim that no human being ever does anything without the
accompaniment of a consciously experienced internal flow of thoughts, even when
asleep, entrances, or absorbed in physical work. In either case, extreme examples
of experimentation in stream-of-consciousness writing such as Finnegans Wake,
Russell Hobans Riddley Walker and some of the later novels of Samuel Beckett,
which forego even the conventions of regular syntax and word individuation might
conceivably stake a claim to providing partially adequate representation of the
continuous qualities of human thinking. But this is surely at most an
unattainable ideal, one that can at best be approximated very roughly through the
fundamentally discontinuous medium of human language.
When one looks at a few supposedly paradigmatic examples of psychologically
realistic stream-of-consciousness writing, what one finds is that in fact a
curious sort of path is negotiated between fairly regular methods for the
delivery of narrative information about an individuals conscious history,  and a
very particular type of digression from the flow of narrative. Consider, for
example, the famous opening pages of Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. This novel begins with a curious barrage of sensations - snatches of
half-coherent song (Oh, the green wothe botheth) fragments of a story being read
aloud to the protagonist , and the observation that When you wet the bed first it
is warm then it gets cold. The sheer novelty of this style of writing, and the
extent to which it contrasts with more conventional first-person styles of
narration, has led many critics to praise the author by remarking upon his
utterly original methods for  capturing the raw feel of our inner, reflective
experience as human beings. But this can easily lead one to overlook certain
crucial ambiguities. For in the first place, it is actually made quite clear by
Joyce (through the use of asterisks which divide up the initial sections of the
book) that this passage is meant to serve, not as a representation of one single,
continuous episode in the conscious life of Stephen Daedalus, but rather as a
sort of representative sampling from Stephens infant thoughts. It is also worth
noting that the glimpses that one does catch of other characters, even in the
space of a couple of pages  of Stephens singing father and his pious Aunt - are
clearly meant to resonate with other passages later on in the novel, after
Stephen himself has developed to an extent that enables him to achieve deeper
insights about the personalities of his immediate family. And in a striking
passage toward the end of the novel, the adult Stephen philosophizes to a friend
about the nature of epical narrative in a way that utterly lays bare the
contrivances involved in the novels early sections:
The simplest epical form is seen as emerging out of lyrical literature when the
artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event and this
form progresses till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the
artist himself and from othersThis progress you will see easily in that old
English ballad Turpin Hero, which begins in the first person and ends in the
third person.
<P>
Perhaps the most interesting example of a text in the stream-of-consciousness
tradition in which this balancing of pure psychological description with the
development of a cohesive, structured narrative is brought into high relief is
the second section of Faulkners The Sound and The Fury. For this portion of his
masterpiece, Faulkner places us inside the mind of Quentin Compson, a troubled
Harvard undergraduate, on the day of his suicide. We watch as he goes through a
meticulous series of preparations for his own death, which are interrupted
comically by some confrontations with young children and hostile immigrants and a
corrupt rural judge. As these events unfold, Quentins imagination drifts back and
forth with apparent aimlessness between his two principal obsessions in life 
obscure memories of an ambiguous, possibly incestuous relationship with his
sister, and reflections upon the various aphoristic pronouncements that made up
his fathers darkly fatalistic worldview. 
What is striking about these passages from Faulkners novel is the almost
rhythmical variation in his depiction of the flow of Quentins thoughts, from
purely subjective, momentary ephemera of consciousness to the delivery of
fragments of information about his environment and the people he meets  details
that are crucial to the readers understanding of what is going on in the world
around him. A number of devices are used to achieve this delicate balance in the
narrative between Quentins free-associative mental ramblings and more
deliberately expository passages. The most explicit and straightforward of these
devices is Faulkners use of italicized text, which always begins when an actual
incident in Quentins environment has called to mind some vaguely remembered image
or idea from his troubled past:
The shell was a speck now, the oars catching the sun in spaced glints, as if the
hull were winking itself along. Did you ever have a sister? No but theyre all
bitches. Did you ever have a sister? One minute she was. Bitches. Not bitch one
minute she stood in the door
<P>
I found the gasoline in Shreves room and spread the vest in the table, where it
would be flat, and opened the gasoline.
 The first car in town Girl thats what Jason couldnt bear smell of gasoline
making him sick then got madder than ever because a girl Girl had no sister
<P>
There is also an element of graceful and quite deliberate irony in the mixing of
Quentins recollections of a night spent in the rain with his sister with his
attempts to shake off a small, silent immigrant girl who follows him around as he
makes his way through the outlying areas that surround the college: 
Youre just a girl. Poor kid. There was a path, curving beside the water. Then the
water was still again, dark and swift. Nothing but a girl. Poor sister. We lay in
the wet grass panting the rain like cold shot on my back. Do you care not do you
do you
 My lord we are in a mess get up. Where the rain touched my forehead it began
to smart my and came red away streaking off pink in the rain. Does it hurt []
Theres town again sister. Youll have to go home now. Ive got to get back to
school. Look how late its getting. Youll go home now, wont you? But she just
looked at me with her black, secret, friendly gaze, the half-naked loaf clutched
to her breast. 
<P>
Finally, there is the repeated reference to devices for the measurement of time
throughout this section of the novel. Quentins tendency to be repeatedly
distracted from his thoughts by the ticking of clocks and the tolling of the hour
provide a neat metaphor for the tragic course of events that provide a backdrop
for the unrelenting play of his obsessional thoughts. The chapters central
symbol, a pocketwatch given to Quentin by his father not that you may remember
time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all
your breath trying to conquer it, provides us with what is perhaps the clearest
example of an authors attempt give us a glimpse of the difficulty that he himself
faces in trying adequately to represent the continuous, ineffable diachronic play
of a characters innermost while at the same time delivering a structured,
coherent narrative.
<P>
Our aim in discussing these few brief  examples of stream-of-consciousness
writing has been to bring to light a crucial but often neglected element of
ambivalence evince in the narrative styles adopted by Joyce and Faulkner toward 
the task of providing a realistic depiction of the flow of the elements of
privacy, flux and continuity in the flow of human thought. When we turn from
stream-of-consciousness fiction to IF, we find that some of the most skillful and
reflective interactive storytellers exhibit a strikingly similar sort of
ambivalence toward the task of providing an accurate representation of what it
feels like for a character to exercise free will in a way that influences how the
story he or she inhabits will reach its conclusion.
Now, in traditional IF of the sort made popular by the game company INFOCOM in
the early 1980s, the player/ reader influences the course of events in a story
through the entering of simple instructions into a traditional DOS-style command
line interface. So, for example, a story might begin with the following passage:
You are standing in the upstairs bedroom of the small urban townhouse that you
share with your wife and kids. To the north is the house's upstairs corridor.
Directly underfoot, you notice that there is a large, gamey heap of your own
recently worn underwear. The bed is unmade, and sunlight streams in through a
small window to the south. 
<P>
followed by some command line indicator (e.g. >) into which an instruction is
types (e.g. wear underwear; close window and so forth). Computer programmers who
design tools for the writing of interactive stories - languages such as TADS and
INFORM and all of the various extensions thereof - try to provide the author with
as many resources as possible in the design of a parser for these command-line
inputs of a reader. One of the indisputable criteria by which interactive stories
are evaluated by fans of the medium is in terms of the degree of inventiveness
that can be tolerated from the player. If a player were to type wear underwear at
the conclusion of the passage given above, only the very shoddiest of IF stories
would respond with something like I dont understand that statement, or Be more
specific. If the player were to input something more esoteric, though, e.g. Bask
in sunlight or Contemplate navel only the very most polished and carefully
designed IF parser would be likely to reply with a remark that did not sound
thoroughly vacuous or formulaic.
 These imperatives that govern he construction of programming tools for IF
serve as evidence for the plausibility of Murrays claim that interactive one of
principal aims of interactive storytelling should be the intimation of diverging
possibilities that we experience as free will. From the programmers point of
view, it is clearly the case that the more possibilities there are  i.e. the
fewer formulaic, repetitive and narrative-stalling parser responses  the better.
There is something of a danger, though, in trying to formulate aesthetic
standards for the evaluation of these new media by focusing to much upon the aims
of programmers and technicians as though these somehow represented a distillation
of what is essential to the task of actually coming up with an interactive
narrative. It is certainly true that most of the best IF authors are inclined to
put enormous amounts of work into the design of highly responsive and imaginative
command-parsers  when one looks at the source code for games by experienced IF
writers like Mike Roberts, Graham Nelson, Cody Sandifer and Adam Cadre, it is
often quite astonishing how much time has been spent coming up with witty,
surprising and thematically salient responses have been implemented for some
manifestly unlikely player inputs. But many of these authors work also stands out
for another, quite different reason. Some of the most successful IF composed in
recent years is notable for the way in which it works systematically to frustrate
the expectations of even seasoned players and readers who expect such works to
behave in ways that are at least broadly analogous to the way that our own
personal environments respond to the exercise of our free will.
At the simplest level, a game may be structured in such a way that the principal
task that the reader is instructed to accomplish at the start (e.g. to find a
treasure, escape from a maze, or retrieve some valuable or symbolic artefact)
turns out either to be impossible or else is frustrated at the very last stage in
the narrative. This device is used to great comical effect in Mikko Vuorinens
King Arthurs Night Out and Leon Lins Kissing the Buddhas Feet.  A somewhat more
extreme example of this general strategy of bringing to light the restriction
upon our exercise of free will can be found in Cameron Wilkins chilling IF story
Bliss, in which the second-person protagonists aims, as manifested by the players
own carefully guided inputs, gradually reveal themselves to be entirely
delusional in nature. 
Other writers have come up with subtle methods of drawing their readers attention
to the inherent limitations of the traditional IF command parser, in order to
bring to light some curious quirks and paradoxes inherent in the human
self-conception as a species of free, autonomous agents. In Adam Cadres
award-winning IF story Photopia, there is a short but very moving scene in which
the main character recounts a dream she has had that the player is able to
recognize as a premonition of her own swiftly approaching death. The dramatic
irony of this scene is intensified considerably by Cadres use of a fake command
line (represented by the symbol [ -> ], below)  for the duration of the dream the
only command that the parser will respond to is a carriage return, but the
effects of command entry and response are still displayed as thought they had
actually taken place:
"Come on, Wendy," Alley says. "You know the rules. It's way past your bedtime.
Your parents'll be home soon and if you're still up it won't look too good for
either of us. I'll be right here if you need anything." She pulls a book out of
her backpack and starts in on her homework.
<P>
>talk to alley
Please select one:
<P>
(1) >ASK ALLEY ABOUT HER HOMEWORK
(2) >ASK ALLEY FOR A GLASS OF WATER
(3) >ASK ALLEY WHERE SHE GETS HER IDEAS
(4) >ASK ALLEY ABOUT HOW I GET HOME
(5) >ASK ALLEY ABOUT THE QUEEN
<P>
Select an option or 0 to say nothing >> 3
<P>
Alley puts down her pencil. "That's not a question people are supposed to be able
to answer," she says. "But I can. All that stuff, every bit of it, came straight
from these weird dreams I've been having. And they're not the only ones. There's
another... are you sure you want to hear about this?"
<P>
"Yeah!" you say.
<P>
"Okay," Alley says. "It starts like this..."
                                                                                 
         [ -> ]
                                                                                 
         [ -> ]
In a dark place
I open my eyes, and I am in a cold, dim, lonely place. I blink, thinking my eyes
are still closed, but then I realize that it is not pitch black: there is a dark
purple fog billowing all around me, so close to black as to make nearly no
difference. There is a faint purple glow to the stone floor, too, though I might
not even notice it if it weren't holding me up.
                                                                                 
         [ -> ]
>EXIT
<P>
I try to find my way out of this place, but no matter which direction I try, or
however far I go, it's all the same. Eventually -- and maybe it's minutes, maybe
it's days -- I can suddenly make out a vague shape in the fog.
                                                                                 
         [ -> ]
>LOOK AT SHAPE
<P>
It's strange, because parts of it look distinctly human, but others are just as
clearly not. I come closer, and I discover the answer: it's a person sitting in a
huge throne made of rock.  No, that's not right. It's not MADE of rock -- it IS a
rock, one single stone in the rough shape of a high-backed chair.
                                                                                 
         [ -> ]
>LOOK AT PERSON
<P>
Her face is turned away from me, but I can tell that it's a young woman, dressed
in long flowing purple garments. Dressed in royal purple, sitting in a throne, I
can only assume that she's a queen or princess of some sort, but since I don't
believe in monarchy, and certainly am not one of her subjects, I don't feel the
need to bow or scrape or call her "Your Majesty".  "Hello?" I say.
                                                                                 
         [ -> ]
>WAIT
<P>
After a moment, she turns to face me. And that's when I start to get really
scared.
<P>
She has my face.
<P>
(transcript from Adam Cadre, Photopia)
<P>
This method of capturing the fundamentally illusory nature of free will as it is
experienced in dream states is not only utterly original, but in addition could
not have been brought about without the games player having been lulled into a
false sense of security about the scope of her influence on the course of the
narrative by the games very intricate and well-designed parser.
Perhaps the most surprising and ingenious example to be found in IF of this sort
of deliberate distancing of the reader from the very features of the of the
medium that provide the reader with the apparent opportunity to direct the course
that a narrative takes can be found in Paul OBriens recently released game Local
Asynchronous Satellite Hookup. The central science-fictional conceit of this work
is that the player is in control of a robot that itself responds to exactly the
set of commands that the parser itself is programmed to understand. At the start
of the game, the robot is sent to an archaeological site to look for treasure 
the former home of a historian of the antebellum south and a pioneer in virtual
reality technology. The games command line is thus supposed to represent the
interface between the players persona  a prospector located somewhere outside of
the site itself  and the robot itself. At first glance, this conceit looks to be
merely a clever way to build the inherent limitations and finitude of traditional
IF command parsers into the very structure of the narrative itself, and some of
the responses one gets during the first half of the game to typed-in commands
support this reading, e.g.:
Parlor
I am in a spacious room that I presume was once the Parlor of the Percy home. A
sofa divides the room in two, with one end pointed towards the doorway to the
east and the other pointed towards the fireplace in the west wall. It is the only
piece of furniture in the room now, but scuffs on the hardwood floor suggest that
it was once accompanied by many others. There is also a doorway leading north.
<P>
On the sofa is a corpse (on which are a leather jacket and a white gold
bracelet),
<P>
>examine corpse
<P>
This is the body of a human adolescent female. She was lying on her face when she
died, which was obviously some time ago. The body is little more than a skeleton,
with a few bits of desiccated flesh on skin still clinging to the bone. It is
held together by a latticework of decaying tissue, and would no doubt fall apart
if touched. Most of its clothes have rotted away, but it still wears a leather
jacket and a bracelet of white gold.
<P>
>lift corpse
<P>
The skeleton collapses as I try to move it, leaving only a pile of bones on the
couch along with the corpses former possessions.
<P>
>x bones
<P>
This pile of bones was once a human skeleton.
<P>
>pray
I do not know how.
<P>
(transcript from Paul OBrian, Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup)
<P>
At the storys midway point, however, the robot discovers a curious collection of
inscrutable machines in the attic of the long-departed couple, and the following
miraculous transformation occurs:
At one end of the attic, the cabinets meet in a sort of vertex, and at the point
of this vertex is a booth.
<P>
>examine booth
<P>
The booth, like the cabinets, is connected to the cube in the center of the
attic. It is a three-quarter cylinder, a little taller and wider than I am, with
the open section facing out. Its wall is made of some sort of opaque black
plastic, and I can see some controls inside.
<P>
>enter booth
I have gotten into the booth.
<P>
In the booth I can see some controls.
<P>
>examine controls
The controls seem to consist of a number of readouts and indicators, and a
prominent button.
<P>
>examine indicators
The readouts and indicators appear to be active, but I can make no meaning from
them.
<P>
>press button
I push the button, and the cylinder of the booth closes, cutting off my exit
along with all outside light. Inside, it is pitch dark, but before my headlamp
even activates, I feel a strange sensation, as though my body were falling,
falling through thick air and velvet murmurs. Systems report no change of
altitude, but the freefall persists inside my brain. It is not an unpleasant
sensation. In fact, as it continues I note sensory functions sharpening and
previously unused brain sections coming online. It's so strange -- one part of me
feels like it is expanding at a rapid rate, touching mental regions I've never
used before, while another part -- 
<P>
[the one speaking now, is detached and observing the changes. I find that I must
erect more and more mental structures to maintain my standpoint as an observer] 
<P>
while the core of me pulses outward, soaked in the vividness of these new 
<P>
[I can only call them] 
<P>
emotions! 
<P>
[It also appears that a type of integration is operating. For example, the
metaphorical, figurative language in which I spoke when beginning to describe the
falling sensation] 
<P>
is completely unlike anything I've ever said before, at least anything I can
remember, 
<P>
[and my memory of] 
<P>
my childhood
<P>
(transcript from Paul OBrian, Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup)
<P>
The player has unwittingly guided the robot into a device designed to simulate
the experience of a black slave in the deep south. Here OBrian is using the very
features of the medium that Murray characterizes as providing for a more
realistic depiction of the experience of free decision-making to illuminate the
fragility of our everyday distinction between the autonomous and the automatic.
The first few moments of the simulation take things even further: 
My master bursts violently into the room! Instantly, he is upon me, taking
painful hold of my wrist and shouting with rage, "God-damn it! What the hell are
you doing up here, you God-damned nigger cunt? Stealing? Are you STEALING?" He
runs his hands run roughly all over my body, sparing me no indignity, before
acknowledging that I carry nothing.
<P>
"Caught you before you could take anything, didn't I?" he bellows, inches from my
face.
<P>
"But what else have you done?" He drags me along as he searches all of the
upstairs rooms, ferociously surveying for any piece out of place. 
<P>
"All right," he says, "I caught you before you could do whatever it was you were
planning. But now I'll make SURE you never make any such plan again!" 
<P>
With this he drags me downstairs, down further and further through the house,
until we finally reach the smoldering hot kitchen. Once there, he pulls the cord
from around my waist and yanks my simple garment over my head, leaving me naked
before him. He then binds my wrists with the cord. Forcing me up onto a stool, he
hangs them over a hook affixed to one of the ceiling joists.
<P>
He kicks the stool away and grabs his riding-whip in one smooth motion, then
pauses a moment to regard me as I hang in front of him, naked and helpless. He
draws his arm back, the whip descends, and
AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH10111010100110000101001101010110101101011101111100000010
AA
10110101101100000010101001111110110101111011111011110110000101001101101101010101
Now I
1010110000101011110101011101011010001010110101000100101110100101001101101010 help
10100101000010011011101101101011101101101110111100000101011010000101010111101
can't 1011101 can't 1011100000101110110 AAAAAA100100000111000000000000000000000
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAnd now he draws back, and the whip
again AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA descends and AAAAAAAAAAthe PAIN is liAAAAAAAAAke nothing
I've AAAAAAAAever imagined. 
<P>
(transcript from Paul OBrian, Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup)
<P>
In this passage, OBrian succeeds in introducing an unexpected and disturbing
element of ambivalence into how the player views what happens to this strange
entity that the game has up to this point taught him to regard as merely an
extension of his own will. 
It seems clear that many of the authors in the current, post-commercial regard
the phenomenon of free will as a philosophical conundrum  a dubious phenomenon
the exercise of which can be as elusive and difficult to detect as any other
value-bearing experience in the course of our mental lives,  rather than a merely
self-evident feature of our metal lives, one that all of us can identify by means
of introspection aided by a knowledge of modern science, and that literature is
merely required to capture with as much photographic verisimilitude as possible.
<P>
It has come to be accepted as something of a truism in some critical circles that
any account of what makes a particular genre of writing valuable or worth
practicing carries with it some sort of implicit historical narrative. What such
a narrative is supposed to explain is how the type of writing in question emerged
from earlier models, and how its peculiar appeal can be traced back through the
intentions of writers belonging to a broader tradition. Murray is sensitive in
her book to the need to provide such a narrative in order to explain the
attractions of interactive literary media against a broad historical backdrop:
After reading the wildly digressive monologue of Sternes Tristram Shandy or the
exquisite moral discriminations of a Henry James heroine or the richly textured
stream of consciousness captured by Virginia Woolf, it is hard to believe that we
could penetrate any further into the workings of the mind. But twentieth-century
science has challenged our image of ourselves and perhaps outrun our ability to
imagine our inner life. A linear medium cannot represent the simultaneity of
processing that goes on in the brain  the mixture of language image, the
intimation of diverging possibilities that we experience as free will. It cannot
capture the secrets of organization by which the inanimate somehow comes to life,
by which the neural passageway becomes the thought.
<P>
It is the curiously cumulative character of this narrative that we have taken
issue with here  the notion that Murray appears to have that the history of
literary accomplishment can be represented as a series of increasingly accurate
or detailed attempts at a faithful rendering of the workings of the human mind.
It seems to us that while she is certainly right to insist upon the enormous
cultural importance of these new media, their appeal cannot be adequately
described without reference to means that they afford to writers for visibly
detaching themselves from the conventions of narrative, in a way that allows
readers to experience all the pleasures associated with a good story while at the
same time sustaining a reflective attitude toward the subtle manipulations
involved in any type of narrative communication. If there is a story to be told
about the historical emergence of IF that conforms to these criteria, then it
must be just one small chapter in the overarching tale (one that perhaps has yet
to be told with complete accuracy and exhaustiveness) of how detachment,
self-reflexiveness and deliberate irony became the dominant tropes of
contemporary fiction.
<P>
PAGE  1
<P>

PAGE  26
<P>

<P>
 See Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977), pp. 108-109, 213.  <br>
 See Murray, Ch. 9.<br>
 Aristotle, Poetics 1451b27-29, Trans. I Bywater, in The Complete Works of
Aristotle, Vol. II, Ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984), p. 2323 (1451b26-28).<br>
 Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IX, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W.
Norton and Co., Ltd., 2000), p, 153 (italics mine).<br>
 Murray, p. 37.<br>
 Murray, p. 48.<br>
 Freud, p. 153.<br>
 See, e.g., Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of
Chicago press, 1961) p. 372. Booths discomfort with the predominance of irony in
modern fiction, which he so often associates with an artificial prohibition in
the aesthetics of fiction again so-called authorial intervention, might have been
mitigated somewhat if he had taken the view of irony that I have suggested above.
 William James, the Principles of Psychology Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981), p. 220.<br>
 Henri Bergson, Understanding Reality from Within in Stream of Consciousness
Technique and the Modern Novel, Ed. Irwin R. Steinberg (Port Washington, NY:
Kennikat  Press, 1979), p. 51 (italics mine).<br>
 For a provocative discussion of the limitations imposed by the nature of
language itself upon attempts to present the stream of consciousness in all its
psychological richness, see Erwin R. Steinberg, The Stream of Consciousness and
Beyond in ULYSSES (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), pp.
161-177.<br>
 James, p. 221.<br>
 Aristotle, p. 2323 (1451b35)<br>
 James, 224-225. The idea that a single human mind could simply never have to
strictly identical thoughts is, of course, quite philosophically problematic, and
it should perhaps be emphasized here that most contemporary philosophers are
extremely wary of a methodology that relies so exclusively upon introspection
when it comes to the characterization of mental content. For an interesting and
sharply divergent account of the nature of mental content, see Hilary Putnams
famous essay  The Meaning of Meaning in Language, Mind and Knowledge, Ed. K
Gunderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975),
 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man (New York: The Modern
Library, Inc., 1916), pp. 1-2.<br>
 See, e.g. Anthony Burgess, 99 novels : The Best in English Since 1939 : A
Personal Choice ( New York : Summit Books, 1984), p. 8.<br>
 Joyce, p. 252. Note that the ballad Turpin Hero was clearly the source of the
title for an earlier draft of Joyces own novel, viz. Stephen Hero.<br>
 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House Inc., 1954) p.
113.<br>
 Faulkner, p. 213.<br>
 Faulkner, pp. 169-170.<br>
 Faulkner, p. 93.<br>
 Taken from my own TADS game Sacroboscos Book of Wonders, scheduled for release
around fall, 2001.<br>
 Murray, p. 281.<br>
 I am aware of no universally accepted formal method of academic citation for
amateur IF stories; rather than risk making one up I shall merely record the URL
of the Interactive Fiction Archive, an FTP site maintained by Volker Blasius
where all of the games mentioned in this essay can be found. The site address is 
HYPERLINK ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/ ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/. A useful
introduction to the archive for those new to IF can be found at
http://interactfiction.miningco.com/games/interactfiction/library/weekly/aa090400a.htm.
 For a clear and interesting philosophical exposition of this view about the
importance of historical narratives to aesthetics in general, see Noel Carroll,
Art, Practice and Narrative in The Monist 71 (1988), pp. 140-156.<br>
 Murray, p. 281.<br>