An Interview with Stuart Moulthrop by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
[conducted while "Pax" was in process]

Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Talk with me about the idea of an "instrumental text"...

Stuart Moulthrop: It's an idea I first heard mentioned by John Cayley at the 2000 Digital Arts and Culture conference, when I think it was relatively new for him. What I'm particularly taken with is the  some ways maps onto the temporal experience and interactive possibilities in game design. The idea of an instrumental text is part of my continuing movement away from node-link and disjunctive hypertext.

Besides Cayley the other person who has very much influenced my thinking in this area is Jim Rosenberg, who around 1995 first opened my eyes to the notion that link structure could be something less constrained than in the early Storyspace applications—things like afternoon and Victory Garden as distinct from later work by folks like Carolyn Guyer that did more with the possibilities of the structure map.

It was Jim who first said to me, "Not 'this or that' but 'and and and.'" You can still do something that is definably hypertextual but has more of a sense of simultaneity and plentiful possibility. Jim's work is about conjunctive possibility, rather than disjunctive possibility, and this has been particularly important to me as I've begun to pursue more graphic work—with more of a sense of environment and built space.

NWF: Can you give an example of "conjunctiveness" in your work?

SM: I think Reagan Library represents the turn toward conjunctive work, especially because the thing that preceded it was Hegirascope,which is mercilessly disjunctive. (Or diabolically disjunctive, in that it has a 30-second timer that will not allow you to stay on a node any longer than that.) Reagan Library has a series of 3D graphic environments that function as an index to the work, and you are meant to explore that space so that it's more of a continuous process. There still are recognizable nodes within that scheme, but contiguity is important. It's perhaps not as important as it could be, and I've been trying to come up with other solutions in which contiguity and physical relationship, spatial relationship, are more important. While there have been interesting experiments, to my mind we haven't yet found a fully successful way to marry page space and exploratory space.

NWF: It seems to me that space has been one of the ongoing concerns in your work. The map in Victory Garden is a famous example from more than a decade ago.

SM: I wanted to include a graphical map in Victory Garden,even though it's a ridiculously truncated excuse for one—cut up into three pieces because they don't all fit at once—it's a kludge.

NWF: It's a zoom.

SM: Actually, it does have a zoom aspect to it. And more generally, yes, space has always important to me. Even with Hegirascope, which is not a particularly spatial work, I started with a spatial idea. I began with a remark of Michael Joyce's—or my own misreading of that remark: "In this the adolescence of our technological age, it is hard to go too far." I took from that sentence the notion of going someplace, metaphorically or virtually, and I started Hegirascope as a meditation on what space meant on the Internet, what space meant on the Web.

Notions of space are also filtered, for me, through that particular type of spatial narrative you find in comics. I'm fond of Lev Manovich's observation, in The Language of New Media, that comics are an inferior form, a cadet form in our literary culture because we're not attuned to spatial narrative. We're aligned with the opposite—temporalized, sequential, assembly-line narrative—which goes back to Fordism. What's so interesting to me about the space of the comics page is that it undoes all that mental circuitry that's built up by cinema. Although, curiously enough, it's also undone each time we open the morning newspaper, as Coover says in The Public Burning.

Scott McCloud's work has also been very important for me, particularly his insight about the gutter between frames of a comic—the complicity you have as a reader in completing the action as your eye passes across the gutters. You're drawn into that pattern matching. It resonates with me because, having done hypertext for a decade by the time I read Scott's work, it seemed like link following—though not quite in that disjunctive sense. Which brings us back to Jim's notion that links can be conjunctive.

 

NWF: Would you say that, in Pax,the way text builds up (rather than one chunk replacing another) is an example of conjunctive practice?

SM: Actually, the accretive nature of the text has more to do with instrumentality. What I'm trying to do is provide the player or reader with more of a stake in the process. And, yes, also escape that disjunctiveness of moving from node to node.

This started in thoughts about a text that I haven't yet taken on, and maybe never will. The idea was to create a stretchtext in which, say, if you stretched a point two thirds of the way through, changes would happen above that. So you'd have to do this constant scrolling up and down to see what was happening as you pulled text in or pushed text out. The idea was to create a body of text that people could hold in their eyes as well as their minds, so it wouldn't be so much of an "and now this" experience (thinking of Neil Postman's famous remark about the grammar of television).

NWF: Back to instruments, I remember you saying recently that instrumental texts offer readers a means of discovering their affordances, and I was wondering what you meant by that.

SM: Well, one of the things that impresses me about computer games is the way they are able to embed learning structures within them. And this also reverberates with some of my literary critical training. I remember discussing certain long poems, and learning how they teach the reader to read them. This is a famous approach, for example, to the early books of Paradise Lost. It's always interesting when you see that kind of dynamic happening in a creative work. To change back to a hypertextual context, it would be nice to have a structure that's less forbidding, that's less likely to be perceived as destructive if it needs to be disjunctive. I suppose I've taken to heart the early 1990s criticism of the late 1980s hypertexts in which people would accuse us of making purely random connections. I think by inviting people to more deeply understand the conjunctive process, rather than simply confronting them with disjunction, we might build more intimacy with the text. And what I have in mind here is the immersiveness of computer games—even though in the late 80s I thought games were the devil.

The two turning points for me were the MaxisSim games—not The Sims, but its ancestors SimCity and a wonderful game called SimLife which was an ecological simulator—and, on the quest side of things, Myst. Oddly enough, games like Myst and 7th Guest did a lot to change my thinking about gaming, even though they were all derivations of the Infocom model (or the Adventure model) that was very familiar in the 80s and which we deeply distrusted.

NWF: So when you were thinking of your hypertext literary work as being 'not a game' the kind of game you were thinking of was more like Leather Goddesses of Phobos than it was like Centipede.

SM: Certainly. I didn't have arcade games in my sights. The turf battle we were picking—'we' here including John McDaid, Michael Joyce, Terry Harpold, and to some extent Jane Douglas—was really with the Infocom folks. There was an element of rank professional jealousy, for sure. They had a market, after all. We were stuck in the garage. In retrospect our allergy to games looks incredibly foolish, both because Infocom's market experience didn't end all that happily, and more important because there was so much good work coming out of that community, and still is.

I suppose what really changed my mind on this was one of the reception hypertext has sometimes got from the literary community: "How dare you? You have no place at this club." The notion that we could have gotten similarly clubby, trying to exclude someone else's work in new media, now seems repulsive.

NWF: Although I'd say that your work, even as you become more interested in games, retains some of the characteristics that would differentiate it from the Infocom work (as well as its predecessors and descendants). The reader is never the "main character"—however much hypertext may have been compared to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventurebooks, in fact Infocom's stuff was much closer to those books—and there's no focus on puzzle-solving, which I think is central to the enjoyment many people get out of the Infocom-style work.

SM: Actually, Hegirascope was an attempt to do some puzzle-building. It's a textual maze, though perhaps a poorly-designed one. In the initial scheme there were two link options on each screen, and the choices were essentially "extend the current narrative line, retain as much local coherence as possible" or "spin out." In the revision I took the link count up to four on most nodes, and in most cases two of those four are going to keep you close by, or prolong the reading track. I suppose another way of thinking about it is as my first attempt at a Cayley instrument. I was hoping that people would come back into this thing and attempt extended runs through it. I haven't spoken to a lot of readers of that text, but I don't think many people engage it in that way. But I thought of Hegirascope as a maze that you would have to solve to get from beginning to extended end, let's say. There are premature ending points in that text—four or five—including a multiple choice quiz where most of the choices are invisible.

Of course, the other aspect of this anxious relationship to computer games probably parallels the way novelists have felt about cinema. The competition looks awfully impressive. Computer games are corporate products created by large teams of extremely talented and intelligent people. I think this is the golden age for computer games. The talent is so good, and so untrammeled, right now, but I don't think the good times will last. The game industry will look more and more like Hollywood (which is already happening) and as a result the creativity will fall off in the mainstream. Hopefully when that happens there will be new avenues for independents. And maybe some of those indies will find themselves in a space that's not too different from the old homestead of hypertext.

NWF: But it will get to the point where the costs of production are such, and the genres are considered well-known enough, that people will only take games from pitch through completion if the pitch is, "This is like Pretty Woman meets Out of Africa."

SM: Exactly. The Ten Commandments meets Lolita. Still, it's hard not to feel that, right now, the real heroes are in the game realm, while what we do in this curiously electronified literary space is of less importance to society and less impressive than a masterpiece like Myst or Black and White. Not to say there aren't some wonderful achievements in electronic literature, but I guess I would understand their value better if they weren't so much in the shadow of the literary. I may be partially to blame for this, since I spent ten years trying very hard to keep us inside a literary fold. I think I still believe in a literary identity to some extent, but it's certainly the case that the graphic interactive imagination seems to have more vitality at the moment, at least for me.

NWF: But I think part of what makes us electronic writers, rather than electronic artists, is that we do love language. Myst-like games are basically language-free, in The Sims the characters speak gibberish—Black and White is something of an exception, but do you think there's the potential for games to move in a direction more satisfying for literary people?

SM: Of course. Right now I'm teaching a course with a game developer here in Baltimore, Chris Clark, who created a commando simulation where the way that a character's dialogue was voiced would change depending on physical state, emotional state, and recent history. So if this character was buddied up with a character who had just been killed, you'd hear in her line readings that she'd just lost a friend. This blew people's minds in the development community—and it came from a sensitivity to language. There were ten thousand lines of dialogue in this game, which by the way was never released. The company lost interest.

There's certainly always room for complexity even in so-called popular forms. Alan Moore, who wrote Watchmen, made a curious remark in an interview once about the "underlanguage" of comics. He seems to be talking about the interplay between his verbal text and the visuals. If you know Watchmen, it's full of puns and ironies. What's in the character dialogue will be echoed or twisted in some way by what you're seeing.

Maybe something like that coming to new media would be very interesting. And maybe cybertext is the way to get to that. When I think of Cayley's What We Will—the QuickTime VR work he collaborated on—I think that's a pretty strong indication that cybertext could begin to open up those visual-verbal resonances

NWF: Well, we have to decide who's definition of hypertext we're using, but I don't think What We Will would fall outside Nelson's definition. Nelson talks about node-link hypertext as just one of the types he's interested in, even if it's the one he wrote the most about. Often I think this cybertext/hypertext distinction is unnecessary. Unless Nelson is Marx and we're Trotskyites.

SM: Oh I think we're sometimes more like Stalinists. But then Tim Berners-Lee would have to be Uncle Joe, or maybe Mao, and that doesn't work. He's far too nice and wouldn't look at all good in khaki.

I've always thought of cybertext as a bigger tent. Cybertext is a major formulation, which I've said from early on, and Aarseth has always seen further down the road than I have. This is especially true with his interest in games, where he was one of the first to sight land.

Game Studies as Vinland, now that's a thought...

Anyway, I don't think that sectarian distinction, "this is hypertext, this is cybertext" works very well. All hypertext is cybertext.

NWF: Though Aarseth has made the argument, for example, that afternoon is cybertext and not hypertext because there are guard fields on the links. To his credit, this was a decade ago, when us hypertext folks probably needed our noses tweaked—but this sort of thing reminds me of Toril Moi's observation that when people come up with a definition of the feminist novel that leaves out Virginia Woolf's work, you can only think there's something wrong with their definition.

SM: I've never much liked the game of categorizing and defining.Which isn't to say I haven't tried to play. The joy of putting books on just the right library shelf has just never gotten to me. The more I find myself engaged as a practitioner the less I find taxonomies interesting.

NWF: Let me ask you one more question about instrumental texts, then. I'd like to ask it in two ways. First, theoretically, what do you see as the relationship between instrumental texts and notions of narrative? Second, to put it in practitioners' terms, what sorts of stories are you interested in telling in your current work?

SM: What's interesting to me about telling stories in an instrumental context is to see how the stories change. And I don't proceed top-down with these things. I don't tend to come in with a preconceived notion. It's been improvisational all the way along.

With Reagan Library I built the visual world first. In a way it was painted. "Pax" has a bunch of human figures, and in a way it's sculpted—literally speaking, modeled. It's those faces and those bodies that really are primary for me, and the stories come along in the process. The stories came with Reagan Library in fits and starts, there were a couple of broken attempts that didn't quite come together, but in the end the stories were there because they needed to be there — in that space. I felt they were anchored to that visual world in plausible ways.

I'm wondering if what happens in the new work will be less obsessively connective than the stories in Victory Garden. For that project I had a tool with which it was very easy to build connections. The linking process, from the writer's perspective, is both a joy and an addiction. It's a great delight to say to yourself, "Oh yes! This bit here can be connected with that bit over there." So the odd thing about disjunctive hypertext is that to the writer it doesn't seem disjunctive at all. Because the writer is carrying around that network of connections inside her head. It doesn't look to the writer the way it does to the reader. I think where I'm going now—more of that conjunctive aesthetic—may be less about "linking this to that" than "placing these things together."

NWF: So will the conjunctive text—the instrument—be more satisfying to players and readers?

SM: Some will, some won't. Maybe some instruments will be hard to play. They may require practice. Or not. As a teacher once said to me about the guitar, "After five or ten minutes you'll make sounds that are almost musical. That's what the frets are for." And that's a great virtue of folk instruments. They do allow you to get in touch with a productive vocabulary very quickly. I think a good instrument would do that. It would stimulate engagement. It should make people want to get in their and interact, and to repeat the experience.

NWF: Now, there's another sense of instrument, implicit in what you've said about the guitar, which is the sense of a tool. There's the sense that people might make many things with instruments once they become practiced at using them.

SM: That's definitely a decent goal. When we can design things that people apply to their daily informational lives in ways that they find enlightening or diabolically funny or something then I think we'll have begun to make a difference. Maybe then we'll be able to class with the game developers.

NWF: So how does "Pax" function as a tool?

SM: Maybe it helps us think about other tools, or about interfaces. In terms of interface, I've been interested in non-binary control structures, something Michael Joyce and I both picked up from Peter Bogh Anderson. In the eighties he deliberately tried to subvert Apple's human interface guidelines by creating buttons with non-binary function. These were buttons you had to caress, rub, and scratch—and you'd get different results from the software by depending on how you treated the interaction device.

Among the things I'm happiest with in the current piece are mechanisms of contiguity. The sprites respond to proximity of the cursor. There are click points. You can move to things and click on them to elicit action. But the process of approaching a sprite changes various states. In future works I'd like to remove the clicks and just work with a grammar of approach.

NWF: But "Pax" is about more than interface tricks...

SM: The departure point, in many respects, was four and half hours I spent at Dallas/Ft. Worth—much of it standing in the rain—because the terminal was cleared for "security" reasons that were never explained. Maybe someone jumped a checkpoint. Maybe there was a phone threat. I did see a guardsman going down a line of trash bins, probing each one with the business end of his M-16.

We never knew the reason. There was the usual litany, "An announcement will be made in the general concourse. Please clear the area." Then in the concourse, "If you come here you'll have to go outside, because we can't let you gather here." So we're standing outside in the rain, facing off with these very young soldiers in a way that wasn't entirely unfriendly, though it's hard to think of someone who's holding an automatic weapon as just another citizen.

Finally, enough of us got so fed up that we walked over to the troopers and said, "What do you do if thirty of us decide we want to come in?" And they looked at each other and said, "You can go talk to our C.O."

There was nothing in the press about this—this has just become unreported news. Terminals being shut down, hundreds of people being introduced to a new way of thinking.

NWF: It's training.

SM: Yes it is. I had that crowd experience. Finding yourself standing in a crowd, knowing who you want to listen to, who you want to talk to. Looking at the body language. All that. There's clearly a set of instinctual programs that take over and run. You know who the reliable people are, who are the ones who are going to panic and cause trouble.

NWF: And so what you're turning to is writing about situations. Something like that isn't plot driven.

SM: I guess you're right. That's the answer to the earlier question. I am a lot less creatively invested in the grand architecture of print fiction, much as I still respect and value it. Or even the architecture of cinematic storytelling, at least in some of its forms. I'm more interested in incident, though that's not the only way to go. Maybe there are enough plots in play right now

 

 

 

An Interview with Stuart Moulthrop: The Iowa Review Web                  25.October.2008

URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/moulthrop/interview.html

 

 

 

 

More Articles: [1] [2] [3][Stuart Moulthrop]

 

 

Academic year 2008/2009
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