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
SM: I wanted to include
a graphical map in
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
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
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
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
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
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
URL: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/moulthrop/interview.html
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Academic year 2008/2009
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