Who Wrote This Paper?
The Evolution of Authorship in the Age of Interactive Digital Narratives
The following interactive essay is best experienced through embeded window below, on a laptop or desktop.
To read the designer's version of the essay, scroll down below the window.
Please Note: The essay makes reference to a computer generating text. This text generation occurs entirely within Twine and does not use generative AI or any outside LLM tool. The designer cannot stress enough how staunchly against the use of generative AI he is.
They borrow much from the history and tradition of the print word (Ryan 23). But despite our progress, we do not yet live in the age of the Holodeck: of boundless, computer-generated potentiality in digital storytelling (Murray 263). Until that age comes, IDNs will be created and guided by human designers, and because they are human, they must inherently have boundaries set upon them.
If the number of narrative possibilities in an IDN is finite, and if those possibilities are determined by intentionally set boundaries, then I the designer can claim authorship over every possibility: ergo, the whole narrative experience.
Take Disco Elysium as one such example. A game with “a staggering number of diverging narrative possibilities,” that somehow maintains the integrity and cogency of narrative outcomes, cannot be driven by any others’ control than the designers (Worthen 2). What seems like a complex, player-written narrative is actually the superposition of many designer-controlled narratives with much more finite outcomes, layered to give the illusion of near-total freedom (Worthen 2). This is a strength, nay a defining factor, of IDNs as a medium.
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They define the experience as they interact with it. If we take a narrative the actualization of a story (Ryan 7), and an IDN has multiple potential actualizations contained within it, then is the act of actualizing the narrative not the same act as creating the narrative itself?
This concept is not new to IDNs; the Author has long been presumed dead (Barthes, 1). When you interact with an IDN, your experience of it is singularly defined by your interaction with the narrative: the story of Schrodinger’s cat does not have it’s conclusion until you, the audience, open the box. You the audience can therefore claim authorship over your interaction: ergo, the whole narrative experience.
Take Papers, Please as one such example. Stepping into the role of a “border bureaucrat” comes with a heavy moral responsibility, one that the game exploits on purpose. “It is the task of the player to assign values to the exploration of the choices that are presented” (Sicart 151). Align with a totalitarian government to protect your family, or conspire with a violent rebel group to bring down the machine? That choice is actualized by the player and no one else. The reasoning and moral arguments behind that choice is made by the player and no one else. That experience is unique; that experience is the narrative.
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...than on digital, computational interfaces. The inherent properties of digital interaction can only be facilitated by computers; without computation and algorithmic thinking, IDNs lose these inherent properties. Adapting Pippin Barr’s argument, “making an [IDN]… is very much a conversation with computation” (39).
But algorithms are much more capable than displaying pre-written text: they can write the text themselves. Once an algorithm is capable of doing that, an audience interacting with that output can start to see the algorithm as human-like. Kate Compton distinguishes these constructions as bots, “algorithms with eyes” (Compton 6:07 – 6:23). If the algorithm has eyes, can string the words together, can display those words to the audience, then what difference is that experience than a human-driven one? Surely the computer can claim authorship of the end product: ergo, the whole narrative experience.
Take Love Letter Generation Algorithm. An early computational poetics experiment, the algorithm allows users to generate love letters, all from the perspective of the Manchester University Computer (M.U.C.). The computer takes a corpus of words and populates random selections into one of many structures also generated from a corpus. The result is simple, yes, but by the creator’s own admission takes on a character of its own: an “almost childishly simple” ridiculousness (Rettberg 87-88). It achieves everything that a basic human-designed IDN would achieve.
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By definition, they cannot exist without the participation of designers, facilitators, and an audience. But to use these terms with their pre-existing definitions becomes cumbersome in this new age. Koenitz suggests that the audience become “interactors”, and the designers “system builders” (Koenitz 21); I will add the digital tools into the mix as ‘facilitators’.
The philosophy of IDN as an artistic medium requires all three components to be considered, so says practitioners themselves. Anna Anthropy describes the makers of games as “authors” and their “accomplice, the player” (105). Lindsey Joyce suggests of an IDN that an audience traverses the levels of narrative whole and single perspective to attain authorship within the designers constructed system (25-26). Scott Rettberg asserts that “the reader plays the most significant role in perceiving [computationally generated] texts” with meaning, in a system where the computer generated the text within the designer’s parameters (93). By these claims, you, I, and the computer can all claim authorship of the whole narrative experience.
Take invisible cities generator, an IDN I designed. It challenges the player to make sense of a meta-narrative as told by evolving computationally generated text. The interactions of the player drive the IDN forward, with text populated by the computer within evolving structures I wrote. It does not work without the participation of me the designer, the computer as generator, and the player as interactor.
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I am writing these words, the computer is displaying (and generating some of) them, and you are interacting with an interpreting them.
If this is an IDN, then we all wrote this paper.
References
Anthropy, Anna. “Making the Games.” Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, drop-outs, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form, Seven Stories Press, 2012, pp. 90-106.
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Barr, Pippin. “Computation: Is Your Computer Having Fun.” The Stuff Games Are Made Of, MIT Press, 2023.
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Barthes, Roland. The death of the author, 1968. na, 1992.
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Compton, Kate. “Bot Poetics.” Video talk at Brown University, 2017.
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Joyce, Lindsey. "KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO. Or, How Not to Get Lost in the Branching Narrative System." Matthew Wilhelm Kapell (Hg.), The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies, Jefferson, 2016, pp. 17-27.
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Koenitz, Hartmut. “Introduction” Understanding interactive digital narrative: Immersive expressions for a complex time, Routledge, 2023, pp. 1-25.
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Murray, Janet. “Chapter 10: Hamlet on the Holodeck?: 2016 Update.” Hamlet On the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Updated edition, The MIT Press, 2017.
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Rettberg, “Combinatory Poetics.” Electronic Literature, Wiley, 2019, pp. 60-133.
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Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Varities of Immersion” Narrative as virtual reality 2: Revisiting immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media, JHU press, 2015, pp. 3-30.
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Sicart, Miguel. "Papers, please. Ethics." How To Play Video Games, edited by Matthew Payne and Nina Huntemann, NYU Press, 2019, pp. 149-56.