There’s an article I’ve had up in a tab all day that I haven’t read yet, but it alongside the recent publication of Taper #9 reminded me that I’ve got a long computer-aided piece kicking around somewhere in a private GitHub repo that I’d really like to finish. I’d more or less gotten all the logic written and the actual content figured out but I wasn’t sure if it ought to be "interactive" or not.
I was originally thinking I’d do something like what I did for the "A Story as You Like It" piece, but in all honesty it was going to be way too long for that to be interesting (as there are only so many tolerable clicks, as I learned via some feedback to the piece I had in Taper #8). I’d written up the prototype to just write the whole work out at once, since that was the easiest way to test it, but I’m thinking today that maybe I believe — in some sense — that it shouldn’t be interactive, above and beyond the "free" interactivity that is the act of reading.
Bear with me.
I know that "interactive fiction" is a thing but I struggle to understand the difference between that and a video game, on some level. I like know there is a difference, but they are also maybe the same. Per Wikipedia:
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text.
And I’m all for that kind of thing, even if it’s not really my cup of tea as a "reader" or writer (in some sense). But I’m wondering about something like Queneau’s "Hundred Thousand Billion Poems," which I "read" recently in The Penguin Book of Oulipo (since when one moves house one rediscovers all the books one’s bought but forgotten to get a start on). Would it really "work" if the poem(s) weren’t all there to begin with? Would the cleverness really come through if you were to, say, open the computer and ask it to give you a poem, even though it would be quite possible that you could read 20 poems and never see all 140 lines?
And so I’m wondering if there isn’t, after all, something analog one might desire in a reading experience. I’m thinking too of video art and it’s loops and cycles.
Of course, perhaps it’s merely a matter of proportion: at what point is it possible to have an interactive experience that can encompass all possibilities? Or at least a relevantly large subset of those possibilities?
There is a question, too, about the purpose of these possibilities or combinations: is it really so bad if some of them simply never see the light of day?
All of which is to say that I think I have an answer for my current predicament (which involves pinning the random seed for the "reading"), but anyway, it was something to briefly think through and I never post on here or really anywhere anymore and so —