(Sorry for the late post, I couldn’t figure out how to host the game and then the commons server went down.)

My project was to create an interactive selection of poems from Leaves of Grass. I have a bit of a soft spot for Whitman. Over the years, I’ve come to disagree with how Whitman is taught in schools. While Song of the Self is a fine piece, often that is all that’s taught. Whitman can be long-winded, but he can also be concise and poignant. He condenses natural imagery and extrapolates outward into philosophical musings. Part of the reason I enjoy Whitman so much is because of this habit; it’s how I was first trained to write metaphor and think philosophically. But in the longer musings, some of this keen eye is lost. In selecting shorter poems I felt able to showcase this as part of the rhetoric of the game.

As I stated in my presentation, I believe that any selection of works that isn’t arranged by the author themselves is inherently argumentative. The order in which I arranged the poems allows for some freedom based on the preference of the player, but there is still a loosely ordered progression through the game. Though it might not immediately come across, I chose the order of the game based on what I believe to be foundational aspects of Whitman’s style and philosophy. The game was also designed with a narrative pace and flow in mind, moving through a series of themes that are representative of Whitman’s body of work in an order which summarizes my interpretation of the themes and their relationship to one another.

The limitations of Bitsy as a development tool demanded brevity and simplicity. However it also allowed for stark design and a certain amount of imaginative freedom. The goal of design was to create an atmosphere appropriate to each poem respectively, to allow the background to set a mood without distracting from the words. In the future, I might update the game to include some sound design, but to an extent, I think the atmosphere is sufficient as-is.

I hope you enjoy the game! Feel free to leave a comment on the itch.io page if you have any thoughts.

[A preview of one of the play screens, featuring the player avatar (a bird), Walt himself, and a waving leaf of grass.]

I’ve pivoted quite a bit from my original proposal. I’m still working with an interactive format, but rather than focusing on themes of control, I’ve decided to make use of spatial and atmospheric features with the Bitsy game engine.

I’ve decided to create an interactive selection of poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The player will navigate through an interactive world collecting imagery from a handful of selected poems to unlock others, eventually progressing to an end. Leaves of Grass itself is a unique artifact in that it is a complete work of the author, not in anthology, but in curation. Because of this, I feel it bears division and critical analysis especially well. 

Because of the format, I had to choose shorter poems. However, I am also of the opinion that, when many people are taught Whitman, they are primarily exposed to Song of Myself. Though it is a pivotal work of his, there are so many other poems of his that are more accessible to readers, length being a key feature of this accessibility. 

The Bitsy engine has some pretty significant limitations, especially in visuals. The game screen is limited to 128 x 128 pixels, and there are some pretty significant challenges to editing the screen. Each tile must be edited separately, rather than being able to paint the whole screen at once. There are some workarounds to this, with which I’ve been experimenting. Audio design is limited as well, to a chiptune editor in the interface, barring the same sort of workaround. However, In the limitations, I’m hoping the imagery of the poetry itself will be able to shine through.

There is a loose linear progression through the game, and therefore through the poems themselves, but there is also a degree of freedom. I want the player to be able to progress through the text based on their personal preference first, and the structure of the game second. 

The end result, I hope, will be an interactive essay on the themes and philosophies found in Leaves of Grass. I don’t want to spoil anything, but as of now the game is split into two areas, which represent key points of—in my opinion and analysis of the text—Whitman’s philosophy on life. 

I hope everyone has a chance to play it!

To be honest, I don’t have a concrete concept. In looking at the examples, I think it would be interesting to work with Twine, so my only inclination (at this point) is to exploit the form of Twine itself and play with themes of audience agency, or agency as a whole. I think it might be interesting to explore interactivity with a text that hinges on agency or control. Immediately, I thought of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but neither text is set to enter public domain until the 2040s. Regardless, this is an idea in its infancy. I plan to explore the features of Twine and see if there’s any aspects of the form that demand acknowledgement in the project, or that bring up any interesting concepts or challenges.

I’m also considering different formats such as Inform and Bitsy, but that may be best for more freeform, spatially-oriented interactivity (i.e. walking around a map vs. the choose-your-own-adventure format of Twine). The implications of this kind of play bring to mind the video game Undertale. For the uninitiated, Undertale is an 8-bit game released in 2015, where the narrative relies not just on your immersion in the game, but your understanding that you are not just a character on the screen. Certain characters intentionally break the 4th wall and talk to you, the player. They even interact with metadata of the game by affecting save files, and preventing the player from using buttons built into the game screen. The overall effect is the understanding that you as the player have choices outside the mechanics of the game. You don’t have to follow the form of the video game RPG and cut a bloody path through the game to gain levels and beat the boss. You can choose to be merciful, and in doing so, you break the pattern of the game itself and save everyone, even the villains.

I think this is an interesting mechanism. Especially in dour social commentary, the ability to move within the story without the same shackles as its characters is a powerful narrative device. In writing this, themes of helplessness or oppressive structures, etc. might also be interesting to explore. Regardless of how hopeless the narrative may be, speculative and cautionary fiction rely on the idea that the audience should learn from the story. In giving the audience freedom to move within the story, we can produce not a lesson learned, but a sense of freedom to enact that lesson. Alternatively, one could use the same agency to drive home any feeling of hopelessness. By structuring the playable product in a way that allows the player agency but no power to change the narrative, one could create a deeper empathy in the player for the characters that are “trapped” in the narrative. For now, I’m not sure which direction to go, or which text to explore. Any suggestions would be fantastic.

In my martial arts school, our curriculum was fairly rigorous, for both adults and children. Adults were strongly encouraged to take notes on certain aspects of technique and children were required to at a certain point. For many of the kids, this was their first experience having to take notes, so it became an exercise in learning to put their thoughts on paper. The Blair piece and the Bush piece both brought be back to the experience of teaching this skill, specifically to one analogy I used consistently over the years. “You have three brains to try and remember your technique,” I would say. “You have your mind brain, your paper brain, and your me brain.” To translate, I meant that they have their internal memory of the technique, their notebooks to remind themselves of it, and if both of those fail, they could ask me (or other instructors). The goal, of course, was to eventually have it in their ‘mind brain,’ because in a belt test or–keeping the worst case scenario in mind–an actual self-defense situation, they wouldn’t have me standing there to ask, and they wouldn’t be able to check their notes.

The reality of this analogy had always rung true for me. To my surprise, it also seems to be true within the field of perception and memory research as well. The philosophical study of the nature of perception had many different schools of thought. Materialism, in particular, is  grounded in physics and can seem cynical in a sense. essentially its the school of thought that on an atomic level, there’s no difference between an action potential in a brain cell and a molecule in a rock rafting to the normal force of the ground beneath it. As such, the idea that notes on a page are an extension of the mind is quite literally true. Materialism asks the question: where do we draw the line between the brain and the body, between the body and the world? And if the information stored outside of one’s brain is readily accessible, where is the line between what is my memory and what is yours? I wouldn’t tell my students as much, but in reality, and depending on your definition, you have infinite brains. Every piece of information, sensory, verbal, recursively generated, could be considered a thought of your own. As such, notes can be considered thoughts extended. Text can be considered memory, especially as annotation can be used to amend and alter the text upon revision, just as organic memory has been proven to do.

Personally, I think pure materialism is an interesting thought, but does not offer a lot of practical jumping-off point for certain fields of study. By the same token, however, discounting materialism entirely limits what we can observe of the role of tools in our cognition, in our histories. Infinite brains are a lot to account for when studying humanity. Three brains, on the other hand, seems to work out pretty well.

As I stated in class, my role in the project was as the second audio editor. Largely, this meant cleaning out all the line breaks (separated with a clap by our fantastic readers) and mixing the audio for balance between recordings and overall effect. This consisted of several listen-throughs of the full length piece. As also stated in class, I had a fantastic time doing this. It was cold, stormy day/evening/night, and I was stuck indoors doing household chores as I listened. I sharpened knives, I laid wallpaper, I did dishes, and I listened to a spooky story to stave off the boredom. It was delightful. Once, at a point of transition between the storytellers, when in the story of an hour the narrator whispers “Free. Free in body and soul.” I legitimately jumped like I was being told a ghost story.

In retrospect, it’s brought to mind two storytelling scenarios. The second that came to mind, but the first I’ll talk about, is the infamous storytelling session that brought us the Vampyr and Frankenstein. Many people know this story already, but to summarize, these stories were thought up in the ‘year without a summer’ (1816) where everything was cold and dreary due to a volcano eruption, which filled the atmosphere with ash and blocked the sun for months. During this dreary time, as a result of the atmosphere and being stuck inside all the time, the Shelley’s, Lord Byron and a few others decided to take advantage of the situation and the feelings brought on by their environment, and tell scary stories. In a way, an audiobook allows this experience to occur in solitude, or in a more easily accessible way. Though it isn’t the same as being told a story by a friend, once can select the story they’re told to take advantage of the environment, and their own mood.

The first thing I thought of was actually campfire stories. Again, this was largely colored by the environment at the time I edited this audiobook, but I realized just how much environment does to affect one’s experience when listening to an audiobook. Cognitively/neurologically speaking, listening to a story does not take as many resources as reading a text of the same content. As such, the environment plays more into the experience of the story. I still remember the other sounds in the background as my dad told me the story of the Maco Light in the back yard by the fire (crickets and cicadas, crackling wood, the neighborhood dogs barking, one single train horn) or the sounds of the bedroom as my mom read us bedtime stories (my wall clock, the ac kicking on and off, wind and rain and thunder, cicadas, the crash of waves). I even remember when we listened to audiobooks in the car on long road trips. I still hear passages of Matilda with the rumble of the road underneath.

When the visual is removed from the text, the auditory becomes more prominent. And because of that, there’s an added opportunity to immerse the ‘reader’ in the story. Though we didn’t quite take full advantage of the weather of possibility of sound design in this project (no regrets, I think it works well as-is), I did grow to appreciate all it has the potential to do. And when the words are alone in the audio, it opens up the experience to individual environmental iterations. More like being told a story by a loved one than the sterile experience I tend to think of audiobooks as. And in that way it gets back to something more primal, akin to telling stories around a table in a cold, rainy summer, or around a campfire, from a bedside. It makes it something present in the moment with the listener.

Of many things that the internet can do, the facilitating the formation of communities is—for better or worse—one of its most consistently preserved features. As ‘the internet’ becomes less of a worldwide web and more of a series of loosely interconnected pockets, these communities have become more insular. But by that same token, they’ve become more self-sustaining. The language, cultural canon, and tone of the communities are actively preserved by community members in the same way archivists and educators preserve the precedent of a field.

The text I’ve chosen for this blog post is a poorly written (not a read, just a fact) piece of Harry Potter fanfiction entitled ‘My Immortal.’ As a text, it ignores nearly every rule of the medium, eschewing grammar, spelling, punctuation, characterization, rules and tropes of the subject universe—the list goes on. Despite its many (many) flaws, it stands as a beloved piece of internet literature. So beloved, in fact that when the original iteration on fanfiction.net was deleted, a community site was erected dedicated to the preservation of its text form. As a text, My Immortal has a consistent pattern of spelling and diction that both adds to its inherent charm, and makes it nigh on undecipherable to the uninitiated. Because if this and its place in the hearts of many, as an icon of a specific counterculture, as specific time period, many audio renditions choose actively to celebrate these linguistic foibles as an integral part of the experience.

I’ve included two versions of this ‘audiobook,’ one done in earnest as a single cohesive (and solely aural) piece, and one recorded as a series of several videos with the text overlain on the screen, and occasional edited graphics to tie in the visual aspects of the experience. I include both because I find the first to be, shall we say, a connoisseur’s version. Or perhaps, a more purely verbal experience to be enjoyed by those delving further, or maybe delving for the first time. The second version is one for the community surrounding the piece. Whether you’ve read the piece in its entirety or are coming across it from another pocket of the internet, the immersive and edited rendition invites you to consume the piece outside of the vacuum of your own experience. The narrator stumbles over words and chokes with laughter, and shares inside jokes in the form of visual editing. The tone differential between these two versions is substantial, but they both offer a version of the text as it could’ve been experienced in its original form, on fanfiction.net. Whether that means listening to the narrator eloquently articulate each misspelling with care, as you would reading the text, or cracking up alongside the narrator like you’re reading alongside friends and sharing in the absurdity.

The two works also share the commonality of being created as a labor of love. And ultimately, with this piece, that’s what keeps it alive. It’s bad writing. Its content is deeply a product of its time. But because of its place in the annals of the internet, it refuses to die. And in that way, it has become, not my immortal, but our immortal.

Earnest Rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Ke71U3MXY

Community-Immersive Rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdv6Q68EutU&list=PLB68C79C86B664E01

Preserved Text: https://myimmortalrehost.webs.com

In the year 2014, my mother purchased me a nook from Barnes and Noble. It was a birthday present (I think) and an attempt to subdue the impending ecological disaster, which the amount of books in my bedroom was likely to cause. I had bookshelves full, stacks upon stacks on the floor, on the dresser, on the bedside table and desk. My nook and I spent a solid year fused as one entity. I started and finished multiple series on that thing. And then, nothing. In almost the exact same trajectory outlined by Price (pg. 3-4) I fell into and out of eBook reading.

For me, a person with ADHD (hooray), engagement with a material is predicated upon more than just my interest in its content. I rely on convenience and a quality, intuitive user interface to even get my foot in the proverbial door. When that foot is in, it’s a slippery slope into stimulus binging, and gorging myself on content for the cheap dopamine. TikTok is the bane of my productivity. To date, the farce of print reading that is the eBook ‘page turn’ has halted my reading progress in its tracks on numerous occasions. Most notably, in recent events, with a novel by Terry Pratchett, made difficult to read in eBook form by its own humor (witty asides in the form of footnotes; simple in print, clunky and disengaging in the Libby app).

Fast forward to 2018 and I am staying up late, reading tens of thousands of words in fanfiction in a single night on my iPhone. This is something I can still do, while reading novels in electronic form is still a challenge for reasons—I cannot stress enough—that have nothing to do with the content matter. It has to do with one thing and one thing alone: continuous scroll. It is important to note that the human brain has no one dedicated process for absorbing and processing text. Rather, written text is processed visually first, the visual input is translated into verbal input by your brain, and then the verbal input is processed by the same systems that process spoken language.

The physical novel holds its place for being a solely text-based form of storytelling. But the digital space, though not unfriendly to text alone, demands exploitation of all its features to shine as a medium. I would argue that the eBook declined as a medium because it tried to imitate, rather than leaning into its own potential to play with form. As discussed in Pressman, digital narrative that actively employs its digital nature to serve a literary purpose stands out as groundbreaking. The most compelling digital interactions with literature that I’ve had in recent years have been so because they could not be reproduced to the same effect in print. Dracula Daily, for example: the SubStack repackaging of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, delivered via email following the timeline of the original novel, using time as an active part of the narrative. Additionally, traditional prose is not the only form of text prevalent in the digital literature space. Author’s notes and tagging systems on Ao3 become acts of creative work in and of themselves. Visual novels and indie video games fold written story and illustration together into narrative experiences marked by ambient music, lovingly drawn art, and a lot of reading. In another universe, House of Leaves could very well have replaced Homestuck. In adopting these unconventional traits to convey a narrative, certain forms of storytelling become more accessible, not just for those who benefit from accommodations, but for everyone. Though nothing will replace prose as an art form, as a narrative tool, or as a way of conveying information, it is not necessarily the pinnacle of text we hold it to be culturally, and opening the form of the ‘novel’ to include media in the gray area of the digital realm would better studies of text as a whole.