Unlike most roleplaying games, Planescape: Torment never gives you the option to pick a name. Much like your character’s combat role (which can switch freely) and history (which depends on which of your innumerable memories you unearth) your name remains inchoate, a formless potential that you can choose to define much as you define your journey. If your name is a blank canvas, perhaps so is your destiny?

* * *

Names give shape to thoughts, provide a skeleton onto which ideas can be strung. In the popular Dungeons & Dragons podcast The Adventure Zone’s “Graduation” season, the party becomes almost paralyzed with indecision when one of the protagonists refused to either give a name or to accept a nickname from the others [2]. ‘How do we refer to you?’ their hesitation asks. ‘How do we organize you in our thoughts?’

The act of naming is non-trivial. “Names can connect children to their ancestors, country of origin or ethnic group, and often have deep meaning or symbolism for parents and families,” write Rita Kohli and Daniel G. Solórzano [3]. By bestowing a name, we bestow the rudiment of form, a way to conceptualize our creation. For a player, creating a name for a character can be part of what Aaron Reed calls “expressive input,” allowing players to “express their distinctive intentions through it,” and to feel “feel ownership, discovery, or surprise.” [4] By naming my rival “Idiot” in Pokémon Red Version [5], my 10-year-old self was imposing a bespoke order upon the Pokémon world, an imperious order, one that reflected a protagonist determined—nay, prophesied—to “be the very best, like no one ever was.” By allowing me to name the monographs my scribe character pens in Chronicon Apocalyptica [6], the game offers me the chance to make my own, unique a mark in the world. The contents of said monographs will forever remain nebulous, but their naming instantiates them in myth.

* * *

A New Old Name

a durational microlarp

by Lucian Kahn

You already changed your name. Now change your old name. Decide what name you would rather have had before you changed it. Whenever someone asks, “What was your name before?” answer with your new old name.

-Lucian Kahn [7]

* * *

The power of naming in games extends further, into the system level. As Robert Yang notes in his blog post Queer Game Studies, “On FeministWhorePurna and the Ludo-material Politics of Gendered Damage Power-ups in Open-World RPG Video Games,” the naming of skills and abilities in videogames, what with such mechanics representing the will and power of the player, absolutely contributes to the political argument the game makes [8]. Yang notes that in an early build of the game Dead Island, the character Purna, an Aboriginal woman of colour, could learn a skill titled, “Feminist Whore” to gain a damage bonus against male characters. While Yang delves deeper into mechanics and representation, the name itself—later changed to “Gender Wars” in the released version of the game—betrays an argument about the identity and motivation of a feminist is: a woman worthy of our disgust who wants nothing more than to hurt men.

Indie RPG Disco Elysium [10] hurtles headlong into wild territory when it comes to naming players’ attributes. While your character can level up their “Logic” or “Reaction Speed,” they can also invest points in skills such as “Inland Empire,” “Shivers,” “Esprit de Corps,” and “Physical Instrument.” In the delightfully weird game about an amnesiac cop, the esoteric naming of one’s own capabilities mirrors the confused soul-searching and frantic battling of one’s own inner demons that the protagonist undertakes throughout the story.

* * *

Names have power. They reveal intent, hope and desire. Even at their very least, they help us conceptualize a thing, help us formulate thoughts about it. In the realm of interactive fiction, where action and drama occur not within screen pixels but within psychic, literary landscapes, names are not just tools, but potent ones at that.

“Your name should be deep gold and orange, like a forest fire on the horizon, but mixed with the stench of liquor rising from your breath.”

-Disco Elysium

Works Cited

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post This Essay on Names has no Title appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Except that this text isn’t meant to be seen as poem. Or at least, not just a poem.

I encountered the words as an installation dominating the walls of a gallery at the New Museum in New York. The letterforms are large and made of tubes of neon light. The edges of the text are fully justified, the words perfectly aligned at either end, creating what are sometimes called “rivers” or “wormholes” between words—ugly gaps that protrude from the text. The verse is underlined with a glowing azure light, again in neon. “[Neon] is a material that people feel sort of obligated to interact with,” the poet-artist Sable Elyse Smith says [2], and the scale of the glyphs, the garish, white light they give off, the gentle, only occasionally perceptible hum their physical material makes, these all ensure that the installation is at once seductive—and a little off-putting.

The piece’s rigid horizontal alignment, its glowing form, and its blue underscoring—like the sky, like the sea—are more prominent when you learn its title: Landscape III. We’re invited to look at the poem but also through it, as prisoners gazing longingly through the gaps in the prison-bars towards the clear blue sky.

Much of this would be invisible if the words were merely ink on paper.

* * *

In stories, important words aren’t just written down. They’re inscribed, emblazoned, or illuminated. They’re carved into mountainsides such that only moonlight can reveal their presence or smeared in blood onto a corridor wall and framed by a petrified cat.

That a text gains power from more than just the words that comprise it has been an important concept for humans from the birth of written language. Sometimes, this idea is taken quite literally. In his 2nd-century medical treatise Liber Medicinalis, physician Quintus Serenus Sammonicus prescribes the magic words “Abracadabra” as a cure for malaria—but only if attached to the neck on an amulet and repeatedly written out in a very specific cone-shaped form [3]:

Abracadabra
bracadabra
racadabra
acadabra
cadabra
adabra
dabra
abra
bra
ra
a

Another spell in the British Library’s Collection, this time from 18th-century Ethiopia, has the power to transform you into a lion… or a python… or an eagle, all depending on where on your body you wear the same incantations [3].

Meaning is clearly more than written morphemes. As Ellen Lupton rhapsodizes in her book Thinking With Type, “Text can be viewed as a thing—a sound and sturdy object—or a fluid poured into the containers of a page or screen. Text can be solid or liquid, body or blood.” [4] In my first essay for this column, I wrote about how different texts are read differently; their context, form, visual substance, and material quality all influence how we read them. [5]

Beyond visual art or magical medicine, thinking about this sort of thing can offer writers of interactive fiction powerful tools with which to engage readers, to increase emotional affect, and to better reflect their worlds and themes.

A simple use of this can be seen in Abigail Corfman’s excellent game Open Sorcery [6]. The game casts you as an elemental of Fire and…C++. Yes, you’re a programmable magical spirit of protection, complete with a control panel, backups, and system analytics. Sometimes you try to dream.

Corfman enhances the feel of your character and world using a number of visual cues. A monospace typeface set with white on black makes you feel like you’re programming in a text editor of some sort. Locations are referred to not by their full names but by codes: “Cherry Orchard Rest Home” is “ChORet”, while “Decker’s Apartment” is “DkApt”. When you scan an area for intruding spirits, a “Searching” message flashes on-screen like a progress meter. Finally, when you actively seek out a spirit, the most “magical” part of your work, your neat, horizontal script suddenly tilts diagonally, a restructuring of the ordered world that only the supernatural can account for. Beyond her exposition and plot, Corfman uses simple visual cues such as these to situate you in her world of magical technology, revealing character and setting through the form of the text.

Kicking it up a notch with typefaces, Astrid Dalmady in Cactus Blue Motel [7] employs two colors of neon light, the symmetrical, rounded glyphs of the Comfortaa font for headings, and a mouseover effect that diminishes the glow of neon text as you hover over it, to give her teen-road-trip-game added oomph. Similar to that in Sable Elyse Smyth Landscape III, Dalmady’s use of neon is at once inviting and uncanny, reflecting the game’s primary setting: the eponymous motel in the middle of the desert. But coupled with a dusky blue background, the neon elements also evoke nostalgia, a longing for a rapidly receding past, the aching yearning for a precious childhood moment to stay preserved in its own bubble of time, perhaps in the middle of the desert, untouched and unspoiled by time and “growing up”.

Finally, Nyamyam goes even further with theatrical tricks in their quirky visual novelesque Astrologaster [8]. You play as “Doctor” Simon Forman in Shakespearean London, who uses astrology to cure his patients’ various medical (and sometimes domestic) complaints. What instantly attracted me to the game when I encountered it at PAX West, however, was the enthusiastic singing of a fully voiced madrigal at the beginning of each scene. Far from necessary to the plot or gameplay, the musical rendition brings a smile to my face at the start of every scene and reminds me of the theatrical, somewhat farcical nature of the Astologaster’s world. Additionally, while the game could easily have gone with traditional A, B, C choices on a menu, it instead places the choices on a star map, and illustrates for you which star constellations (and their subsequent astrological meanings) your choices draw from, deepening the characterization of Simon Forman as a… err… legitimate astrologer.

* * *

“The play experience,” writes Mary Flanagan, “has, for thousands of years, been intertwined with aesthetics.” [9] This statement is as applicable to the ancient board games that Flanagan proceeds to describe as it is to a stylistically illustrated, fully voiced contemporary visual novel. If games, like other art forms, are to be considered conveyors of emotion, we must consider all of their components, not merely the mechanical. Think about old video games that were considered gems in their time but that modern audiences have difficulty fully appreciating due to the dated look of their graphics. Or consider the endless clones of “connect-three” games, whose representational tweaks, from jewels to candy to laid-off workers [10], can change the feel of the entire game. Similarly, if the “mechanics” of interactive fiction include the reading and writing of text, one must look beyond just the words and engage fully with artistry that encompasses any piece of IF. Our words may not form a landscape as literally as Sable Elyse Smith’s verses, but a blue underline may just accentuate our description of one.

Works Cited

1. S. E. Smith, Artist, Landscape III. [Art]. New Museum, 2017.
   http://www.sableelysesmith.com/Landscape-III-New-Museum
2. New Museum, “218 “Trigger Gender As a Tool and a Weapon” Audio Guide: Sable Elyse Smith,” New Museum, New York, 2017.
3. British Library Board, Harry Potter: A History of Magic, The Official Companion to the British Library Exhibition at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2018.
4. E. Lupton, Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
5. S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” Sub-Q, February 2019.
   https://sub-q.com/rituals-cheating-and-the-dream-of-possibility/
6. A. Corfman, Open Sorcery, Open Sorcery Games, 2016.
   http://abigailcorfman.com/Home/OpenSorcery
7. A. Dalmady, Cactus Blue Motel, 2016.
   http://astriddalmady.com/cactusblue.html
8. Nyamyam, Astrologaster, Nyamyam, 2019.
   https://www.astrologaster.com/
9. M. Flanagan, Critical Play, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013.
10. Tiltfactor, Layoff, Tiltfactor, 2009.
    https://tiltfactor.org/game/layoff/

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Neon Landscapes & Spell Pyramids: Visuals and Form in Interactive Fiction appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Some people spit out the candy.

In the evening, museum technicians refill the pile to an exact 175 lbs., Ross’s ideal body weight. Perhaps this rejuvenative act grants Ross perpetual life. Or perhaps it chains him to corner like Prometheus, whose liver was devoured every morning by an eagle only to regrow overnight for another day’s gruesome snack.

Eat. Regenerate. Eat. Regenerate. The cycle of actions is Art.

At the inaugural Narrascope conference at MIT earlier this year, Aaron Zemach delivered a primer on drama theory. Synthesizing an array of thinkers, from Aristotle to David Ball, Zemach discussed the primacy of the “action” in a play and how a play is a series of actions, verbs, or processes that convey meaning to an audience. A playwright never writes moral quandaries, internal thoughts, or dramatic conflict, Zemach argued. They can only craft a sequence of actions that produce these metaphysical phenomena in the minds of the audience. He then extended his thoughts to games: “It’s easy to figure out a moral argument by looking at which actions were rewarded and which actions punished.” [3]

Even if Zemach hadn’t been explicitly drawing parallels between theatre and games, the connection between his and Bogost’s thoughts on the semiotic function of action and process is particularly glaring. Be it through the meatspace actions taken by players in LARPs, actions in the psychic space of tabletop roleplaying games, or those encased in the silicone back-end of interactive fiction, the verbs we partake in during our gaming activities become powerful vectors of emotion and meaning. This may partly explain why the “illusion of choice” (or “dream of possibility’ [4]) model for interactive stories work so well. Noting the correlation between an action and its consequence appears to be less important than simply taking the action itself.

Zoe Quinn’s interactive story Depression Quest is famous for providing readers with choices that are crossed out and inaccessible. The choices are dangled tantalizingly in front of players but are forever out of reach. Are they even real choices? By deliberately showing players what they cannot do, Quinn attempts to convey how depression can render one powerless to perform even basic functions [5].

Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu’s widely lauded LARP Sign forces players to convey complex emotional truths via pantomime and a crude, improvised sign language—no talking or writing allowed. If you grow frustrated about your signs not being understood, you have to mark yourself in ink, a bodily reminder of your inabilities. The game conveys the frustrations that come with simply trying to be understood by others, while also giving players some idea of the challenges facing deaf children in Nicaragua in the 70s. [7]

The choices in Laura Michet’s interactive story Swan Hill focus more on the setting and emotions than on your actions. You do make decisions about what to do, but many of the interactive, clickable elements are about changing the scenery or your interpretation of the scenery. Michet weaves a tale of nostalgia, guilt, and regret by making you choose how to look at your present surroundings and their relationship to your past.[8]

Consume. Build. Consume. Build. The cycle of actions is humanity.

Maybe it’s for the best that games overload action with meaning. Maybe games can help us pause in our voracious appetite for doing, pause and think about the candy we’re eating, even if it means spitting it out.

Works Cited

[1] F. Gonzalez-Torres, Artist, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). [Art]. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1991.

[2] I. Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

[3] A. Zemach, All the World’s a Screen: How Improv and Playwriting Can Inform Digital Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Narrascope Conference, 2019.

[4] S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” Sub-Q, February 2019. Available: https://sub-q.com/rituals-cheating-and-the-dream-of-possibility/.

[5] Z. Quinn, “Depression Quest,” 14 February 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.depressionquest.com/.

[6] W. Beltrán, M. Kelly and S. Richardson, Bluebeard’s Bride, Magpie Games, 2017.

[7] K. Hymes and H. Seyalioglu, Sign: A Game About Being Understood, Thorny Games, 2012.

[8]L. Michet, “Swan Hill,” 2012. [Online]. Available: https://lauramichet.itch.io/swan-hill.

[9] J. Wyatt, R. J. Schwalb and B. R. Cordell, Player’s Handbook, Seattle: Wizards of the Coast, 2014.

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Actions, Verbs, and Processes: Games and Being Human appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Why had a few stray words that Rowling had let slip in response to a fan question so changed my outlook of an entire world—a fictional world, a world constructed in the imagination, but a world nonetheless. Dumbledore never really talks about his sex life in the books; I could have just decided for myself that he was gay and basked in my own version of the Potterverse, but no, hearing the author declare unequivocally that Dumbledore was gay—that made all the difference.

Which is weird.

“We prefer the imagined integrity of a metaphysical object to the stable version that we observe,” writes Espen Aarseth, referring specifically to our idealized notion of a “transcendental text” [2]. And apparently, authors have tremendous power over these psychic ur-texts, even though we as readers and film-goers construct much of the story in our own heads. The idea of “canon” in stories—that there’s one “true” version of a fiction, the fiction that “really happened,” and that it is controlled by the author—is potent.

Partly because we revere canon as the inviolable writ of an omniscient Author, we feel betrayed when the story deviates too much from what we expect or when beloved characters do things contrary to what our perspectives dictate. Game of Thrones fans, for instance, were so upset at HBO’s handling of the show’s 8th season that they started a petition to remake the season [3]. Again though, notice that the fans required another authored version of the story for it to be considered “real.”

The thing is, as Aarseth puts it, “textual integrity…is a cultural construct.” He continues to say “so is our notion of what constitutes a text itself—not only our conception of its function, but also what it appears to be made of and what conditions have to be met for us to acknowledge its existence.” [2] We create stories in our heads. Yes, they’re based on breadcrumbs authors may leave for us, but the experience of a story is a personal one. Evan Torner and David Jara go so far as to support “an understanding of fiction as a form of make believe and role-play.” [4]

This is somewhat true for all kinds of stories, even those we consider to be nonfiction. We love being told about the past, for example. Only if events are written down by someone are they crowned History, capital ‘H’ jaunty and gleaming. But the lines between history and mere story are blurry. Rebecca Slitt, partner and editor at Choice of Games, happens to have been a professor of history in a previous career. When I asked her how her academic training had informed her work with interactive fiction, she mentioned that what really helped her was the understanding that “historical narratives are always constructed by the person writing them and by the society in which that person lived.” Diving into her scholarly publications shows that her research echoes this sentiment. In her article, The Two Deaths of William Longsword: Wace, William of Malmesbury, and the Norman Past, Slitt writes about two specific chroniclers who not only dissent from the mainstream biographies of the second duke of Normandy but also deliberately shroud their assertions in historical doubt in order to protect themselves from backlash; to Slitt, “the question of historical accuracy versus invention is a thorny one.” [5]

I wouldn’t be writing this, of course, if games didn’t come into the picture. Games are funny when it comes to canon because we don’t simply consume the narrative in a game: we shape it (or at the very least, we feel like we shaped it). I’ve mentioned in a previous essay, Rituals, Cheating, and the Dream of Possibility, that my (and many folks’) tendency to give primacy to one version of events in a game, even though I’m aware of the directions into which the narrative might branch [6].  EA’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic famously boasted multiple endings [7] and while the series considers one of them to be “canon” with regards to sequels, I can’t help but think of “my” ending as the real one. More modern games go a step further and implement technology to import players’ choices and make them canon: your choices within Dragon Age: Origins’ [8] complex, branched plot carry forward into its sequels. Even on the IF front, titles such as Choice of Games’ Superlatives: Shattered Worlds [9] allow you to import data from its prequels.

In certain types of LARP, the idea of canon is flung even further out the window, what with each of the dozens of participants seeing only a small portion of the whole story tapestry, and that too is filtered through a backstory that only they know about (having imagined it themselves). In the first sequel to 2016’s New World Magischola, for example, in order to account for the various convoluted plotlines that players had created, designers Maury Brown and Ben Morrow were forced to introduce into the canon the idea that various alternate realities and timelines had come apart and tangled in on themselves [10].

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fred.

-Terry Pratchett, The Truth

Works Cited

[1]D. Smith, “Dumbledore was gay, JK tells amazed fans,” The Guardian, 2 October 2007. [Online]. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/21/film.books.

[2] E. J. Aarseth, “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” in The New Media Reader, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2003, pp. 762-780.

[3] L. Bradley, “Thousands of Angry Game of Thrones Fans Call on HBO to Remake Season 8,” Vanity Fair, 15 May 201. [Online]. Available: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/game-of-thrones-season-8-remake-petition-hbo.

[4] D. Jara and E. Torner, “Literary Studies ad Roleplaying Games,” in Role Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, New York, Routledge, 2018, pp. 265-282.

[5]R. Slitt, “The Two Deaths of William Longsword: Wace, William of Malmesbury, and the Norman Past,” in Anglo-Norman Studies XXXIV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference , Woodbridge, 2011.

[6] S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” Sub-Q, February 2019. https://sub-q.com/rituals-cheating-and-the-dream-of-possibility/

[7] C. Avellone, D. Karpyshyn and J. Ohlen, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Electronic Arts, 2003.

[8] B. Knowles, M. Laidlaw and J. Ohlen, Dragon Age: Origins, Electronic Arts, 2009.

[9] A. Ripley, Superlatives: Shattered Worlds, Choice of Games, 2019.

[10]M. Brown and B. Morrow, New World Magischola: Yuletide Escapade, Newbury Township, OH, 2016.

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Dukes and Dumbledore: Truth and Canonicity in Stories appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Traditionally, games devote their attention to the Hero and the details of their epic quest. We players, bloodhounds slavering for plot, fixate on this Hero. We tear into them, inhabit them, and through their agency, we exert change on an authored world.

Killing is often involved. (The bloodhound metaphor still holds.)

“No matter how dissimilar one image may be to another, there is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning and resonance in even the most jarring combinations. Such transitions may not make ‘sense’ in any traditional way, but still a relationship of some sort will inevitably develop. By creating a sequence with two or more images, we are endowing them with a single overriding identity, and forcing the viewer to consider them as a whole.” [2]

The linear juxtaposition of images forces us to assign meaning to this juxtaposition, a meaning that is greater than the sum of the individual images.

While McCloud is talking about images on the page of a comic book, it isn’t hard to make the conceptual leap to images in your imagination. Because humans operate in linear time, our stories are consumed in a specific linear order. Be they spurred by the interpersonal storytelling of a tabletop RPG or the prose of a piece of interactive fiction, the linear juxtaposition of images forces us to assign meaning to this juxtaposition, a meaning that is greater than the sum of the individual images.

Interactive fiction, in its various forms, can uniquely take advantage of this fact. By allowing players to determine which portions of the story to consume, interactive fiction assigns an alchemy of meaning unique to each player, informed by their choices (or perceived choices, as I mentioned in my last essay [3]).

Rather than tell a singular hero’s journey along a predefined path, the branches and detours of a piece of interactive fiction allow for a more meandering, exploratory experience.

Interactive fiction offers to players a rich means of exploring a world. Rather than tell a singular hero’s journey along a predefined path, the branches and detours of a piece of interactive fiction allow for a more meandering, exploratory experience, where the setting, the side characters, and the environments take center stage. Stories are often told through their environments, after all [5].

Not all these paths need be fully mapped. McCloud also talks about “closure” or the mind’s ability to fill in the gaps of a story, even when the eyes cannot see it [2]. Allowing players to come to their own conclusions, to create their own links between parts of the story is its own alchemy. In order to make sense of two elements juxtaposed in a “jarring combination,” the mind must build a bridge spanning the occluded areas and be forced to create story where none is visible. Reading such a piece of interactive fiction, thus, becomes an even more creative act.

With the growing ubiquity of game design tools, especially in interactive fiction, I’m heartened by the unconventional stories independent designers are telling. Rather than tales of bloodshed and conquest, we’re seeing more games that make use of these affordances that interactive fiction gives us to create stories of wonder and exploration, of learning about others worlds and other people. Hounds no longer, we metamorphose into bees, into birds, into graceful, flying things that soar to the upper atmosphere of human imagination, and then out further still.

Works Cited

[1] L. Simpson, A Companion’s Tale, Sweet Potato Press, 2018.

[2] S. McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.

[3] S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” sub-Q, February 2019.

[4] C. G. J. C. O. W. Alexis Kennedy, Fallen London, Failbetter Games, 2009.

[5] S. Biswas, “Videogames and Art of Spatial Storytelling,” Kill Screen, 1 March 2016.

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Hounds & Heroes: Control, Closure, and Exploration in Games appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

It chuckled.

One did not write in that kind of book. One wrote in notebooks, and perhaps textbooks—but only those specifically designed to be written in. I had been taught at a young age that books were sacred to the Goddess Saraswathi, Patron of Knowledge and Learning (majuscule included). One must never destroy a book, write in one, or even touch one with one’s feet. A book was to be read, ideally with reverence.

Above the lobby of the Public Theatre in Manhattan soars a fan of thirty-seven rigid metal blades, like the feathers of some sort of giant mechanical bird, each embedded with 3000-odd white LED lights. This is artist Ben Rubin’s The Shakespeare Machine, and each blade digitally contains the text of a complete play, and displays fragments of it in various patterns [1]. One moment each blade might show a different “You + Noun” phrase, creating a curious litany of insults and honorifics: “You King. You Fool. You Whoreson. You Sir.” At another time, they might each display a descriptor The Bard employed: “Rose-cheeked. Sharp-quilled. Wall-eyed.”

The first time I beheld the sculpture—because you really do behold, rather than merely see it—I lingered under it for a while, taking in its shape, exploring its space, scanning the words, delighting at the linguistic patterns and associations. Kate D. Levin, who commissioned the piece as Cultural Affairs Commissioner for New York City, said that it “reminds us how juicy and exciting language can be.” [2]

Notice that this text is not meant to be read, per se, the same way you might read a book. Of course, in their original form, neither were Shakespeare’s plays.

I didn’t matter that I’d read a certain ending. Reading it didn’t fix it in the personal story I was constructing in my psyche.

I did this with every other game book I ever played. Because that is how I thought one must interact with that sort of text.

In his article Nonlinearity and Literary Theory, Espen Aarseth talks about how we use and consume texts differently [4]:

“A text includes a practice, a structure or ritual of use. Different practices adhere to different texts. We do not read Peanuts (the comic strip) the way we read the Bible.”

And while Aarseth, in this discussion, is talking about the mechanics of reading, the “algorithm, and choreography that conducts the script from the text to the mind of the reader” (such as my complex finger-dance for the Goosebumps game book), one can extend this argument to interpretation and comprehension, à la Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim, “The medium is the message” [5]. Not only do we have different cultural practices for specific types of text, but different media inherently conjure different ways of reading. As an example, scholars Mary Flanagan and Geoff Kaufman proposed in a 2016 study that electronic and paper texts are absorbed differently by the brain, and promote different types of cognition using the information captured [6].

In most interactive texts, you rarely see all of the constituent parts in one go, and doing so is, moreover, unhelpful.

This means that “interactive fiction” is much more than a simple agglutination of two buzzwords. Somewhere along the line, something changes. A synergy emerges, a transfiguration that introduces wholly new aspects that neither mere “fiction” nor “interactive” can account for. Perhaps we even need a new verb; “Read” is far too limiting, and “play” doesn’t fit perfectly either.

Consider the fact that in most interactive texts, you rarely see all of the constituent parts in one go, and doing so is, moreover, unhelpful. As Aarseth puts colourfully puts it [4]:

“When we look at the whole of a nonlinear text, we cannot read it; and when we read it, we cannot see the whole text… The text, far from yielding its riches to our critical gaze, appears to seduce us, but it remains immaculate, recedes, and we are left with our partial and impure thoughts, like unworthy pilgrims beseeching an absent deity.”

It’s precisely this blind spot created by interactive fiction that prompts the all-too-familiar fingers-in-pages behaviour for game books, or repetitive play in digital IF stories. My desire for a specific outcome is so strong that I’m willing to “cheat” my way to it, breaking the “rules” presented by the experience. It’s worth noting that the very act of introducing more rules to the system (as opposed to the simple rule of “read from beginning to end” that’s implicit in regular-old linear fiction), by adding choice and decisions and page-turning or hyperlinks, we encourage people to “cheat”.

“Because they primarily exist as rule systems, games are particularly ripe for subversive practices,” writes Flanagan in her book Critical Play, further asserting that, “A great deal of pleasure for players can be derived from subverting a set of interaction norms… no matter how structured that play is.” [7] Of course, this raises questions about whether “cheating” is really “cheating” if the designer knows it’s going to happen, and even designs for it. I recall Choose-You-Own-Adventure books which included sections that were impossible to reach by following any of the rules or prompts. These Easter eggs revealed themselves only to the most ardent hunters, and only when they strayed from the prescribed paths.

But that’s all “ritual of use”, “algorithm” and “choreography”. What of the cognitive?

When I recently read/played (see what I mean about a new verb?) Kyle Marquis’s Tower Behind the Moon [8], I decided early on that I wanted to try and hit most of the different ending listed in the “Achievements” page.. However, although I played the game multiple times, my first run, where I ascended (descended?) to demonhood, will always be my “true” run. Perhaps it’s because “you never forget your first”, or because large swathes of the game remain the same over different run-throughs, or even because of what Aarseth calls the “metaphysical belief in a transcendental text” [4] that we all cling too.

Even so, though I elevated one path over others, the fact remained that I was aware of my options, and the consequences they would entail. In a compelling video-argument on PBS Game/Show, Jamin Warren contends that it’s often the illusion of choice that matters more than the presence or absence of choice itself [9]. Rather than cleaving to the image of a duped reader, however, and especially since many IF stories offer more than just illusion, I prefer to wax effusive about the dream of possibility.

It’s nice that the medium and genre of interactive fiction allows me to do that, to dream that there are other options out there, that the decisions I make have the possibility of ripening into something different but wonderful, and that it’s my own damn decision whether or not I scribble in pencil in a book.

Works Cited

[1] B. Rubin, Artist, The Shakespeare Machine. [Art]. The Public Theater, 2012.

[2] R. Cembalest, “The Thing’s the Plays: Public Theater’s New Shakespeare Machine,” 16 October 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.artnews.com/2012/10/16/ben-rubin-shakespeare-machine/. [Accessed 5 January 2019].

[4] E. J. Aarseth, “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” in The New Media Reader, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2003, pp. 762-780.

[5] M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

[6] G. K. Mary Flanagan, “High-Low Split: Divergent Cognitive Construal Levels Triggered by Digital and Non-digital Platforms,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, 2016.

[7] M. Flanagan, Critical Play, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013.

[8] K. Marquis, “Tower Behind the Moon,” Choice of Games, 20 December 2018. [Online]. Available: https://www.choiceofgames.com/tower-behind-the-moon/#utm_medium=web&utm_source=ourgames.

[9] J. Warren, “Your Choices DON’T Matter,” PBS Game/Show, 7 April 2015. [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/fdAos7stz7A.

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.