ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Playing with the texts

After examining bits of game theory and working with Jason Nelson’s “Injury”, I’m really getting fascinated by notions of “playing” a text to promote different forms of access and interpretation with a work. While I am still working with what it is to “play” a text, exactly, I am drawn to a lot of musical metaphors that these digital media open up to the reader, whether the textual resources we look at involve sound or not, or are designed with the notion of a game in the classic sense, of something involving a specific player return. In some way, all of the things we’ve looked at involve a breaking down of the text, if only by virtue of the fact that they are now in digital format. Some of best ones, however, through varying means of deforming and drawing out of the elements of the text, much like sampling, give the reader/user different tools for their own remixing of the text. How “playable” a text can be depends on both the samples it gives you to work with and the interface on which you can pull out a new composition.

I am particularly fond of Textarc and MUDs as two different tools for their potential to sample, remix, and play a given text. Both programs lend a level of instrumentality to text that provides new access into the traditional (analog?) codex. With Textarc, detailed breaking down of the text into the concordance lays the text out in one neat track, ready for the user to set the needle anywhere and grab line, a word, or check out the beats/frequency of the words in a work and it has a particularly seamless interface, like a well laid out soundboard. It’s playability likes in the user/reader’s ability to break down and sample a text. When it comes to the sampling of a text, searchability is key, and Textarc is particularly smooth and helpful with its library in Project Gutenberg, and the visual window that calls up possible hits as one changes the parameters of the search. Textarc is foremost a textual medium, and I think it’s purpose is not so much a medium of composition as a medium of exploration, a researcher’s tool to dissect and examine the medium for later interpretations. Which is not to say that this exempts the nonresearcher/author reader, but perhaps that’s just a matter of the knowledge of the technology being first available amongst scholars and those in the university settings. Even the audio and color visuals still draw attention to the breakdown of the text, rather than any form of recomposition. For that, I’d head to the MUD.

The MUD at Romantic Circles has a number of advantages for sampling and remixing texts. For one thing, it is not limited to the literal texts. Works the authors come up with are open to thematic interpretation and remixing as well as offering the ability to play with the original text of a work. In addition, if a GUI interface is available, the MUD need not be a textual tool alone, but allow a user to interplay between the images and text of a work, showcasing one or the other, or letting both speak to a user simultaneously. A MUD has its playability located in both it’s interpretive power (the ability to mix elements of a given text), and in a more classical game theory mode, centered on the reader/player.

In fact, there are a number of games going on in a MUD, so to speak, as the author first plays the text itself, crafting rooms and narrative as he or she sees fit with playing the reader in mind, sometimes guiding them to make certain choices in the game, just as the reader will come to the MUD with the purpose of learning how to play the text/game itself. The player must figure out what the text and the author have contrived to derive success at the game and move forward through the given narrative by breaking down the narrative into parts accessible by certain commands. For instance, it is given in a hint in the Beulah section of the Romantic Circles MUD that the command needed to start the action is , and then the reader/player must interpret hints from the narrative of the text and translate (remix) them into the proper MUD commands that will get them to the next passage or section.

The key elements to really make a GUI MUD work lie in the interface and the integration of the textual elements of the traditional MUD and graphical layout/components for the textual aspect of the game. In this, I think the Romantic Circles MUD needs work—there is a severe breakdown in the seamlessness of the user interface for the MUD. While the graphical interface often worked very well, little attention seems to be paid in the translation of those elements to the textual aspect of the game. There were instances where the keyed terms were sticky, highly object specific without the use of aliases to better allot for player interpretation. The command to access the Help desk, for instance, must be typed with ASCII spaces and proper capitalization in only one certain way, instead of making a few alternatives for user ease. In addition, a number of traceback and player_msg errors were occurring that broke the narrative up with bug code and interfered with both the ease of playability and readability of the text. To make a long story short, this area in the MUD felt very much like the author’s own interpretation of the work, with little consideration for the ease of player accessibility and reception. Which is fine, if that’s the artist’s goal, for his or herself, but at its heart, I think the MUD is best utilized as a more mixed medium where the variables involved in player/reader interpretations are considered. What really makes the MUD work is the playability for the reader/player in conjunction with the author’s intent of designing the game.

So, to draw back and simplify, while Textarc and the MUD at Romantic Circles may not be designed as tools for mixing texts or game play in the traditional sense, the qualities of playability that these two programs give us to take to texts, I think, are worth further delving into and using for different projects, specifically because they go beyond the normal database or text archive and take textual scholarship one step further, into the realm of playing the text.

Posted by Kelly at May 5, 2004 02:38 AM