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Singular, idiosyncratic and a little mysterious, Black Clock is one of America's leading literary journals.

Archive for the ‘Outside’ Category—

POTENTIAL *EMERGENCY* MINECRAFT (Part 2 of 2)

This, the fourth entry in “Playing Between The Lines” (a series of expeditions into the evolving space of interactive storytelling, its praxes and practical benefits), concludes the investigation of the narratological implications of Minecraft begun here.

In Part 1, I expressed some of why I find the experience of watching other people play Minecraft rewarding.  It speaks to my views on what makes all interactive storytelling rewarding.  I’ve described the symptom in enough detail, at this point, that it’s probably time to look at the cause, to begin to unpack the three narrative types I mentioned earlier and to figure out how exactly they’ve come up with this digital distillation of the private soul that we’re calling Minecraft.

LORE

I’ll begin with the most familiar, the one most people refer to simply as “narrative.”  When Karen/Ebert besmirches the video game “story,” this is what they’re referring to.  Even those who share my enthusiasm about the interactive form have a tendency to place the “story” in its own bracket, to block it off from the aspects of the experience with which they pretend to concern themselves.  In reality, because the lines of distinction between these three narrative forms become nebulous in good interactive design, their distinct characteristics and interplay are often rendered invisible: it’s often difficult to tell where “story,” as the Karen/Ebert is using it, ends and where the rest of the experience begins.

To avoid implications that any one of these three forms is subordinate to the others, I’m going to swap the term “narrative” here for a slightly more fraught, but less problematical, one: “lore.”  When interactive aficionados discuss lore, they refer to the largely unspoken but internally consistent rules and backstory that govern the behavior of the secondary characters and the setting they inhabit.  The recent Bioware title Dragon Age: Origins, for example, includes a rich vein of lore in its virtual codex, a hypertextual compendium of terms, figures, history and beliefs concerning the high fantasy realm in which it is situated.  This is a very different approach to how From Software’s Demon’s Souls characterizes its high fantasy setting: the latter employs minimal but effective dialogue, focusing instead on evocative architectural structures and the telling placement of characters, objects, and creatures within them.  This, too, is lore.

Minecraft’s lore is diverse and plentiful, though more deeply buried than in the previous examples.  Lore can be something as simple as where friendly or hostile creatures (known as “mobs”) are likely to appear, how they behave, and what sorts of materials they drop when killed, especially when the results are particularly esoteric or unexpected.  It’s important to note that the actual mechanics of the AI and whatnot aren’t lore — that’s just coding — but the player’s understanding of those mechanics can be.  If the player finds a saddle, for example, it can be used to ride a pig, for whatever small pleasures that conveys.  The green moss covering the walls of all Minecraft dungeons (small randomly-appearing chambers containing treasure chests and mob-spawning mechanism) is lore.  Recipes for refining and crafting items from raw materials are part of the lore.  Alternately, lore can be as complex as The Nether: an underworld added in October 2010, accessible only via portals generated when the player constructs a 4X5 archway of pure obsidian blocks.  The Nether comes attached with all sorts of delicious and evocative rules or exceptions: any distance traveled in The Nether is multiplied by eight when the player transports back to the world above, clocks and compasses fail to work, and it contains its own unique set of creatures and materials.

Lore, in the specific sense suggested by these examples, can be understood as an effort to suggest a much larger framing narrative fueling and lending interpretation to the player-character’s passage through the interactive world.  World-building would be an acceptable alternative term, as might paratextuality.

I think it would be useful, though, to consider lore more broadly: not simply as the hidden details or worked surface surrounding the narrative, but as every aspect of the narrative that is fixed in place.  Lore is the only degree of control the author of an interactive story has over the way the story will shape up, even in the most linear of interactive stories.  This would make the blocky visual appearance of everything in Minecraft part of its lore.  It makes any prologue or supplement found in an instruction manual, or on the back of a game case, lore.  Lore now includes the actions mapped to individual buttons or commands, the player-character’s library of verbs.

It also includes things like the non-interactive cinematic reel that introduces virtually every video game.  It includes the ending, or multiple endings.  It includes every line of dialogue, every scripted gesture.  By this broader definition, “The princess is in another castle” is part of the lore of Super Mario Bros.

This is more than just a taxonomic whim.  Lore, as I said before, suggests and interprets the actions of the player-character.  Because the protagonists acts outside the direct control of the interactive story’s author, we have to take into account where the authorial hand does show itself.  Doing so, we find it to be equally present, and operating in much the same way, in the environmental minutiae of the story-world (lore specific) and in the forty-five-minute movie that precedes the climactic battle (lore general): both feed, emotionally and narratively, into how the player approaches and experiences that fated clash.  Even previous experiences of failure or success can be lore, as they alter the interactor’s attitude toward and understanding of the task at hand.  People who build a wall between “story” and “gameplay,” or anything else, forget that without story, gameplay would be a purely technical exercise.

POTENTIAL

Let’s not forget, though, that the opposite is equally true.  Just as a game’s interactive elements cannibalize from its lore for their emotive and narrative impact, so a game’s story must include every interaction the player provides, regardless of their apparent lack of importance.  This is the key to understanding the concept of potential narrative.

The term “potential narrative” is fairly self-explanatory.  In traditional narratives of the kind Great-Aunt Ebert champions, the author writes us from A to B to C, from the exposition all the way up until the denouement.  To utilize a Minecraft-appropriate analogy, writing traditional narrative is like building a rollercoaster: it might be full of surprises, twists and turns, it might speed up and slow down, it might lull you into a comfortable rhythm only to pull the ground out from under you, and it might be intricately constructed and beautiful as hell.  But the tracks don’t change.  It’s the same plot from reading to reading, though our understanding of it may vary (see: emergence).

In a potential narrative, the plot is built from the interplay between information the author has provided, or lore, and input the interactor provides, and thus varies from reader to reader and from reading to reading.  The author simply lays a groundwork from which conflict and resolution may naturally develop.  In Minecraft terms, reading a potential narrative is like traversing a dungeon: you know there will be skeletons, and you know there will be treasure, but it’s up to you how and in what order you choose to encounter and resolve these plot points.

Minecraft, which keeps its scripted elements as invisible as possible(there’s no introductory reel, no set goal, and no way to win, in fact no end to the story except in death) isn’t the best model for clarifying potential narrative.  For a more concrete example, we need look no further than Andrew Plotkin’s Hunter, in Darkness, mentioned in this series’ previous entry.  Hunter, in Darkness begins with the lines “Nearly — nearly. The animal stink is rank and close. You raise your crossbow, try to peer beyond dark, wet stone.”  This is an immutable element of the story; every potential narrative will begin the same way.  From there, the player-character may venture forward into the darkness … to be immediately devoured by the lurking beast.  Thus ends one potential narrative.  In another potential narrative, the player-character investigates a side chamber to the left, where a swarm of bats necessitate a blind dive into a pit.  There’s another pit to the right of the starting point: most attempts to descend this will result in protracted but inevitable death (capping their respective potential narratives).  The option to fire blindly at the beast, wounding it but allowing it to escape, also exists, but all paths lead eventually to death, or to the bottom of a pit with a wounded hand and blood-hungry bats on your trail.  If we rule out death and failure (which are, rightly, potential narratives of their own), this and the opening, along with several other milestones leading to the conclusion, are fixed narrative elements. They anchor all the potential stories together, allowing for the illusion of a unified narrative.  These fixed milestones are what most people refer to when they talk about the “story” of a video game or other interactive work, but in reality each experience with an interactive story is its own potential narrative.  Actions such as shooting the beast, which have repercussions on the written narrative, or making closer investigations of the pit and other elements of the cave system, which emotionally flavor the overall text, are far from trivial additions to be judged separately from the fixed “plot.”

It’s important enough to repeat: everything that unfolds within the interactive story, regardless of its apparent significance, is a part of the potential narrative.  That means that, in Minecraft, placing a block in the middle of the field, then immediately reducing it to rubble, must still be counted in the potential narrative, even though it will have no repercussions on the ending (if Minecraft had an ending).  Taking a step forward then back, or standing in one place, likewise contribute. After all, in the absence of other signifiers of character, how are we to tell if Minecraft Guy is decisive or vacillatory, adventurous or lazy?

To provide some literary context: in 1960, author Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais joined forces to create the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Oulipo, with the goal not of creating works of literature themselves, but of discovering new metaphorical machines for generating works of potential literature.  Noted authors as different in aesthetic orientation as George Perec and Italo Calvino have employed Oulipian constraints and algorithmic processes to produce literary works that they regard less as books than as models of potential literary processes.  What many people fail to consider, however, is that every interactive story, from the most linear shooting game to open-ended playgrounds for self-expression like Minecraft, is its own machine for generating potential narratives.  As with the Oulipian texts, the literary quality of the narratives produced, like the content of the narratives themselves, cannot be accurately predicted.

I’m not interested in Minecraft as a game.  If I were, I would have played it by now.  No, in my addiction I see it not as a game at all, but as a generator of potential narratives.

EMERGENCE

Which, it turns out, has only a little bit to do with narrative as we would normally conceive it, as even the Oulipo conceived it.  It has everything, on the other hand, to do with emergence.

Emergence arises when interaction governed by a simple set of rules transforms into something significantly more complex.  While you could view it as a question of degrees — emergent narrative is one notch up from potential narrative — they’re actually complementary concepts.  The easiest distinction to make is that potential narratives are, at least conceptually, measurable and recordable.  Emergent narratives, on the other hand, can’t be found in the screen or on the page.  They are entirely psychic phenomena, and can afflict, without warning, any person tuned in to receive them.

Generally, emergent narratives emerge when the input from the audience and the feedback from the interactive story approaches a 1:1 relation.  In most potential narratives, the player-character’s actions are built from the lore provided by the author.  In emergent narratives, the player-character’s actions are built from the actions of the player-character.  It’s the same process by which we make narratives out of dreams and fevers.  Noby Noby Boy, Keita Takahashi’s interactive art game thing, is emergent to the point of abstraction due to its literally elastic controls and high level of unpredictability.

If potential narrative is like a dungeon full of monsters and treasure, emergent narrative is like Survival mode itself.  A dungeon can be carefully crafted out of lore to lead adventurers to discover certain paths.  Trick floor panels and pitfalls can be installed.  Ancient scrolls detailing the terrible, primordial, and prophesied evils that dwell in the deepest locked room can be scattered about, usually next to the key to that very room.  Not to put too fine a point on it, a dungeon can be constructed.  Minecraft’s Survival mode, on the other hand, procedurally generates entire worlds, complete with forests, oceans, islands, mountains, and cave systems.  Procedural generation, to oversimplify things, means that the content is, for all intents and purposes, random.  Algorithms are put into use to ensure that bits of lava aren’t floating around in midair above an ice floe, but that’s as far as the authorial hand extends.

Which means that caves in Minecraft aren’t guaranteed to contain treasure, or skeletons, although the chances of the latter are fairly high.  They certainly won’t contain ancient scrolls and mysterious keys.  They don’t contain, in short, anything remotely resembling a plot.  What they do contain is the unknown in its purest form.  Every block you uncover in Minecraft is another cubic meter of uncharted wilderness, a frontier virgin to the eyes of man.

Emergence is why the minutiae and tedium of potential narratives — that 1000th skeleton vanquished, those hours spent mining wood from trees — remain vital.  Emergent narratives are unpredictable, and can therefore reliably be expected to adhere to the least expected moments.  In an emergent system, subtle changes, such as those introduced in Survival mode, can engender profound effects.

Advertising for video games, which are by and large fairly linear potential narratives, often make a big fuss about the choices presented to the player, all of which tend to fall into uninteresting binary categories.  “Will you be a hero?  Or a villain?  Will you save the world?  Or destroy it?”  An emergent narrative, on the other hand, doesn’t ask such questions.  It doesn’t offer choices.  It simply offers a space in which the player is free to act as they see fit.  Most potential narratives are multiple choice tests.  Emergent narratives are Rorschach tests.

The previously cited Minecraft videos illustrate one of the most exciting benefits of creating emergent or potential narratives: they come to reveal at least as much, if not more, about the interactor as they do about the author.  Of course, this comes with fairly steep trade-off: the more emergent the narrative is, the more tongue-tied it leaves the author, an issue closely related to the interactive author’s dilemma in Alexander Ocias’s very different independent work Loved.  Notch isn’t making a statement with Minecraft.  He is building an increasingly rich and varied environment in which his players can express themselves, or in which they find themselves expressed, for the emergent narrative is often as much of a surprise to the interactor as it is to the original author.

Simply put, if you have more answers than questions, you’d be a fool to try to express them emergently.  It’s no place for political commentary.  But when the goal becomes unlocking things neither the author nor the audience knows are there….

Even with that in mind, there’s another hurdle.  It’s 600 meters tall and made of flaming cubes of magma.  Even in something as unpredictable and open-ended as Minecraft, there’s no guarantee a narrative will emerge, and if it does, its form will be entirely unpredictable.  There’s only a small chance that anything meaningful will arise at all; it will depend entirely on the audience.  In short, one does not write an emergent narrative; to do so would go against the very nature of the thing.

Which isn’t the same thing as saying there’s no such thing as an emergent text.  “But I know nothing of interactive storytelling!” you quaver, in your best staunchest luddite impersonation.  Bosh, I say.  As much as they take advantage of the interactive form, emergent or potential narratives can exist, and even thrive, outside of electronic media.  Interactivity is an element of the way a work is conceived and received; it isn’t tied to medium.  Go read a poem: symbolism, slippage, sensorially supercharged abstraction … these are all fertile grounds for emergent meaning.  Sure, you aren’t likely to read the novelization of Minecraft any time soon.  Any book emergent on the same level of Minecraft would look like a crossword puzzle, or a collection of abstract ASCII art.  Both the author and the reader would have to relinquish control.  If potential narratives are about choice, then there must exist a choice to view the page as something more than a self-contained box of text, as a mere staging ground  for an as-yet-unwritten drama.  I’m thinking of collaboration, of revision, of adaptation and appropriation.

I don’t know if such a book yet exists.  I don’t even know if it would be worth writing.  A good narrative can be very reassuring.  There’s an existential anguish in casting about in a wilderness, finding nothing but random patterns and a meaningless wash of your own inputs.  It takes a great deal of dedication to press on into that world of darkness and of your own reflections, in the hope that you will discover something of meaning, something beyond solipsism.  If the Minecraft novel existed, I don’t know if I could read it.  But it would still excite the hell out of me.

As I said above, unpredictable narratives emerge when a simple set of rules yields something more complex.  What could be more simple, and more complex, than written language?

A box of Legos, perhaps.  A starship made out of toy blocks.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity

POTENTIAL *EMERGENCY* MINECRAFT (Part 1 Of 2)

This is the third entry in “Playing Between The Lines,” a series of expeditions into the evolving space of interactive storytelling, its praxes and practical benefits.

Video games have terrible stories.  You know it.  Your Great-Aunt Karen knows it.  Roger Ebert, famously and repeatedly, knows it.

Yet people invest hundreds of hours of their lives, long after any apparent narrative satisfaction has been achieved, on what amounts to an endless epilogue of monster-slaying and skill-point distribution.  There is an emergent narrative, in double-jumps and headshots (the kind that involve eruptions of viscera), that gamers find so thrilling they ignore the inadequacies of the scripted tale.  The stauncher of the anti-gaming luddites express bafflement when grown men, not to mention teenage boys, confess to shedding tears over these ridiculous melodramas with nary a trace of three-act structure.  Goodness!

But maybe you, Roger Ebert, Great-Aunt Karen, and the rest of the stauncher luddites are looking at it the wrong way.  Judged against classic film theory or narratological structures, many interactive stories do indeed fall far short.  Yet, if they produce as strong or stronger an emotional or intellectual reaction in their audience, can we really call them inferior?  Interactive stories, video games included, should be judged not by their scripted content, which is often limited.  They should be judged by the potential stories they make possible, which are infinite.  These potential stories don’t exist anywhere in a trailer or script; they can only be experienced by means of true, invested, 1:1 personal interaction.

To illustrate this concept, I’m going to talk about a game I’ve never played.

A CLASSIC IN THE MAKING

I’ve never played Minecraft.

I just wanted to let you know that, if you haven’t played Minecraft either, you’re not alone.  There’s you, me, and probably at least one other person out there somewhere.  Great-Aunt Karen, maybe.  Possibly somebody who has spent the past two years researching flightless birds at a remote base in Antarctica.  It’s also possible they were dwelling at the bottom of the ocean.  Or pinned under rubble.  Not perfect cubes of rubble, though, because if they had, they would have been playing Minecraft.

Minecraft, developed by Markus Persson, a.k.a. “Notch,” is a freeform saga of creation and destruction built in Java.  It began in May 2009 as what is now known as Minecraft “Classic,” or “Creative mode.”  Classic resembles nothing more than a horizonless shoebox filled to the brim with digital legos.  Providing players with a randomly generated terrain and graphically simple cubes of various design, Notch tasked them with building, collectively or alone, anything they could imagine.  The players, experiencing this virtual architectural Toyland from the first-person perspective of a nameless fellow about three cubes tall, could stack limitless quantities of the block of their choice vertically or horizontally, as well as destroy any blocks currently in existence, with the click of a mouse button.

If there’s anything to be learned from Minecraft Classic, it’s that human beings can imagine a great many things, and, like chimpanzees with a typewriter, they will build them given enough time and resources.

This primitive version of Minecraft was an unmitigated success, and within a month Notch was accepting pre-orders for the final version of the game, which is still off there somewhere beyond the edges of the shoebox.  By January 10, 2011, over 1,000,000 copies had been sold.  Lest we forget, this is something that was developed by one person over the span of two years, and it’s still very much a work in progress—in fact, its conceptual framework relies on this state of incompletion.  It can be taken as a given, at this point, that Minecraft will join the ranks of Second Life and World of Warcraft as an honest-to-goodness phenomenon of interactive design.

While the range and complexity of objects produced in Classic is a true testament to humanity’s unswerving drive to — especially keeping in mind that these full-scale reproductions or cloud-capped monuments to whimsy were put together block by pixellated block — the original Minecraft was too blatantly and open-endedly an electronic toy-set to be considered a storytelling platform.  There was no goal, except to build, and no conflict, except for the internal conflicts all creators face.  The most exciting narrative that could arise went something like: build a beautiful structure, make it public, have it destroyed or vandalized by somebody with malicious intent (figures known among collaborative gamers as griefers).  Some might call this the quintessential structure of a tragedy, but it was too repetitive, and too vague, to carry any emotional oomph.

All that changed when Notch introduced “Survival mode.”  In Survival mode — available only to those who have pre-ordered the game — things function in largely the same manner…but for two all-important distinctions.  One, building blocks are no longer free or limitless: the player must now collect and craft every resource by hand.  Two, the procedurally generated worlds are no longer uninhabited: they now contain sheep, cows and chicken, which yield resources as important as leather and feathers.  With this population boom, as well, came mobs of predators, inhabiting dark spaces only to emerge at night and home in on the player with eerie precision.

Suddenly, Minecraft isn’t about devoting weeks to building a scale model of the Tower of Babel.  It’s about scrambling to fashion some form of shelter, just to last through the night.  It’s about venturing into caves infested with hostile creatures in the hopes of discovering some of the more valuable resources.  It’s about survival in a way that camping in the woods doesn’t begin to approximate.  And it’s about making something out of that inkblot of a cubist world, something revelatory and meaningful.

Suddenly, it’s a wellspring of potential narratives.  Which is precisely why I haven’t played Minecraft.

“LET’S PLAY”

I’ve let other people play it for me.  And it’s become an addiction.

Luckily, people seem more than happy to make their struggles and victories public.  Series of “Let’s Play” videos on video sharing sites such as Youtube provide narratives at least as engaging as the highest budget television serials.  If you don’t believe me, check here.  Or here.  Or any of dozens of others.

It can be difficult to explain the draw of these videos to somebody uninitiated in the infinite drama Notch has incepted.  Watching other people play video games seems a counter-intuitive practice, particularly after my declamation about invested personal interaction in the introduction.  The pivot-point here is that there are actually three co-planar levels of narrative at work in any interactive story: “lore” (a term I’m using broadly to encompass all elements of linear storytelling present in an interactive work), potential narrative, and emergent narrative.

I’m going to touch on all three in greater detail in the follow-up post, so you can keep your wig on.  For now, let me just say that Minecraft Survival is deeply emergent.  So emergent, in fact, that I couldn’t hope to navigate the subterranean sprawl that houses its various narratives if I merely played it by myself.  Narratives emerge from the back-and-forth between the simple, flexible, but elegant process that drive the game and the distinct subconscious signatures of the players.  Playing it myself, I would soon fall into a rhythm in the way I react to the way Minecraft reacts to my reactions.  My narratives would begin to homogenize, and the narratives of others would soon become a part of that homogenization, victims of narrative projection.  It’s therefore more rewarding for me, more fascinating, to watch others try to cope with survival.  I witness narratives sprouting up out of the darkness that I would never have seen on my own.

Minecraft has become a door via which the inner minds of its players are made visible.  With each step into the unexplored caves, they are venturing deeper toward the basal planes of their own psyches.  It’s like watching them build a toy block window into their most intimate recesses.  It’s like people-watching with x-ray goggles.  It’s like a number of other analogies with perverted connotations.

It’s what makes Minecraft so appealing to not play.

Watch out for part 2, in which I delve deeper into the narratological trinity from which interactive stories are composed.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity

Etsy for the Erudite

If your ethic carries even a hint of DIY, it’s likely you’ve already heard about Etsy, the notoriously indie online marketplace for all that’s holy in the world of handmade. Etsy pushes the idea that we can all make things and a living at the same time, and that annihilating middlemen is the path to a sustainable and visionary economy. Whether it’s crocheted head adornments, Dia de los Muertos cufflinks, or taxidermy-themed housewares you seek, it’s unlikely that Etsy will disappoint. But what happens if you’re looking for more than miniature red velvet cupcakes? What happens if your heart’s desire looks more like magnetic poetry or a fountain pen whose quill dares never to run dry?

Enter the search term “literature” on Etsy, and your results will number in the many-thousands. Refine your search so that you’re only culling from that which is handmade, (because you should be buying your vintage lit from book and mortar bookshops, right?), and you’ll generally knock your results down to a couple thousand. Take a moment, now, to bask in the unequivocal variety that cascades down your screen. Here lies one of the bounties and banes of all community websites: self-attribution. Sellers on Etsy dictate their own tags for the items they list, and undeniably, members of our species don’t always agree about what certain words mean. Within the world of Etsy, this means that you’re bound to run face first into both the agreeably expected as well as the exultantly unforeseen.

Let me warn you–you’re going to see a lot of maimed and cut-up books. They will have found rebirth as secret boxes, canvases, and things heart-shaped. Pages torn will be ensconced in one-inch pins, in pendants, and in frames. Tiny glass vials will hold, in pieces, your favorite lines of Poe. Find grace in the fact that, for the most part, you will be spared the gore of inky spills and shredded remnants of the canon. This is what we call upcycling.

Next, you’re going to read a lot of quotes. They’ll be on t-shirts, magnets, stickers, and even more pins. You’ll find many authors unaccredited, because one of the favored pastimes of literati is taking note of all the moments that prove its members are of a secret society that knows more good lines than any other. Or, get quippy. Need people to know you’re serious about your syntax? Get a “Grammar Police” pin to identify thyself. Want your offspring to demonstrate how very in-the-know you are? Acquire a shirt proclaiming him or her “Mr. Darcy’s Love Child.” Stud your leather with “fat books are so damn sexy!” or “i am a cautionary tale.” Press, savagely, upon thy bosom, the burning visage of Bukowski.

What you might love more than anything else here, though, is what follows interpretation. Have you ever wondered what “Curiouser and curiouser” smells like? Will your highest hopes be manifest after you’ve burned through an Oscar Wilde prayer candle? If you bathe yourself with One Hundred Year of Solitude, will you find it your fate? And I have to know–would you ornament your pulse points with the oil of the Torture Garden?

When Etsy says “literature,” it does so in either the most literal sense (not to torment you again with the image of books torn limb from limb), or in the most ideological (oh, how we love our Ophelias, our fleurs du mal, and our bell jars). Dig deeper in what’s bookish here, and you can traverse a captivatingly motley landscape of zines, handmade blank journals, and ostrich feather pens. But linger too long, and you might find it advisable, nay, crucial to get thee a hollowed book outfitted with a flask. At once.

by Patricia Cram
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Interacting with Andrew Plotkin

This is the second entry in “Playing Between The Lines,” a series of expeditions into the evolving space of interactive storytelling, its praxes and practical benefits.

Last time, we examined certain properties of interactive storytelling and discussed their implications for literature as a whole. What this inquiry failed to address, of course, was the fact that one of the oldest forms of computer entertainment has been straddling the border between literature and the interactive since the mid-’70s. Often misrepresented as a dead genre, interactive fiction, sometimes known as text adventures and often abbreviated IF, has enjoyed a steady but stealthy renaissance in the past twenty years, thanks to the contributions of independent authors such as Andrew Plotkin.

On his Kickstarter page, Plotkin refers to himself as “a hacker, game designer, and general messer-around of code, art, and language.” Winner of eighteen total XYZZY awards, the IF equivalent of the Oscars, Plotkin has also made numerous technical contributions that have helped make the form more widely accessible. In July 2010 he gave a lecture that attempted to describe IF for readers and writers of traditional fiction, providing a much more elegant and comprehensive introduction than I could hope to. He’s also compiled a page of decent introductory works in the form.

Near the beginning of November, Plotkin made the shocking announcement that he would be quitting his day-job to write interactive fiction, which has been almost exclusively freely-distributed since 1989, full-time. Within a single day, his announced goal of $8,000 in pledges to kickstart this enterprise had already been surpassed, with total pledges exceeding $31,000 as of the sixth of December–a strong indication of the respect the author commands. His first commercially distributed work will be Hadean Lands, available semi-exclusively on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, a teaser of which is available here.

While all of Plotkin’s major IF works are available to experience in-browser at his website, three in particular are worth singling out. Shade begins in a dark, cramped apartment, but it is not long before the bleak, arid atmosphere, and the overwhelming sense of melancholy, begin weighing down the walls of your tiny existence. Spider and Web is a Rashomon-esque reimagining of the relationship between the interactor’s input and the story–or in this case, stories–consequently constructed. Lastly, Hunter, in Darkness draws inspiration from the classic computer game Hunt The Wumpus, imbuing it with a palpable sense of dread, darkness, and the terror of survival.

Recently, Black Clock had the opportunity to do some old-school interaction with Plotkin, the kind that involves two human beings swapping ideas. In this case, we asked him a few questions about his past and present work, as well as his vision regarding the possibilities of the form in which he works.

BLACK CLOCK: You’re best known as an author of interactive fiction. What exactly does that mean? Just what is it you do?

ANDREW PLOTKIN: I write programs that simulate a story world in an interesting, explorable way.

I build adventure games with a familiar command-line interface, in which the player types simple text commands and the game responds with textual output.

I write stories with a head-thumping abundance of setting and description, inexplicably in the second-person point of view, which give the reader just enough influence over insignificant details to feel responsible for the protagonist’s mistakes.

I take part in a retro school of game design which hearkens back to 1975 (and which was commercially extinct by 1990).

I take part in a forward-looking school of game design which experiments and innovates much faster, and with far more freedom, than the “real” game industry.

Ever heard someone say “twisty maze of little passages, all alike”? Or “it’s dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue”? I write those.

Alongside people like Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, and Emily Short, you’re one of the biggest names in independently-developed IF. What’s your proudest contribution?

I hate to choose. Not because of excessive modesty (I’m no more humble than the next guy), but because comparing art with craft is hard. Was it more valuable to create a new IF virtual machine that people now rely on, to come up with a clever dissection of IF storytelling through unreliable narration, or to write an introspective, allusive game that pointed IF beyond the genre adventure story?

Okay, I’m really no more humble than the next guy. The point is, I’m differently proud of software tools, narrative tools, and stories. I’d like to say that I’m most proud of inventing a new rule-based programming paradigm, but after years of thrashing I still haven’t succeeded in inventing it!

On that note, in what role–programmer or writer–do you feel more comfortable?  Or do you inhabit a space between?

I am completely comfortable as a programmer. Programming is easy; you turn the pieces around until they’re elephant-shaped, and then you add anything necessary to hold them in the shape of an elephant, and presto, it’s an elephant. Sometimes you have to knock a bit in half to make the ear look right. I was a programmer to begin with–I mean, from age nine at latest, and we didn’t even have a computer until I was ten–and programming is what I’ve done to make a living.

That is to say: writing is the hard part for me. I haven’t had any formal training in writing, so I’ve had to invent what I do based on the works that I read. See previous question.

I can divide the question up further: I am comfortable writing text, but I’m uncertain writing stories. (This is both cause and effect. IF gives you lots of text to write, even in a game with a slender story, or no story at all. Talent is what you pursue.) If you accused me of pushing those structural boundaries, or writing allusively, in order to gloss over stories that I’m not confident about–I wouldn’t deny it.

You’ve been active in making IF accessible to a more general audience. Do you imagine a future where IF, or some variation thereof, has become as ubiquitous as traditional books?

Imagine? I imagine futures in which people play IF while drifting on very slow glacier-barges across the Mediterranean icefields, pausing occasionally to fight off narratively-starved hordes of extremely literate snow-crabs. Imagining these things is easy.

I don’t find it likely that IF will become as popular as books (that is, books in general)–nor as popular as games (games in general). It’s a narrower medium, and it will have a narrower, more dedicated audience.

But if you were asking me about some new genre of book, I’d inevitably tell you it’s not as popular as books in general. That’s always the wrong question. I think IF could be as ubiquitous as (say) fantasy noir detective stories, or as popular as casual tower-defense games. IF could develop a following that isn’t scattered and disconnected–regular players could be hooked up to authors writing regularly. With discussion and criticism in the literary press.

Then we’d be complaining that our subgenre isn’t as popular as farming teenage vampires, but it’s always something, right?

Speaking of books, have any non-interactive works of fiction been of particular influence to your IF? Or does it change with every project?

You can recognize particular influences–setting, tone, or event–from all sorts of sources. Heliopause riffs on the lyric space opera of Jack Williamson and George R. R. Martin. Hunter has a claustrophobic moment inspired by an Alan Garner novel. Delightful Wallpaper is notionally set in an Edward Gorey illustration.

(I like to remind people that Delightful Wallpaper was inspired by House of Leaves, because the influence is completely undetectable. Except that there’s a house. The book was the start of a thought process, which went off around several corners.)

These aren’t interesting answers. The more fundamental influences…. When I look at prose I try to remember the textures that Patricia McKillip writes. Dave Duncan, and more recently Brandon Sanderson, are great at constructing fictional tools (devices, magics) that interact in subtle, systematic, and surprising ways. C. J. Cherryh can portray a setting, universe and all, just by framing a character’s point of view. Diana Wynne Jones describes the fantastical by grounding it in the reader’s unconscious knowledge of the real world. I try to do all these things.

What element or work of IF first reeled you in as a reader/player? Following from that, what motivated your decision to author your own work?

I got hooked playing Colossal Cave (a.k.a. Adventure), the original text adventure, when I was a child. My father’s office had a take-your-kid-to-work day–one of the few places I could have seen a computer in 1978 or so. He plunked me down in front of a mainframe terminal, and the rest was history.

I started writing IF by sitting in front of the family Apple (a few years later) and thinking “Ok, I can do this. Text input, text output.” I don’t think there was ever a question that I wanted to write IF. IF was the best kind of game there was.

Are there particular spaces or narratives you feel IF is better equipped to explore than traditional fiction?  Than graphical games?

Usually I’m asked what kinds of story-telling IF is best equipped to handle. Immersion, complicity, playing points of view off each other–easy answers. Text games (like any prose form) can do internality and voice; any visual form has to strain to imitate those. (Generally by adding voices, but spoken text is so slow.) IF lets you collapse a room, a building, or a neighborhood into one unit for the player’s attention.

But you asked about spaces and narratives, not techniques. That’s a more interesting question. Questions.

Far as we’ve come in the past twenty years, IF is still best at explorational, environmental stories. A book with that much setting can turn into a travelogue, but in IF you’ve got your hands in it; it won’t get dull. Or it shouldn’t.

Any narrative that turns on a realization is ideal for interactive presentation. Particularly so if the realization is in the reader’s head, with contrasting movement in the protagonist’s. A story that’s conveyed with a system of rules, rather than events, makes great IF…. You know, these are terrible answers. Explore an island! Solve a puzzle! You don’t need me for this.

We’ve just barely begun to figure out what kinds of stories can be told — can only be told — in multiple revisions. What can be conveyed from many outcomes considered together? (Or many in-goes, perhaps?) I don’t have an answer.

In Dual Transform we move between various spaces by invoking metasemantic archetypes, and in Delightful Wallpaper we’re dealing with potentialities and intentions, with all means of physical interaction cut off. Navigation in The Space Under The Window is virtually indescribable by IF standards. Do you think it’s necessary to redefine the way the interactor moves through or conceives space in order to create the sort of conceptual spaces that interest you?

Redefining movement is not necessary, no. Space is a wonderful toy and I love playing with it; it goes back to my love of mazes. (Many IF players will tell you they’re sick of mazes in IF; but if they tell you they’ve never loved mazes, I don’t believe ’em.) But it’s just one toy.

It is necessary for me to build interactions that will befuddle, enlighten, surprise, and then (again) enlighten the player. You could say that any such complex interaction is metaphorically navigation in a state-space. I might say that myself; my perception of game mechanics (and programming mechanics, and probably people mechanics) is proprioceptive and structural, rather than verbal or visual or what have you. But that’s just a way of modeling the design. In the story world, the interesting interactions could just as well be about manipulating objects, or manipulating the environment, as about spatial movement. Wallpaper is an example of all three, in different ways.

(I just asked a bunch of IF-playing friends if they loved mazes, and some of them said “sure” and some looked at me like I was nuts. So, now you know my biases.)

Playing Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, I found myself naturally falling into these nautical or nautical-romantic terms during play, such as ‘weigh anchor’ or ‘hoist rigging’ or even ‘go forth.’  The effect was really liberating, and at the same time immersive; it allowed me to lose myself in the rhythms of this world. Do you think modern IF has become too mired in its traditional input language, these plain dry verbs that have been handed down from things like Zork and Adventure?  How useful is it to revise that vocabulary?

I push around the edges, but the center is always the same. Or if it’s not, shifting it takes a great deal of work.

Even Heliopause relies on some old-school taking, dropping, and putting. Indeed, you can play it through entirely with the standard vocabulary–get the anchor, open the sails, wait. Discovering the new verbs is fun, but if the player reaches for the old ones and finds empty space, the mood will crack right apart.

Heliopause might be on the edge of what we can do. I chose a vocabulary that most people (most native English-speakers, anyway) would recognize. I laid down a great number of verbs, mapping to a very few actions, so that all of the obvious guesses would have useful effect. And most players don’t know real sailing terminology, after all. It’s not like I tried to handle knots.

Plus, Heliopause is short. I think I took the sailing actions as far as I could; any more would have gotten (more) mechanical and tedious. So should more games try (as it were) this tack? Of course; but it’s a harder course than it appears.

How do you deal gracefully with the need to provide your audience with the vocabulary they need for a successful interaction, without sacrificing immersion?

It’s not a graceful maneuver. Nobody expects it to be, at this point.

(Even in commercial video games, teaching the interface isn’t subtle. You’re maintaining good immersion if you pop up a discreet “press X to jump” banner, as opposed to having the protagonist shout “Press the X button to make me jump!”)

Heliopause starts in a very simple environment; you have nothing to do, which is a pointed clue. The description says you can “weigh anchor”. If you try flying or launching (or even going upward), the game again suggests “weigh anchor” or “raise anchor”. The command is (I hope) impossible for the player to avoid, and I repeat it relentlessly. Subtlety is just not worth the risk at this point; if the player doesn’t step into the right frame of mind, the rest of the game is wasted.

In the Hadean Lands demo, I flat-out order the player to try “recall” and “speak word” at the appropriate points. Since I want to make that game accessible to newcomers, I might go farther, and add tutorial messages for all the familiar IF actions.

Later on, one can back down the learning curve, beckoning the player into her own realizations. You’re still managing the process of learning; but you’ve built more structure for the player to climb.

Then, of course, you spend hours sweating out all the possible variations that a player might type. No learning process is unambiguous.

Let’s talk about Hadean Lands for a moment. Without asking you to show your hand too much, is there something new you’re planning, either in terms of narrative or interaction, with this upcoming project?

How about this? I want to get back to an element which isn’t new at all: resource puzzles. 1980s adventure games were full of items that you could use up, destroy, or run out of — food, lantern fuel, fragile treasures, spells that only worked once. If you consumed a resource for the wrong reason (or just ate the food too quickly), well, too bad. You’d have to back up to an old saved game and try to find another way through.

In that era, players expected that sort of hardcore foolery. You kept your saved games, and you expected to run through tough scenes dozens of times before figuring out the right plan. But that got less popular when graphical adventures came along. Maneuvering through a sequence of video animations was slow, particular on 1990-era computers. A style of gameplay which was already tedious in text (where you could type quickly and skim, after all) turned into a tarpit of graphical frustration.

Myst firmly established the idea that there were no fatal mistakes, only puzzles you haven’t solved yet. (Aside perhaps for a few dramatically-failed denouements.) Text games rapidly began following the same path–particularly in the IF Competition, which invited short games and promised a tighter, less frustrating experience.

My first few games allowed fatal mistakes, but for the past decade I’ve been sticking to the “polite,” safer model. I don’t regret that. But I miss the puzzle designs that are possible when you have irrecoverable choices to make.

So for Hadean Lands, I’m going to try a compromise. As you know if you’ve played the demo, you’ll have alchemical resources to use. Some are in limited supply. As you’ll also see in the demo, space and time are… fractured, perhaps… and that will offer a way to recover from mistakes. You’ll be able to try different combinations of elements to solve problems. The trick will be finding combinations that don’t require the same element.

I have to keep the frustration within tight bounds, of course — the iPhone interface discourages unnecessary typing. So there will be shortcuts for various paths, once you know how they work. You won’t have to repeat sequences of commands. That’s all to the good; the fantastic shouldn’t be made familiar through repetition.

Writing IF full-time sounds like a bold move. Do you see it returning as a commercially viable form sometime in the future, or would you prefer IF works remain freely shared among the community?

Didn’t you start by asking me this?

Yes, yes, I do see IF becoming commercially viable. I could be hallucinating, but I see it. Whether I truly wind up doing this full-time depends on the success of Hadean Lands. I’ve collected enough advance funding to cover its development. If that turns out to be repeatable, then I’ve got myself a career. If not, I’ll do something else.

The community will continue to freely share IF works — of course. We’re several Internet decades past the point where anyone could pretend that a free art community is antithetical to commercial art. If my livelihood has to struggle against a tide of work freely available online, then — I’ll have proven that IF is just as viable as writing, music, and filmmaking. Right? Because all of those people have the same problems. I look forward to it.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity

Loved and the Strange Frontiers of Interactive Storytelling

This is the first in Playing Between The Lines, a series of expeditions into the evolving space of interactive storytelling, its praxes and practical benefits.

Alexander Ocias describes his brief, open-ended browser-based game Loved as “A short story in the form of a flash platformer.”

“What’s this?” you cry.  Perhaps your narrative sensibilities have been outraged. “Platformers?  Like that Super Mario?  Where can a story possibly exist in something like that?”  As we shall see, the answer is: everywhere and nowhere.

“JUMP OVER THAT PIT OF BARBS.”

On first glance, Loved does resemble, superficially at least, some of the red-capped plumber’s more famous adventures.  Although the ambient, melancholy music track and stark palette scream “art game,” you’ll spend much of the five to ten minutes it takes to “win” this “short story” jumping gaps and avoiding obstacles or enemies.  Where was that story again?

Ocias answers this question with his own statement of intent: “to build something confrontational, that would engage players to give thought to what they are doing both in and out of game.”  In other words, Loved treads a fine, ambiguous storyline that spurs heated debates as to whether it’s an allegory for abusive spousal, human-animal, or parent-child relationships, and about the extent to which a parent / guardian / government’s seemingly cruel, arbitrary commands ultimately benefit the child / ward / citizen.  Despite the ambiguity and sparseness of the apparent narrative, Loved still successfully engages the player as an interactive story by explicitly dealing with its own form and means of production.

“WILL I TEACH YOU HOW TO PLAY?  OR NOT?”

When seeking a better understanding of interactive storytelling, it’s useful to examine those interactive stories that are both overtly self-referential and overtly game-like.  Being games, they necessarily include a set of rules and goals.  When content mirrors form, and vice versa, we get a glimpse into both the rules that govern a game and the rules that govern the creation of a game.  And once we grasp these rules, we can begin to formulate a sort of player’s manual for the writing and reading of interactive storytelling, its inherent strengths and weaknesses, and insight into what interactive and static narrative–the ergodic and the nonergodic, if you prefer–offer one another.

Gaming is rife with extradiagetic or metatextual statements.  The classic and pervasive command “Press Start to Begin,” for example, makes no sense in the context of the game world (“Who is pressing start to begin what and why?”), and therefore exists only on the level of metafiction.  From control tutorials to Game Over screens and pleas to “Insert More Tokens,” this tendency arises as a matter of course from the interactive nature of the medium.  Gaming necessitates a constant re-education of the audience for two reasons: one, it is still a relatively new medium, reaching virgin audiences (no jokes, please) on a daily basis; and two, new games advertise themselves by flaunting innovations in methods of interaction.  Therefore, if an audience is to interact with the work in a meaningful way, electronic games must provide a set of instructions to facilitate unfamiliar interactions.

In your “typical” electronic games, the disembodied, authoritative voice speaking above the story quickly ceases to faze its audience, and thereby ceases to be meta at all. The “Press Start” screen can be likened the title page of a book; in both instances, the omnipresence of extradiagetic information does not detract in any important way from the story itself.

In a strange twist, interactive games like Loved that integrate things like “Press Start” seamlessly into the narrative on an intradiagetic level, i.e. within the world of the story, draw more attention to the story’s construction, and consequently to the narrative techniques that drew attention in the first place. An early example is Konami’s 1987 Metal Gear, an espionage game in which the protagonist has a specific radio frequency for saving his data and the game’s villain, appropriately named Big Boss, sends him messages imploring him to turn off his computer and walk away.(1)

The metafiction in Loved functions on a similar level.  When play begins, the unseen narrator asks “Will I teach you how to play?  Or not?”–a variation on a common method of toggling tutorial messages for new or veteran audiences.  The statement that follows, however, jettisons convention and cements the identity of the narrator / guide as a character within the story: “You do not deserve it” the faceless voice coldly informs us, proceeding somewhat paradoxically to issue a series of commands, some more helpful than others, which may be read as goals or missions or even a form of tutorial: “Jump over that pit of barbs,” “Touch the statue,” and later contrary or redundant commands such as “Do not move” or “Do not fail.”

“YOU ARE WRONG.”

Now, interactive stories achieve their interactivity by building feedback between the audience and the story: one could technically interact with, say, a painting in various ways, by touching it or reciting incantations before it, but it will never react meaningfully; there is no feedback.  In contrast, Loved provides feedback on two primary levels: there is the genre-standard navigation of basic hazards, failure in which will undo some of the player-character’s progress, and there is also the way the game-world reacts, textually and visually, to the player’s responses to the aforementioned commands.  Obedience adds detail and definition to the visuals: it is only after jumping over the barbs, for example, that they are recognizable as such.  Disobedience produces a visually confounding effect: fat, rainbow-colored pixels obscure elements of the interface, reminiscent of the “corrupted environments” often caused by programming glitches.

This corruption, more blatantly than the corrupt affection of the disembodied voice, forms the basis of Loved’s metafiction.  The interactive story deals implicitly and explicitly with the basic dilemma of the interactive storyteller: the balance between a guided narrative and the illusion of choice.  A well-formed story should take the audience by surprise, either emotionally or intellectually; otherwise, it devolves into an exercise in self-congratulation, at best.  However, interactive storytelling by its very nature must offer the player, and provide feedback for, some degree of control over narrative progression.  Hence the storyteller’s dilemma: a game in which the player exercises complete control over the narrative offers no opportunity for narrative surprise, but if the author exerts too obvious a pull, the player feels cheated and the interactive effect, a crucial element of the medium’s immersive and empathetic capabilities, is lost.

A more concrete example might be helpful here.  Let’s imagine for a moment that the story of Oedipus: The Game(2) hinges on the reveal that the grunt the player killed in the level 1 was actually the player-character’s father.  If the player doesn’t kill the grunt in level 1, the narrative ceases to function; it literally becomes corrupted.  However, unless the player willfully kills the grunt by choice, the impact of the latter revelation becomes softened to the point of impotence.  The author cannot simply wrest control away from the player and dispatch the grunt in a cinematic, or report his death second-hand.  A simple and common work-around would introduce an impediment, lifted by the grunt’s death, that literally arrests the narrative until the desired action has been performed: the unmanned chariot crashes through a roadblock, allowing poor Oedipus access to Thebes.  However, this trick has the danger of becoming obvious with repeated use, and the more blatant it appears the less the action feels like a true choice.  This inherent dissatisfaction drives the player to “trick” the system, to find that marginal, glitch-inducing alternative route to Thebes.  This is known as sequence breaking.

Loved plays with this concept of pushing at the edges of a structured narrative.  When the player follows the arbitrary script set by the disembodied author / narrator / guide / voice, he or she is rewarded with a defined, clearly delineated game-world: by playing the story the way the author intended, the world–and the narrative that unfolds within it, for story and setting are never far removed in electronic games–take on some degree of depth.  The temptation always exists, however, to do things differently: when the voice commands “Travel the lower path,” and yet a higher one devoid of obstacles is so clearly visible, it betrays the arbitrariness of the player-character’s proscribed actions.  Why must we take the lower path?  Because the obstacles within it provide the conflict that shapes the story.

In other words, Loved illustrates that place where an author’s authority becomes authoritarian.  When the voice commands “Throw yourself into the barbs,” we do so because the story demands a sacrifice, the sacrifice of choice and freedom for the glory of a meaningful narrative.  When the game denies our claims of manhood, and instead insists that “You are a girl,” or vice versa if we claim femininity, we acquiesce because this is, after all, the story of a girl, isn’t it?  When our manhood–or womanhood–is later restored, we feel victorious, forgetting that the same voice now rewarding once denied.  Our ennoblement can only take place after we’ve been degraded, and both moves are equally calculated to serve the caprices of the narrative.

“YOU WILL FAIL.”

Things only begin to fall apart when the player takes the high road rather than the low.  Although providing the illusion of a fully realized narrative space, Loved, like all narrative, is only as wide as it has been written.  Push beyond the pixel-thin borders at your peril: there you will find naught but chaos and madness.

And yet it chafes, this higher road denied us.  Why?  Nobody questioned Scout’s double-X chromosomes when Harper Lee told us it was so.  Nobody looked for a workaround to Oedipus’s inevitable self-blinding.  There is an authorial power that we passively accept in static storytelling: the construction of paragraphs or the framing of shots are much more constrictive than the arbitrary edges of an interactive narrative, the higher path left totally occluded from view.  Sequence breaking only exists in literature insofar as one could, conceivably, skip to the last chapter to find out whodunit.

Why should this be so?  As readers, shouldn’t we have the right, the desire to re-cast Scout as boy rather than tom-boy, and explore the narrative from those darkened, corrupted corridors?  As writers, shouldn’t we remain open to the possibility that some may travel avenues in our narrative that we never realized were there?  What could be more exciting, more terrifying and exhilarating, than a space within a narrative where even the author daren’t venture?

In the spirit of Loved’s abrupt, ambiguous ending, I conclude less with a solid declaration than with an open-ended question, or a rallying-cry for writers and readers: Where do the edges of our fictions lie, and who among us can claim to have braved the frontiers beyond?

(1) The Metal Gear series has since become famous, or infamous, for this particular style of breaking the fourth wall.  A non-exhaustive list can be found at Metal Gear Wiki.
(2) Although this example was intended somewhat farcically, it should be noted that a few attempts have been made to turn Sophocles’s play into a game, the most successful of these being Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Labs’ Seer.

by Byron Alexander Campbell
a Black Clock Editorial Assistant preoccupied by dreams and theories of interactivity

Hey, this cookie is a book!

As readers, writers, and literature lovers, we have all had our lit-geek moments, whether it’s naming our dog after the protagonist in our favorite book or laughing at an obscure authorial reference in a movie. Some of the most rewarding moments, however, occur when we stumble across literature in decidedly non-literary places. The following is a random, by no means definitive, list of examples.

1) As I Lay Dying
This one’s a freebie. Yep, it’s a band. And a William Faulkner novel.

2) Myths of the Near Future
It’s a short story collection by J.G. Ballard, but it’s also the debut album name of the indie British band, Klaxons, as listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Bonus points: Track 1 of the album, “Atlantis to Interzone,” refers to both Atlantis, the mythical lost city, and Interzone, a short story collection by William S. Burroughs, while Track 7, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is named after Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel of the same name.

3) Lorna Doone
 An amazingly tasty, buttery shortbread cookie by Nabisco. Also a 1869 novel by Richard Doddridge Blackmore. The book’s full title is Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. Who would have known?

4) Taylor Swift’s Love Story
Couldn’t resist this one. Sure, the whole song draws unabashed comparisons to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but did anyone else notice the subtle, one-time reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter? “Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter/And my daddy said stay away from Juliet”… Sorry for getting it stuck in your head.

5) The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus
The aforementioned walrus in this brilliant, famous, clearly acid-inspired song is a reference to the walrus in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There? Apparently, John Lennon didn’t realize that the walrus was a bad guy at the time, and he thought to himself, “Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said ‘I am the carpenter.’” Beatles fans around the world thank Lennon for his mistake.

6) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
While we’re on the subject of Lewis Carroll, it seems fitting to mention that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have been influential enough to warrant a Wikipedia page entitled Works based on Alice in Wonderland. From a neurological condition called “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” to Salvador Dalí’s illustrations based on Alice in Wonderland to Gwen Stefani’s Alice-inspired video for “What You Waiting For?” the unexpected references are endless.

Lit-geek-out and share your literary references in non-literary places with us and the world by leaving a comment or tweeting @blackclockmag.

by Chrysanthe Tan
a singer-songwriter, actor, violinist, poet, Pisces, and Star Wars enthusiast

frieze Magazine’s “Ideal Syllabus” Series

On the prowl for new reads, I discovered a gold mine of literary insight in an unlikely place—in an art magazine. To be fair, frieze Magazine is known to be on the cutting edge of arts and culture, and I often look their way for some of the most provoking and relevant writing being published in contemporary periodicals, critical or not, “art-genre” or not. Their “Ideal Syllabus” series is, in their words, an ongoing series that “asks an artist, curator or writer to list the books that have influenced them.” Contributors include writer and academic Maria Fusco, visual artist Carol Bove, and painter Monika Baer, to name a few. Though at first expecting to see manifestos, philosophy, or other canonized essays (which indeed populate several if not many of the subjects’ lists), I perked up when I came to Tom McCarthy’s list of books—a bounty of fiction.

McCarthy, whose artistic pursuits include the spearheading of an avant-garde organization and a novel (the highly touted Remainder) and a critical study of the work of Hergé, shows a compelling appreciation for both narrative classicism and innovation, with his colorful—dare I say good humored?—sequencing of titles. Praise for Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is sandwiched in between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The Adventures of Tintin made the list, as did Pynchon’s chef d’oeuvre. He hails The Sound and the Fury as the “single best novel ever written.” And although I don’t share McCarthy’s enthusiasm for all of his picks, I was absolutely inspired to investigate those that were foreign to me⎯most notably, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur.

You can find the article series in print and online at www.frieze.com/magazine.

by Mallory Farrugia
a writer and freelance editor living in Venice, CA

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