Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Now for something totally unrelated but still sorta kinda related...
Submitted by Lulu on 30 September 2006 - 1:08pm.
We've been talking a lot lately about the various issues that stem from reading hypertexts. All these discussions about reader participation and power dynamics in the hypertext world reminded me of something very random, but somehow related in a weird sort of way.
Does anyone remember these things? My mom got me one in sixth grade, and I was obsessed for several months afterwards. I would bring it with me to school and feed it, play games with it, clean up its trash--all so that one day it would grow up into the "ideal." Apparently, there's lots of different forms that each "pet" can ultimately grow into, depending on how well you take care of it. If you were a superstar owner, it would turn into a beautiful cat-like thing, but if you neglected it, it often turned into an ugly tadpole-like creature and "die" young. Basically our choices resulted in the final form.
Yeah, I know, this is really random, but I was thinking about forms of interactive digital media besides hypertext, and my mind landed upon these Tamagotchis. I felt like my experience with reading Joyce's "Afternoon" was, in a strange way, related to my experience of taking care of my Tamagotchi. I actually tried to read "Afternoon" twice, hoping to get a different ending the second time around, but as we all found out, due to the very format and nature of hyperfiction, it's pretty hard to retrace your steps or control where you ultimately end up. Similarly, with my Tamagotchi, I would attempt different caretaking methods: sometimes, I would be an excellent caretaker, while other times I'd purposely neglect the poor thing, just so I could reach a different ending each time. I think there was even a "surprise" creature, so you can imagine how hard I tried to mix up my caretaking methods each time I played.
I almost feel like the creators of virtual pets, at some point, thought along the same lines as hypertext authors. Wouldn't it be cool if readers/owners participated in the creation of texts/pets? What if participants could actively control the end result instead of following the author/creator? It's also pretty interesting that both products--hyperfiction and virtual pets--both died out pretty quickly. Except the virtual pet actually enjoyed a short period of faddish success, while I'm not sure if hyperfiction ever really took off.
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hypertext fiction, poetry, tamagotchis
Tamagotchies were an interesting interactive fiction in that they embodied a character, used something like a gesture of direct address, and most particularly because they happened in something like realtime. The kids who used them integrated them into their own daily schedule and their interaction with other kids.
Hypertext fictions of the Eastgate sort never had significant commercial success. But Eastgate's a publisher of experimental literature, and it has survived nearly into its second decade. That would be a grand success in any other context that I can think of.
I'm always a bit disconcerted to hear that hypertext has passed. The Eastgate people so adamantly insisted that only certain forms of linked text were properly "full" or "complete" hypertext, but Eastgate's not the whole story at all, just one little company with a big voice. Readers progressively rely more on electronic formats. The book has not ended or died but it has decentered further. In '94 I tried to find books on HTML -- that's hypertext markup language, BTW, Joyce & Landow aside -- and they barely exist. By '96, the same stores I'd looked in stacked the books shoulder-high in the aisles because they had no time to shelve them. Since then, one of those stores has closed down, and this summer I found that the other is having a clearance sale of all its books.