afternoon, a story is a poetic hypertext piece about disorientation and grief. It follows a recently separated father named Peter who, after passing a car accident on the way to a meeting with his boss, begins to wonder if his ex-wife and son may have been victims in the accident. Though Peter is too afraid to check initially, he can attempt to find the answer to his fears by consulting with other characters throughout the narrative, such as the headmistress of his son’s private school, the hospital, and his therapist; though these sources are largely unhelpful and inconclusive. The text generally comes to a close at seemingly random points or begins to repeat with no certain answer, as the path to definite conclusions is obscure (and indeed, none of the students in our play session happened upon it).
Our class discussion on afternoon, a story broached many topics, including agency, clarity, authorial intent, and the emotional experience of a non-linear interactive narrative. afternoon was the most puzzling of the three digital works we discussed, with no map and little navigation available for a player to situate themselves. This aimless feeling and lack of clear directive was something many classmates brought up, as some had even managed to miss the inciting incident of the plot (the car crash). Many felt that this confusion was a key aspect of the experience, in fact, separating it from other works like patchwork girl or genres like choose-your-own-adventure stories. There are many ways to interact with afternoon, such as clicking on specific words or answering yes and no, and these interactions all provoke a response—from guiding the player to different locations and characters, to altering scenes so that characters receive different information. Yet, despite afternoon being an interactive piece of media, and the player ostensibly being in control of the narrative’s direction, many felt distinctly out of control while experiencing the story.
Not knowing how to progress, where in the narrative you are, or what you are even hoping to accomplish makes for a disorienting and even daunting experience. Some classmates noted that reading afternoon felt like reading pages or chapters of a novel out of order. The general consensus, however, was that despite these feelings of lost agency and lack of clarity, the form actually served the intended affect. The process of reading afternoon fostered a fraught emotional state which mimicked the sense of grief and trauma Peter was enduring, encouraging the reader to empathize with his situation.
An aspect of the conversation I found particularly interesting, however, was after we had moved on to another piece of hypertext fiction, and some students remarked that they felt more agency after reading the text than during. While they felt lost and tentative at the time, it was afterwards when reviewing the information and attempting to establish motives and timelines that they felt a sense of control and comprehension over the narrative. This agrees with the conclusion we had reached earlier about the form generating a certain affective experience (with this posthumous gaining of agency reflecting the experience of unpacking and resolving trauma), but it also provokes interesting questions about the role of player perception in digital narratives.
In many digital narratives the player is expected to participate and make decisions about the course of the story, but I find that players often shape the narrative even beyond their capacity to interact with game systems, driven by both creativity and the human tendency to narrativize experiences. Take ELIZA, for example—the program only functions because we imagine a linear conversation taking place, while the computer only reads one line of text at a time and is unaware of any greater context. When I interacted with it, I imagined the character ELIZA becoming increasingly annoyed with me, or learning more about my situation, but neither of these cases were true—ELIZA only scanned the previous line, and offered a fitting response, no matter if it clashed with the preceding conversation. Still, I felt the urge to apply a logic to seemingly disparate events. I have had similar experiences in more open-ended games like The Sims, attempting to connect random happenstance into a coherent narrative about the family I’m playing with—ascribing intent to random actions and so forth.
To an extent, every piece of fiction is interactive. Even if we cannot directly influence the events of a film or novel, we still must decide how to engage with it—whether to believe the narrator or to accept the story’s premises, which characters we enjoy and if we approve of their actions, or even whether or not to continue reading or watching. This is why, for example, there exists the literary theory of death of the author (a theory which argues that a reader’s interpretation, rather than the authorial intent, is the best way to derive the meaning of a work). Heightened interactivity such as in the case of afternoon and similar works only brings these questions to the forefront of a literary piece, by more directly affording authorship to a reader. In afternoon, a reader takes on an almost curatorial role, unintentionally determining the order the text will be read (and implicitly altering the context of certain moments and scenes). I find these human tendencies to raise questions about the boundaries of interactive storytelling—when player interaction is a codified aspect of the object, how far does player interpretation go? How much of the narrative does the player ultimately create, direct, or influence?
By Nicole
Intermittent Mechanism 