Part 1: The Introduction

So, this is my manifesto for ENGL344, Intro to Digital Writing in the Genres. And specifically, this is the introduction to my manifesto. I have to admit, even after reading through some of the other manifestos my classmates have written, I’m still not completely sure how to approach this. I’ve never really been very good at really bold statements – I think Bridget’s Manifesto is great, but I don’t think I could write something quite like it, even though I know that’s the purpose of things here. To be honest, part of my struggle with all of this might have to do with the fact that I’ve never thought of writing as an art, even though I know it is. But there are things I associate with art and the mindset of art that I’ve always felt were fairly separate from writing. I’ve heard of people refer to writing as more of a craft, and somehow that makes sense to me. Granted, thinking about it now, I’m not completely sure how I would define the difference between a craft and art, but I think it does seem to factor into why I don’t think of writing as art.

So as far as aims for this course go, I would say a big one would in fact be to explore the notion of writing as an art, as opposed to writing as a craft. I think this should actually work, as I can say that some of the ideas we’ll be approaching here with digital writing do seem to have more in common with art than pure writing. One of my favorite websites is jodi.org, which has been around for a while, but I’ve always been inspired by its approach to digital art and experimenting with text, hypertext, images and web effects. It’s probably one of the first things I ever encountered that made me think about the possibilities of the web and hypertext as art, as opposed to just a means to display information. More recently, blueful.com has also made me really think about the possibilities of digital writing – blueful does some brilliant things by stretching out its story across a variety of Web 2.0 websites (so you go from a MySpace profile page with the text interspered into a profile, to a Youtube video that uses annotations for the text, to a Google Docs spreadsheet with more text spread out through the cells. It’s already getting some intersting reaction - this review covers some of the positives and negatives.  Even though I’d feel like I’d be ripping Aaron Reed off to some degree, I really do like this approach to using unusual mediums to place the text, and I’d love to experiment with it a bit.

Aside from that, interaction fiction has to be one of my greatest inspirations. Some of my earliest memories with the computer were playing old Infocom text adventure games, specifically Zork. Back then, of course, I didn’t really distinguish between the idea of “interactive fiction” and any other games. All I knew back then is that even though Zork was “text only”, I found it to provide a much richer experience than one could get on, say, an Atari 2600. Part of that of course is the Atari’s primitive graphics and simple gameplay, but I think there’s clearly more to it than that. Zork worked because it depended solely on text and its ability to trigger your imagination to fill in the details. Frankly, to this day, as advanced as computer games have become, I’m still hard pressed to think of a game that has engaged me like those old text adventures.

I’ve always wanted to explore interaction fiction, and now it is more accessible than ever – especially thanks to the relase of Inform 7, which makes it possible to write works of interactive fiction naturally, without having to actually write the underlying programming code. So I think that will be one of the biggest areas I focus on in exploring the possibilities of digital writing. I actually had forgotten about IF for a while, but recently a friend pointed me to an amazing work called Violet, which has really inspired me to try my hand at it finally. I highly recommend checking it out – you can actually play it online here without having to download a separate interactive fiction interpreter.

Finally, I aim to be able to come out of this class with a coherent and direct response to the question of “What is digital writing?” – One of the things I’ve found so far is that when I tell people what classes I’m taking this semester, invariably people will ask “What is digital writing?”. It should be a simple question to answer, but I generally find myself responding with something along the lines of “Well, umm, you know….. like, writing for the Internet, writing for online. It’s like normal writing but with hypertext links to other pages or information, stuff you couldn’t do on the printed page. And, uhh, games, that kind of thing.” But this really isn’t satisfactory, and of course it only touches the surface of what digital writing is. Yet I find myself having trouble articulating what that is. One of my other big goals will be to clearly explain what digital writing is.

Part 2: Criteria For My Art

1. Whatever I create for this class has to stretch the bounds of what is possible with digital writing. It isn’t enough to just write something and stick in some links and other media and call it a day. Ideally what I put together for this class should be something that offers the reader a new experience, and allows them to look at something in a new way. jodi.org and blueful.com are good examples of what I am inspired by and would be striving for.
2. As a rule, I agree with the notion that nothing I do here should be something that could be duplicated easily in print. It wouldn’t be enough to write a linear fiction narrative and make it “interactive” by just having someone go from room to room or scene to scene. Or if it will be fairly linear (i.e. if I do something along the lines of blueful), it at least has to be an incredibly novel and interesting experience.
3. As another guiding principle, I will stretch myself by learning new techniques. Aside from learning how to write interactive fiction, I’ll make a rule for myself to try as much as possible to utilize technologies I’ve rarely worked with before, like Photoshop and Flash, and integrate them into my toolkit.
4. I also agree that multi-linearity is something I should strive for. I’ve always been intrigued by the initial ideas behind hypertext (especially the notion that links should be two-way, so that everything that links to something would have links back to what linked to it – of course, that isn’t always feasible, but it is an interesting goal).
5. Condemnations? That’s a tough one – I’m hard pressed to condemn anyone or anything, frankly, when it comes to art. I guess I can certainly condemn pretentiousness – I think that could be one of the hardest things to avoid. I’ve already seen how blueful has been criticized on those grounds, although to some degree most of that criticism is aimed at the writing itself, not the vehicle for telling the story (which most people seem to universally agree is pretty brilliant). But I think I would want to avoid something where the mechanism itself was the only thing of value – I do feel pretty strongly that the mechanism or storytelling vehicle can add a certain sense of “newness” to a work, but the underlying work itself should also be enjoyable.

Part 3: Concluding Statement

Going back to my introduction, I’d have a hard time making a bold statement like claiming that the world would be a better place thanks to whatever I output in this class or based on whatever ideas I come up with. Certainly that would also be a great goal, but stating it outright is tough. I think at best, I would say that if at least one thing I create in this class is able to inspire someone else in the way that previous digital works like Zork, jodi.org and blueful inspired me, I would consider that to be a great realization of my goals. Considering that interactive fiction in particular is still very much a small niche (I read somewhere that interactive fiction is often compared to poetry, in that it is something that does not have a wide audience, but has a very devoted following among those who do care about it, and I think there’s something to be said for that), I think it would be great if anything I do here maybe makes someone else take a look at it as a genre and tries their hand at it as well.

So, in the end, I can only hope that I will learn some things about digital writing and interactive fiction that I didn’t know before, that I can finally create some digital writing that will be worthwhile and hopefully inspire others to do the same.