Moulthrop (2004) Pax, Writing and Change
From Inventiopedia
Moulthrop, Stuart (2007) Pax, Writing, and Change, in Harrigan, Pat and Wardrip-Fruin, Noah Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press.
In this paper, Moulthrop presents his work of hypertext fiction called Pax. Though whether it really should be called hypertext or something else is a good question:
Combining animations derived from rendered 3D graphics with written text, the project explores a space between hypertext on the one hand, and video games on the other. Its technical motivation came from a remark made in early 2001 by John Cayley, who noted that we play many things besides games, including musical instruments. What, he wondered, would textual instruments look like? One possible answer is Pax. (Section 3, paragraph 1).
Pax basically consists of a Flash graphic of a number of human figures that are rising, then falling across the screen. Clicking on the figures produces a series of text fragments on the side of the screen, which Moulthrop descripes as "a blog or wiki of the apocalypse", adding that "like the text of most blogs, the words produced by Pax are meant for momentary consumption" (section 4, paragraph1). This leads Moulthrop to ask the important question of whether the hypertext is in fact a sort of game.
To put this question plainly: if the text remains volatile or impermanent, why is there text in the first place? Joyce, John McDaid, and I once tried to distinguish our work by loudly repeating, this is not a game, but lately I have at least partly recanted. Many things are games, when you come down to it. So why not build an actual structure for play, following the main evolutionary line of motion graphics into some more familiar form of video interaction? (section 4, paragraph 2)
As I have argued elsewhere in more detail, segregating writing from game design could lead cybertext to a new "dissociation of sensibility," as the elders of our tribe once called it (Moulthrop 2005). It could encourage us to identify writing as the medium of reflection and argument, while graphical interaction becomes the exclusive domain of play. The outcome could be a significant restriction of horizons both for games and writing. (section 4, paragraph 3)
Moulthrop goes on to speak about
a more genuine revolution in writing: not the composition of text, but the writing-as-programming of systems that themselves compose text - in other words, not writing by itself, but the writing of artificial writers. To be sure, this ground was well prepared decades ago in projects like ELIZA and Racter, but these precedents make current work all the more significant, suggesting that they may bring new advances to a neglected evolutionary line. Given a few more rev cycles, the intersection of artificial writers, games, and feral hypertext might bring us to an interesting place indeed. (section 4, paragraph 5)
"the writing of artificial writers"... Moulthrop anticipates the obvious reaction to this: "For some, no doubt, these possibilities will look like nothing less than the ultimate collapse of structure, an end to the humanistic conversation, if not of legitimately human experience itself" (section 4, paragraph 7). And his goal is surely commendable: "...to build channels and flow lines between writing and the moving image, to maintain crossing points from new media to old, and to keep the word in play" (ibid.).
Even so, this idea makes me think of what someone once said (if anyone knows whom and where, tell me): That if computers truly could speak, that is, speak their own minds, there is no reason to think that we could understand them - or that what they would say would hold much relevance to us. After all, the experience of being a computer seems to be quite different from that of being a human. To the extent that we don't want to treat our computers as persons with their own identities and right to be heard, it seems more interesting to use them as tools to explore human expression. Instead of comping up with ever more sophisticated ways to integrate computer logic into literary texts - which seems to be the direction Moulthrop is pointing us in - shouldn't we rather focus on ways of using computers to increase the opportunities for humans to play with text?
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 00:22, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
