David Millard

Back in the Spring, when all things seemed possible, Claus Atzenbeck, General Chair of ACM Hypertext, asked myself and my long term collaborator Charlie Hargood whether we could write a locative Hypertext for the conference. Nothing to big, something simple.

Filled with the breezy optimism of March we said yes.

The result is our second collaborative project, ‘The Dean of Liminal Studies’, a locative story set around the campus of Hof University. If you are in Hof (or if you know the secrets of StoryPlaces demo mode) you can read it here.

Liminal What?

We were inspired by conversations had during the development of StoryPlaces as to whether a locative story could be transposed to different locations. What would the choices be? Could the rules of thumb be respected? What would be the impact on the experience?

So we set out to create a story that could be moved to many places, and where the transposabilty was itself a theme, using the concept of liminal rifts, connections in space and time, that linked different aspect of the world. In our case ‘The Academy’ the epitomy of scholarship and study. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘tear down the wall’. In our story, if you squint just right, there is no wall.

The Academy. A manifestation of the ideal University, existing in trans-dimensional liminal space, and simultaneously connecting all campuses in all times. But in some places, the threads wear thin. How committed are we to scholarship, to study, to our fraternity – and what walls are we unwittingly building? The Dean of Liminal Studies is coming to inspect our campus and see how we measure up. But no-one knows what the Dean really wants…

The titular Dean is a transdimensional visitor, here to inspect the points of connection, and deliver whithering comment on the state of higher education and how far we have fallen from our ideals. Via three scenes (Fraternity, Scholarship, and Exam) the reader makes choices about their own relationship to the Academy. Choosing between the reality of supporting friends and students, and the more self-serving but grander dreams of pure research.

I have no idea why this theme appealed to us.

Once more unto the authoring problem

We wrote the story over two working days, and many scattered hours over the next few months – totaling fewer than 48 hours, meaning that we could submit to the 48 hour Hypertext panel in good faith.*

Although the Dean is published in StoryPlaces we wrote it using a range of systems: whiteboard sketches to capture the broad structure, Google docs to do the collaborative writing, and email exchanges of images coupled with liberal use of Google satellite maps in order to place the locations (with help from local hero Ben Deufel). Once the text was ready we built the structure in StoryPlaces, copied the content across, set up the rules, conditions, and locations, tested it (virtually and in Hof) and finally published it as a public story on the Southampton server.

Again, I was struck by how each individual hypertext seems to require its own authoring tool. I’ve written about this in the past in terms of ‘Uncommon patterns’, structural patterns that are unique to one particular story that nontheless occur repeatedly within that story. The Dean is slightly different, here we have many versions of the same node (6 for each scene, plus 12 more for the two choices), changing in two narrative dimensions: the act of the story (1/2/3), and the history of player choices that move them between the real world and a more fantastical place (academy/neutrality/reality). Keeping track of these content changes was a big challenge, and something that a bespoke editor would have helped with greatly (perhaps showing the equivalent text in both directions of both axes, and tracking edits of common passages).

Dynamic embedded content would have helped, but the changes are spread thinly throughout each lexia.

For example, from academy:

A young man in a sharkskin waistcoat jostles me, and I notice for the first time that some of the people have banners. CND signs are scrawled on at least half of them. There’s a placard over to my right held by a man in bell bottomed trousers and a tight leather jacket, I thought I was the only one round here who wore bell-bottoms. The crowd is growing. ‘This is one of the places isn’t it?’ I can’t help my excitement, ‘These aren’t my students.’ Somehow I know that we are looking at this place as it was, those decades ago.

‘Perhaps we ought to move on,’ I have to shout to the Dean now, ‘I’m one of the Health and Safety Officers back in my own Faculty  and I doubt very much if these people have permission to be here.’

To neutrality:

A young man jostles me, and I notice for the first time that some of the people have banners. There’s a placard over to my right. Behind me someone blasts an airhorn. This crowd is growing.

‘Perhaps we ought to move on,’ I have to shout to the Dean now, ‘I can’t imagine that Health and Safety will be to pleased about this. I’m not sure these people have permission to be here.’

To reality:

I am about to reply that academic freedoms only go so far, but a young man jostles me, and I notice that the crowd is getting restless. Some of the people have lifted banners. There’s a placard over to my right. Behind me someone blasts an airhorn.

‘Perhaps we ought to move on,’ I have to shout to the Dean now, ‘I’m one of the Health and Safety Officers back in my own Faculty  and I doubt very much if these people have permission to be here.’ 

Otherwise the tools held up well, and I was reminded to be grateful to the development team in Southampton that built something so solid.

I’m pretty sure it’s not books

Trying out the experience in Hof was fun, although writing a more generic locative story has some disadvantages, I missed some of the flourishes that link the storyworld to the real surroundings: the specific colours, vegetation, references to the line of sight. But in other ways the story created serendipitous moments, and I laughed out loud at one passage encountered, by chance, next to a field of muckspreading:

‘I smell books. Do you smell books.’ The Dean is at it again. He is the plump bloodhound tracking a musty deer, and I am the new hunter blundering along behind. 

Tentatively I sniff the air. ‘I can smell something,’ I say, wrinkling my nose. ‘But I don’t think it’s books.’

This was lucky happenstance, but when writing for generic locations I can imagine it’s possible to leave gaps for this to happen. Only a few need to land to make the experience special.

Getting the mapping right was challenging, we had to drop some of the thematic connections in order to get the navigational paths to work, but at least we knew to do that much – the Dean confirms that in locative storytelling the physical movement of the reader is everything. Abandon all else before you abandon that.

Where else?

I am hoping to do a mapping of the Dean to Highfield campus in Southampton, so that colleagues and students here can give it a go. And I might take the opportunity to do a tiny bit of editing along the way!

Thanks to everyone who helped make it work, from Claus and his team in Hof, to those friends and colleagues from the electronic literature world who are so welcoming to a couple of liminal computer science academics.

* By the way, the panel was good fun, and I hope not to indulgent. Our fellow panelest, John McDaid, was very kind about our efforts and it was a good opportunity to share the message to others that you too can write Hypertext. Not necessarily good Hypertext in our case, but that is hardly the point.