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I admit that the question with which I began--the question of whether forms of fiction making might be able to make use of the communicative features of the networked computer--remains open, but these reflections may at least have narrowed the field over which it can range. We can say this: there are two main shifts to which fiction (literary or otherwise) must adjust when it is communicated in a medium in which the recipient helps to assemble the system of inscriptions in topologically significant ways. First, it needs to recognize that the role of the reader familiar to us from print changes in the degree to which the links between textual elements remain semantically underdetermined. Second, fiction somehow needs to manage the fact that the user's navigational decisions can be driven by motives wholly divorced from the fictional world, provoking a crisis of fictionality. The fictionalization of reception is one way of addressing both shifts, for a fictionalized "interaction" would be severely limited by the boundaries of the fiction, thus rendering the fictional world a larger, more complex, and more interesting space to inhabit.1 If the examples for the sort of fictionalization of reception I have in mind (MUDs and MOOs, various web-based writing games) are any indication of things to come, then the forms of fiction making we can expect to find in the medium of the networked computer will have little in common with traditional notions of literature. The reason is quite simple: such games do not produce primarily readers but writers, and these writers do not write to be authors; what they put down is not meant to amuse or instruct other readers, rewarding them as readers, but meant rather to provoke them into becoming writers themselves (by contributing to the writing game, for instance). Because the reader accepts the asymmetry in literary communication with the expectation of being repaid (in pleasure, knowledge, moral instruction, cultural capital, and so on), criticism highlights those examples that excel at holding our attention through their skillful configuration of thematic and formal elements. But the prose generated in role-playing or adventure games is not meant to impress readers or to give rise to complex interpretive moves. To some extent this is true for literary hypertexts as well; they are far more interesting to produce than to read, regardless of the medium they appear in. Raymond Queneau's 1961 Cent mille milliards de poèmes , a mix-and-match book in which the user composes a sonnet by selecting one of ten choices provided for each line, yielding 100,000,000,000,000 possible poems, is an ingenious print hypertext that must have been hugely pleasurable to compose; it is far less pleasurable to read (and rightly so, for it quite obviously invites us to play with it rather than read it). The term reception that, faute de mieux , I have been using for the role of the user fails to credit the immense change verbal fiction making is likely to undergo in the medium of the networked computer; rather than being a spectator sport played by professionals, it will involve player-participants content to be amateurs. Chances are it will not yield great literature, but it will probably be a lot more fun. 1 These boundaries are not imposed from outside, by the author, or by some other agency but emerge as the edges of the fictional world that the reader constructs through textual clues. |
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