Babyface Dev Diary #2 – Choices

My last development diary entry looked at the origins of Babyface, my submission to the 2020 Interactive Fiction competition (IFComp). This dev diary entry looks at one of the first things reviewers say about Babyface: that it’s mostly linear. Usually this comes as a simple description of the game’s format, rather than a criticism. Because I did expect people to criticize the game for having such a linear-driven narrative. Babyface lacks some of the hallmarks of interactive fiction. There are no puzzles you can solve. And there are no choices that change the outcome of the game. This lack of choices is absolutely deliberate. So now I want to talk about my approach to the question of agency and choice (or lack thereof) in Babyface.

Babyface is categorized as “choice-based” on the IFComp list of entries. But I only selected “choice-based” as the category because Babyface clearly doesn’t fit the other available category, parser-based. Both categories carry with them a set of associations:

  • Parser-based games generally revolve around puzzles and occasionally riddles.
  • Choice-based games generally involve, well, choices, and ideally choices that have some sort of meaningful impact on the game.

If there had been a “hypertext” category, that’s what I would have selected for Babyface. I like the hypertext designation because it retains some of the expectations of the choice-based formats (you’re clicking on links rather than typing commands into a parser) but it shifts the focus away from the actual choices. “Hypertext” opens the door for thinking about links as something other than choices. In Babyface you can probably see this most clearly in the late Thursday night / early Friday morning sequence, when you find yourself back at the Babyface House. You find the same link multiple times in a row, and each time you select it the link remains the same, while the text slowly expands:

An animated GIF showing repeated clicks on the phrase "I find myself" in the game Babyface.

You could think of this as a kind of stretchtext. But rather than expanding the narrative by filling in gaps (say, like the stretchtext in Pry), it conveys a paradoxical sense of standing still while nonetheless moving forward.

If I were to drag in narrative theory (yes, I’m going to drag in narrative theory), I think about how Marie-Laure Ryan places interactivity in digital games into two distinct categories. There’s interactivity that corresponds to the player’s perspective: are they embedded in the game as a participant in the story (internal interactivity), or are they looking down from an omniscient godlike perch (external interactivity). And there’s interactivity that corresponds to the kind of actions available to the player, what Ryan calls exploratory versus ontological interactivity. Does the player probe an existing world or set of choices (exploratory interactivity), or does the player have the power to change the game world itself, as in Minecraft (ontological interactivity). I picture these kinds of interactivity like this, along two axes:


            Exploratory
		        |
		        |
		        |
		        |
Internal -------+------ External
		        |
		        |
		        |
		        |
            Ontological

A game like The Sims or Civ fits in the external-ontological quadrant. You might consider a first-person shooter to be internal-ontological, depending on how much you think killing NPCs changes the game world might. Babyface clearly fits within the internal-exploratory quadrant. You play as a character, about whom you can glean some details and personal history as the game progresses. That’s internal interactivity. And you can only move about in a world I have strictly delineated. That’s exploratory interactivity. There’s nothing you can do in the game world to change it.

The exploratory nature of the game is heightened by the occasional loop with in-game documents, like the old Polaroid photographs. When the narrator’s father hands her a set of four photos, you can click each multiple times, and each time reveals a different description. In this way I’m trying to convey a sense of discovery about the history of Babyface, one piece of evidence at a time. I programmed that sequence so that it always moves on to the next narrative beat before the narrator’s had a chance to see every description of the photographs. No matter what order you click the photos, there will always be one description you don’t get a chance to see. My hope is that that last piece of evidence becomes an Easter Egg that draws players with a completionist mindset to go through the game again.

So internal-exploratory interactivity. But there’s another kind of interaction with Babyface (ideally, though this won’t be true for all players) that the four quadrants of interactivity doesn’t capture. I call this epistemological interactivity. Epistemological, that’s a mouthful. What I mean by epistemological is the nature of knowledge and knowing in the game. I picture epistemology as a Z axis that juts forward and backward from my graph above, intersecting with the other two axes.

So there’s internal-ontological-epistemological interactivity. That’s solving puzzles in the game that would have an impact on the game world. Of which in Babyface there are none. Then there’s internal-exploratory-epistemological (IEE) interactions, which are mysteries in the game that you can try to figure out, but which won’t impact the game world itself. You could argue that learning how to work the interface is an internal-exploratory-epistemological puzzle. For example, figuring out that at certain points the narrative will only proceed after you click on the photographs several times each. Piecing together details of the narrator’s life is another IEE mystery, as is the story of her mother and Babyface.

But, while there are plenty of clues about the nature of the relationship between the narrator’s mother and Babyface, there’s nothing in the game to definitively explain it. At the heart of Babyface are several kernels of sheer irrationality. To reach any kind of narrative closure about the game, you have to reach beyond the game. That’s external-exploratory-epistemological interactivity. A little bit of research, a little bit of Googling, and some of the odd pieces of Babyface hopefully begin to—well, if not make sense, then at least cohere. One of my early taglines for the game hinted at this nondiegetic epistemological interactivity: “A Southern Gothic horror story, where the only puzzles are metaphysical.” What I meant was, the puzzles the game poses spill beyond the borders of the game.

Another way I conceived of Babyface early on was as a Southern Gothic creepypasta story. I stopped referring to the game as creepypasta, though, because that word (like parser-based or choice-based) carries associations I didn’t necessarily want attached to Babyface. Nevertheless, the game does share a family resemblance to creepypasta. As I see it, two key features of creepypasta (as a genre of fiction, not as a website or Internet phenomenon) are (1) irrationality disrupts the every day world; and (2) there’s a blurring between the inside and outside of the story, raising the specter that the story really happened. Both features operate within the realm of epistemology: What really happened? How do we know? Could it have really happened? Could it happen again?

Those epistemological questions are what I hope the close reader of Babyface walks away with, rattling in their heads. It’s an engagement with the story—interactivity—that happens outside the story itself. For the story I wanted to tell—which is ultimately a story about the year 2020 and the decades leading up to it—this kind of epistemological agency mattered more to me than player agency.

Babyface Dev Diary – Origins

Cover art of the game Babyface, featuring the title and a large gasmask
Babyface coverart

So, Babyface is a thing I made. It’s a creepypasta-style Southern Gothic horror story. I’ve entered the game into the 26th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp for short). You can play Babyface right now! I’ve followed IFComp for years—since at least 2007—but this is the first time I’ve made anything for the competition. Not that I haven’t wanted to, but finally everything lined up: my idea, the time to write it, the skills to do it, and finally the deliberate shift in my professional life from conventional scholarship to creative coding.

IFComp authors often share a “developer’s diary” that details their creative and coding process. I don’t really consider myself a developer. I’m more of a “I make weird things for the internet” person. But still, I thought I’d give this dev diary thing a try. If nothing else, than to debrief myself about the design process. I’ve blurred the text of any spoilers—just hover or tap on the blurred text to read it.

Babyface wasn’t supposed to be my game for IFComp. I was working on another game, a much larger game, a counterfactual history of eugenics in America. The game is basically asking what if CRISPR-like gene editing technology had been invented in the 1920s, the height of the eugenics movement. The game is heavily researched and includes meaningful choices (unlike Babyface, which is more or less on rails). But! But! But—I ended up talking about the game in conference talks and symposiums and showing it to enough people that it felt like it would be disqualified for IFComp, which has a strict rule that the competition must be the public debut of the game. So I released that game (or rather, the first “chapter” of it) back in May as You Gen #9. Play it, please!

Anyway, I was left without a game, which was fine. But then I had a horrific nightmare in May, and I couldn’t get one image out of my head. It literally haunted me. And then in July Stacey Mason on Twitter announced a fortnightly interactive fiction game jam. So I started playing around with my nightmare, trying to give it context and a narrative frame. Pretty quickly I realized the game was going to be too ambitious (LOL, it’s really quite a modest game, but it felt ambitious to me) to finish in two weeks for a game jam. So I continued working on the game all through August and September. On one hand three months to put together a polished game is not a lot of time. On the other hand, I had been working in Twine almost every day for the past year, and the story is modest (my best estimate is around 16,000 words, though it’s tough to measure word counts in a game with dynamic text). Plus there’s not a lot of state logic to keep track off. No complicated inventory systems, no clever NPCs. Just the narrator, a few interactions, and her memories.

I’ll talk more about specific design choices in a future post, but for now I wanted to say a few words about the setting. Like most Gothic fiction, the setting itself is a character in the game.

I was working with a concrete geography in Babyface. The old brick house is based on a real house in my small North Carolina college town. I could walk there right now in about 20 minutes, all on pleasant neighborhood streets. Less than five minutes by car. A recluse lived there, and the house, as in the game, is down the street from the local elementary school. The recluse died a few years ago, and it was some time before anybody even knew. Somebody eventually bought the property, tore down the old brick house, and put up a gaudy McMansion.

One detail I had wanted to include in the game but decided against, because it would have seemed too unbelievable: between the old house and the elementary school there’s a cemetery. I had considered incorporating the cemetery into the story as the narrator runs away from the house, but it just seemed too forced. One of those instances where real life out-narrativizes fiction, and in order to make the fiction more palatable, you have to dial back the realism.

The Southern backdrop is understated, though I dropped in enough clues that some readers might realize the centrality of the South in the game. More about those later…

An End of Tarred Twine, a Monstrous Moby-Dick Hypertext

In my previous post I listed all the digital creative/critical works I’ve released in the past 12 months. (Whew, it was a lot, in part because I had the privilege to be on sabbatical from teaching in the fall, my first sabbatical since 2006. I made the most of it.)

Now, I want to provide a long overdue introduction to each of my newest works, one post at a time. Let’s start with An End of Tarred Twine, a procedurally-generated hypertext version of Moby-Dick. I made An End of Tarred Twine for NaNoGenMo 2019 (National Novel Generation Month), in which the goal is to write code that writes a 50,000 word novel. Conceived by Darius Kazemi in 2013, NaNoGenMo runs every November, parallel to National Novel Writing Month. I’ve always wanted to participate in NaNoGenMo, but the timing was never good. It falls right during the crunch period of the fall semester. But, hey, I wasn’t teaching last fall, so I could hunker down and finally try something.

An End of Tarred Twine is what I came up with. The title is a line from Moby-Dick, where Captain Bildad, one of the Quaker owners of the Pequod is fastidiously preparing the ship for its departure from Nantucket. As sailmakers mend a top-sail, Bildad gathers up small swatches of sailcloth and bits of tarred twine on the deck that “otherwise might have been wasted.” That Captain Bildad saves even the smallest scrap of waste speaks to his austere—one might say cheap—nature. The line is also one of the few references to twine in the novel. This was important to me because An End of Tarred Twine is made in Twine, an open source platform for writing interactive, nonlinear hypertext narratives.

An End of Tarred Twine is like the white whale itself—at once monstrous and elusive. And that’s because all the links and paths are randomly generated. You start off on the well-known first paragraph of Moby-Dick—Call me Ishmael & etc.—but random links in that passage lead to random passages, which lead to other random passages. Very quickly, you’re lost, reading Moby-Dick one passage at a time, out of order, with no map to guide you. Or as Ishmael says about the birthplace of Queequeg, the location “is not down in any map; true places never are.”

A Monstrous Hypertext

Here, this GIF shows you what I mean. It starts with the start of Moby Dick but quickly jumps into uncharted waters.

An End of Tarred Twine
Clicking through the opening sequence of An End of Tarred Twine

This traversal starts off in chapter 1, jumps to chapter 24, then on to chapter 105, and so on. One paragraph at a time, in random order, with no logic behind the links that move from passage to passage. As a reading experience, it’s more conceptual than practical, akin to the Modernist-inflected hypertext novels of the 1980s. As a technical experiment, I personally think there’s some interesting stuff going on.

Look at these stats. An End of Tarred Twine has:

  • 250,051 words (the same as Moby Dick, minus the Etymology and Extracts that precede the body of the novel)
  • 2,463 passages (or what old school hypertext theorists would call lexias)
  • 6,476 links between the passages
  • 2.63 average links on any single passage

Another visual might help you appreciate the complexity of the work. One of the cool features of the official Twine app (i.e. where you write and code your interactive narrative) is that Twine maps each passage on a blueprint-like grid. For the typical Twine project, this narrative map offers a quick overview of the narrative structure of your story. For example, here’s what Masks, one of my other recent projects, looks like on the backend in Twine:

A map of the game Masks in Twine
A map of Masks in Twine

Each black line and arrow represents a link from one passage to the next. Now look at what An End of Tarred Twine looks like on the backend in Twine:

EKtmWCDWsAEsMH2
An End of Tarred Twine in Twine

The first passage (labeled 0) is the title screen, with the word “Loomings” linking to the second passage (1). You can see that passage then has outbound links as well as some inbound links. Here’s another view, deeper into the hypertext:

EKtmWCEWoAArtdo
Lost in the map of An End of Tarred Twine in Twine

There are so many links between passages by this point that the link lines become a dense forest of scribbles. You can almost image those lines as a detail taken from Rockwell Kent’s stunning illustration of Moby Dick breaching the ocean in his 1930 edition of Moby-Dick.

A whale breaching the ocean, illustration by Rockwell Kent

Workflow

Now, how did I create this unnavigable monstrosity? The point of NaNoGenMo is that you write the code that writes the novel. That’s really the only criteria. The novel itself doesn’t have to be good (it won’t be) or even readable (it won’t be).

Here’s how I made a several-thousand passage Twine with many more thousands of random connections between those passages:

  1. First, I downloaded a public domain plain text version of Moby-Dick from the Gutenberg Archive. I chopped off all the boilerplate info and also deleted the Etymology and Extracts at the beginning of the novel, because I wanted readers to dive right in with the famous opening line.
  2. Now, the Twine app itself doesn’t foster the editing of huge texts like Moby-Dick. And it doesn’t allow programmatic intervention—say, selecting random words, turning them into links, and routing them to random passages. But Twine is really just a graphical interface and compiler for a markup language called Twee. The fundamental elements of Twee are simple. Surround a word with double brackets, and the word turns into a link. For example, in Twee, [[this phrase]] would turn into a link, leading to a passage called “this phrase.” Or here, [[this phrase->new passage]] will have the text “this phrase” link to a new passage, clumsily called “new passage.” There are other compilers for Twee aside from the official Twine application. I use one called Tweego by Thomas Michael Edwards. With Tweego, you can write your Twee code in any text editor, and Tweego will convert it a playable HTML file. This means that you can take any text file, have a computer program algorithmically alter it with Twee markup, and generate a finished Twine project. So that’s what I did.
  3. I wrote this Python program. It does a number of things, which follow.
  4. First, it breaks Melville’s 1851 masterpiece into 2,463 individual Twine passages—basically every paragraph became its own standalone passage.
  5. The program also gives each passage a title using the simplest method I could think of: the first passage is 0, the next is titled 1, the third is 2, and so on. That’s why there are numbers in each passage block in the screenshots above.
  6. Next, the program uses the SpaCy natural language processing module to identify several named entities (i.e. proper nouns) and verbs in each passage.
  7. Finally, the program links those nouns and verbs to one of the other over 2,463 passages by surrounding them with double brackets. This technique makes it a simple matter to direct links to a random passage. You just have Python pick a random number between 1 and 2,462 and direct the link there. Note that I excluded 0 (the title passage) from the random number generation, because that would have created an endless loop. The title passage only appears once, at the start.
  8. After the Python has done all the work, I use Tweego on the command line to compile the actual Twine HTML file.

Sample Twee

You can check out the Python program that does the heavy-lifting on Github. But I thought people might also want to see what the Twee code looks like. It’s so simple. Here’s the first main passage. The double colons signify the passage title. So this passage is “1.” Then whenever you see double brackets, that’s a link to a different passage, which is also a number. For example, the name “Ishmael” becomes a link to passage #1626.

:: 1
Call me [[Ishmael->1626]]. [[Some years ago->2297]]--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly [[November->526]] in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

The links in this sample Twee code are different from the version of An End of Tarred Twine that I posted for NaNoGenMo and published on Itch. Because every time I run the Python script it creates an entirely new hypertext, with new links and paths through it. This what tickles me most about the project: anyone can take the source text and my Python program and generate their own version of An End of Tarred Twine. It reminds me of Aaron Reed’s recent novel Subcutanean, in which every printed version is different, algorithmically altered so that words, phrases, even entire scenes vary from one copy to the next—yet each version tells the fundamentally same story. In her review of Subcutanean, Emily Short suggests that the multitudinous machined variations fit the theme of the novel, of “the unknowable proliferation of motives and outcomes.”

Similarly, with An End of Tarred Twine we could have thousands of versions of the story, none alike. Just fork my code and make your own. A thousand different paths through Moby-Dick, none of them really Moby-Dick, but all of them monstrously “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly”—like the vengeful malice that drives Ahab himself to his ruin, dragging his beleaguered crew down with him.

Play This Stuff I Made

An endless list of dreams crushed by the coronavirus
The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams (April 2020)

When you’re a college professor, you follow a different calendar from the rest of the grown-up world. There’s school and there’s summer, and that’s how you plot your time. Of course, a global pandemic wreaks havoc on this calendar. But usually, somewhere about now I stop thinking about the previous academic year and start looking ahead to the next one. My New Year begins on July 1, not January 1.

Since I’m closing the books on the 2019-2020 school year, I wanted to remind myself of all the projects I put out into the world during this time. Here in one place are all the critical-creative digital works I released in the past 12 months. I’ll write more about many of these projects later, so right now a blurb for each will have to suffice. Hopefully that’s enough to pique your interest…

  • Ring™ Log (October 2019) – imagines what a Ring “smart” doorbell cam might see on a Halloween night
  • An End of Tarred Twine (November 2019) – a randomly generated hypertext version of Moby Dick in Twine, with 2,463 pages and 6,476 links, and utterly impossible to make sense of
  • Masks (December 2019) – a short hypertext narrative inspired by the Hong Kong protests
  • @BioDiversityPix (February 2020) – A bot that tweets random illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams (April 2020) – An infinite list of hopes, dreams, and aspirations crushed by the coronavirus
  • Ring Pandemic Log (April 2020) – Using the same concept of Ring™ Log, this version imagines what a Ring camera might see during an early day of the coronavirus quarantine
  • You Gen #9 (May 2020) – the first chapter of a longer counterfactual interactive narrative about eugenics and gene-editing technology, set in the 1920s
  • Content Moderator Sim (June 2020) – A workplace horror game that puts you in the role of a subcontractor whose job is to keep your social media platform safe and respectable.

In general I was working in one of two modes for each project: procedural generation or interactive fiction. The former hopes to surprise readers with serendipitous juxtapositions and combinations, the latter hopes to entice readers with narrative impact. Whether I succeed at either is a question I’ll leave to others.