IMMORTAL HAND,
IMMORTAL EYE
Devlog 2: I'll Take Hypermedia For 200
What is Immortal Hand, Immortal Eye?
It’s the thing this part of the website is about. It’s the project I’ve been working on with complete devotion for a year now. And that work is writing, programming, HTML design, music, a little bit of cryptography and conlinguistics, and managing spreadsheets to keep track of it all. What do you call something that uses all of these parts? Can you even call it something that a normal person would understand?
Is it a game? — Ultimately, yes. There are a lot of pieces of the definition of “game” that could be called into question here, but the most important one is whether or not there is a second player. Games are definitionally multiplayer, even when there is only one human involved; the other player can be a computer, or the computer’s larval form: the randomness of the physical universe (“luck”). Traditional novels are nongames because they are nonresponsive. Nothing about a book’s content changes based on the reader’s actions. Even CYOA-type books are static; they just happen to be mazes instead of labyrinths.
IHIE definitely does respond to the reader’s actions. From there, I have to question if it does so in a way that really goes beyond CYOA, or if it’s just using its computerized format to realize the “truest form” of CYOA — one where the navigation of pages is actually enforced instead of being on the honor system. You can’t, (or at least shouldn’t be able to, assuming I programmed it correctly,) go to the wrong page in IHIE; certain pages prevent you from leaving until you’ve honestly reached the end, and links don’t appear until you’ve honestly met their prerequisites. If that was all, I would say it’s just optimal CYOA. But there are, in fact, other instances where reader actions change things, and change the substantive content of the story. Not to get ahead of myself, but the order in which you visit pages determines what happens in the future. And, furthermore, there are some things that operate on randomness, which a static CYOA can’t do. Music is pulled randomly from a list of options, and a couple incidental bits also employ Math.random(). The engine is a second player. That’s enough to call it a game in my opinion.
Is it a computer game? — Yes. If IHIE is a game, then it is definitely a computer game. But I want to poke at the definition of computer game a little.
“Computer game” and “video game” are not synonymous to me. It is possible for a game to use computers and not video — of course, the definition of video is itself open to interpretation, but there are at least a few things that are absolutely not video, such as audio, which games have been enacted through. Even outside of games that are designed explicitly as non-video experiences, there are games intended for video that are nonetheless played without them. Here’s another one. You can look up virtually any game + “blindfolded” and find someone who has played it more or less to completion. (Tangential extension: playing games with no immediate sensory feedback at all is fascinating and impressive, but I think it ceases being a “game” in this context. This is a puzzle.)
A computer game is a game that uses non-human computers to do things that would be impossible for human players to do themselves. It is possible to use computers to expedite non-computer games, like using calculators to figure out numbers in a TTRPG, but in that case the computer is an external interferer. IHIE indisputably relies on the computer to track information based on player actions that the player theirself can’t see. But —
Is it a video game? — The use of video once again becomes a question of intent versus reality. If the video aspect is removed from any given video game, are you left with a game, or with nothing?
Consider a pinball machine. Modern examples can be quite advanced, even incorporating games played on a video display - but I don’t think anyone would make the argument that a modern pinball table is a video game.
(Ahoy: The First Video Game, 27:53.)
Well said, Stuart. Surely they wouldn’t! Surely no one would say that pinball, or, haha, let’s just get totally ridiculous, bowling, is a video game! Surely they wouldn’t say that on my tumblr posts. SURELY.
So, um. Is IHIE a video game? It definitely has video-reliant elements, like colors and shapes, but its core is text, which can clearly exist in non-video format. It could maybe be considered “the same thing” if it was altered to, like, display all the pages by printing them out or narrating them aloud, which would allow it to be played on a computer with no screen. I consider the music an important part of the experience, but turning it off doesn’t technically prevent you from progressing, so the game could theoretically be run on a hacked electronic typewriter that takes “press 1 for x, press 2 for y”-style inputs. Is that enough to call the video aspect as extraneous as it is in pinball?
Well, the fact is that the version of IHIE that actually exists right now uses video. Versions of the story ported to non-video media are possible to imagine, but do not currently exist. For now: yes, IHIE is a video game. In the future, it might be a video game that also exists as a non-video computer game. It’s not likely. But it could happen.
Is it a Twine game? — I talked about this in the first devlog. Twine is the ubiquitous interactive fiction engine, and there are very few modern hypertexts developed without it. There are even fewer developed without a similar authoring system. IHIE, manifestly, is not made in Twine; it’s a bespoke Javascript app. But functionally, is it a Twine game? After all, today there are thousands of “books” which are written and published without printed paper being involved in the process at all, and “films” that aren’t shot on film, and “TV shows” that don’t air on television stations. Is a “Twine game” a game that’s made in Twine, or is it just anything that takes the same format in the end?
I don’t personally want to call IHIE a Twine game, but it’s not, like, the opposite of a Twine game. It’s a Twinelike, maybe. An evolutionary relative. IHIE isn’t a Twine game, but I probably wouldn’t be really mad if you called it that. Let’s call that a slightly fuzzy no.
Is it a visual novel? — I consistently refer to IHIE as a novel, and I’ve already established that it is visual, but then again so are ink-and-paper books. The term “visual novel,” taken as a single entity, currently and popularly describes a pretty narrow genre: a VN is a game where you choose dialogue options, and characters talk to you through sprite portraits. The modern VN scene is the result of interactive fiction facing a genetic bottleneck through otome games, (commonly called dating sims by people who don’t get really mad about the definition of dating sims), probably concentrated around Hatoful Boyfriend, and then attempting to rediversify out of this basic concept of picking lines to build relationships with characters. IHIE is pretty clearly not part of this genre; there is no interactive dialogue between the player and the characters, and if you want to fall in love with one of them, you will do so paratextually. Therefore, while IHIE is a “visual” “novel,” it is not a wikipedia dot org slash wiki slash Visual_novel.
Is it hypermedia? — Unequivocally yes! Finally, an easy win.
Okay, but what the hell is “hypermedia” anyway? — Once upon a time in the late 1980s, when computers could finally do things that weren’t fucking boring, people got really into multimedia.
Here is what Wikipedia shows as examples of multimedia. I think this is a perfectly succinct aesthetic summary.
Books have had illustrations since forever, and I heard that apparently there used to be a TV channel called “MTV” that showed like live action amvs for pop music? But the computer allowed you, anyone, to do it all in one place. You could have text and images and sounds and link mazes and three seconds of 144p video, and you could use them for darn near anything! This was truly the next dimension of media — no longer was information bound to the line of time, but could be navigated through freely. Holy shit. This must be The Future.
And then it stopped being cool, and started being ubiquitous, and now every website loads sixteen popup windows as soon as you enter it. But for a while there, it was awesome. Probably. The cybernovel age bloomed and died rapidly, and nothing was apparently notable enough to have the kind of genre-defining impact seen in other niches. Parser adventures had Zork, which is the kind of nerd thing that they mention on the Big Bang Theory, but cybertext had, uh, Stir Fry Texts? Which is good! But no one knows what it is.
The shadow of hypermedia continued to haunt the internet through things like Homestuck and 17776, which were and are lauded as somehow uniquely weird and ambitious twenty-first century things, and no one knew what a cybernovel was. And, gradually, as we kept seeing wild and unique forms of storytelling through the internet spring up and be misnomed as alternate reality games, I leaned closer and more maniacally in to my screen, yelling, “WE ALWAYS COULD HAVE HAD THIS! THE INFRASTRUCTURE WAS HERE THE WHOLE TIME!”
But can something really remain fringe and experimental for that long? An experiment has to get results eventually. If cybertext had burrowed its way into the mainstream entertainment industry before I was born, there would be nothing left for me to experiment on today. And I will always, to the point of pathology, need to do something weird in order to be satisfied.
Immortal Hand, Immortal Eye is a hypermedia story told mostly through (hyper)text and (hyper)music, which progress and evolve according to the actions of the reader-player-user-audience. It is a computer game, but one in which the player and the computer are not really in competition nor coöperation, and the only goal is to find more words to read.
Is it pretentious to fret so much over the specific definition of my own art like this? — I feel like it would be way more pretentious to claim I’m making something so weird it can’t even be described. An “audiotextual hypernovel” is the lesser evil in this case.
… but is it even good? — God, I hope so.