Patchwork Girl and Filmtext
March 30, 2008
Filmtext remains, to me, a piece of art that is too incoherent to warrant much attention. It’s structure is such that it may comment on the nature of viewing, listening, partaking, and experiencing literary work, as well as how one interacts with a work of art, but what points it seeks to make or questions it seeks to ask are indecipherable.
The content is just as ambiguous. Images flash, sounds sigh and echo, words scroll by sometimes too quickly to read. Maybe Filmtext is expressing something important or meaningful or profound, but if that is the case why obfuscate the message behind a film of insoluble mystery?
And on that note, if it does have something serious to say, it should treat itself seriously. But here is a quote from the work: “It can’t be real because I’ve never seen it before and unless I’ve seen it before I don’t know it and if I don’t know it how it can it be real” [sic]. “Know it how it can it,” eh? I get the feeling the whole experience has just been hashed together out of the neatest bits of code Mr. Amerika could find, and blatant typographical errors do not help lend the piece a sense of importance. I’m usually forgiving in this regard, but if your intent is to create something new, especially a new form of art, then one should probably take special care to perform at least a once-over proofread. Filmtext shows no indication that this took place.
Patchwork Girl, though, has some potential. For its time I can see it making quite the fuss, as it apparently did in some circles. Why hasn’t it been re-done and revamped?
In high school, I took a seniors-only Creative Writing course in which the final exam was to create a “choose your own adventure” story online, through websites. That was in 2002-2003, and I managed, as a 17-18 year old, to create a (horrid) story that was more easily navigable than Patchwork Girl. I don’t think it would be too difficult to create “interactive” stories online far more cheaply than Patchwork Girl was to publish. So why aren’t they being made?
I don’t know. But I’m partially at fault if I claim to be a writer who tries to publish material online and I’m not writing it. It’s just “not what I write” (unless, of course, I’m forced by an overzealous high school English teacher).
But I’m not opposed to it, either. So, as an editor, were I to receive a submission crafted as an interactive narrative, I’d toss it some bonus points on account of being unique before attempting to evaluate its quality and appropriateness. I think a lot of editors would do the same. So if the technology is available and might benefit those who take use of it, why aren’t writers taking use?
It doesn’t seem like a complete answer to the question, but I think we should consider that interactive narratives are more difficult to relate to. Maybe they are historically less successful because their structure does not reflect the structure we find in life; it is not the case that if we make a decision to do not like we can backtrack to the decisive moment and choose again. And in a sense the ability to do so, even within a read narrative, works against the validity of the artwork by making it contradictory. If I can make the lead character perform different decisions than those already performed, why am I only given this option around certain decisions? What if I would like to do something other than what the author has thought of?
Well, then either I write my own deterministic story, or I become a role-playing gamer and experience an interactive narrative inhabited by others. Those genres, after all, continue to thrive where the choose-your-own-adventure story has failed.
