“COUNTDOWN”: AN INTERACTIVE FICTION by Jessica Cassidy Kammerer A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Wilkes Honors College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Concentration in Writing Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May 2018 “COUNTDOWN”: AN INTERACTIVE FICTION by Jessica Cassidy Kammerer This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Professor Rachel Luria, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: _____________________________________ Professor Rachel Luria _____________________________________ Professor Annina Ruest _____________________________________ Dean Ellen Goldey, Wilkes Honors College ____________ Date ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Professors Rachel Luria and Annina Ruest, my thesis readers, for their time and feedback. This humble project would be humbler still without them. Thanks to Professor Luria for her kindness and herculean patience in being my academic advisor over the last two years. I am forever grateful. Thanks to Professors Rachel Corr, Jacqueline Fewkes, Michael Harrawood, Joanne Jasin, Dorotha Lemeh, Rachel Luria, Yasmine Shamma, and Gavin Sourgen, whose classrooms I have at one point or another joined. I have been challenged in ways that made me excited to rise to the occasion. Particular thanks to Professors Michael Harrawood, Rachel Luria, and Yasmine Shamma, with whom I have been incredibly fortunate to take several classes each. I hope I have proven worth the honor. Thanks to Ashley, Hannah, Miles, and Sonia for giving me the occasional use of your couch and the honorary title of Fifth Roommate. Your friendships have been things of beauty. Thanks to Gineva and Isaac for maintaining our friendships despite the distance. Your texts bring brightness on hard days. I’ll see you both soon. Thanks to both my mothers, who pushed me to go back to school. I am lost without you. iii ABSTRACT Author: Jessica Cassidy Kammerer Title: “Countdown”: An Interactive Fiction Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Professor Rachel Luria Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences Concentration: Writing Year: 2018 Today’s readers are not, in fact, readers, but rather configurative authors, accustomed in this digital age to controlling the media presented to them in such a way that their configuration is as important to the content’s overall structure and interpretation as author intent. Interactive fiction, which is any text-based media that the reader can alter through their actions (Montfort, “Twisty Little Passages”, vii), addresses this configurative authorship. “Countdown” is my own work of interactive fiction. It is an interpersonal drama that meditates on inevitability and the effects of our choices. It employs randomization at a high level that impacts which scenes of the story are seen and when, and this complicates the relationship between the configurative author and the creator. This approach can be applied to other projects to place the reader in productive tension with the story itself, the author, and/or the narrator. iv CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 What Is Interactive Fiction? .......................................................................................................... 3 Definitions ............................................................................................................................... 3 History ..................................................................................................................................... 5 Genre ....................................................................................................................................... 7 What Is “Countdown”? .............................................................................................................. 10 Themes .................................................................................................................................. 10 Technical Decisions ................................................................................................................ 11 Post-Mortem: Difficulties Encountered and the Evolution of “Countdown” .............................. 13 To Conclude .............................................................................................................................. 15 References ................................................................................................................................. 17 Appendix A: Screenshots of the Quest Program ........................................................................... 17 Appendix B: The Code Behind “Countdown” ............................................................................. 20 Appendix C: Recommended Readings and Interactions ............................................................. 149 Appendix D, Flowchart A: Story Cyles ..................................................................................... 150 Appendix E, Flowchart B: Carnival .......................................................................................... 153 Appendix F, Flowchart C: Debauchery ..................................................................................... 154 Appendix G, Flowchart D: Game Night ................................................................................... 155 Appendix H, Map A: Fairy Hive .............................................................................................. 156 Appendix I, Map B: Prowling Beast .......................................................................................... 157 Appendix J, Map C: Ascend the Tower ..................................................................................... 158 Appendix K, Map D: Friend’s Apartment ................................................................................. 159 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 160 v INTRODUCTION I am fifteen and, like most fifteen-year-olds, on fire with restlessness. An avid reader and gamer growing up, I no longer find much to interest me in either hobby and largely spend my days of summer vacation staring at my shiny new smartphone or browsing the internet, unable to process the teenage itching in the back of my head. An app in the “Games” section of my phone’s app store makes me snicker: First Times. What kind of name, I wonder, is that? The description is cryptic, but summer is bearing down and I have nothing better to do. I install and open it, and I am shocked to be confronted with text and a blinking cursor. After a few frustrated attempts to talk to the program as I would talk to a friend, I type “help” to more success and, with new understanding, begin to progress. It is surreal to configure the scenario – that is, to manipulate surroundings so they adapt to my desire - as I would in a game, then read and interpret it as I would in a book, and to do vice versa. I have never (at this point in my life) been exposed to Dungeons and Dragons. I have read and promptly forgotten about choose-your-own-adventure books. The stories of the video games I have played either were negligible or never occurred to me as things I could control. The world, therefore, undergoes a cosmic shift for me as I am shown that the reader can be in collaboration with the author. Thus my two fading interests, reading and playing, collide with my third more enduring interest, writing, and I see stars. I show my father what I’ve found, and he, a child of the seventies, says, “Oh, that’s like Zork.” The rest, as they say… This story stems more from probability and creative flair than it does true memory. I do, however, remember the broader aftermath. I began consuming interactive fictions hungrily. I turned to literature and to games with renewed interest in narrative and found more and more to commend me toward a strong relationship between the reader and author. I began dabbling in my own imitations of titles such as Zork or First Times instead of consigning my talents to terrible fanfictions, 1 which in turn led to more coherent static fiction on my part. I picked up forum-based roleplay, a kind of collaborative storytelling. Above all, I reinvigorated my hunger for content and creation. Today’s fifteen-year-olds are far more digitally oriented than I was. They’re technologically literate, and with technological literacy comes also a technological literature – a kind of media unique to this aptly named iGeneration. This literature is that of the website, the mobile app, the video game – digital items with which the reader can interact. This digital interactivity has provided readers with configurative authorship – the ability to manipulate the content with which they are presented in such a way that reader agency is as inherent or more inherent to the content’s construction as author intent. We see this on websites, where the only relevant information is that to which the reader navigates. We see this on mobile apps, where the predominant data is that which the reader