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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 INTERACTIVE FICTION, VIRTUAL REALITIES, AND THE READING-WRITING RELATIONSHIP DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Sarah Jane Sloane, B.A., M.F.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1991 Dissertation Committee: Approved by A. A. Lunsford J. Phelan H. L. Ulman Advisers Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was about halfway through the rough draft of my dissertation when I began to hear radio reports that the remains of Amelia Earhart's plane might have been found: researchers had uncovered a wooden chest on a small island in the South Pacific. From the markings on the chest they inferred that it came from Earhart's ill-fated flight, and plans were being made to scan the reef skirting the island to search for the wreckage of her plane. The researchers speculated that her aircraft, low on fuel, might have landed on a shoal just off the island and, eventually, as Earhart's radio broadcasts went unanswered, slid under. In the intersection of those radio broadcasts with the writing I was trying to do, I felt an inkling of the larger communities in which we compose. I was just embarking on writing about my own encounter with a new technology, a technology of creating stories called interactive fiction on computers. I thought about Earhart as another pioneer exploring the possibility of technology. And as I write these acknowledgements today, and recount the helpful influences on this dissertation, I think it is fitting to reach back and out to that wider community of people who have used and developed new technologies : "For we all move in many circles out and away from the small-self of one meter," as Scott McLean has said. It is probably ii hubris to think of myself in the tradition of other, greater women contributing to our understanding of computers, but I would like to acknowledge here the indirect influences of Ada Lovelock, the world's first computer programmer, and Grace Murray Hopper, who wrote the first high level compiler and coined the word "debug." I would like to acknowledge these pioneers and some of the other predecessors to my own efforts to understand and influence the genres of computer narrative: Alan Turing, Brenda Kay Laurel, Marvin Minsky, Joseph Bates, David Graves, Abbe Don, and Allucquere Roseanne Stone spring to mind in an unlikely coterie. We all move in widening circles. I began writing these acknowledgements on a flight back to Columbus from San Francisco where I had spent two weeks visiting my friend Judy at the Headlands Center for the Arts. The interdisciplinary artists at the Headlands Center gave me a shot in the arm just as I was beginning to lag in my own writing. The artists there, and their challenging, eccentric assemblages of materials and knowledge challenged me to make this an essay as rich, milky, and febrile as their own installations of compasses caked in ice, definitions of the River Styx, a hemostat nipping the binding of a book, corn stalks drawn in dried milk on the floor. One installation artist looked around her huge sunny studio and said to me, "the windows are in real-time, but the walls are historical." This visit to the Headlands Center was valuable to me, and, ultimately, to this long essay, because I saw firsthand some results of rigorous rearrangements of the parts of our world, as well as iii a faithfulness to the whim, the oblique, the uncatalogued, and the unknown; I observed art as a rhetoric of human inquiry. Thank you to those artists, the place and its groves of eucalyptus trees, and especially to the artist Anna Woodson of Chapel Hill who plans to be using pieces of my dissertation in one of her installations. I remember Inerio making sculptures from books in Calvino. In addition to that serendipitous meeting with seven artists in the spring of this composition, I have other important influences to acknowledge here. Looking much farther back, I need to acknowledge the support of my family. I was lucky to come from a family that reads; I also come from a family that teaches : my grandmother, mother, and brother are teachers, as is my father, after a fashion, although I have a clear memory of him giving me the history of the Greeks when I asked him for help with an algebra problem. I would like to acknowledge here the importance of my family's good influences. There are numerous other people and places who bear mentioning as well. The street I grew up on. Hickory Hill Road in Tappan, New York, was a cooperative that fostered a diverse community rich in intellect, friendship, and respect for democratic debate. In addition to my mother there were fourteen other people who taught for a living on my road, including five college professors; my childhood was full of academic role models. I am thankful to my neighbors on that hill, especially another teacher and good friend, Teru Morimoto. IV other circles. Here at the Ohio State University, the weekly meetings of the study group I started in January, 1990 have sustained me, given me hope and energy when I felt discouraged, and supported my work during my general exams and in this dissertation. I especially want to thank the other two original members, Mindy Wright and Kelly Belanger, as well as Heather Graves, Carrie Leverenz, and Donna LeCourt, for their steady help and friendship. Jim Buckley, Cindy Cox, Ruth Ann Hendrickson, and Eric Walborn have also provided needed support at crucial points in this writing. The friendship and instruction of Keith Walters, Beverly Moss, Debra Moddelmog, and Roger Cherry have been important as well. I have been lucky in friends at Ohio State University. My dissertation directors, Andrea Lunsford and Jim Phelan, have shown a tolerance for the experiments, the false starts, and uneven thinking that naturally accompany an interdisciplinary dissertation in a new area. I want to thank them for that tolerance and also for participating in this experiment in collaborative directing of a dissertation. Lewis Ulman, too, has offered steady help; I have enjoyed our mutually caffeinated conversations about artificial intelligence, realism, and social constructionism. Andrea, Jim, and Louie have offered the support all graduate students hope for: they have been fair, sustaining, steady, and have offered exactly the right mix of nurture and challenge. Finally, it is no exaggeration to say that this particular dissertation would never have been written if it weren't for the encouragement, understanding, and advice of my friend and partner Judy Doenges: through three different graduate programs, and from four different states, for the last seven years Judy has nurtured and encouraged me even as she has steadfastly pursued her own fiction writing. To Judy, because she has always helped me keep perspective, because we share a love for good stories of all kinds, and because of the dimension she has given my life and work, I dedicate this dissertation. I think about how these acknowledgements place me, how I am located by my own tellings of the circles around this composition. I mean to acknowledge here all the fortuitous contexts that surround my dissertation's exploration of what happens when a page becomes a window instead of a wall; but I wonder how the intention of the writer truly rises out of these words. I wonder whether I am freezing into space my own layered accumulation of influences, or whether I am simply misleading you, the reader, as I prepare you to read my dissertation on interactive fiction. Let me suggest you follow Calvino's advice. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel all other thoughts. And begin. VI VITA October 5, 1957............................................................................................ ; Bom in T^an, New York Summer, 1978 ........................................................................................... Breadloaf School of English Lincoln College, Oxford 1979 B.A., Middlebury College Middlebmy, Vermont Fall, 1979 ........................................................................................................................ Visiting Student University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, Scotland 1979-1981........................................................................................................ Thomas J. Watson Fellow Edinburgh, Scotland 1983-1987.......................................................................................