Perhaps, because I’d already read Daniel Punday’s article, “Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Electronic Narratives,” I was already primed (and perhaps too aware) of myself as an audience upon my visit to Welcome to Pine Point. As somebody who has only a passing familiarity with computer games, interactive stories always make me wonder if I’m missing a hidden clue or means of moving the narrative forward. Sure enough, I messed it up. I first saw the list of lexia (I hope I’m using that term correctly) at the lower left hand corner of the “Intro” screen. I assumed this screen was something akin to a DVD menu and thought that hitting “GO” would make the narrative “play” like a movie, failing to realize that this was all part of the introduction. Instead, maybe due to being too much in my own head, I assumed that the list of lexia were an index of various pieces of background information that would familiarize me with the narrative. Believing that I would return to “GO” having familiarized myself with—what I believed to be—pieces of background information, I jumped in at the “Town” section and moved through the narrative this way. In doing so, I skipped an incredibly important piece of context, the seven different pages of introductory material.

I certainly feel silly about this mistake but am comforted (somewhat) by Punday’s assertion that “we must understand how a particular hypertext narrative works before we will know how to follow its links” (29). I highlight this experience because it made me very aware of my role as intriguee and gave me a sense of how that was different from the roles of narratee or implied reader. In the actual introduction of Welcome to Pine Point, the narrator talks about nostalgia and memory formation by recounting his own first-hand experiences, his discovery of Pine Point’s fate, and the rediscovery and recognition that comes from viewing a photo album. The implied reader seems to be one who is able to understand the nostalgic value associated with place (even if they can’t necessarily understand the attachment of many Pine Pointers) and material objects, like the magnetic photo albums that the narrative seems, at times, to remediate. The intriguee, however, seems to be a person who can follow simple commands. The narrative is laid out in a linear manner; clicking “GO” will launch it, then the reader can toggle forward and back by using the “NEXT” and “PREV.” tabs onscreen. Whereas the narrator of “Intro” seems intent on highlighting those themes having to do with memory, the intrigant demonstrates the way that the rest of the narrative will unfold. That is, in a manner similar to a book. The reader could navigate the lexia out of order, but this would result in confusion, since the narrative relies on linearity to make sense.

On one hand, this gestures to, as Punday says, “[translating] the demands that intrigue makes on the reader into those made by acts of narration and [blurring] the role of intriguee and narratee” (39). In following the narrative as it progresses linearly, we’re asked to go on a journey that might be similar to the experience of the authors as they collected the stories of Pine Pointers: listening to recounted memories, following along as people explain what’s happening in a given photograph, watching a home movie. Taking part in other peoples’ memories often asks us to follow narratives that unfold at a pace we can’t control, as speakers forget, embellish, double back, or pause to remember. The narrator’s words, written on strips across the background of moving or still images, often jockey for attention with the audio of the speakers. Because there was no scrubbing button and starting the audio over requires re-loading the page, I quickly learned to listen to the speaker first and then read the words of the narrator.[1] Whereas the town of Pine Point lacked, as the narrator says, “the organic growth of most towns, where things morph to fit trends and tides of people,” the narrative is the opposite. The time it took to listen to each speaker, watch each clip, comb through the “material” artifacts that are available, reminded me that the diffuse experiences of the individuals whose memories the narrative relates are what drive it forward. In this regard, it reminds me of a scrapbook or photo album. Often, it’s collections of events that define the organization and shape of these pages’ grid-like spaces rather than the exigencies of a single, unified narrative.

Nevertheless, the relationship between intrigue and narration in Welcome to Pine Point, a move taken from Punday, makes me wonder about the implications of discussing narrative and intrigue as distinct aspects of a text. For example, Punday offers a thematic analysis of the texts he’s looking at as well as a description of their intrigues. In the case of his final example, the collaborative text Outrances, he states that

In Outrances narration and intrigue are connected thematically: both are concerned with finding order in chaos, with losing oneself in art, and with the process of connecting to and differentiating oneself from crowds. Here narration and intrigue are independent but thematically complementary textual systems” (43)

Of course, multiple interpretations of any text are possible, but I wonder about the extent to which we can analyze intrigue separately from narration: how, for example, has the poem’s manifest and latent content impacted Punday’s analysis of its intrigue? Moreover, what about the broad categories of narration and intrigue themselves? What about the context of a narrative’s creation or its genre? Punday certainly talks about the implications of the text as digital, but what about other things? I’m trying to think about my own reading of Welcome to Pine Point in this regard, but am having difficulty separating (what I understand to be) the design of the intrigue from (what I interpreted as) the goals of the narrative and its relationship to the history that it’s trying to recount.

It’s entirely possible that much of this question could be attributed to the gaps in my knowledge of narratology. I wonder, though, whether my question highlights some of the criticisms of the discipline, mainly its tendency to, in the words of Michael McKeon “[cut] across the chronological and disciplinary divides of historical practice” (McKeon xiv). Might separating narration from intrigue in this way risk creating a new category of analysis that could be criticized as ahistorical or too static? My intention here isn’t to criticize Punday, I’m just curious about what this means for the ongoing conversation about the ways that narratology negotiates things like genre and history.  It’s clear that I need to do more research about how digital narratives like Welcome to Pine Point are being studied and discussed.

Finally, I didn’t get a chance to talk about it here, but Evie Ruddy’s narrative Un/tied (https://www.untied.shoes/) is also available on the National Film Board of Canada website. It’s a really great piece and one that I’d recommend!

McKeon, Michael. “Introduction.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael Mckeon. Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. xiii-xviii.

Punday, Daniel. “Narration, Intrigue, and Reader Positioning in Electronic Narratives.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. 4, 2012, 25-47.

[1] I’m reminded here of Professor Davidson’s question about interpellation that my last blog post discussed. Members of wilde Cunningham may have had their bodies interpellated by the Second Life experience, but in the context of the reading experience (broadly) readers are “hailed” and told whom the implied author needs them to be–I’ve never thought about this before! Intrigue takes this interpellation a step further and hails intriguees, asking them to become a certain type of game player. Whether these two instances of interpellation are distinct, though, I can’t say.

How are the bodies of the members of wilde in Au’s “The Nine Souls of wilde Cunningham” interpellated by the virtual affordances  of the Second Life interface?

At first glance, this question drew my attention to the fact that in the article, the bodies of the members of wilde Cunningham occasionally seem to be defined in opposition to the “freedoms” provided by the Second Life interface. While they highlight the “level playing field” created by the virtual world, this seems to throw the expectations of an ableist society into sharper relief.

However, to take into account only those expectations ignores the aspect of recognition, which plays an important part of the process of interpellation. Indeed, the members of the wilde group appear to recognize themselves in their avatar, wilde, as well as in the world of the game. This is, perhaps, most apparent in the way that their experience seems to push against Horkeimer and Adorno’s argument that people “submit to ideologies that interpellate them as passive, and thus comply with their own domination.” Indeed, Second Life seems to be an opportunity for the members of Wilde and opportunity to subvert ableist society’s attempts to interpellate them. John’s notecard, for example, alludes to this by identifying society’s “misconceptions” about people with cerebral palsey, which we can read as an attempt to hail, and then arguing that those misconceptions are wrong:

that they are not intelligent
that they are happy to be ignored
that they lack humor
that they don’t mind the total dependency
that their common sense, humor, insights don’t surpass yours at times

In very direct terms, John tells his reader that attempts to interpellate his body (and those of others with cerebral palsy) in a specific way are incorrect: this seems to be an instance in which hailing has failed. While Lilone explains to Hamlet that John “can’t speak as such,” Second Life allows him a voice to define (self-interpellate?) himself. In re-framing the terms in which he can be addressed, John nevertheless participates in a form of ideology; I’m not arguing that there is a way to step outside of our nature as “always-already subjects.” Like all instances of interpellation, this example is historically conditioned and, in this case, defined, subtended by the medium, the very virtual affordances that enable it. John’s note card, however, is an example of the ways that ideology is historically contingent and can shift.

The article also highlights how the active nature of the virtual world challenges the notion that media position subjects as passive viewers of entertainment. Indeed, the members of the wilde collective must actively make decisions about their role in the world, not simply consume a predictable and gratifying narrative. Moreover, participation in-world requires the members of wilde to be in constant negotiation with one another and also takes a degree of physical effort:

It takes 15 minutes to set up to play, with all the chairs and such [around the computer]…And then the group play is a more times taking endeavor than playing alone. So we get about 45 minutes of playing time per session. We are full of desires of things to do, but all in good time.

The management of time, space, expectations and desires all indicate that this type of play is anything but passive. Similarly, the subject whom David Gauntlett posits, one who experiences media through “uncritical consumption,” does not appear to apply here, since the Wilde group seems rarely to forget about their own bodies. While, for example, most in the group agree that walking around is nice because “it’s nice to be able to do what others can do,” they also point out the distance that they experience from it, saying “it’s still a little removed from us, as we watch it instead of do it.” While the goal of virtual reality simulations might be to make viewers/players feel a degree of immersion, Second Life is still unable to provide that for the players of wilde Cunningham. This raises a question that I’ve not been able to answer and wish that the writer could have revisited later: if hardware becomes capable of providing more immediacy (bigger screens, better controls, faster internet access), how would the group’s experience change? Would it shift the way they thought about their own bodies? Would it impact the extent to which they felt able to embody certain elements of the game?