As I’ve delved more into the history of pre-digital and early-digital women’s games, I’m surprised to see the number of scholars who remark upon the lack of documentation and evidence of women making games. The well-documented playfulness of Surrealism, Dada, Theater of the Absurd, Situationist International, the OuLiPo and even early text games is marked by strong gender biases. Appolinare, Jarry, Duchamp, Tzara, Debord, Queneau – a history dominated by Frenchmen! While there is a movement within game studies to draw connections between some of these artistic movements and text-based games, women’s contributions to the word game tradition are nearly invisible. I hope that by exploring the work of playful pre-digital writers, like the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven and text game pioneer Roberta Williams, I can begin to build a compelling prehistory of the Twine games that precipitated Gamergate that acknowledges both the literary and computational aspects of these woks.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about praxis, what Patrick might call “critical making” (Jagoda 357), or what Sayers might describe as engaging with “conceptual matter” (Sayers 4). For my final project (which will also be the basis for a larger, year-long research effort) I’m making a Twine game that engages this longer history of women’s word games and recuperates and contextualizes seven pre-Gamergate Twine games within this historical archive. While I feel I have a strong argument for the scholarly importance and timely relevance of this work, it’s been difficult to articulate why I feel a Twine game is the best way to make this argument and to tell this story.
Sayers writes: “the research presented here exhibits an intricate awareness of how making and scholarship start in the middle […] we witness partial knowledge and situated relations with materials, the sort of approach that keeps conversations growing against the hubris of mastery and the force of progress. We also witness how conceptual matter – or the inability to unmoor materials from how we interpret materials – demarcates this from that and thus puts them into relation” (Sayers 8, their emphasis).
I’m compelled by the idea of starting “in the middle:” it seems to accurately describe how I it feels to interact with many of the texts/games I discuss, but it also helps me describe the proximity I feel to Twine, both as a genre of game, a development platform, and a media format. It seems only right to deal with the conceptual matter of an engine that implements a natural coding language and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), while discussing its affordances and arguing for its importance to the expansion of women’s word games. As I build this text/game (and acquaint myself with Twine 2), I know I’ll develop more insight into how Twine 2 facilitates certain choices and make others more difficult. I prefer this deeply subjective proximity to my object of study: it echoes the DIY aesthetic that shapes many of the works I’ll discuss. In so doing, I hope to resist a teleological approach to my topic that emphasizes these works as “mastery and progress,” a technodeterminist reading that would see Twine as the logical endpoint of a century’s literary progress. I prefer to draw edges between nodes, suggesting the partiality of my archive, the inadequacy of its records, and the DIY aesthetic as prominent because, simply put, if these women wanted to see stories that reflected their queer desires, unruly bodies, unique aesthetics, and utopian desires, they knew they needed to do it themselves.
Have I demonstrated the necessity of engaging with Twine as I write about Twine? It would certainly be easier to write a paper than it will be to write a Twine game, and it seems a tricky thing to justify the messiness of praxis when I feel academia usually prioritizes the intellectual rigor of book-like containers. I look forward to talking about this at our conference, but would love to hear folks' opinions as I enter my first development process for this piece.
Works Cited:
Jagoda, Patrick. "Critique and Critical Making." PMLA, 13.2, 2017, pp. 356-363.
Sayers, Jentery. "I Don't Know all the Circuitry." Making Things and Drawing Boundaries. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 1-18.