Writer, game designer, and self-dubbed “dead swamp milf,” Porpentine Charity Heartscape is known for her atmospheric hypertext narratives in Twine.[1] Her latest Twine game, The shape you make when you want your bones to be closest to the surface[2] (henceforth shortened to closest), will be the subject of this review. Closest employs hypertext to link Porpentine’s autobiographical remembrances of a horrifically abusive childhood and still tormented early adulthood, photos of pages from her dream journal, mini rpg platformers, musings on the potential of the internet and her own use of hypertext, and dystopian visions of a cybernetic world careening towards heat death. This analysis will first look at closest’s mnemonic procedural rhetoric and move onto its speculative world-building, which I find resonates with but perhaps also challenges the abstraction of cyberfeminist Donna Haraway’s call for tentacular thinking.[3]
Porpentine calls closest an “autobiographical sci-fi fever dream.”[4] This statement indicates an entanglement with the workings of emotive memory for which closest’s procedural rhetoric seems particularly appropriate. Primarily, the resultant game experience resembles reading the textbox of a visual novel, with chunks of sentence- to paragraph-length narrative text punctuated by highlighted words. Each highlighted term links into another set scene of text, but the logic behind such sequencing is at first difficult to predict, and narration sprawls and digresses between past, present, and future.
In an apt (if still somewhat static and artificial) mimicry of the self-reflexive, flitting, and anachronistic workings of memory and mental association itself, players often wind up repeatedly looping through the same branching point, sent there by different words that seemingly bear only tangential or even no rational connection to their destination.[5] After some repetitions, players begin to remember not just the content of memory, but also how the mnemonic structure of this game operates — similar to how an individual can eventually learn which particular thoughts trigger which trains of thought, players come to be able to predict which word will leap into which associated text. Thus the game not only communicates remembered content in a way that mirrors memory’s workings, but also prompts the player to realize a cognitive self-awareness of the pattern behind one’s own mental associations.[6] This interwoven memory reminds me of moss, in the ground-level nearness it elicits (one is induced to pay close attention to a single sentence when it is the only legible thing on the screen) and employment of a sensitive, organic process of outgrowth and ingrowth rather than systematized, rational logic of correlation (say, like a puzzle would).[7]
As suggested above, closest employs an associative and digressive storytelling method that is both entangled in itself and extends its tendrils across real and imagined times and spaces. Branching between remembrance, present experiences, and futuristic visions, this vegetal approach brings to mind the tentacularity of Donna Haraway. In the face of the vast ecological destruction wreaked by the so-called “Anthropocene,”[8] Haraway argues that humans must develop a deeper affinity with and emulate our earthly brethren — spiders, worms, and yes, tentacled octopi — to survive. Confronted by “[s]carcity’s deepening persistence,” we must abandon an ideology of human exceptionalism and develop more “earthly integrity,” which works both practically — “welcoming limitations of our numbers, economies, and habitats” — and philosophically — “History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do not do History.”[9]
Meanwhile, each of the numerous mini-games littered throughout closest elaborates an enigmatic alternate universe populated more by critters than humans. Glimpses into such speculative ecosystems mingle with Porpentine’s fractured account of her own perilous survival as an anorexic trans girl in an abusive household and world at large, highlighting the consonance of otherness, disempowerment, and oppression shared between the wretched of the earth and society’s rejects.[10] As Porpentine muses in-game, “Humanity is an organism that hasn’t integrated the full impact of its mistakes and therefore cannot change. … people, the kindest and gentlest, killed or driven insane to prevent humanity from waking up from its dissociated rampage.” The emotional and physical ruination of people is quite explicitly aligned with — perhaps even positioned as the prelude to — the destruction of the earth: it is no coincidence that a mini-game in such a deeply and painfully personal work envisions a future whose only ending is heat death.
However, while the experiences that have propelled Porpentine towards the realization of the sisterhood between humans and invertebrates evidently have been awful and traumatic, her depictions of the possibilities sprouting from this abject kinship are as tender, playful, and effervescent as they are depressing. Visually too, they appear as soft and refreshing breaks from the harsh black and white of the game’s primary textual narrative.
In these mini-universes populated by hominids, slime, vermin, and everything in between, Porpentine crafts urgently-needed speculative alternatives to dystopian presents,[11] artistically practicing (and predating) Haraway’s written call: “It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies … Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters for living and dying well.”[12] Porpentine’s explicit and graphic linkage (through sci-fi biological fusing or futuristic cohabitation) between disenfranchised people and lichens makes Haraway’s somewhat high-flown metaphor come off as comparatively hollow, as though Haraway had her eyes set so far into the future and deep into the mud as to have missed humanity’s nearer persecuted cousins and their strategies for survival — many of “the kindest and gentlest” have already been scraped off certain rocks and by the fury of mankind, and survivors like Porpentine have already undertaken the work of burrowing spaces to breathe in a hostile environment that demands them to squat and squirm, crouch and crawl.
As such, closest arguably exposes a tendency towards abstraction in Haraway’s argument that overlooks nearer suffering and tactics of survival. In its messy, bubbling, and viscously networked thought (perhaps smudged somewhat by not-so-sticky mechanics), closest and Porpentine’s general body of work thus construct an ecology of queerness and otherwise marginalized experience that resonates with but also, I argue, goes beyond the tentacular thinking espoused by Donna Haraway.
[1] an open-source tool for crafting interactive, nonlinear fiction online.
[3] For a better understanding of tentacularity, I suggest reading the following manifesto: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/
[4] https://mcachicago.org/Publications/Websites/I-Was-Raised-On-The-Internet/Artworks/Porpentine-Charity-Heartscape-The-Shape-You-Make-When-You-Want-Your-Bones-To-Be-Closest-To-The-Surface-2018
[5] Porpentine’s hypertext reminds me somewhat of David Foster Wallace’s incessant footnotes in some of his short stories. Both are self-reflexive, although DFW’s seem more calculatedly cerebral and sometimes also more intentionally paranoid.
[6] Just like remembrance, there is also no clear-cut end to the game: Players can eventually encounter the options to: “Stop playing” “Or keep hurting yourself,” but “Stop playing” has no highlighted text so it cannot be pursued as an in-game action — the player can only literally quit the game. But “hurting” is highlighted — one can begin the cycle anew.
[7] In an interview, Porpentine states: “The purpose of a puzzle is to provide resistance. For me, that resistance doesn’t need to be coercive or challenging, just interesting and aesthetic. My mechanics are to be touched. Games are perhaps the most intimate art because the player must remain touching at all times. They must touch or the game does not exist.”
[8] AKA the current geological age in which human activity, more than any other factor, has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Haraway herself critiqued this term, but that argument is not within the scope of mine.
[9] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/
[10] Text from closest: "If you look at me from the outside you might someone who fits the anatomical inventory list of more or less a human being, but go just under the surface of the skin and I'm soup, all my inputs and outputs tangled like spaghetti, rearranged like a teleporter malfunction."
[11] In their calamitous, sensitive vulnerability, they are also alternatives to mainstream game culture: As Porpentine mused in a recent interview (https://www.artforum.com/interviews/porpentine-charity-heartscape-talks-about-her-works-in-the-2017-whitney-biennial-67067), “the game industry tries to make something that someone can play forever. What they’re manufacturing is the promise that you will not have to consider the ruinous passage of time, if you just lock yourself inside a game.” (I believe this is true also of apocalyptic games like Bioshock or The Walking Dead.) Porpentine’s games can be said to perform the opposite: they lock you into a consideration of the ruinous passage of time.