Political Remediations in Interactive Fiction: Emily Short and Liza Daly’s First Draft of the Revolution
| May 23, 2025 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 34, Number 1, September 2023 |
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Susan Vanderborg
Abstract
This essay reads Emily Short and Liza Daly’s First Draft of the Revolution (2012) as a leading example of recent digital interactive fiction that uses remediations for political critique. The clashes and contradictions in First Draft’s remediations of paper texts are where the piece discloses the propaganda of a suppressive regime as well as challenges the idea of a new medium’s immanent revolutionary potential. The essay briefly traces interactive fiction’s development as a genre grounded in remediation and concludes by placing First Draft in context of related interactive “complicity” texts and other political directions for the genre’s future remediations.
In their classic monograph Remediation (1999), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin discuss the many methods programmers use to rework previous media: archiving pre-digital texts, simulating their authority, contesting them, or pledging extravagantly to “revolutionize” earlier information structures, as well as civic involvement, for greater “democracy” (45-46, 15, 59-60). But few digital remediations combine a would-be revolutionary world with a sensuous tribute to older means of writing as dramatically as author Emily Short and programmer-designer Liza Daly do in their 2012 interactive fiction First Draft of the Revolution. Amid plans for a new edition of the piece, this article reexamines the brilliant remedial play that made its own first release so impactful. First Draft has been hailed as “advancing the form of interactive fiction” (Boluk et al.); arguably it does so by probing the most chaotic aspects of remediations—the inconsistencies and historical distortions under their surface appeal to the past—to critique both ruling-class propaganda and claims of revolutionary media.
At the plot level, First Draft’s story remediates one of the most iconic political revolutions, writing “an alternate version” of the onset “of the French Revolution” (Short and Daly, “Statement”).[1] It opens in July, 1788, twelve months prior to our world’s Bastille assault, with one character predicting “a great and cataclysmic change” in the country, “now very near” (FDR 20). Marked an “epistolary novel” (Short and Daly, “Statement”), it is praised for depictions meshing “the personal and the political” in class-inflected marital disputes (Joyce). Juliette, the slightly lesser-ranked wife of an elite aristocrat, Henri, gets “banished” to the outskirts of Grenoble in his home province (FDR 2) for her faux pas toward the top Parisian nobility.[2] Her letters plead to be invited back to that world even as she criticizes its immorality. Henri’s missives deploy Juliette to verify whether a certain poor village boy is the result of his prior liaison with a peasant woman. Meanwhile, a rebel friar, whose words register only in secondhand accounts, tries to exploit Juliette and the boy in order to stage assassinations of the nobility.
The biggest difference in this “alternate” history, and what announces remediation as a crucial diegetic praxis, is that socioeconomic status in its France depends on being actual wizards at media translations. Only the most preeminent aristocrats here have the biological capability to do a magic of “correspondence[]”-derived “links,” where “models” and imitations relay information, seemingly with no data lost (FDR 8, 26, 3). Connected “mirrors,” for instance, can display “rooms in another province” for a viewer (3). In the story’s letter correspondence, a pun that indicates how essential epistolary media are to the world’s class structure, the user writes on one piece of noble-magicked stationery and those sentences materialize on a “linked” piece in the recipient’s home (2-3). A lynchpin of the friar’s “revolutionary” scheme is the desire to make “highborn” correspondence magic available to commoners (9, 20). The rebels, in other words, already combine disparate senses of revolution, the supplanting of a regime and its social framework with the medial “‘revolution’” Elizabeth Eisenstein defines: an “abrupt and decisive change” in their “communications technology” that would have “long-range irreversible” outcomes for information acquisition, labor, and communal relations (Printing Revolution 333, 314, 334) if the rebels could use it.[3]
In the smaller scope of textual form, First Draft’s own structure could be considered a revolutionary turn in interactive composition. Every lexia shows the remediated image of a character’s letter on stationery; the reader finishes the page by emending several sentences. For each indicated line, we click on the mental writing prompt that we want out of the ones proffered, as when we can make a character ponder etiquette (“‘I should hint more delicately’”), defend candor (“‘Perhaps he will tell me why I am here’”), or despair of a response (“‘It’s no use asking again’”) (FDR 4). Each of the prompt-links takes us to a separate phrase in place of the old line or excises it. This process, Short notes, was game-changing at the time, “credited with influencing the text-replacement mechanic of many subsequent games in Twine” (“Games”). The piece took “Best Use of Innovation” in the 2012 XYZZY Awards for interactive fiction. There have been extended discussions, too, of how its line rewriting creatively remediates epistolary literature or challenges filmic depictions of letters (Gold; Ng).
But there is less discussion of an equally inventive remedial device: the deliberate aporias within First Draft’s remediations as the letters ambiguously evoke two distinct eighteenth-century media at once: manuscript and print. First Draft’s remedial inconsistencies, examples of what Bolter and Grusin describe as “hypermediacy” (5), are not a sidebar, but the key vehicle for interpreting the political revolution plot.[4] They convey the power of the aristocratic regime even while divulging its machinations and lies, suggesting how beguilingly persistent its public fictions can be. The inconsistencies focus attention on the work and workers excised from noble stories, but also raise questions about the revolution’s outcome and whether, or how, a formally revolutionary communications medium might impact political struggles. In The Gutenberg Revolution, John Man argues that a groundbreaking technology can render sovereign power more efficient, but can also give suppressed populations “a lever with which to organise revolts” (14). In First Draft’s mix of accurate, expunged, and speculative historical references, the effect of that lever is unclear; the rebels have trouble reappropriating the nobles’ correspondence medium for their own purposes, and the shifting verbal and visual remediations force readers to reconsider their own support for one side or the other in the political conflict.
Interactive Fiction Definitions and Remediation Scholarship
Narratives embedded in remediation aporias are a growing part of a genre that has always pioneered new forms alongside previous media. Even if considering electronic formats only, “interactive fiction” is a generatively flexible grouping, tied to its remediations of many other genres. Nick Montfort, in the preface to Twisty Little Passages (2003), the initial monograph on digital interactive fiction, cites descriptions by Short, among others, for his definition: “computer programs that display text, accept textual responses, and then display additional text in reaction to what has been typed,” with a “parser” for user language and the invention of “a simulated world” as the most crucial constituents, going back to games like Adventure and Zork (vii-viii, 1).[5] He also traces traits linked to chatbots such as ELIZA (82-83) and to riddle poetry, whose language is still “‘mysterious’” and enticing to readers after the riddle is unraveled (61-62). That poetic complicacy, however, makes him acknowledge “more expansive” definitions of the field as well, including hypertext or crossover works splicing parser and hypertext features; as he points out, Bolter in Writing Space (1991) describes hypertext compositions as “‘Interactive Fiction’” (Montfort, 8, 12-13). In a 2007 essay, N. Katherine Hayles cites Montfort’s beginning definition of interactive fiction, while also discussing “variant” compositions like the phantasmagoric pictures springing from selected scenery in Donna Leishman’s Deviant (sec. 2). Hayles notes the continuity between games and interactive fiction, but argues that the latter fosters deeper “interpret[ation]” with “clever modifications of traditional literary devices” (sec. 2). Short’s own 2014 entry for interactive fiction in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media addresses the genre ambiguity by starting with two “common usages” of the phrase: one, “any story that allows reader participation to alter the presentation or outcome of the narrative,” prioritizing that “narrative development over gameplay”; and the second, which she dates from the 1980s, is the “parse[r]” and “world model” Montfort cited (Short, “Interactive” 289). First Draft itself fits best with her flexible first definition. It is listed in her “Games” portfolio under “Literary Interactive Fiction” and relies exclusively on writing prompts for its world progression, but is composed in hypertext.
First Draft also appears in the Interactive Fiction Database, whose offerings from multiple countries include games, prose, and poetry in parser programs, hypertext, crossovers, and other formats, some entries mainly verbal but others extensively multimedia, each remediating different sources.[6] While all-verbal text programs may take on the paragraph layout of print stories, the IFDB offerings for 2021-22 alone also include a piece with Wiki pages for an apocryphal telecast program (Guest et al.), an imitation of a phone “texting adventure” (Willson), a chess game tale (Schultz), a cacotopia’s psychological support bot (Riemer), a space disaster game with NASA photographs (Sarikhani), and a source-cataloguing game with emails, newsgroup posts, diaries, a Wikipedia overview of a food program, and early computer monitor images, alongside a premise of translating reports enciphered in DNA (Chen). The pieces’ politics are equally varied, from less overtly political puzzle games to the omnipresent politics in Autumn Chen’s The Archivist and the Revolution, a title invoking both remediation and rebellion; the game opens in a tyrannical city marked by “transphobia” and poverty, the site of prior and possibly new “[u]prisings” and “[c]oup announcements.”
The gamut of intertexts in these field-opening interactive fictions—indeed, the fact that their innovation follows from their conflicting references to several previous media—fits well with recent remediation scholarship that cautions against studying a “revolutionary” medium only on its own, and reexamines what that adjective means in form or politics. Rather than focusing on “the revolution[ary]” nature of one technical breakthrough, as in Eisenstein’s targeted focus on “the printing press as an agent of change” in social and conceptual spheres, medievalist Jessica Brantley supports analyzing a “multiplicity of . . . media and their complex intermedial interactions” within a specific time (Brantley 201-03). In later contexts, Brian Reed in Nobody’s Business (2013) discusses “avant-garde” poetic “remediation” texts that question the myths and forms of a “digital revolution,” preferring instead “obsolescen[t]” media styles, many in print, to counter commercial electronic patterns and explore “aporias” in “existing institutions” (74, 26, 2-3, 48). Jessica Pressman in Digital Modernism (2014) similarly redefines “revolutionary” texts as ones that decline digital models of superficial “interactivity” in favor of an electronic reworking of modernist media to attack, from the inside, “technologies of global capitalism” (8, 7, 105, 9). While not discussing First Draft, she does mention “intentional dissonance” through “remediation” breaks, as when a Flash text frustrates audience surmises by imaging presswork sheets with weblink markers (107-08). Her approach utilizes Marshall McLuhan’s base work for remediation theory, media archeology, Hayles’s theory of “‘intermediation’” with “cyclical and recursive interactions,” and historical studies by Lisa Gitelman and Bonnie Mak of “overlapping and often mutually dependent usage of old and new technologies” (Pressman 28-55, 58-60, 158-62). Reed and Pressman both suggest political effects for remedial forms, but in terms of “bringing about revolutionary social transformation,” as Reed notes, a text’s political “critique of language and literary form in the context of class struggle” is different from fostering “a violent revolution” (xiii, 48).
A reluctance to theorize “newer media” solely as “revolutionary” shapes James O’Sullivan’s own arguments about “aporetic” digital literature, with its denotative “inconsistencies,” in his 2019 Towards a Digital Poetics (3-4, xvii, 99). Looking at how media as well as discrete e-texts “are consciously evolving and remediating,” he asserts, could reframe debates about the politics of medial forms, since “[t]echnology is inherently political, and thus simultaneously heralded as being as oppressive as it is liberating” (121, 16, 97). O’Sullivan lauds electronic literature for setting up more markers of “semantic intent” than print paratexts do, he agrees with Pressman that some digital styles might “perverse[ly]” remediate mass-sold programming, and he discusses two political pieces, one documenting public rallies (100-03, 53, 107). But he remains dubious about broader revolutionary claims for digital literature in either form or politics, reiterating that the “liberation” and “upheaval” in “the established order” advertised for “seductive” electronic texts are still circumscribed by the companies selling the ostensibly “revolutionary tools,” which are “embedded within systems designed to reinforce the status quo,” coaxing artists and their audience to accept those conditions (14, 12).
The Path to Revolution? First Draft’s Remediation Plots
First Draft’s own remediations skillfully play out the tension between the dream of a revolutionary medium and the pull of older forms at every level of structure and plot. The player’s independence in First Draft’s innovatory digital line-rewriting strategy is curtailed, as reviewers note,in ways that echo less flexible aspects of conventional stories on paper.[7] While the text may prompt us to “[r]ewrite” specific letter sentences (FDR 4) with preset substitutions, it is only to better “expose[]” the letter writers’ psychological traits, as Short says in her often-cited author notes, stating that we won’t derail those traits or the letters’ purposes, and that several of the verbal amendments “are required” in every lexia to get to the following page (“First Draft” sec. 4, 5). Nor does our input shift the story’s closing, in which First Draft differs from Short’s earlier interactive fiction Galatea (2000), which one dedicated researcher logs at 70 variant resolutions (Palop), some recasting not only the title character’s fate but her basic identity.[8]First Draft’s one endgame remediates the single closing of conventional paper narratives, and the end is “lightened,” as Short says, in its lack “of consequences for” the Ancien Régime (“First Draft” sec. 3). In this respect it is less provocative than the paper epistolary novel it resembles, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). Instead of Laclos’s exposé of French nobles’ turpitude leading to duels, deaths, and public ignominy, all the noble characters survive and thrive in First Draft, with the convent-educated ingénue just becoming more agile at out-maneuvering her new relations.[9] The aristocracy also seems to thwart the friar’s revolutionary menace—or this instance of it—easily by the end.
Rochelle K. Gold, who discusses First Draft in an excellent dissertation chapter on electronic correspondence literature by women, does see qualified rebellions within the plot, despite the forced or demarked line amendments, set ending, and need to replay to recover or modify a page draft after it’s rewritten (99, 90, 92-93). Noting “literacy” qua “magic” in this France as the basis of “political and social power” (94), she argues that the rewritings redefine literacy, undermining premises of a letter’s “truth-telling” or the “fixity of print” codex pages versus the “variations” of e-books (85, 88-89), while the eighteenth-century remediations subvert “progress” truisms that communication machinery is “always improving and that newer is usually better” or “equali[zing]” (86, 130, 215).[10] Yet her chief focus is less on the details of First Draft’s paper images per se than their digital allegory. The note seen by sender and recipient at nearly the same moment, she points out, is a metaphor for digital mail, and the characters’ anxieties about “magical literacy” suggest alarm about the modern “digital [literacy] divide” (94-96). If this world’s wizardry symbolizes programming aptitude, it also has “limits,” she argues, “joints and gaps,” shown in the emendations, “that characterize the entangled subjectivities and materialities of networked reading and writing,” as when spellcaster Henri feels “control . . . slipping away” in his frantic “‘translation’” of the friar’s phrases (98, 86-87, 96). Juliette, with no software-spells, still shows “agency,” Gold contends, though in a “highly constrained” form as she “strategically navigate[s]” the chauvinist media culture’s “censorship” and its drive to make subjects police themselves; so too the player can do “a reparative reworking of the text and of history” that valorizes “surprise” and “multiplicity” (92-93, 99, 95, 100, 98, 86). While Gold acknowledges that Juliette’s growth comes at the cost of any allyship with the poor, a plot point that she notes splits the audience’s allegiance, too, Gold sees the political “revolution,” like “the so-called digital revolution” to which it is linked here, being on its way nevertheless (97-100).[11] Even if First Draft’s magic pages anticipate future media, however, we need to explore more deeply the details of its conflicted remediations of paper texts. They remain the crux of the piece’s political satire, grounding its critique of the aristocracy but also creating doubt as to whether the Revolution is truly coming. If, as Nigel Hall contends in an essay on historical pens and stationery, “the materiality of writing,” its tools and effects, “is at its most visible when the technology doesn’t work” rather than when it goes seamlessly (84-85), then we might extend that scrutiny to the fissures in their remediated forms.
Handwritten
Noble Stationery
First Draft’s politicized remediation of the written letter starts with the social aesthetics of its represented paper. The noble stationery fits Johanna Drucker’s description of “auratic” texts that “generate a mystique, a sense of charged presence,” sometimes with “an effect of age—of magical and arcane references” or of the “precious” and “costly” (93-94). Possibly the paper’s linked aspect is always superadded by noble spellcasters, as when the friar makes his pupil “perform some magic on a page of writing” (FDR 14), and any paper could be so transmuted, but Daly’s images celebrate the stationery’s sumptuous veneer, in tints from cream to yellow-green and peach, with detailed, often floral patterns, each page style the cherished property of a single correspondent.[12] These images create the fiction of opulent goods whose “textured, deluxe presentation” only a “privileged” few can savor, as Short describes (“First Draft” sec. 2), with the floral designs symbolically naturalizing the owners’ wealth, leisure, and prestige. Refinement flaunts itself by contrast: Juliette “plans her letters on ordinary pages,” a reminder of her own “ordinary,” or lesser-ranking origins, “but when they are ready, she copies them on” the “enchanted” products (FDR 2). Shadows and position shifts suggest a three-dimensional heft; when we send a letter, it tucks into the holder’s slots like a treasured keepsake or a valuable document framed in a patron’s archive.
The word “enchanted” tries to elide the effort and workers behind such products. Magic obviates the labor of postal systems, although the sentence “No time is wasted on couriers” (FDR 2) still reminds us of the mail gatherers, assorters, letter tax handlers, and coach drivers overseen by the historical postal tax farms (Vaillé 75-78, 87). “Enchanted” elides, too, the arduous twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts in eighteenth-century “paper mills,” with employees from linen processors to sheet shapers, treaters, and checkers (Rosenband 214, 219) getting out the actual pages pre-magic. The past participial adjective also deflects the identity, time, and effort of the spellcaster, since Short has stated in the source text for another Lavori game that “[l]inking” objects takes “labor” (“Book 3”). Juliette says that “[Henri] chides me about the waste of linking paper” (FDR 10), but cost and “waste” are cloaked to outsiders by noble discourse; “like magic,” after all, denotes something done “with great ease” and “incredible rapidity” (“Magic,” def. 1.e). Even the less physically taxing chore of handwriting is covered up as the letter recipient watches dissociated language effects emerge on a page, the narrator granting instrumentality only to the texts: “The words form themselves on the matching sheaf in her husband’s study” or “Another letter writes itself,” Henri’s impression when he receives a correspondence from his sister (FDR 2, 5).[13]
But just as the friar denounces the nobles as “tricksters” (FDR 16), so too readers know that the spectacle of sumptuous material goods delivered effortlessly, that lie on which noble authority rests in this world, is magic as more prosaic “illusion” or “trickery” in these remediations (“Magic,” def. 3; 1.d). We aren’t able to finger the screen pages, test their thickness, or hold the designs up to the light.[14] Images and narrative also create conflicting accounts of the paper’s magical form that puncture its noble aura. Within an individual lexia, we edit and “[s]end” the same stationery recto, rather than see images of the two sets of paper the narrator mentions: the “ordinary” stock for brainstorming versus the magicked stationery for a finished letter (FDR 4, 2).[15] The commands to “Rewrite this,” “Erase,” “or write” (FDR 8), centered above a character’s interior monologue lines, do show up on images of smaller, plain note papers with a pin struck through them, but are still attached to the same stationery page. Secondly, the Mother Superior’s non-magicked stationery, dispatched “by a much slower conveyance” (FDR 19), looks visibly similar to the type of stationery the sorcerous nobles use, blurring the distinction between “legitimate noble” versus illegitimate users and media (FDR 8). Finally, while Lavori paper seemingly thwarts mail theft or interception, that familiar plot device in epistolary novels, the names for media magic already suggest covert anxiety over its superior dependability. “Link” and “correspondence” challenge the exactness of message transference; a correspondence is a “[r]elation of agreement, similarity, or analogy” (“Correspondence,” def. 2.a) rather than an identical copy, just as digital lexias and imaged papers remain imperfect analogues of one another in the text’s remediations.
Lines and Hands
Like the paper images, the text’s descriptions of written lines and writing tools create an aristocratic façade of social power, but with similar contradictions that subvert the nobles’ claims for their exclusive, occult status. Short explains: “the act and experience of writing is tied to aristocratic identity. These characters belong to a world in which literacy rates are not high, and their ability to write and communicate quickly is part of the magic-based luxury they enjoy in their lives” (“First Draft” sec. 2). First Draft’s narrative links the letters’ lines to the noble families’ bloodlines in combined images of writerly and sexual reproduction, again suggesting the extent to which the aristocrats spread fictions that naturalize and supernaturalize their purported superiority. For writing as inheritance, “Henri gets out a pen that belonged to his grandfather, and begins to write” (FDR 7), his magic inked lines and magic family line both reinforced by this handheld phallic heirloom, on a page with an equally suggestive phallic floral design.[16] God is the ultimate paternal line drafter, Juliette learns at the nunnery: “the Lavori magic was given,” in politicized terms, “to the leaders of men, by God” (FDR 9). Except, the smooth transference of neither written lines nor bloodlines is assured here. There is something wrong or inauthentic about the remediated letter lines from the beginning. The cover’s “A PARIS” (FDR 1) and other place or character names are the only French words (plus the Italian “Lavori d’Aracne” for the noble magic [23]) in the story; the rest is in English. The shift from one lingua franca to a new one is a reminder that words and social beliefs that seem shared, respected knowledge do not always stay that way. A mock-historical tract accompanying an earlier Short interactive fiction piece on Lavori magic, Savoir-Faire (2002), adds subtle political satire to the language shift, since we learn that the English, unlike the French or Italians, are unimpressed by noble sorcerers: “Of the Lavori in England, there is less Noise made. The English, being too stable of Sense and staid of Disposition . . . disdain to laud their Nobility of magickal means with the same Reverence” (4).
Apart from being in the wrong language, the First Draft letter lines seem easy to disrupt. After Henri’s angry, shifting construals of an enciphered letter sent by the friar, whom he thinks has seduced Juliette and therefore interrupted his bloodline, “‘fears’” of adultery also “‘corrupt’” his written lines’ hegemonic syntax and punctuation (FDR 16). The first draft of a letter line to Juliette, “I have to ask you what is the truth of your relationship to this friar, is it possible that he has already—” is a run-on and cut short at the same time (17). The second trial, “do you take him in place of me” (17), a distorted wedding vow, lacks any capitalization and punctuation, blurring the inception or confirmation of the family. And though Juliette is “‘faithful,’” Henri’s unrevised letter lines about bringing his own illegitimate son into the aristocracy disclose how much their bloodlines’ supposedly inherent powers are faltering: “Few legitimate noble sons now demonstrate so strong a manifestation of the gift” (12, 8). His sister adds chattily in another letter: “I believe I have discovered who is the father of the P— heir,” citing and undercutting that familial inheritance in the same breath, and she warns Henri that legitimate children can just as easily be “disown[ed]” and “disinherit[ed]” by aunts who dislike their marriage alliances (6), further narrowing the gap between lines of authorized and unauthorized magic media users. As the phrase “Lavori d’Aracne” suggests, moreover, the nobles’ mythical lineage, a title the letter lines use to impress inferiors (FDR 23, 8), is just as conflicted. “Lavori” itself means “labor[s]” or “work[s]” in Italian, which can signify acts from physical work to performances (“Lavoro,” def. 1-2, 8, 10). While monastics in a “mystic order of the Weaver” do approach Lavori magic lines worshipfully (FDR 20), the classical Arachne’s lineage and works are far from mystical. Here is Ovid’s portrait of Arachne the artisan, seen through the perspective of a goddess jealous of her ability:
. . . The girl was no one In birth, nor where she came from; her father, Idmon, Was a dyer, steeping thirsty wool with crimson. Her mother was dead, a common sort of person, With the same sort of husband, but the daughter Was famous for her skill . . . (129)
This is a curious choice of legend for the French nobles to adopt, undercutting the uniqueness of their gifted lines even as Minerva shares their contempt for “common” ancestry. Arachne’s trade gestures toward real workers prior to the Revolution, the “spinners, flax-combers,” and “weavers,” who, as Kathryn Norberg notes, were among “the most impoverished segments of Grenoble society” (179), and back to paper workers as well, since paper was made from old cloth like woven linen. Arachne’s weaving lines are also openly rebellious against the mighty, debasing the gods by limning scenes of their sexual misbehavior (Ovid 132-33). She should be a revolutionary inspiration, or at worst a counsel against social insubordination, given her spider sentence. How was she remediated as the aristocrats’ patron saint so thoroughly that Juliette is infuriated by a child fixing a peasant enclosure with Weaver sorcery (FDR 9)?
The cooptation of Arachne’s story reveals a larger tension between revolutionary critique and conservative motifs in the remediated lines. First Draft’s letter lines explore the contradictions between the nobles’ exquisite writing forms and regressive ideologies and the grievances of those whose work supports their lifestyle. The Mother Superior herself, presumably noble but not of Lavori status, can, in a revision prompt, describe an individual Lavori representative like Henri as less than “‘trustworthy’” (20), an adjective, interestingly, often applied to textual definitude.[17] She goes further with another line amendment, equal parts daring and qualified, that replaces a remark on the friar’s motivation as “jealousy of his betters” with “[i]n times of trouble we cannot always trust entirely to our leaders and authorities, which may be misguided” (20). Does she consider the mistrust itself “misguided” or rather the “leaders and authorities”? This advice ostensibly warns Juliette about the friar, but he is a lowly advisor; could she be questioning the Lavori nobles, the “betters,” as well? Yet at the same time they register dissent, First Draft’s remediated lines also suggest how readily possible revolutionaries or allies might “trust” in, and be coopted by, the premier aristocrats’ practices. Juliette may “self-silenc[e]” critique in her lines (Short and Daly, “Statement”), but she still relishes penning Henri a magic letter “daily” (FDR 2).[18] Her most independent, consequential act is one of remediation—impersonating the linguistic style and handwriting of Henri’s lines in a letter enticing his son to Paris near the story’s end, after which she speaks of the high aristocrats’ resources as “our strength” (22-24).
Even from the outset, Juliette’s care for her hands, the primary letter-writing tools, suggests her assimilation to the Lavori cause. Far from Paris, she displays her enhanced position by overbuying fancy Grenoble “gloves” (2) to protect them. Tellingly, the “Rewrite” preference and “Send” pointer for the noble letter lines is a perfectly white, unsullied hand emerging from a ruffled sleeve, the paleness denoting both the writer’s leisure and racialized markers of class status, in contrast to hints at the low-class friar’s swarthier features, “eyes that are almost black” and “black eyebrows” (4, 18). The gloves themselves have historical revolutionary significance. While Grenoble was noted for crafting upscale gloves, glove stitchers saw little of the vendors’ profits; they were “the single largest group of individuals exempted [from taxes] because of poverty in 1789” (Norberg 167, 187, 190). Henri’s grumbling about Juliette “enrich[ing] the merchants of Grenoble” (FDR 8) similarly ignores the workforce. In the run-up to the real Revolution, about a month before Juliette’s first letter, Grenoble saw a skirmish between laborers and royalist servicemen during the “Day of the Tiles” (Popkin, New World 95-96; Sgard), but Juliette’s lines don’t mention this, its absence further questioning a revolution’s likelihood here.
Printed
The medial conflict in First Draft’s letters that most openly raises questions about revolutionary history breaks out of one remediation into another one entirely. The narrative gives details about characters’ handwriting—“Mother Superior had learned letters in Alsace and her penmanship bore Germanic quirks” (19)—but the visual letter lines on the stationery pages don’t imitate that handwriting. Instead, they mainly simulate print typefaces. The remedial shift comes right past the frame words. The command “Send the Letter” is in Zapfino calligraphic font, and the narrator’s first few words and concluding “The End” are in Youngblood by Insigne, whose “swirly serifs suggested writers who were committed to beauty” (Daly, E-mail). However, instead of continuing these fonts or copying a cursive letter, as the end of Short’s Savoir-Faire feelie does, Daly picked Hoefler Text for the letter lines, a typeface-modeling font, which in Windows reverts to Times New Roman (E-mail), another type-based font. Even the signatures are typed. The uncertainty about the letters’ media status heightens the narrative clash between discretion and exhibition, opening up a supposed domestic correspondence.[19] But introducing print specifically in a fought-over correspondence medium that rebels wish to access makes it difficult not to interrogate possible links between revolutionary form and politics.
If print, as Brantley notes, was often seen as the ante-digital epitome of a medial “revolution” (202), Short chooses a historical context where that medium also seemed to aid in advancing a political revolution. Robert Darnton champions the unifying and transmutative work of print texts in the French Revolution: “Without the press, [the rebels] can conquer the Bastille, but they cannot overthrow the Old Regime. To seize power they must seize the word and spread it—by journals, almanacs, pamphlets, posters, pictures, song sheets, stationery, board games, ration cards, money, anything that will carry an impression and embed it in the minds of twenty-six million French people” (xiii). “The printing press,” Darnton concludes, “served as the main instrument in the creation of a new political culture” (xiv). Newspapers especially, a formula molded by letters (Earle 4; Bazerman 23), delineated and “g[a]ve legitimacy to the new lawmaking of the Revolution,” Jeremy Popkin contends in Revolutionary News (3-5), though he acknowledges that “[i]lliteracy and poverty” narrowed their client base (82).
Yet in First Draft’s alt-history, the use of print for and by the revolutionaries is another historical facet that’s elided. Granted, the story opens in 1788 when French newspapers were more monitored by the regime, but, as Popkin notes, “[i]n practice . . . the government had never succeeded in imposing complete control over the flow of news” (“Gazette de Leyde” 77).[20] First Draft’s characters might expect regime critique, if not in the monarchist press, then in newspapers composed in French from companies abroad (Popkin, Revolutionary News 20-21); “political pamphlet[s]”; or “the first truly revolutionary journal,” the Sentinelle du peuple (25-26). But these resources are never mentioned by the friar, and the hope for timely news in print seems wholly usurped in First Draft by the correspondence pages under the nobles’ proprietary use, the handwriting references in print format suggesting their hand in sending their own account of relevant news within their social circle.
The promise of swift news itself may be undercut here. After all, the framing print remediation that moves us from the diegetic stationery pages to our own reading act is not a newspaper but a book. Daly describes Hoefler as “a bookish font,” and she was interested in how “the affordances in the EPUB ebook standard” reshaped book metaphors, though the text is currently played on the Internet (E-mail). Short, too, depicts it as “more book-like than game-like” in her portfolio (“Games”), and while the inkle team post notes the fiction of “handwritten letters,” they reinforce print codex allusions with their choice of a framing book image with type on the cover page (see fig. 1). It is prefaced, in the Electronic Literature Collection, by an opening lexia where Daly expands the book frame with replicas of the cover edges (see fig. 2), suggesting a shelf of such volumes.
Fig. 1. Cover page of First Draft of the Revolution, © Emily Short and Liza Daly with visual design and production by inkle. Used by permission.
Fig. 2. Cover design of First Draft of the Revolution as a shelf of volumes as shown in the Electronic Literature Collection, © Emily Short and Liza Daly with visual design and production by inkle. Used by permission.
The showy, collectible book frames for prosperous buyers pull us far away from revolution. Blunting the exigency of the letters, First Draft’s print book icons assert a regally closed, finished text, with all the delay after portrayed scenes that a publication process implies, the blood of the Terror, if it occurs in this world, muted to the tasteful dull red of the inscribed leather. The inkle post foregrounds that remove, its shifting media references invoking “a book of letters that you might find open under glass in a museum” to “bring to mind the voices of the long-dead authors, their characters, personalities and concerns . . . that ghostly feeling.” Or perhaps First Draft’s simulated print lines create another kind of detachment, suggesting the text’s actual status as historical novel, buttressed by the note monologue lines that are both quoted and italicized, like a fusion of a novel’s typographic conventions for speech and thought, the print genre markers again diminishing the need for intervention. Daly’s book cover illustration of printing further heightens the tension between the conservative and the revolutionary. While not probing its origin directly, she selected the picture “because the individual elements conveyed craftspeople at work producing documents” (E-mail). The engraving shop illustration does crucially restore the work of text production that First Draft’s nobles downplay. But the image is taken from the “adresse de l’imprimeur Claude Lercullier,” engraver for the Cabinet des Estampes in the royal library, and the triple coats of arms featured are the king’s, with the fleurs-de-lys at the top, the ship signifying the city of Paris, and the cross design of the Abbé Bignon, the royal librarian (Courboin 160-62), evoking both the power of the ruler and religious sanction for that rule. Here is another tantalizing ambiguity. Is this monarchist imagery remediated seditiously in First Draft to introduce the earliest stages of the Revolution, or are revolutionary impulses coopted by the people the rebels want to depose?
Minimizing or questioning printing’s part in the French Revolution in these clashing, polysemic remediations anticipates O’Sullivan’s argument that it is not a medium itself that is “revolution[ary],” but rather that its divergent uses and impacts are better evaluated as they augment or contend with other formats (5, 16). The friar’s media takeover revolution fails, in part, because it lacks such dialogue. He wants to “kill every Magician,” but takes the same writing technology the “oppressors” do without détourning their usages or intermixing populist forms, and he often reproduces noble logic despite his cruder language (FDR 16). The letter he sends on magicked paper, like First Draft’s cover image, has a façade of royal and religious authorization, the lines cryptographically tied to “a psalm” by “King David,” and a contempt for those who “do not know their place” (15-16), simply flipping classism’s targets. His audience is equally unexpected. Though “he does not seem the kind to conspire with lords and counts” (14), his correspondent, Juliette speculates, is probably an aristocratic woman he has successfully enticed—“seductive and dangerous” are the Byronesque traits Juliette attributes to him (14, 24)—even as the story suggests he is the one seduced by noble forms. Juliette conjectures that the friar is another illegitimate son of an aristocrat, hinting that he “is angry” less at their regime than at being denied a “place” in its exchanges (9, 16). The upshot is disastrous; Juliette memorizes his letter from a “copy” (14), the word suggesting his social and medial mimicry, to send her husband. As patrician Henri, we can “‘[d]ecrypt’” the friar’s letter (16), but have no opportunity to amend it as the friar, underscoring the latter’s entrapment within noble communications. Never dignified with a name, the friar speaks only from reported dialogue and this letter, both remediated with unknown accuracy in Juliette’s writing.
The friar’s media prodigy tutee is assimilated even more quickly into aristocratic exchanges. Despite his revolutionary training, Juliette notes, “at other times he is an ordinary young man, pleased to be served his breakfast chocolate, and to be winked at by serving girls, and to have coin for gambling with. In the end I think these motives will pacify him” (26). Here, “ordinary” shifts from its earlier sense of media resources for those of lesser rank; the “ordinary” condition now is to take delight in “our” top aristocratic comforts, which others “serv[e]” up obligingly (26). First Draft’s remediations betray a pessimism about how much our media messages or politics truly evolve. “In the end,” Juliette writes (26), and First Draft’s own end page (27) gives another meaning to revolution, since in clicking beyond it we pivot back to the opening title page’s Ancien Régime coats of arms, our final remediating glance inviting us to play the same game route again.[21] First Draft’s gesture of return may itself be sardonic political commentary, a closer analogue to real history than it seems, evoking the French Revolution’s aftermath with the repressive Terror, and then Napoleons, new monarchs, and new revolutions before France’s final republic.[22]
First Draft makes us ask why we create specific politicized fictions of previous media. Is this pre-Terror letter remediation, genteel in tone despite its subject matter, or else enciphered, a respite from our own millennial traumas—economic inequities, a planet in crisis, the brutality of a war ostensibly waged on terror itself? Does First Draft, as Gold suggests (130), deconstruct the Enlightenment metanarrative, expressed in texts like Condorcet’s Progress of the Human Mind, of humans moving toward fresh discoveries and political disenthrallment?[23] Or does it address that metanarrative’s afterlife? What makes the discourse of revolution and magical technology so wrenching in this 2012 piece is perhaps less an e-mail analogue than the reminder of the social media forums and cell phone texts used in 2011 movements like the Arab Spring revolutions or the Occupy Wall Street protests in the United States. Even given subsequent questions over how transformative or curtailed the technology was for the movements, and our awareness, as O’Sullivan notes, of the companies behind the machinery and programs (14),[24] it is still frightening to see Short and Daly’s alt-history with its possible revolutionary forms so tightly locked down to service only noble ideology. That’s the catch. Any of the above interpretive possibilities might be part of First Draft’s remediations, but the one constant is that we always play as nobles. Short describes our own captivation by, and naturalization of, the “deluxe” writing tools she remediates: “It encourages [the reader] to identify and feel complicit with the aristocratic characters, and their natural desire to protect the advantages they have” (“First Draft” sec. 2). The text’s “aesthetic pleasure” (Short, “First Draft” sec. 2) echoes Montfort’s idea of interactive fiction’s “pleasure” (3), but is also hijacked as a warning. If First Draft’s narrative does not confirm an approaching revolution, it nevertheless insists that readers examine their roles in maintaining real-world political and economic exploitation, whether by demonizing would-be rebels as “villain[s]” (Short, “First Draft” sec. 3), trying to placate or coopt those injured by our choices (FDR 26), ignoring the conditions of workers and other disempowered communities, or simply consuming enjoyable products each day without examining their hidden costs.
Remediations for Interactive Fiction’s Future
First Draft’s political remediation strategies place it within a type of interactive fiction that Short describes as turning the genre’s participatory structure into a measure of conscience, “confronting the player with a situation in which a morally dubious action is necessary to make narrative progress” to see if they would “be complicit” in the supposed “progress” (“Interactive” 291). Aaron Reed’s 2011 text maybe make some change, which Short cites as an exemplary “complicity” fiction (“Interactive” 291), has some nightmarish analogues to First Draft’s subtler language games and remediations. Here, too, are unexpected definitions of “ordinary people”—but the context is grimmer; they are U.S. troops in court for the “killings of Afghan civilians,” referencing army crimes in Maywand in 2010 (Reed, “Statement”). While the project remediates news features, combat videogames, and soldiers’ declarations, the main text’s font in the browser edition chiefly mimics handwriting, here as a signifier of “confess[ion]” and “accus[ation]” (Reed, “Notes”; “Statement”), revising its pronoun from “you” to “any one of you,” “he,” and “we,” before a final typed “i,” to implicate the shooters as well as a national culture that inculcates violence (maybe). The remediations visually reinforce the game’s charge that we do not easily escape past training: “you will only do what you know how to do and you only know how to shoot” (Reed, maybe), as our keyboarding hands double with the shooting hands.[25] Attempting to write other commands—“calm,” “hug,” “warn”—when they appear later often spurs a team member’s objections or the rejoinder that this choice is falsifying history: “that’s not what these reports say” (Reed, maybe). The hesitant, lowercase, less-than-revolutionary title, further ironized when we find out that the words express a sentenced soldier’s original desire to help in Afghanistan (Reed, maybe), recalls First Draft’s ambivalence about whether individuals and communities can reverse course.
Mark Marino’s 2012 Living Will is equally trenchant, using remediations and verbal/family lines to depict “the long shadow of colonialism” that its players “profited from” (“Author Statement”; Clause III). Advertised as a modern entrepreneur’s “telematic testament,” it also represents itself as a “paper” composed with Thackeray-style mockery, the remediations pulling us into a history of Congolese oppression from “King Leo[’s]” Force Publique to recent pacts with warlords for mining cellular phone materials, a reminder that “[y]ou hold in your hands” oppression’s payoffs in machines more tangible than the ersatz paper (Clause I, “Preramble,” Clause III, opening page).[26] We enter as the mine’s corporate “heir” (opening page) with little hope of revamping its practices, simply settling if the proprietor survives or someone else—often us—takes over. The patriarch’s garbled remediations—“I lift pen to lips, pen to tongue, pen to parchment”—suggest his justification that profiteering and human rights crimes span media history, even as his initials, “E R,” condemn that erring attempt at exculpation (“Preramble,” opening page).
micha cárdenas redirects player politics in Redshift and Portalmetal (2014), arguing that remediations can be a “Spell for Decolonial Time Travel” (“Intra-Retinal Texting”), opposing imperialist and cisgender biases in canonical historiography. The “portalmetal” assisting “travels” to planets despite policed barriers in her speculative cosmos is remediated cultural ornaments: “We have found the power in these / necklaces, bangles, hoops, nose rings, / that connects us to our ancestors, / our communities” (“Finding: Portalmetal”). The video images of “these” decorations in curves and iridescent wreaths like calligraphy swirls, shown off proudly by the character Roja, signify another type of communicative “power,” reinscribing histories of emigrants, Indigenous populations, and trans collectives after “diaspora” (“Redshift and Portalmetal,” “Living on the Ice Planet”). cárdenas’s eco-fable about fleeing a polluted Earth gives a wry turn to the idea of drafting revolution, implying that we will devise a “new home” world (“Back Home”) less from revolutionary striving than because we have made our first one unlivable. Remediating current site videos for the fantasized planets, natural spaces described as fouled with toxins (“Desert: Damaged Environment”) or long corridors of industrial smoke, scaffolding, and street lights by the terrorizing “border checkpoint[s]” (“Stopped by the Border Patrol,” “Dreaming of Running”), emphasizes the exigency of using other bequeathed narratives and protocols than the ones devastating the world now (“Statement”).[27]
The next wave of remediation-focused interactive fiction may continue to challenge official media or celebrate marginalized ones. They may give readers more rewriting options for remediated genres as interactive fiction adapts AI, emulating a game like AI Dungeon, where the player can not only type instructions but also rewrite the program’s responses to pivot the plotline, or “Custom” develop a new narrative universe (Walton).[28] Other interactive fiction may follow First Draft’s friar in inciting players “to break the bonds of magic” (24), taking apart the linked media in a composition to examine the politics of aporias within each remediation. Kentucky Route Zero (2013-2020) lines up that analysis, its narrative well-noted for remediations of antiquated equipment, symbolically “starved for power” or parts to represent the characters’ entrapment in dying jobs and losing battles against monopolies, becoming “ghosts in the static” of a message of national growth (Act I).[29] At the same time, more players, too, “learn the art of the magicians” (FDR 23), writing their own interactive fictions of rebuilding or preserving through remediations. While expanding the dungeons of interactive formats may not lead to the liberation of a real Bastille, these remediation texts can make us better readers of our media histories and their political backgrounds, help explore the rhetoric of protest movements, or test out new audiences for old subversion strategies. First Draft’s own remedial surfaces, I have argued, succeed in undermining noble messaging where the friar failed; the incongruously linked forms project a different account, and accounting, of media “heritage” (FDR 20), yoking together the struggles of disparate historical workers, the demands and misconceptions of users, and the cost of production techniques and the ideologies that supported them. New artists investigating “[h]ow to create” their own aporetic remediation narratives “and the value of doing so” (FDR 24) will be indebted to Short and Daly’s production.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to my stellar research assistant, Mary Elizabeth Smith, for tracking the Youngblood font and Lercullier’s adresse.
Footnotes
[1] Quotations and image reproductions, used with permission from Emily Short, Liza Daly, and inkle, are taken from the online edition of First Draft of the Revolution in the Electronic Literature Collection’s third volume, Windows format, cited as FDR. Punctuation and italics are reproduced from that format.
[2] Juliette’s convent instruction suggests noble lineage, but she is below Henri’s Lavori tier. Deirdra Kiai, too, notes that the nuns have not furnished Juliette with the “social graces” demanded by Henri’s “privileged” peers.
[3] Eisenstein herself, in “On Revolution and the Printed Word,” apposes the medial and civic denotations of revolution, examining “possible connections between the advent of printing and those political upheavals” in the English, American, and French Revolutions (190).
[4] Bolter and Grusin define “hypermediacy” as “[a] style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium,” stressing “‘fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity’” as they quote William J. Mitchell, in contrast to “immediacy,” where audiences are “immersed” in a text, with its “information made visible and almost tangible,” while “the interface” seems “transparent” (272, 29-31).
[5] Andrew Plotkin adapts Montfort’s parameters, especially the “immersion” in the constructed “world,” from “‘text adventures’” to “‘graphical adventures’” like Myst as well, correlating the assorted effects of mouse taps with keyboarded “verbs” (62-65).
[6] Many IFDB works are in English, from various countries, but some are in Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, and other languages. The Electronic Literature Collection similarly includes a growing number of works by international authors in multiple languages across its volumes. In terms of the multimedia nature of certain interactive fiction, see Short (“Interactive” 291); Hayles (sec. 2); and the annual XYZZY award, since 2014, for “Best Use of Multimedia” in the genre.
[7] Aaron Reed praises First Draft’s possible adaptations of the letters’ “tone,” demonstrativity, “phrasing,” and degree of news, while echoing Short’s description of how the plot and tempo are not amendable, or, he adds, letters after the initial rewriting (“What I’m Playing”); see, too, similar assessments by Porpentine and by Nick Keirle, who ties the textual “limitations” to Juliette’s suppression by Henri’s family. Jenna Ng also concedes an “illusion of choice” within the “offered options,” compulsory or not, the incommutable sent letters, the preset plot, and the inability to play as the friar to rework his phrases (178-80, 184-85). More broadly, as she and others note, the “‘[i]nteractivity’” of interactive literature has long been debated (Ng 179). O’Sullivan contends that “no medium can transcend fixity,” since the creator still “dictate[s] the architectural path” (81), and an electronic milieu is a delimited “technical, cultural, and literary space” (120). He praises Mark Marino’s a show of hands for circumscribing player options so as to guarantee “narrative coherence” (O’Sullivan 108-09). Bolter imagines presswork advocates contending that when hyperfiction “authors prescribe links, they deny the reader the choice of making her own associations, so that a printed novel or essay actually gives the reader greater freedom to interact with the ideas presented” (43). Hayles cites Espen Aarseth’s assessment, too, that hyperfiction confines selection more than paper volumes do (Hayles sec. 3). Lynda Clark, after redefining interactive fiction as “any story in which the reader alters the course of, or is left with the impression of having altered the course of, the story through their interaction,” uses the familiar trope from the Lavori world of a “magic trick” or an “illusion” with studied “‘showing and concealing’” to talk about interactive fiction’s semblance “of agency,” which is debunked in First Draft, she notes, through repeat play that betrays the one finale and compulsory emendations (55-59). Short explains that certain interactive texts “sharply constrain player agency . . . to make that constraint an important part of the message” (“Interactive” 290).
[8] Montfort states that Galatea’s identity switches “reveal different, even contradictory assumptions that the IF world was founded upon” (219).
[9] Anthony Hope, referencing a movie adaptation of Laclos’s novel, likens the Marquise de Merteuil to Henri’s sister. I would add, in keeping with First Draft’s more lenient tenor, that Alise does not get to devastate other characters as Merteuil does. See, too, in Joanita Baú de Oliveira’s dissertation on “interactivity” and characterization in presswork and digital letter fiction (7), comparisons between First Draft and Liaisons, Juliette and Cécile (113, 210-12, 230, 223-24).
[10] Ng, too, states that the idea of “fixed or stable messages” is undercut by First Draft’s amendment stages (183), and see Agnieszka Przybyszewska on its pre-amended lines (69).
[11] Gold agrees with Bolter and Grusin, whose ideas of “‘immediacy’” and “‘hypermediation’” she mentions in the context of parser interactive fiction, in regarding with some skepticism the thesis that forums such as “social media can revolutionize or democratize hyperindustrial society” (Gold 105, 5).
[12] For the “distinctive stationery,” Daly writes, “I loosely tried to match the paper textures and watermark designs with how the characters made me feel” (E-mail).
[13] Downplayed work may refer to First Draft’s composition as well. Martin Paul Eve sees the tendency to elide the price of work put into digital texts as an outgrowth of “commodity fetishism” (386-87). Eve states that although there is no fee for running First Draft and “the source code . . . is openly licensed,” the story’s paratexts recall the effort of Short’s composing and Daly’s and inkle’s programming and visual layout (387). Darren Wershler(-Henry) discusses strategies for compensating writers’ work when a press posts digital formats of its paper texts, and the needed work of advocacy and publicizing (100-02). Rieke Jordan analyzes the user’s “curatorial labor” as “she selects text options and sifts through databases” in an electronic game (xiii-xiv), and Gold examines how a piece such as Digital plays up “the mechanical labor of correspondence” (106), though she does not analyze ignored authorial or diegetic work in First Draft. Ng argues, too, that First Draft’s stress on the “laboriousness” of composition or text “decryption” complicates the story’s “‘magic’ of instantaneous transmission,” which she sees as a reference to the apparent ease of tapping through “hyperlink[ed] . . . webpages” (182-83, 185-87). She observes that it “take[s] time to refresh the webpage for the next letter draft” in First Draft, mentions the length of regular 1780s postal transport “by foot, horseback, or stagecoach,” and notes the methods and sparsity of enspelled sheets in-story and the “anachronism” with “elaborately embellished pages” of stationery in a digital text, though more to suggest the persistence of “time and distance” within “the ghost[ly]” epistolary style (184-86). In contrast, see Daniel Punday on the piece’s “aesthetics” of “waiting” troped as “idleness,” deepened by the letter story’s generic “urgency” dilemma of telling addressees about “suspenseful events . . . in the past” (87-88).
[14] See Daly’s comments on early criticism about “what you can’t do” using e-texts, a result, she states, of misinterpreting them as “mere simulacra of” paper forms (“What We Can Do with ‘Books’” 35-36). First Draft remediates that misinterpretation with its disjunctive paper simulations. Przybyszewska discusses the loss of palpability in a different “digital remediation,” but also finds gradations of that loss in some paper epistolary remediations, while others foreground “sensualnej” [sensual] characteristics and affective “‘wysilku’” [effort] (60, 64-68).
[15] Timothy Wilcox also notes the discrepancy between the antique “medium simulated” of “drafts” before “a finalized version” and the rewrites “on one fixed page,” which he describes as operating more like “a word processor” screen, an instrument Punday cites too (88).
[16] Carolyn Steedman, analyzing “sexuality and textuality” in letter writing, sometimes with “an erotics of class,” remarks that “Gilbert and Gubar famously asked whether the pen was a penis” (122-26). See, too, their research on the conceit of the litterateur who “‘fathers’ his text just as God fathered the world,” the “‘gift’” touted despite “paternity[’s]” unpredictability (Gilbert and Gubar 3-5).
[17] “[I]nformation believed to be accurate,” Adrian Johns states, is part of the fashioned premise that contemporary books are “trustworthy” (1, 34).
[18] Barbara Maria Zaczek describes a progression in eighteenth-century epistolary literature from kinspersons overseeing women’s letters to characters learning to compose “with caution” on their own (16-17). Juliette’s circumspect monogamy, too, may offer a different spin on her English letter lines. If, as Nicola Watson argues, English authors after 1789 correlated epistolary fiction’s “seduction” storylines of “marital infidelity” with “French liberty,” an “excessive,” “revolutionary sensibility” that was “gendered female” (8-9), does Juliette’s constancy indicate the Revolution’s prevention in this world?
[19] Ng observes “conflicts between the private and the public” in the early letter lines versus the “self-censorship” of the last stage, “polished and smoothed over as if—indeed—for public display,” noting briefly Henri’s issued note about the friar as an exception that remains “draft-like” (175, 177, 181, 183); Oliveira also observes his fractured or choppy lines there, as well as Juliette’s adoption of Henri’s previous public mode (211). Joe Bray’s monograph on epistolary fiction, some with revolutionary staging, ties letters to Habermas’s “‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres,” citing Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook on novels’ depicted “‘personal letters’” being “‘brought into the public sphere’” by “‘the printing press, the post office, the periodical’” (Bray 41-43). Cook’s book adds that this overlap “of private and public,” enacted via alternating references to “script and print,” is “[t]he indispensable fiction of the letter-narrative . . . that behind the volume you are reading, almost visible through the bars of print on the page, are the original, personal documents from which the printed text has been impersonally, typographically transcribed: handwritten letters, bearing traces of the body that produced them” (12, 2). Oliveira mentions this ruse as well in discussing epistolary fiction “remidiação” [remediation] (25, 27, 37).
[20] Keirle compares First Draft with another 2012 revolt game, The Republia Times, that remediates print newspapers; we play “a newspaper editor serving an autocratic and potentially violent, unstable political power.” But in line with Popkin’s history, there are chances to “Place negative articles!” (Pope) about the dictatorship’s flaws.
[21] Pressman finds a comparable play on “‘revolution’” in Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, a “returning” that “simultaneously suggests circularity and wholeness” as much as “rebellion and change,” where “we read” the book “by rereading” (159, 161). See, too, Eisenstein (Printing Revolution 333).
[22] Short looked at Delphine for “period research” while creating First Draft; Germaine de Staël’s letter novel, though describing revolutionary France, as Short notes (“First Draft” sec. 3), also speaks to her contemporary society under Napoleon’s dictates.
[23] Condorcet heralds “[t]he progress of the sciences” and “the multiplication of printing presses” as furthering “liberty” and “equality” within and beyond states (360, 308, 323, 317).
[24] Philip N. Howard et al. argue that “social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring,” disseminating “democratic ideas across international borders” (2-3). In contrast, Evgeny Morozov describes social media as “playing an important mobilization role” in Tunisia or Egypt largely since other “favorable political, social, and cultural factors” were in place previously, and points out that “Western firms” stock “the most heinous regimes” with “surveillance and censorship technology” (324-25).
[25] “There’s something about typing out each of the commands that cements complicity,” Short writes in a review (“‘maybe make some change’”). Sam Kabo Ashwell comments on the text’s strictures: “Most actions are invalid, either denied by the narrators or self-censored by the protagonist,” remarking that one participant in a prior form of the game “stop[ped] playing, refusing to enter the commands,” to which Reed replied: “‘That’s a totally legitimate response.’”
[26] Stuart Moulthrop, who discusses the game’s “aesthetic opposition,” describes coltan as “a notorious signature of rapacious globalism in which the digital world is deeply implicated” (448). See, too, Short, on the audience’s “real-world” product “complicity” and one character’s inability to thwart the founder or reject “benefit[s],” despite “crises of conscience” (“Living Will”).
[27] For Roopika Risam, the text has readers “envision new sets of practices that resist settler colonialism”; it also fits the prioritizing of “local context” and “digital cultural heritage” via “practices of Indigenous communities” (81-83). Finley Coyl, too, notes the game’s “future” vistas retrieving “memories” of communal emigration to “‘hack[]’” imperialist barriers or plotlines that might “repeat or relive injustices of history” (23). cárdenas details the piece’s “acts of shifting”—including donning ornaments in the e-text and performed renditions—as “trans of color” and “culture of family” preservation measures (Poetic Operations 121-22, 113-15). Thea Pitman underlines the ornaments’ “‘stitching’ together distributed communities of care” across lifespans and persecuted populations in the game’s calls to “allyship” against “the route of colonizations past” (14-15).
[28] That does not mean complete freedom in playing/authoring. As Tom Simonite observes, the program’s responses draw from a set lexicon of network subject matter.
[29] Jae Sharpe reads game descriptions of “‘broken’” and “‘discarded electronics’” as “stand-ins for the problems of structural decay in Appalachian communities” and a rebuke to uncritical “beliefs in technology as redemptive and democratizing” (146, 141, 155). Aubrey Anable follows the piece’s “remediat[ions]” of cybernetics, games, and appliances, where “broken” equipment and “humor” show “the limitations of computational systems” and game research’s sexism (31, 16, 27, 29). For Jordan, the game’s “broken computers and slow machines” invoke not only the despondent subjects but also “societal and medial instability” (127, 131, 135), causing programs, economies, and toiling “bodies” to be more “visible” (138, 148) in a critique “of technological progress,” while “remediation processes” generate “something new” from mechanical wreckage (140, 135, 141).
Works Cited
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