Cardplay, a New Textual Instrument
David Durand
dgd@acm.org
Brown University
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
nwf@brown.edu
Introduction: What is textual play?
We are exploring what it means to play textual literature.
We don't mean, by this, playing games that incorporate textual
material within their structure ߞ but rather textual and
literary structures for which play is a primary means of interaction. We are
conducting our exploration both as creators and scholars of
digital media. This paper discusses a number of related issues —
including the notion of "instrumental texts" discussed by
electronic literature authors, the critical games proposed by
Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker, and what Markku Eskelinen has
characterized as the challenge of ludology (the study of games)
to traditional literary study. This discussion then becomes the
background for describing a system we are building — Cardplay —
its design goals, our authoring work within it, and its
relationship to prior work in the hypertext and artificial
intelligence communities.
Texts and instruments
In the electronic writing community there has been increasing talk, in
the last few of years, about the idea of instrumental texts
(Cayley, Moulthrop, Wardrip-Fruin). An instrumental text is meant to be
played, and provides affordances for such play, much as folk musical
instruments do (as the frets on a guitar invite the production of the notes of
the scale). Such texts can and should provide opportunities for practice and reward
mastery. What is practiced and mastered — again, the analogy is drawn with
musical instruments — is often presented as a physical discipline.
Instrumental texts also show close resemblances to computer
games in these ways. Given that most works presented as examples of
instrumental texts always use the same material for their play (always, so
to speak, play the same tune) the analogy with games may be the more
accurate of the two. However, the type of engagement that authors hope to
produce with instrumental texts may be more musical than game-like.
A textual instrument, on the other hand, is a tool for
textual performance which may be used to play a variety of
compositions. In this sense it is evocative of Thalia Field's
figure of the "language piano" — something that one learns to
play, and which may produce a much wider variety of texts than is
the case for those projects normally discussed as instrumental
texts. However, a textual instrument need not be like a prepared
piano. The direct selection of text, rather than the manipulation
of a non-linguistic device, can be its interface. And the
relationship between a textual instrument's interface affordances
and the possible textual outcomes need not be one-to-one at all
levels (as it is with a piano's keys, though they may be
played in many combinations). Gaining an intuitive understanding of how a
textual instrument will react for a given composition is part of learning to play
that piece. Compositions, here, consist of a body of text (and/or a means of acquiring
text) and a set of tunings for the instrument(s) used, where a tuning
is a particular configuration of the interaction mechanisms and settings for the procedures
(along with any instructions on how these change over time).
We have previously built two
[Note 1: ]
textual
instruments — one, for performing local pre-parsed texts (and for which
currently there is one composition, Regime Change), the other for playing
live network RSS feeds of current news. Both of these operate
using the logic of n-gram statistical models of text (first used in textual
play by Claude Shannon) and exhibited strengths and weaknesses that might be
expected from such a purely statistical approach. An intuitive understanding
of how to get good results from both works is possible, however, despite
the fact that there is no pre-set goal to the interaction. Because of the
aleatoric nature of the automatic processes in both works, and the size and
opaqueness of a statistical model of even a short text, these instruments
are easy to compose for, but relatively resistant to precise control, by
author or reader. Cardplay, on the other hand, is designed to operate more
directly out of human authorship (of texts and rules), with interaction
techniques and infrastructural motifs more typical of hypertexts
or rule-based artificial intelligence systems. The aim is a blend of these
parallel (non-intersecting) but closely related sets of techniques.
Playing with games
Interest in games has a long history within the literary
community. The work of the Oulipo, for example, could be seen as
a relatively recent entry in a series of authoring games
stretching back through literary history. (Amusingly, the Oulipo
have referred to those employing difficult authoring constraints
before them as "anticipatory plagiarists" — and characterized
themselves as rats who design the mazes from which they propose
to escape.) Critical interpretation has also been characterized
as a game. Warren Motte has done important work on playtexts.
However there has been little attention to games in a more formal
sense — games involving rules, moves, and outcomes. Perhaps this
is because few literal games have, before the last couple of decades,
contained much of literary interest.
Now this is changing, and rapidly. Critics from literary
backgrounds are among the most active in the formation of the
rising field of game studies (or ludology). Meanwhile, other
critics have proposed means by which the metaphorical game of
literary interpretation can be literalized — via the
introduction of rules, moves, and outcomes into public acts of
interpretation carried out in a computational media
environment.
Among those from a literary background who are now helping
create the field of game studies, we will primarily focus on
Markku Eskelinen's recent work. While we might also fruitfully
consider the work of Espen Aarseth, Lisbeth Klastrup, Susana
Tosca, and Torill Mortensen, it is Eskelinen who has most clearly
brought concepts from ludology into contact with the notions of
"instrumental text" and "textual instrument" . He
points out the importance of overcoming the "fear of variety" in
order to understand instruments fashioned precisely so that each
reading is different. We must find methods of reading not only
textual outcomes (which vary) but the systems that produce them
(which remain consistent).
In another sense, the creation of systems for playing literature — but
for critical purposes, rather than artistic ones — has been a focus of the
Speculative Computing Laboratory at the University of Virginia. Best known
of these projects is The Ivanhoe Game first proposed by Jerome McGann and
Johanna Drucker. Here some types of literary interpretation are formalized
in a manner that would be recognizable to ludologists, even if they do not
fully satisfy all formal definitions of the term game.
Playing cards for drama
In Cardplay, we are trying to create a textual instrument whose center of
gravity is clearly literary, focused on the creation of a work, a play, that
is in some senses conventionally literary, and yet to make the process of
playing the work simultaneously be the the process of playing a game
in the most literal sense. In Cardplay,
players manipulate virtual cards (each associated with text that is not
fully visible to the players), in an attempt to win the card game (Solitaire
is also possible). However,
a successful play wins points when the card played
interacts with other cards played to advance the creation of the script of a
play, whose transcript accumulates and may be saved. Copyright in
the result may be automatically granted to the winner of the game, by the
program, on the successful completion of the game. Players of the game are
thus in competition with each other to advance the story. Unlike many
interactive fictions, however, neither player is identified with a character
in the ongoing story, nor is the plot of the story necessarily determinative
of victory in the game.
Significant aspects of Cardplay are inspired by the description of Mark
Bernstein's systems Thespis and Card Shark.
In Berstein's Card Shark, players
create texts by playing cards each containing a fragment of narrative. Each
card may have some named properties, which are active once the card is
played. Cards may also have preconditions which must match the properties of
active cards. Thespis extended this notion to a self-composing drama system
in which a number of artificial agents try to play their own cards, with a
similar condition system.
In neither of Bernstein's systems was the notion of a game used. In
Thespis, a number of standard AI techniques (Blackboard systems, Agents) are
used in a minimal way to create a reading experience. Cardplay cards can be
divided into two types: Fundamental cards, which respresent aspects of events,
characters, places; and Master cards, which create textual content in the
transcript. There is no procedural aspect to Cardplay cards, unlike
Bernstein's Thespis agents, and the conditions by which cards are matched
are more complex than those in Card Shark. A Cardplay card is more like a
logical rule in an AI system, which has variables that it can match in the
cards on deck, and results that it presents, to which other cards can
match. When played, a Master card, and the cards that it has matched with,
are all removed, and the transcript is augmented with the results.
We believe that the methods of symbolic AI provide a fertile area for
exploration in the creation of literary systems and games. The thorny AI
issues of how the knowledge in such systems is grounded are irrelevant to the creation of the
experience of irreal worlds, which by definition are not so grounded. As
authors, we find what has come to seem the naivete of early AI methods quite attractive,
because it means that the resulting systems
are relatively easy to understand and control. Finally, we find it
interesting that in our system the reader will play a game whose issue will
provide a soul for the machine that is our text.
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