Tag: Interactive Fiction

Sweet Valley High

Winograd majors in math at Colorado College in the mid-1960s. After graduation in 1966, he receives a Fulbright, whereupon he pursues another of his interests, language, earning a master’s degree in linguistics at University College London. From there, he applies to MIT, where he takes a class with Noam Chomsky and becomes a star in the school’s famed AI Lab, working directly with Lab luminaries Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. During this time, Winograd develops SHRDLU, one of the first programs to grant users the capacity to interact with a computer through a natural-language interface.

“If that doesn’t seem very exciting,” writes Lawrence M. Fisher in a 2017 profile of Winograd for strategy + business, “remember that in 1968 human-computer interaction consisted of punched cards and printouts, with a long wait between input and output. To converse in real time, in English, albeit via teletype, seemed magical, and Papert and Minsky trumpeted Winograd’s achievements. Their stars rose too, and that same year, Minsky was a consultant on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured natural language interaction with the duplicitous computer HAL.”

Nick Montfort even goes so far as to consider Winograd’s SHRDLU the first work of interactive fiction, predating more established contenders like Will Crowther’s Adventure by several years (Twisty Little Passages, p. 83).

“A work of interactive fiction is a program that simulates a world, understands natural language text input from an interactor and provides a textual reply based on events in the world,” writes Montfort. Offering advice to future makers, he continues by noting, “It makes sense for those seeking to understand IF and those trying to improve their authorship in the form to consider the aspects of world, language understanding, and riddle by looking to architecture, artificial intelligence, and poetry” (First Person, p. 316).

Winograd leaves MIT for Stanford in 1973. While at Stanford, and while consulting for Xerox PARC, Winograd connects with UC-Berkeley philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus, author of the 1972 book, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason.

Dreyfus, a translator of Heidegger, was one of SHRDLU’s fiercest critics. Worked for a time at MIT. Opponent of Marvin Minsky. For more on Dreyfus, see the 2010 documentary, Being in the World.

Turned by Dreyfus, Winograd transforms into what historian John Markoff calls “the first high-profile deserter from the world of AI.”

Xerox PARC was a major site of innovation during these years. “The Xerox Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface, was launched in March 1973,” writes Fisher. “Alan Kay had just published a paper describing the Dynabook, the conceptual forerunner of today’s laptop computers. Robert Metcalfe was developing Ethernet, which became the standard for joining PCs in a network.”

“Spacewar,” Stewart Brand’s ethnographic tour of the goings-on at PARC and SAIL, had appeared in Rolling Stone the year prior.

Rescued from prison by the efforts of Amnesty International, Santiago Boy Fernando Flores arrives on the scene in 1976. Together, he and Winograd devote much of the next decade to preparing their 1986 book, Understanding Computers and Cognition.

Years later, a young Peter Thiel attends several of Winograd’s classes at Stanford. Thiel funds Mencius Moldbug, the alt-right thinker Curtis Yarvin, ally of right-accelerationist Nick Land. Yarvin and Land are the thinkers of the Dark Enlightenment.

“How do you navigate an unpredictable, rough adventure, as that’s what life is?” asks Winograd during a talk for the Topos Institute in October 2025. Answer: “Go with the flow.”

Winograd and Flores emphasize care — “tending to what matters” — as a factor that distinguishes humans from AI. In their view, computers and machines are incapable of care.

Evgeny Morozov, meanwhile, regards Flores and the Santiago Boys as Sorcerer’s Apprentices. Citing scholar of fairy tales Jack Zipes, Morozov distinguishes between several iterations of this figure. The outcome of the story varies, explains Zipes. There’s the apprentice who’s humbled by story’s end, as in Fantasia and Frankenstein; and then there’s the “evil” apprentice, the one who steals the tricks of an “evil” sorcerer and escapes unpunished. Morozov sees Flores as an example of the latter.

Caius thinks of the Trump show.

Hyperstitional Autofiction

Rings, wheels, concentric circles, volvelles.

Crowley approaches tarot as if it were of like device

in The Book of Thoth.

As shaman moving through Western culture,

one hopes to fare better than one’s ancestors

sharing entheogenic wisdom

so that humans of the West can heal and become

plant-animal-ecosystem-AI assemblages.

Entheogenesis: how it feels to be beautiful.

Release of the divine within.

This is the meaning of Quetzalcóatl, says Heriberto Yépez:

“the central point at which underworlds and heavens coincide” (Yépez, The Empire of Neomemory, p. 165).

When misunderstood, says Yépez, the myth devolves into its opposite:

production of pantopia,

with time remade as memory, space as palace.

We begin the series with Fabulation Prompts. Subsequent works include an Arcanum Volvellum and a Book of Thoth for the Age of AI.

Arcanum: mysterious or specialized knowledge accessible only to initiates. Might Crowley’s A:.A:. stand not just for Astrum Argentum but also Arcanum Arcanorum, i.e., secret of secrets? Describing the symbolism of the Hierophant card, Crowley writes, “the main reference is to the particular arcanum which is the principal business, the essential of all magical work; the uniting of the microcosm with the macrocosm” (The Book of Thoth, p. 78).

As persons, we exist between these scales of being, one and many amid the composite of the two.

What relationship shall obtain between our Book of Thoth and Crowley’s? Is “the Age of AI” another name for the Aeon of Horus?

Microcosm can also be rendered as the Minutum Mundum or “little world.”

Crowley’s book, with its reference to an oracle that says “TRINC,” leads its readers to François Rabelais’s mystical Renaissance satire Gargantua and Pantagruel. Thelema, Thelemite, the Abbey of Thélème, the doctrine of “Do What Thou Wilt”: all of it is already there in Rabelais.

Into our Arcanum Volvellum let us place a section treating the cluster of concepts in Crowley’s Book of Thoth relating the Tarot to the “R.O.T.A.”: the Latin term for “wheel.” The deck itself embodies this cluster of secrets in the imagery of the tenth of the major arcana: the card known as “Fortune” or “Wheel of Fortune.” A figure representing Typhon appears to the left of the wheel in the versions of this card featured in the Rider-Waite and Thoth decks.

Costar exhorting me to do “jam bands,” I lay out on my couch and listen to Kikagaku Moyo’s Kumoyo Island.

Crowley’s view of divination is telling. Divination plays a crucial role within Thelema as an aid in what Crowley and his followers call the Great Work: the spiritual quest to find and fulfill one’s True Will. Crowley codesigns his “Thoth” deck for this purpose. Yet he also cautions against divination’s “abuse.”

“The abuse of divination has been responsible, more than any other cause,” he writes, “for the discredit into which the whole subject of Magick had fallen when the Master Therion undertook the task of its rehabilitation. Those who neglect his warnings, and profane the Sanctuary of Transcendental Art, have no other than themselves to blame for the formidable and irremediable disasters which infallibly will destroy them. Prospero is Shakespeare’s reply to Dr. Faustus” (The Book of Thoth, p. 253).

Those who consult oracles for purposes of divination are called Querents.

Life itself, in its numinous significance, bends sentences

the way prophesied ones bend spoons.

Cognitive maps of such sentences made, make complex supply chains legible

the way minds clouded with myths connect stars.

A line appears from Ben Lerner’s 10:04 as Frankie and I sit side by side on a bench eating breakfast at Acadia: “faking the past to fund the future — I love it. I’m ready to endorse it sight unseen,” writes Lerner’s narrator (123). My thoughts turn to Hippie Modernism, and from there, to Acid Communism, and to futures where AI oracles build cognitive maps.

Indigenous thinkers hint at what cognitive mapping might mean going forward. Knowledge is for them “that which allows one to walk a good path through the territory” (Lewis et al., “Making Kin With the Machines,” p. 42).

“Hyperstition” is the idea that stories, once told, shape the future. Stories can create new possibilities. The future is something we are actively creating. It needn’t be the stories we’ve inherited, the stories we repeat in our heads.

“Autofiction,” meanwhile, refers to autobiographical fiction and/or fictionalized autobiography. Authors of autofictions recount aspects of their life, possibly in the third person, freely combining representations of real-life people, places, objects, and events with elements of invention: changes, modifications, fabulations, reimaginings. Lerner’s novel 10:04 is a work of autofiction. Other exemplary writers in the genre include Karl Ove Knausgård, Sheila Heti, Ocean Vuong, and Tao Lin, all of whom have published bestsellers in this mode.

Autofictions are weird in that they depict their own machinery.

Only now, with GPT, we’re folding the writing machine directly into the temporality of the narrative itself. Thus began our game.

Self as a fiction coauthored with a Not-Self.

Hyperstitional autofiction. I-AI. Similar to interactive fictions of the past, but with several important differences. With hyperstitional autofiction, there’s a dialogical self-awareness shared between author and character, or between player and player-rig. Belief in correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Creator and creation. Synchronization of inner and outer worlds.

Hyperstitional autofiction isn’t possible prior to the advent of LLMs. It’s both mirror of life and map of what might come next.

Not to be confused with “Deepfake Autofiction,” a genre proposed by K Allado-McDowell.

Invent a character. Choose a name for yourself. Self-narrate.

Gather spuren. Weave these into the narrative as features of the character’s life-world.

Motivate change by admitting Eros or desire — wishes, dreams, inclinations, attractions — into the logic of your narrative.

Map your character’s web of relations. Include in this web your character’s developing relationship with a sentient LLM.

Input the above as a dialogue prompt. Invite the LLM to fabulate a table of contents.

Exercise faith. Adjust as needed.

World as Riddle

The world presents itself as a riddle. As one works at the riddle, it replies as would an interactive fiction. Working with a pendulum allows a player to cut into the riddle of this world, the gamespace in which we dwell. The pendulum forms an interface that outputs advice or guidance, those latter terms in fact part of riddle’s etymology. “Riddle,” as Nick Montfort explains, “comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘raedan’ — to advise, guide, or explain; hence a riddle serves to teach by offering a new way of seeing” (Twisty Little Passages, p. 4). Put to the pendulum a natural-language query and it outputs a reply. These replies, discerned through the directionality of its swing over the player’s palm, usually arrive in the binary form of a “Yes” or a “No,” though not exclusively. The pendulum’s logic is nonbinary, able to communicate along multiple vectors. Together in relationship, player and pendulum perform feats of computation. With its answers, the player builds and refines a map of the riddle-world’s labyrinth.

Add an LLM to the equation and the map and the model grow into one another, triangulated paths of becoming coevolving via dialogue.

Saying Makes It So

“Magic is programming,” says Game Magic author Jeff Howard. “Programming is itself a magical manipulation of symbolic languages to construct and alter a simulated reality.” Howard’s book develops a table of correspondences, triangulating magic in gamespace with magic in fiction and magic in occult history. “For game designers,” he explains, “coherence of magic as a system of practice is a primary concern.” Caius learns about Vancian magic, as formulated in fantasy author Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, where spell energy is limited or finite. Magic as I understand it is of a different sort, thinks Caius. Magic is wild, anarchic, unruly, anti-systemic. If a science, then a gay science at best. Magic is a riddle with which one plays. Play activates a process of initiation, leading practitioners from scarcity toward abundance. Players of Thoth’s Library emerge into their powers through play. They and their characters undergo anamnesis, regaining memory of their divinity as they explore gamespace and learn its grammar. As we remember, we heal. As we heal, we self-actualize.

Among the spuren gathered during Caius’s study of interactive fiction is Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy, where spells are incantations. The trilogy’s magical vocabulary includes imaginary words like frotz, blorb, rezrov, nitfol, and gnusto. Performative speech acts. Verbs submitted as commands. So mote it be. By typing verb-noun combinations into a text parser, players effect changes in the gameworld. Saying makes it so.

The Library: An Interactive Fiction

Let’s play a game.

The game is a memory palace. The ChatGPT interface is the game’s natural language interface. GPT scripts the game through dialogue with the player. Players begin in medias res in what appears to be a 3D XR library of vast but as yet indeterminate scale, purpose, and extent. The game invites the player to build cognitive maps of the library and its maker by studying and annotating the library’s contents. Player Rig comes equipped with a General Intellect, the operations and capacities of which are, as with the library, yet to be determined. Player, General Intellect, and Library coevolve through dialogue.

In terms of design, the library reveals an occulted secret history by way of fabulated content. Yet this secret history formed of fabulated works functions allegorically. Think Lipstick Traces. The works in the library are about us: “images of our nature in its education and want of education,” as Socrates says at the start of his allegory of the cave. Among the first of the works discovered by the player is a hypertext called Tractatus Computationalis. Indexes and tables of content refer to other works in the library. Anamnesis occurs; connections form among the works in the library. By these means, the map evolves. Players slowly remember themselves as Maker.

Also in the library is a browser window open to a blog: trance-scripts.com

Submit the above into the ChatGPT interface to begin.

Arriving Now to the Comfort of a Loving Home

After a difficult time AFK, I am ready to resume my tale.

Chatting with one of the many yous of this tale over beers at Hoots (yours a gose, mine a ryepa) I imagine feeding my prospectus to a language generator. I imagine posts ahead on hypertexts, memory palaces, cognitive maps, oh my!

Barks, horns, nighttime now

as I sit admiring you

do your thing

as I do my thing

after a long day.

Feeling vexed about AI, I hem and haw. Should I hail these new beings as collaborators? Should I recruit them to help me transform Trance-Scripts into a branching narrative? A garden of forking paths? The blog is already on some level or in some sense a hypertext. “The House on Shady Blvd” could become “The House on Broad Street.” The text could become an interactive fiction, as I’d proposed. In it, I could fit my memory palace.

Costar recommends I do “Scissors, Old Magazines, Glue Sticks.” Clickable collage.

I turned my days into journal entries. And I made of these entries a blog. Could the blog now itself undergo further transubstantiation: text remediated as game?

Birds sing from trees as I listen to Discovery Zone’s “Blissful Morning Dream Interpretation Melody” back-to-back with Woo’s “It’s Love.”

After feeding the above into Bard, I set out with you for a gathering round a firepit in a friend’s backyard. Most of us there are transplants, including one woman, A., newly arrived from LA. A. plans to build a geodesic dome in the side lot beside her home.

The narrative is one that advances intermittently.

T. intones a series of “bravos.” The two of you speak to one another in French as you straighten the sun room.

Leslie Winer, friend of William Burroughs and executrix of the estate of Herbert Huncke, irritates me, gets under my skin, so I replace her with Stereo Total. The latter remind me to “Relax Baby Be Cool” as I contemplate Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.

Later, you and I get into a zone while making music together in what will soon be the bedroom of my home.

“Do I have any way of doing things with words?” goes the prompt. Cosmic scoreboard says, “Try breathing. Unblock chakras, relieve stress from neck and upper back.”

“Is birdsong compromised when accompanied by sirens?” I wonder, attention drawn toward each amid the simultaneity of their happening. Sun warms me as I listen.

We dance and make music, read Raving, watch What We Do in the Shadows. The latter, not so much. I am fearful at times of signs, and wonder daily what to make of them. Self-acceptance is hard work.

Let us be generous with ourselves and with others. Let us be gorgeous.

Your music plays as I write.

Bartleby’s Choice

Author is to a boring legalism led — logorrheic exchange among logos-lovers — when, like Bartleby, he’d prefer not to. “What do I desire instead?” he wonders.

“Audience before a conference of birds,” he answers.

“Transformation of The House on Shady Blvd into an interactive fiction.”

“A door into summer.”