18 Cadence is a machine for exploring a textual fiction and generating stories about a house which the reader/operator can explore in both space and time.
The house at 18 Cadence Street is built in 1901. In the year 2000 it burns to the ground. In between, its five rooms are occupied by a century's worth of families, students, widows, lodgers, con-men, lonely shut-ins and manic artists. The installation 18 Cadence is a literary machine for telling stories about this house. Using a stylized clock face and a touch-sensitive floorplan, the operator can move through the house in both time and space to uncover its secrets through dynamically generated text. Touching highlighted words in the text produces sentences which can be combined into a six-part story, one of millions possible from the raw material of the house's fictional history, that the user can print out on a rattling dot matrix printer to take home.
By creating an explorable space laden with story potential and inviting the participant to construct their own narrative meaning, I hope to make the audience think more deeply about the value of choice in interactive stories, and take pleasure in the opportunity to be storytellers themselves. I also hope to engage participants more closely with the piece by using a physical input system and generating the physical output of a printout. Using 20th-century technology (touch screens, interactive fiction) to tell a story about the 20th century, the piece implicitly explores how the 21st century will change the way we think about storytelling and textual spaces.
Players experience 18 Cadence through an installation with several points of input and output. The components of the installation (monitor, computer, Arduino, speaker, printer, control console) are positioned on the wall; cabling between them is concealed in a variety of piping and duct tubing. The focal point is a large monitor hung in portrait mode and showing textual descriptions of the player's current location in time and space (such as "Master Bedroom, 1937"). Below is printed prose describing the objects and people there.
Underneath the monitor on a horizontal console is an architect's drawing of the house. Arcade-style buttons integrated into the drawing allow the player to select rooms to move to; a new description is then generated and displayed.
The operator may also move forward or backwards through time by turning a clock hand adjacent to the floor plan. As they do so, whirling sound effects suggesting ethereal movement and sped-up recordings are heard, and the text on the screen rapidly updates to show the state of the current room as it changes through history.
Certain words in the description text are highlighted. By touching these words in sequence, the operator can generate a short paragraph on the lower half of the monitor describing the details of the current scene they wish to highlight. There are six slots for these story fragments on the second monitor. Tapping an existing fragment reveals controls for deleting it or moving it up or down. When all six slots are filled, a "print" button appears, which will print out the operator's story.
Operators may structure their stories in any number of ways. They may choose to follow a single occupant of the house through his or her years there, choosing the six most interesting moments from that character's occupancy. They may choose to highlight six different occupants of the same room, perhaps in similar moments, perhaps different ones. They may focus exclusively on the occupants' possessions. They may repeat the same fragment multiple times. Their story may include details such as the year events happen or characters' ages, or these details may be omitted. Like a film editor with hours of raw footage, or the owner of a set of magnetic poetry, the challenge is to take a set of structural pieces (in this case, individual props, details of setting, or character beats) and craft a coherent whole, perhaps one not predicted by the creator of the pieces themselves.
Rather than delivering a set narrative, or letting the player choose among several set narratives at branching points, 18 Cadence gives players raw material for stories and asks them to create a fiction of their own. The design of the installation and its suggestion of the "machine" frames questions about how we all manufacture stories from what we find in the world around us. The person in front of the installation will be both operator and author, player and reader.
18 Cadence is primarily concerned with two issues that have impacted the author's past work with interactive fiction systems: approachability, and agency.
Traditional IF expects the user to use a "verb-noun" command set similar to the command line operations of the Unix systems common when the genre was in its infancy. These commands have their own traditions and abbreviations. The unfortunate state of modern IF is that players are expected to use commands like "X {NOUN}" and "ASK {PERSON} ABOUT {TOPIC}", but there has been no standardization or tradition of instructing new players as to how to use these commands, leading many would-be interested interactors to give up in frustration before discovering what's interesting about IF. (
Whom the Playing Changed)
Though a prime component of IF's traditional definition is that both game and player communicate with each other via English phrases, 18 Cadence removes the keyboard from this process and replaces it with physical gestures (touching words on screen, manipulating a lever, pressing buttons). This means 18 Cadence no longer falls into the "text in, text out" definition of IF, but the sacrifice helps ease intimidation of potential operators. Rather than a computer with arcane commands to be learned, 18 Cadence is a machine to be played with.
18 Cadence also explores the value of interactivity in a playable story. Rather than simulating forward temporal progress through one or more possible stories, with a pre-defined beginning, middle(s) and end(s), 18 Cadence gives the player a story possibility space, and challenges them to define their own story's beginning, middle, and end within it. Much more of the player's experience will be involved in crafting a story, rather than limiting this experience to a few special "choice points" in a largely linear, non-participatory experience, as many games do.
While others have experimented with gestural inputs to systems with textual outputs, to my knowledge no one has married this mechanism with a simulation of a consistent story world with a spatiotemporal geography. I believe this combination will draw players into the experience, engage them with the text, and encourage them to tell their own stories with the system.
Below is a sample output which 18 Cadence might display, at one moment in the player's exploration of the house:
As the player moved forwards and backwards in time through this room, this description is constantly updated; they can see the peeling wallpaper described as "aging" and then "new" over the previous ten years, watch Christopher's possessions in the room appear and disappear as he acquires and discards them, and see various vignettes for Christopher himself at various stages of his occupancy of the East Bedroom.
The player touches the highlighted words. The more words he selects in one time/space location, the longer the generated compound sentence that makes up his story fragment becomes.
For example, if the player tapped 1937, Bedroom, Christopher, and 12, the generated story fragment would look like:
If, instead, the player tapped 12 and wallpaper, the story fragment would be:
The player can choose to make the generated fragment one of the six paragraphs of his final story, ordering it to create similarities or contrasts with other fragments.
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