18 Cadence operates at the nexus of several storytelling traditions, some digital, some pre-digital, including the text-based interactive fiction (IF) of the 1980s, the "literary machines" of the OuLiPo, the postmodern/deconstructionist novel, the hypertext fiction, and the arcade game. Its final form and play experience are informed by all these traditions, but distinct from each of them: it cannot easily be classified in any existing taxonomy. By producing an interstitial piece outside of established forms for digital fictions, I hope to explore modes of agency and interaction models that have not yet been navigated by existing work. These explorations may produce insights that can be taken back to a more traditional form such as hypertext, or spawn new directions that merit further exploration.
While 18 Cadence takes certain structural cues from IF, such as simulating a story world and describing it with present-tense prose, the player does not communicate back to the story world with text. The player's fluid movements through space and especially time via console controls, as well as the presence of audio sound effects accompanying this movement, suggest the interfaces to the arcade games of the 1980s and 1990s. This juxtaposition between traditionally slow-paced and thoughtful interactive fiction and traditionally fast-paced and violent arcade games speaks to a yearning to find a common ground between these two extremes: a storymaking machine that is neither pedestrian nor ultraviolent.
The second component of the interface, touching highlighted words to select story fragments, invokes traditions of literary hypertext, but for a different purpose than the selection of links is normally used for in that medium. Rather than displaying a different, pre-written text fragment, touching hyperlinks in 18 Cadence lets the player produce their own combinatorial text fragments, and order them to create a personal story. The effect is to empower the reader to go beyond the navigation of a story (as in hypertext) and actually participate in its construction.
18 Cadence is in many ways a story about itself, and owes much to the traditions of the self-reflexive novel. Authors such as Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Jose Luis Borges, Mark Z. Danielewski, Vladimir Nabokov, and Stanislaw Lem have been influential on my thinking and style. The work of the OuLiPo in further pushing the boundaries of how literature can make its readers complicit in the storymaking can also be seen with this project.
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