Dream publication announcement!
The modified prototype (and I do mean prototype) of the parser-based game that formed the basis of my C&W 2024 keynote from has been published in Kairos!
As an Inventio piece, the idea was I would include 10 pieces from my keynote address and reflect on various aspects of my “repairing digital composition”/”diasporic-disabled digital composition” process. I ended up with a game where the player has to interact with objects in the environment to discover Inventio footnotes and, to discover keynote excerpts, has to purposely inflict pain on a brown woman named Vali (my thinly-veiled alter ego—vali means pain/power) in perimortem stasis: not quite dead, desensitized, or anesthetized. She/I respond with pained expressions on being tortured. The point is frustration, discomfort, and highlighting your complicity in the torture I experience every day in academia and academic writing.
Composing perimortem required a lot of letting go. A tear in my shoulder muscles was confirmed in December, so computer work was difficult, and the game as I really envisioned it—a fictocritical transmedia chapter in ஐயோ/AIYO that can be played as a standalone game or as a side-quest of a visual novel in ஐயோ/AIYO, and that references, extends, and enacts other sections of the project—wasn’t going to work here. I didn’t have enough time, for one thing, and as much as I tried to orthographically signal that “theoretical rigor” belongs in a coffin, I was hesitant to pitch a truly fictocritical piece. I spent most of December and early January making sure the prototype I had drafted for C&W 2024 was at least playable, and I accepted that glitches and typos would likely lurk in the final product. I’m a perfectionist at heart and don’t want people to think I was careless with my craft, but at the same time, publishing a text that isn’t error-free prose better reflects my error-riddled, chronically pained body.
At least it was a kick in the ass to work on the ஐயோ/AIYO version of the game, titled Ghosts Among Us, which puts the player in the shoes of a clinical practitioner and academic who is an antagonist in the visual novel, responsible for maintaining the historical conquest of pain and eliminating aberrations—Vali being one such anomaly.
Here’s an excerpt from perimortem, the version published in Kairos (slashes indicate alternate textual output):
You find yourself back in the autopsy chamber, a circular room with a floor tiled in radial spokes emanating from a panoptic center. The glossy white sterile walls are inset with hundreds of drawers. The freestanding steel storage cabinet you were just hiding in abuts one wall.
In the center of the room stands an autopsy table, Vali’s body lying on it. / The electronic door by which you originally entered the autopsy chamber is on the east side of the room. You don’t plan on leaving until you get the data you came for, but it might be a good idea to secure the room somehow and buy yourself a little more time. / A mosaic pattern on the floor depicts some kind of surgical procedure. Blood drips steadily from the autopsy table into a sluice drain in the floor. 1 / The ceiling is patterned with concentric circles and, oddly, a mirror. You can clearly see the mottled pink, red, white, and yellow of Vali’s interior, along with a bright glow. Your own shadow casts a dark stripe across it, your awestruck face beside her.
It seems that, to access the minefield, you have to effectively “go down” into the subject’s interior, with the auger in hand. / Some distortion of the ceiling mirror makes your face look small and wizened, and Vali’s interior as lively as a forbidden garden.
1 Inventio: Cutting Room Floor: There was no cutting room floor for this text, only different versions of it. The keynote version: The textual equivalent of a 50-minute reading, or 54 texts whose corresponding 54 pulli were the first to be sequentially enclosed by a line that eventually encircles all 441 points. The path I chose is not the only possible path, but it’s the first one I completed after many errors and therefore the one I settled on. The full version: 441 individual and interconnected pieces mapped onto a 21×21 kolam whose dots represent thematic intersections on a Cartesian plane. The “demo” excerpt: The game you’re playing now, comprised of the first 10 pieces interspersed with descriptive and expository text, characteristic of parser games.
And if you want a sneak peek, the story description of Ghosts Among Us is:
In the beginning, allegedly, the world was without pain. Enter a world where pain has been conquered, with inestimable difficulty and cost. The Sanctuary, the New England research facility established by the Aponia Commission in 1966, still stands on North Brother Island, annexed to the dilapidated shell of Riverside Hospital. Its operations are secret. And yet the Sanctuary campus—its pastoral clearings, its incongruously modern corridors—somehow conceals even more clandestine activity. The stakes of discovery are high. But then again, they always are, and this is rarely a deterrent.
Read “perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor]” at Kairos and check out the full issue—especially Maggie Fernandes and Megan McIntyre’s fantastic “Giving Voice to Generative AI Refusal”—as well!
