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tags:computersifai
Thought
On visit to Sterling Library at Yale on 1/25/25 there was an exhibit on Amnesia with a small book available that I am taking notes on here.
Written by Claire Fox with the amazing title “Software Preservation and Emulation Librarian.”
Clear connection to the chat interface of LLM chatbots.
Every text requires conscious effort to read. It is participatory. Unless it is the text of a witch, it does not write itself and it doesn’t read itself.
The cadence to a text that is produced by a chatbot is different. It is produced at the moment of decision. At least with interactive fiction like Amnesia it is node based (though, you could say that the parsing of a “regular” book is also node-based just with sequential certainty in each step - though I wonder in practice if a text is even read that way, or there’re actually internal digressions like this one. How would you detect a digression in the reader, maybe eye movement or their finger being traced. But if it is just a stream of words you can’t really tap into their reverie.)
Amnesia is a work of interactive fiction by science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch (who seems to have also written The Brave Little Toaster.) The game was an attempt to bring the world of games to the realm of literary art by translating a novelist’s script into a medium that readers could only experience through interacting with a computer.
EA published Amnesia in 1986. Personal computers were no common at this time.
Disch seemed to anticipate the potential for irreversible loss of information if digital materials are not carefully maintained over time.
They hoped the game would expand the artistic possibilities of books and computer games.
In the text based world of interaction fiction, the mark of a successful game is the number of locations (or nodes) that a player can explore and the complexity of traversing these locations. He said “You have to be aware of the possibilities of branching, and telling not just a single story but creating an environment in which a story can grow like a houseplant in various directions.”
Disch wrote on a Kaypro II, with 64Kb of memory and weight 29 pounds.
Initially he “wrote” the game in notebooks. The process of translating the script of Amnesia into computer code was arduous. The 300 page draft was coded into a programming language called “King Edward Adventure Language” because the paradigm was to “envision the game as a series of stage sets, like you might have for a play. ”