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On Database Fiction

Created: 2022-06-01 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-14 (07:39:32)
Status: in progress

Reading Traversals by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, a book about trying to preserve interactive fiction, I was really struck by the chapter on Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger. Malloy first published Uncle Roger on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL) as a sequence of lexias, short text extracts with some metadata. The idea was that you’d copy these lexias and their metadata into your own database software as they were released on the WELL, and from there you’d be able to navigate through this story by searching through the metadata and retrieving different entries.

I really like how minimal this system was. Publishing these entries agnostic of any specific database software, just an extract of text and some keywords, which readers could enter into their own systems as needed. Most systems now need a bit more infrastructure than this. I’m writing this entry in markdown and converting it to html using a pandoc batch command. Even this is more apparatus than the original version of Uncle Roger. But I want hyperlinks and css styling, and there’s no way of getting those using just text files. Even twine in comparison is a whole lot more apparatus.

Why focus so much on the formatting? Traversals points out that a lot of early electronic literature has become inaccessible, sometimes less than a decade after it was first created. Works like Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse or Patchwork Girl, which relied on proprietary software.

On the other hand, it is still possible to replay something like Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library because it was designed as a collection of html pages. The work has held out longer against shifting software and web standards. There is a significat caveat to this: the beautiful, navigable panoramas in this work have not lasted as they relied on the now-obsolete Quicktime VR format. Short of emulating a turn of the millenium web browser, the only way of seeing these panoramas is to download the files as you go and open them in another program.

This page is intended for thinking about database fiction and games preservation. Right now it gathers a few different things together, but as always, they may get split off if things get too cramped.

Grigar and Moulthrop, Traversals

Grigar and Moulthrop write about preserving and traversing four foundational electronic texts: Uncle Roger by Judy Malloy, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse by John Mcdaid, Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson and We Descend by Bill Bly.

Traversals focuses on the way each work is informed by its technological medium and the way technological changes subtly alter our experience of the works. Every year, changes in software and hardware make these older works more inaccessible. What happens to the experience of reading Uncle Roger when Judy Malloy ports it from a serial novel posted on The WELL into a database application programmed in basic or into a series of linked hypertext pages? This is where the notion of the traversal comes in, an audiovisual demonstration of the work performed by or otherwise involving its author that uses historically appropriate hardware and software.

The traversal also forms the core of Grigar and Moulthrop’s earlier companion project, Pathfinders.

Malloy, Uncle Roger

Microchip espionage at the onset of the computing revolution. Jenny, a recent graduate, has moved to the west coast and taken a job as babysitter for the tech executive Tom Broadthrow. Jenny hovers at the margins of successive parties held by the Broadthrow family through which an ensemble of characters rotates, including her repellent and possibly dangerous Uncle Roger.

I played the 1995 hypertext version of the story, considerably changed in format and content from the original unix and basic versions. It still remains engaging. Similarly to Reagan Library, discussed before, the work is also still entirely functional since it was designed as a collection of html pages with hardcoded links. There is however a detailed discussion of how Uncle Roger migrated across formats and platfoms in Traversals.

See also

References

Endmatter

Tags: @archival @cybertexts @in-progress

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