Cyclic Fruition Number One

This is a short branching hyperlink game that is cyclical in nature and uses a new system called 'spiki'.

It's based on information theory and linguistics (not the exact terms the author uses but the general gist of things). Three characters with initials A, B, and C are in a constructed virtual world that simulates a version of England where they meander about and go in shops. New information is intruded in the form of a latin phrase that pops up.

Each option in the game is symbolic in the author's version of conversation theory, fulfilling an archetype like 'withdrawal' or 'elaboration'. One link instead corresponds to an external essay hosted on a different website.

The writing reminded me of GK Chesterton. Overall, I found it interesting as an intellectual exercise and as a text.

The selfposession required of selfreference is to avoid seeming so selfevidently selfinterested, which is gauche, when we’re all quite vogue, thank you, perfectly selfaware. The characters are stuck in a loop, but never you worry, they’re tying themselves in knots to prove their agency: “Chalgrove: Human action is repetitious. We establish a routine and it propagates to others. / Broadstairs: Yes, and the vocabulary evolves accordingly. New words are created, or older ones get repurposed. / Appleby: But here we’ve encountered a semantic token with no apparent reference. Which implies an entire process of action which hitherto we’ve been unaware of. / Chalgrove: So I’m classifying this as a Phantasm. For the moment, at least. / Appleby: OK, and whatever else we encounter will simply accrete. Until we glimpse its nature. / Broadstairs: Then our own vocabulary will adjust to explain it. / Chalgrove: A new case then? / Broadstairs: A new case. Top priority. Happy now, Appleby?” A reciprocus structure cycling over and over, and “With every repetition we precipitate new meaning.”

Do we? New meaning requires a first meaning, some germinating core which roots whatever proves straining this point to structure fruitful. So very well, who are our interlocutors to localize all this interlocution? Some characters are sketched promisingly: “To consult with Broadstairs is to discover a beneficent uncle. To engage him awakens a mighty foe. His letterhead crowns only solemn undertakings. His monogram makes most weighty the deed. / He is sincere in every syllable. So he will spare you the details. You will be unable to recall exactly what was promised. And when he gives his Word, his Word comes not with a word. The Word of Broadstairs is a nod. An affirming smile. An intoxicating handshake.” A dutiful but ambiguous operator, certain of his authority, affable uncertainly along the banks of a ruse, excellent, but where is that in the actual dialogue? “Broadstairs: Pie and chips? Or Welsh Rarebit? / Some place where we can smoke and sit. / A pint nearby, my pipe well lit. / And these two sitting opposite.” Whatever ambitions you might have had for this man to fulfill all go up in smoke, alas. Each turn you take through the looping draws up more and more of the blanks, which is great for Russian Roulette, but in a story the mirror of the soul is made a meta vanity. The structure of the text is structuring the text, every reincursion blunts the borders dully unporous, suffocation in the selfsame: “Broadstairs: Do we have a stable representation of our situation? I’d like us to agree on some sort of interpretation. / Chalgrove: OK, here’s what we know. A new word has appeared. And it is propagating everywhere. / Appleby: No, we need to think in terms of processes. Language is action. / Chalgrove: Action by whom? / Appleby: I don’t know. But forget where you think you are. If I’m right we’re experiencing some sort of poietic fruition. / Broadstairs: This is becoming a three pipe problem. I need to reflect for a few minutes.” So’s the issue with dialogue ultragained to white noise, we think only in the terms of processes.

A mention is made here, I cannot imagine idly, of a Winograd matrix, and like a lot of Eastgate era hypertext, the text is the hypertext, so it’s an inconvenience to be dragged back to the text. I blame all of this, of course, on Samuel Beckett, whom I’ve never forgiven. Beckett in the past tense is perfect, you see, so many negative constructions all minimus arrayed, any presumption pops to plummet you voidnausea, voila. The problem is that, at some definite point in time, you’re engaged in reading it to have eventually have read it, and precisely then the gap between you and the nothing drones nonzero, which I insist it is, still, it’s spring outside, there’s got to be a world out there, somewhere…

Anyway, this is a satisfying sentence: “A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals.” Sorry for complaining! I’m always complaining. Oh well. Thanks!

Hard to put a finger on this one...

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: this is a demo for a new IF authoring tool called Spiki, presumably developed by the author themself.

Spiki looks like Chapbook from Twine. Like, really similar. I would've thought it was a modified version of Chapbook if I didn't read the blurb first.

The only notable difference is that Spiki has a chapter index, containing all story passages, available from a menu at the top left. Cool, but pretty useless, in my opinion, and practically speaking, since the ordering of passages is static, without any indicator for what passages you've already visited, and with the only differentiator of passages being their names, and a number or letter.

There's a ton of passages and you're likely not remembering what all of them are titled, so navigating with the chapter index is infeasible. So, ignoring that, it's just Chapbook, then.

But this is all secondary. Though it's offered as just another demo, the story's actually really interesting.

Without giving too much away, you follow 3 friends as they look for 'temporal anomalies'. A certain Latin word keeps popping up again and again, and it's driving them crazy. Depending on your choices, you can either leave the site early, or eventually happen upon the real purpose of this story.

Which is, that it's a demo for a dialogue system. A really really complicated dialogue system (to my untrained eyes). You'll get a link to the author's blog where he explains it all. There, you'll find explanations for many of the unexplained terms in the story, like Florean Winograde, and the name origins for our trio (I was like, "OOOh, Aaai get it" when it finally clicked).

All in all, a pleasure to read. The writing teeters just on the edge of too abstract and sheer brilliance. I'm leaning towards brilliance, here. It's honestly way over my paygrade. I had only vague ideas of the setting at any given point in the story. Walking down the river, I conjured, unbidden, an image of a quaint town by the Thames, 19th century. No clue if that is in any way accurate.

Also, I love the trio dynamics. My favourite is Appleby. He's the one who actually gets things done. B and C are inseparable, though, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Would definitely read more of these guys. CFN 2? Here's hoping.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/14/26
Playtime: 30min, 4 endstates reached, 10/15 branches taken

Bait and Switch is a well-known pejorative at this point. Promises made, only to dissolve into nothing and be substituted with something far less attractive, commonly in service of a scam of some kind: monetary, emotional, whatever. Seems like a wild way to open a review of a work whose blurb is “A short story with hyperlink branching.” That’s like marketing Stephen King’s The Stand as “A thick book of pages, each with a lot of words.”

“Reviewer, how can this be bait and switch? That looks like a pretty naked hook to me!” Absent literally ANYTHING to hang on to, all we have left is every single IF game we have ever played. IF is a wonderfully broad canvas. Might we be in for a work of Gothic/Body/Cosmic Horror? Some hard-science or pulpy sci-fi? Light fantasy, puzzlefest, romance, slice of life, some REALLY MOTIVATED vampire erotica? Even in the face of that impossible expanse, you can be forgiven not finding room for “Multimedia Philosophy Lesson.”

This is not a lick on CFN1, in any way. The work arguably went out of its way NOT to set expectations, so much so our pattern recognition brains inevitably reach inside, attempting to frame what is to come. By avoiding any expectations of its own, the work puckishly lets our imagination flail around, knowing we will be flummoxed once it is fully revealed. It is a bold subversion of expectations on all fronts, so much so that it carves out for itself a truly novel IF experience, in some way echoing full on Augmented Reality Games.

The piece opens with some absurdist characters exploring a town, possibly investigating some ill-defined supernaturally-philosophical threat. The kind of thing Grant Morrison might conjure in his sleep. You are given choices on how to engage the town, but right away, things are a little off. As with any number of choice-select works, choices are embedded in the text, loosely associated with one of three characters. But there are also links beneath the transcript, meta-commands of some kind. They carry distinctive but contextually empty meanings. In most scenes this presents a bewildering number of options, some concrete, more just baffling. I want to say “all” in the next sentence, but since my data is anecdotal I must in good conscience downgrade myself to “most.” “Most” modern browsers (that I have used) highlight the http address of links you hover over. It took a moment’s exploration to determine that the inline links repeated the ‘meta’ links. This created a new mystery! How are these obtuse words aliasing to concrete actions in the text of the game? Why are THOSE two things driving to the same destination? That frisson alone, of trying to decode the game’s architecture, was a pretty uncommon experience in IF, and the novelty of it really hooked me.

Nothing in its very short runtime suggested any answers. Each screen presents MORE of these action/arbitrary word aliasing as a meandering story of no true climax plays out, inhabited by characters more avatar than alive. Except eventually, you find one link that does NOT alias to the labels at the bottom. Instead it takes you to an essay! Well, this is new! The essay makes it clear that what you have experienced is an implementation of a taxonomy of election-to-action. A State Machine model of human behavior in the finest tradition of Constructionalist Philosophers. You even get a bubble diagram!

Suddenly, the opaque decision making, the flat but elevated language of the work, the common links all make sense! You were not inhabiting a protagonist (or three) on a fictional mission, you were experiencing the model through example! Guided by rhetorical tools, personified. Example-before-theory is kind of a backward way to teach, but a powerful one! It gives us fresh, concrete experiences to crystallize around the abstract theory, immediately clarifying it. I found this to be simultaneously a very effective way to convey abstract theory, and somehow a completely new IF paradigm where multiple media converged to make my education a detective game! How did I get to an education Switch, from IMPLIED Bait???

It will not surprise any longtime readers to hear that now, I HAD to explore the game multiple times, armed with new understanding and using the state machine as a game ‘map.’ I explored its narrative structure as if it were a rudimentary colossal cave. Math checks out! Every branch of the construct was sure enough mapped to narrative action, a complete implementation of its thesis.

So. Your enjoyment of this will depend on how open you are to starting on Danny the Street, and finishing on Sesame Street. Given how liberally I sprinkle real-world grains of my life into these reviews, I must have previously mentioned my Philosophy Minor in college, years ago. For me, this work was a joyous surprise, engaging neurons I hadn’t fired in decades. From its intriguingly opaque narrative and befuddling construction, it encouraged my mind into an exploratory state, EXACTLY the mentality needed once its true purpose was revealed. This was an anti-narrative puzzle whose solution was every bit as satisfying as the most obtuse parser construct.

The focus of this review has left one observation adrift: the language of it. Once its purpose is understood, the language turns out to be much more engaging than necessary. The below is an example passage that just tickled me green. I’m sure that’s the expression?

“Whatever can exist, does exist”
“Then why haven’t we seen it before?”

A pretty pithy reference to this work!

Spaceship: Discovery
Vibe: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work, I doubt I would have focused on THIS construct. While rigorous and intellectually interesting, I’m not sure I was convinced of the UTILITY of the model. Understanding a conceptualization is inherently rewarding, but I’m not sure THIS conceptualization has enough predictive utility to live beyond this work for me. Had I authored it, I probably would have centered a model more immediate to my own interests. Which is kind of a ‘who cares’? The point of the work felt like a PROCESS more than a message. Certainly, that’s what I responded to!

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Literary hypertext is like a fractal miniature of the IF scene: compared to the larger world of video games, IF is a tiny, un-commercial niche more focused on quality writing than fancy gameplay or bells and whistles, whereas in comparison to mainline IF, literary hypertext is a tiny, un-commercial niche etc. etc. While I haven’t dug into the classics of the subgenre, I’ve appreciated reading about them in places like Jimmy Maher’s blog, and where I’ve come across their few latter-day inheritors, most notably kaemi’s oeuvre, I’ve often found myself bowled over – their distinctive features are self-consciously literary prose and a dreamlike, nonlinear use of links to connect a story’s component parts, so done right, these pieces can feel like the best video games James Joyce never wrote.

So I was excited to see Cyclic Fruition Number One pop up in the festival, as from the first click it’s clear that it’s working in the literary hypertext tradition. Structurally, there are static passages telling a story with no particular character identified as a singular protagonist, with inline hyperlinks on words that obliquely point towards an action or change of location. Interestingly, these links are echoed in the page footer, where they connect to the same destination passages but boast new, abstract titles – the one link in the first passage is a character saying “I’d like to wander around first”, which is picked up at the bottom of the page as “Proposal”, for example.

As for the content, it’s also giving Modernism, as the kids say. We follow a trio of agents of some ineffable bureaucracy as they visit a midcentury-vibed railroad station, before exploring the neighborhood in pursuit of a rogue word that’s invaded our pre-existing linguistic consensus:

"He cocks his head up to listen. A glissando of crimson minims on identical white staves chain the undulating frontages in linking measured intervals. Each one declared under management of Reciprocus."

Per the above excerpt, the prose is controlled, complex, drily amused. I enjoyed this description of Chalgrove, the last of our abecedarian three, so forgive the long quote:

"His mind exists, even downright persists, by virtue of regular routine. It is laid out in a grid pattern, and castellated in certain critical ratios. A measure of seven splits into a two and a five. Where precision is required (and Chalgrove does enjoy precision) twenty-four is employed as the divisor.

"This cerebral containment resembles, perhaps, the rear garden of a modern family dwelling. Never quite embracing nature; the planters positioned according to policy, and the greenery only from certain Approved Suppliers.

"There is likely to be a mild disagreement very soon. Appleby always wants to go his own way, whereas Broadstairs will demand a clear objective. Chalgrove is the man to schedule this dispute for later."

As for where they’re going, well, it’s mostly in a circle. The game is fairly short, and as the title indicates, while a few of the passages do have multiple exits, they all eventually lead back to the railroad station, at which point you can keep playing to explore alternate trajectories. It’s workable enough, though I confess I found it a bit unsatisfying, possibly because I found the “true path” – which explicitly calls out the loop and links to an external blog post that explains a little more about the structure undergirding the thing – on my first go-round; unsurprisingly, later iterations felt like exercises in diminishing returns, simply piling up more incident without adding much to the picture, albeit the prose remains a draw throughout.

The about text on the festival page indicates this is a “demo piece”, though I’m not sure whether that means there may be more of this story to come, or just that it’s a shakedown for the system it’s written in, the new-to-me Spiki (my hot take: looks a lot like Twine’s Chapbook story format, seems fine). If this is a preview, then sure, I’d definitely play the next bit. As a work unto itself, though, it feels quite slight. But either way, I’m left wanting more – bring on the literary hypertext renaissance, we have nothing to lose but our attachment to causality.