The Winograd Matrix by Richard Holeton profile Science Fiction 2022 Web Site

About the Story

Published in the digital rhetoric journal Kairos, "The Winograd Matrix" is an interactive fiction made with Twine's Chapbook format about a gaming-industry couple who face interpersonal and work-related conflicts, jealousies, and roving bands of thugs while confined together in a near-future, post-pandemic world. Unlike many choice-based Twine games or Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories, the narrative offers the reader choices that are grammatically-based (or based on meaning-making) rather than action-centered. Those choices are constructed of so-called Winograd schemas—pairs of statements with pronoun reference ambiguities such as, "A ball crashes right through the table, because it's made of [steel/Styrofoam]" (is the ball made of steel, or is the table made of Styrofoam?). The story branches into slightly alternate realities that parallel and echo one another before merging. Conventions of forking narratives are interrogated, first, in the form of the story and its transparent structure; and second, in its content, which invokes both physical laws like "time reversal symmetry" and, via a character named Beau "Bo" Drillard, literary theory.

Game Details