Cyclic Fruition Number One

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.

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.

This is going to be a very short review, simply because I find it difficult to talk about a game that seems to resist any clear understanding of what is going on. I got the main general gist of the loop, and the characters were interesting and I enjoyed the dynamic between them, though it definitely got way too confusing to follow at times. Most of the time I sort of wandered, choosing what I thought was better. Also, I thought the parallel links at the bottom with more clear defining of what each of the choices led towards was interesting but I couldn’t pin down a meaning. It got more interesting once there were no links in the text and only in the navigation bar at the bottom, which ultimately led to (Spoiler - click to show)the supposed escape from the game that the story seems to commenting on. I liked the idea, and (Spoiler - click to show)if you look at the url of the ending, it seems to be by Tundish, so I wonder if D E Haynes is Tundish, or that is simply a citation?

One note is the entire text seems like it has more padding on the left than on the right side of the box, which is a subtle but wrong feeling. (I’m certain it isn’t purposeful, so just noting.)

Originally written on the intfiction forums. Minor edits were made.

This is a hyperlink story that is also a demonstration of the author’s own Spiki framework. Dialogue is shown in script form with descriptions written in literary style. To progress the story, you can click underlined text within the current page or click on the passage names at the bottom bar. You can actually go to any passage in the game, regardless of where you are, by accessing the sandwich menu at the top left.

Cyclic Fruition centers around a trio (there is a narrator, who sometimes speaks as if they are part of the group, but they’re not acknowledged by the others so I was confused if they were an actual entity) who decide to explore a nearby town since their train hasn’t arrived. While going through the story you will quickly, or eventually, learn (Spoiler - click to show)that the game continuously loops. You will go back to the same starting passages (text does not change with repetitions, so you are reading the exact same words) once you explore a thread enough.

The word choice, description quality and overall structure made this story interesting to think about, if a little hard to digest. One particular thread takes a turn into a philosophical and linguistic discussion after a short verse section. Another passage contains (Spoiler - click to show)a hyperlink that doesn’t shunt you towards the next passage, but rather a blog post about a real-life textbook, with its origin story quite similar to what just happened in the game. Within the blog post is a diagram that explicitly inspired Cyclic Fruition’s structure, including the direct names of some passages. After reading the post, I understood what the author was going for and appreciate what their goal was writing this game, though I still find my comprehension of the final product uncertain and incomplete.

Still, I was immersed in this little world, and it was a great way to get me to start thinking more about (Spoiler - click to show)behavior structure.