The World Without Cybertext

Stuart Moulthrop
Fourth Digital Arts and Culture Conference
Providence, Rhode Island
April 28, 2001

Note: The main text (black) represents the talk as delivered in Providence. Borrowing the parliamentary privilege to "revise and extend," I've added some further reflections in red.

Many of the concerns of this talk are reflected in my later article "From Work to Play," included in First Person, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (MIT Press, 2003).

I no longer consider this talk work in progress and withdraw my earlier request that it be cited as such. (2-20-03)

[1] I buried Paul

As mortal animals possessed of language, we love to play games with endings, or with metaphors of death. The impulse runs deep and has important consequences. From this obsession with virtual mortality, Walter Benjamin traced the root of all narrative. Working along similar lines, Don DeLillo closes one of his most memorable novels by invoking "the cults of the famous and the dead," reminding us how tightly those terms are entwined.

For some reason this takes me back to a moment in junior high school, when like a few million people my age, I was convinced that Paul McCartney had died in 1968 and was buried somewhere in the tracks of the White Album. None of this was true, which I think I understood even at the time, but truth value was hardly the point. The concept of secret messages reverse-encoded in bits of noise seemed enormously important; or maybe it was just the revelation that you could actually play records backward--the medium as the message. Mainly, however, the McCartney Death Saga taught me something about stories.

Lacking better things to do, we like to tell stories (that is, systematic lies) about momentous passings. If the subject has not actually passed away, so much the better. Sometimes we call this practice fiction, and in other cases elegy, as when Birkerts laments the lost empire of Gutenberg. Sometimes the better word might be allergy, a polemical opposition, as when Coover declares the "End of Books" or Nick Montfort solves the "Hypertext Murder Case." In these last instances we are talking less about mementi mori than wishful thinking.

All such enterprises seem radically inaccurate, if not insincere. The supposed death of literature has not stopped either Birkerts or Coover from writing more books, and even after displaying the cold "corpus" of literary hypertext, Montfort grudgingly admits that "interesting" work may still be done in this line. In the midst of cultural death we are in life, which is to say, sunk to our neckbones in disagreement and uncertainty, key attributes of the human condition. Paul is not dead; it was John who died all those years ago, and so the Beatles are dead--only they're not, just look on Napster. Napster of course is always about to go under (so the R.I.A.A. keeps saying), so long live Napster. In our ends are new beginnings, and that certainly goes for tropes. I come not to praise the New Economy but to bury it, here in the decline of the west, the very late age of print, and the glorious twilight of cybertext.

[2] The receding tide

If we can celebrate false funerals, then it is certainly possible to mourn the end of a falsehood --which is where we seem to be at the moment vis-a-vis our recent good times. The year 2001 seems marked by regained sobriety: in many ways the theme of the new U.S. administration. We have just experienced the closing of the Millennial jubilee and the putative return of Business as Usual; or of the business cycle, at least. The gay science of Being Digital has finally surrendered to the dismal science of late capitalism, and we find ourselves tumbling into recession, a condition not limited to economics.

However chilling it might be, our recessionary moment does have one virtue. It invites reflection upon a fundamental duality: the evanescent as against the permanent; flotsam versus jetsam. To speak of the littoral (as Michael Joyce and Carolyn Guyer would say), the tide has turned. As the grand flood recedes, some things float away and others are left behind. Which are the ones that matter?

[3] Valuing by subtraction

The game of flotsam and jetsam seems easy to play these days, as the old economy gleefully celebrates the ongoing collapse of the formerly new. How badly do we miss Pets.com or Priceline? How much distress would we feel at the collapse of E-Bay, Travelocity, or Amazon?

These days it seems difficult to appreciate anything, at least in the sphere of information culture, without renouncing it-a cultural logic we might call valuation by subtraction. As we used to say of chainsaw massacre movies: when this is all over, who will be left and what will be left of them? Or to put the question another way, how much can we lose before we have lost too much?

In this spirit, and in solidarity with all the defunct dot-coms, I offer a rather parochial thought-experiment. What would the world be like if it did not include cybertext?

[4] Esoteric versus exoteric cybertext

Read one way, this question may be outrageous, or perhaps silly; in other lights it may be chillingly plausible. Much depends on the definition of terms. For cybertext I adopt a loose version of Espen Aarseth's definition: any instance of symbolic communication significantly mediated by a computational feedback loop. This definition is not limited to hypertext (a very specialized form of cybertext) but includes distributed Web applications, virtual environments, games, simulations, and various forms of self-generating discourse and perhaps even artificial life.

Obviously, if we cast the net this broadly, the effects of subtraction would be severe. Without programmed trading, for example, much of the contemporary financial system would be impossible. By the same token, the absence of e-mail and chat services would probably be missed. Though the point seems increasingly debatable, certain back-end business-to-business systems might leave a perceptible hole in commercial reality if they were taken away. We might even miss a few of the dot-coms.

The above examples represent what we might call exoteric cybertext: instances of the form that are broadly and tightly woven into the fabric of economic and social life. The word begins with the prefix "exo-" because its instances refer outwards, spreading a network of influences and dependencies. In contrast to this broad category we might also speak of an esoteric branch of cybertext: a specialized set of practices whose acts and implications tend to be focused within a narrowly defined community and a set of highly sophisticated or sympathetic readers--for instance, this conference.

(Some people who have encountered the exoteric/esoteric distinction before, for instance in discussions of the occult and mystery religions, may find my usage odd. David Durand has raised this point with me several times, but I persist. While the hypertext and cybertext communities may not constitute mystery cults in the strict sense, they do have a tendency to separate higher understanding from the crude perceptions of the marketplace. Or I do, at least.)

If we restrict our attention to esoteric cybertext, the act of subtraction might produce a very different outcome.

[5] Forget about it

To begin with my own closest concern, hypertext fiction--what difference does it make? Victory Garden does not appear to have changed the world much at all. A man called George Bush is still President and the nation seems about where it was, economically and socially, at the end of the 1980s. The cultural war on political progressives declared by George I in 1991 proceeds apace in the rein of George II ten years later. And if that is not enough bad news, gasoline prices have returned to the record levels they last reached just before the Gulf War.

So we have a viable point to start from. Let's perform some subtractions and assess the likely consequences, advancing by stages:

Stage 1: Lug away the guts of hypertext fiction, from afternoon to Lexia to Perplexia. Effect? You'd please more professors of English than you would offend. Students would also thank you, at least until they were sent back to reading the other Joyce.

Stage 2: Round up John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, Loss Glazier, Rob Kendall, and Jim Rosenberg. Dispatch them to a distant city with nice weather, really good pubs, and lousy telecommunications. Poetry as most people know it--hardly at all--would continue.

Stage 3: Erase all of interactive fiction, from Adventure to Winchester's Nightmare. This would piss off some hardcore programmers and sysadmins, but most, being over 28, will have reached that point in their careers where moodiness is simply ascribed to aging.

Stage 4: Demolish MUDs and MOOs. A lot of creative, highly educated, technically advanced people would be made unhappy--but they could be resettled in chat rooms!

Stage 5: Eliminate Net-mediated, multi-player games such as Doom, Quake, and Everquest. This may be the most dangerous stage in our experiment, as it would force millions of deeply addicted players into severe withdrawal. Indeed, Mr. President, this action raises a serious risk of social unrest. Going after games and entertainments may bring us to the tipping point, i.e., the moment when someone raises enough money to purchase the attention of a U.S. Congressman. But here we have passed once again from the esoteric back to the popular, or exoteric.

[6] Esoterica and incunabula

Having failed to make an intrinsic case for esoteric cybertext, we might try an indirect or prospective approach, following reasoning laid out some years ago by Janet Murray-whose work, it will be apparent, forms the foundation for much of my recent thinking, and certainly for this talk. In my view Murray has made the most compelling case so far for the social significance of esoteric or artistic cybertext; though it isn't that she really likes the stuff.

Murray thinks most of what we now call creative cybertext constitutes the cradle-work or "juvenilia" of a higher form yet to appear. Here is how she summarizes the state of the digital arts at the end of the last century:

The technological resources of the gamemakers are directed toward rapidly transforming visuals rather than expressive storytelling. The self-conscious webs of the postmodernists and the link-happy exhibitionism of the Web soaps send us hopping from screen to screen in search of a coherent story. The more filmic CD-ROMs offer more extended story segments but embed them in a shallow branching structure that frustrates our desire for participation and agency. The MUDs offer extensive opportunities for participation in formulaic narrative environments, but the collectively generated stories are diffuse and repetitive. None of these formats puts the processing power of the computer directly into the hands of the writer. (HoH, pp. 212-213)

The framework of this critique is probably familiar. Murray has a vision of narrative yet to be. Once writers are properly empowered, we'll be on our way to the real future of interactive narrative, namely immersive, improvisational environments with rich, machine-generated content: not just cybertext but cyberdrama, resembling in many respects Star Trek's vision of the Holodeck.

[7] Respect your ancestors

If we take Murray's line, then maybe our ex-post-modern culture really does need esoteric cybertext after all. There may be some value in having ancestors. They cost relatively little to maintain and make a useful point of comparison by which to demonstrate your own terrific advancement. When they're safely dead, you can praise them all you like.

Using Murray's list of backhanded compliments as warrant, we may be able to save even hypertext fiction from the tide of oblivion. The argument for its preservation, along with other forms of esoteric cybertext, might go like this: What we do in these dark ages may be foolish, wrongheaded, and incoherent, but from our mistakes shall come the shining successes of a new industry--and most important, a vastly popular industry.

[8] Nice dog.exe!

To combine Murray's analysis with my own terms, we might say that the esoteric evolves toward the exoteric. This is hardly a bold or original idea, though it may be useful nonetheless. The proposition restates a very familiar logic that may explain much of cultural life in the last century. What was outré in 1920 becomes standard advertising practice in 1975. The punk wail of 1980 sells financial services in 2001. Time (if not AOL Time Warner) domesticates art.

Indeed, as Murray sees it, art itself can play an important domesticating function, especially when it intersects digital technologies. At a certain point in Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray becomes interested in simulated animals-"Dogz" and "Catz". Writing of these artificial creatures, she notes:

They make the idea of the mechanical less frightening by bringing it into our cultural sphere and domesticating it, just as our distant ancestors made the frightening world of the beasts less so by turning the wolf into a watchdog. We may not want to acknowledge a connection between ourselves and the mechanical world, but to be alive in our time is to be faced with this reflection, like it or not.... With the creation of these quirky, exploratory characters... the narrative imagination is beginning to awaken to this task. (HoH, 246-47)

To be fair, Murray does not suggest that interactive art is good solely for house-training the machine, but the phrase "awakening to this task" seems interesting. Can we infer from this reflection a direct and material grounding for cybertextual art?

[9] Post-humanism

Murray's remark may indeed suggest a master-narrative for cybertext and other forms of interactive art practice. If we follow her drift, its "task" is to humanize the infosphere, bringing the technologies that once seemed so threatening into our extended post-human family. If this idea seems grandiose, recall that Murray compares the creation of digital animals more or less seriously to the breeding of dogs from wolves.

At the very least, this seems a positive enterprise. Taking Murray's notion a few steps further, we might see digital creators as co-creatrors of a new cultural basis--a "post-human" condition, as Katherine Hayles calls it--balancing the spheres of the animal, human, and mechanical (or cybernetic). Though she invokes none of these figures directly, Murray might have cited Hayles or Donna Haraway in this respect as readily as Norbert Wiener, whose "science of control and communication in the animal and the machine" gives us the first root of cybertext.

[10] Machines of loving grace

As Haraway notes, the cyborg future can be both frightening and compelling. Told one way, this story of second or third nature might be part of a grand historical evolution that has taken us out of the suicidal period of ideological conflict (the Cold War just passed) into a new age of commercial, rather than military competition. As symbol of this transformation, consider the latest generation of the Macintosh, which Apple proudly touts as a personal supercomputer, and whose prodigious processing power we are invited to use for graphic design, digital music, and streaming video. It's worth remembering what supercomputers were used for before they came in designer colors. In addition to purer forms of science, they helped us develop thermonuclear weapons, design combat aircraft, and do cryptography. Of course, certain buyers in the developing world may have those very same old tricks in mind, but who wants to get in the way of progress?

[11] I contradict myself

I have a certain problem with progress--if not in the abstract then in the particular, and particularly when it comes to writing. Among my more charitable critics, N.K. Hayles has described my theoretical work as "broken-field running," which any fan of the NFL must take as a compliment. I try to be productively inconsistent. There are times when honesty, if not clarity, demands a sudden change of course. We are coming to one of those moments.

Before the reversal, an important acknowledgement. I find it impossible to cast Murray in an entirely adversarial role, since so much of her work is essential to the broader, emerging field of cybertext which has sprung up to surround the old hypertext homestead. Murray's approach to interactive art actually has much good in it--just not all good. It requires a kind of friendly opposition, or dissenting opinion.

Much of this talk may seem sharply, though I hope not harshly critical of some points in Hamlet on the Holodeck. During discussion, it was suggested that I had set up Murray's book as a straw man, the better to drive a pernicious wedge between traditional literature and cybertext. On the contrary, I consider Murray's work among the strongest and most internally consistent in the field, a rigorous challenge and anything but an easy mark.

I mean my deference to Murray quite sincerely. Hamlet on the Holodeck has made a vital difference in several of my classes. Along with the insights with which I disagree, the book also contains many for which I am grateful--e.g., Murray's contention that multiform narratives do not lack coherence, her recognition that interactive forms proceed from deep changes in contemporary culture, and her insistence, to which we will come, that students of new media concentrate on departures from existing genres and "formats."

Murray and I differ markedly in our concepts of literary value, but I do not regard her as unsophisticated or marginal. Indeed, I believe her neo-Aristotelianism, and even moreso her neo-Romanticism, represent highly significant threads in literature-and-technology circles, if not in literary culture at large. I think they deserve a serious response.

[12] Transparency

Begin dissent.

According to Murray, "all successful storytelling technologies become 'transparent'," and cybertextual forms should be no exception. Here is how Murray describes the ultimate moment of interactive evolution, echoing terms first introduced by Richard Lanham:

...at some point we will find ourselves looking through the medium instead of at it. Then we will no longer be interested in whether the characters we are interacting with are scripted actors, fellow improvisers, or computer-based chatterbots, nor will we continue to think about whether the place we are occupying exists, as a photograph of a theatrical set or as a computer-generated graphic, or about whether it is delivered to us by radio waves or telephone wires. At that point, when the medium itself melts away into transparency, we will be lost in the make-believe and care only about the story. We will not notice it when it happens, but at that moment--even without the matter replicators--we will find ourselves at home on the holodeck. (HoH, 271-72)

As Murray sees it, the current deficiencies of incunabular cyber-art cause the medium to obtrude upon the story. Once climax forms arrive to replace the ancestral lines, the situation of digital art will match the quiescent stability of print: users will no longer perceive the medium as such, but will see "through" it and become entirely absorbed in the story-world.

The dangers of such all-enclosing illusion should be apparent (not transparent). If we no longer concern ourselves about how content reaches us, whether by waves or wires, then we have no reason to ask who owns and controls such facilities. They don't worry about such things on the holodeck. In the world of Star Trek, we might remember, there is no such thing as money, and the Enterprise and her cousins seem far beyond free enterprise (which was of course why the mercenary Ferengi had to be introduced in the post-Reagan years).

[13] Dogs and wolves

In contrast to the immaterial transports of holo-humanism, we might turn our attention to a different set of stories, this one much closer to the present century. These cautionary stories do not feature nice cyber-doggies, but canines of the older, undomesticated type. Consider some particulars that have come to light in just the last few weeks:

Last week, a U.S. Federal District Court in Atlanta, Georgia granted an injunction against publication of The Wind Done Gone, a deliberately heretical parody of Gone With the Wind that retells Margaret Mitchell's story from the perspective of a mixed-race slave (Scarlett O'Hara's half-sister). The court decision is based on an interesting interpretation of the copyright held by Margaret Mitchell's surviving nephews. If the decision stands, it could extend copyright protection beyond specific bodies of text to characters, scenarios, and situations-a legal innovation that might someday be quite convenient to the proprietors of interactive drama.

Most likely the Atlanta decision will be quickly overturned by some court outside the Confederacy [it was indeed overturned May 24, 2001 by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals], and ordinarily this escapade might seem nothing more than a curious aberration. However, other recent developments suggest it may not be so far from the tenor of the times:

A few days before the Atlanta ruling, the Federal Communications Commission announced new rules for ownership of TV stations, newspapers, and other mass-media outlets. As the New York Times described the development: "[The FCC] and the appeals court have become significantly more sympathetic to the free-speech rights of corporations and more skeptical of the role of government in promoting diversity in mass media" (Labaton, A1). Significantly, the media conglomerates arguing for the looser regulations "say that the rules have become both unnecessary and anachronistic at a time when new technologies such as the Internet make it more difficult for one company to control information coming into homes" (A16).

The FCC action is notably unlikely to be overturned by the courts. It is no aberration but a decisive change of policy, and its purported rationale is chilling. While the Internet may be offered by some as a faithful household pet, or even a watchdog of personal liberty, the non-domestic canines, to say nothing of lions, tigers, and bears, have not gone extinct. The world of the present includes significant threats to artistic expression and diversity of opinion. The owners of major media concerns do not want us to take note of these developments. They want us to concentrate on the dog, not the wolf. This could be notably dangerous in the long run. As Espen Aarseth recently observed: "Wolves won't eat carrots."

[14] Another form of I.D.

To defend against developments none of us would welcome--and this "us" no doubt includes holodeck imagineers as well as skeptics like me--I suggest an alternative or dissenting practice, one that is less concerned with interactivity and much more deeply invested in interface. Or if "interface" seems too narrow a term, take instead my preferred term interstitial, marking an insistence on what radically stands between, a metaphor on which I can ring many changes:

• the mediating position of the interface;
  
  
• the transitional work of the artist as critical interpreter of a technology always unfolding;
  
  
• the space between dominant paradigms or genres (we'll come back to this one in a bit);
  
  
• the gaps and lacunae in certain master narratives (ditto).

At its most direct, interstitial design insists and expatiates upon the materiality of expression. It embodies precisely the opposite of "seeing through," in that it holds forth its own mediation, along with that of other texts, for relentless inspection. It does not take us beyond mediation into the pure and timeless realm of story. It does not lead to the holodeck.

[15] Wrong way to the holodeck

It may seem unnecessary to mention examples of this work, since they are so abundant at this conference. Thursday's panel on digital poetics made a particularly strong case for resistant, obtrusively materialist practices, and the performances of John Cayley, Jim Rosenberg, Judd Morrissey, and Lori Talley carried the theory compellingly into practice. Nonetheless, I want to mention two additional instances in this line, partly for their artistic virtue, but more important, and perversely, because they complicate my claims:

The first of these is Noah Wardrip-Fruin's Impermanence Agent (1999), perhaps the most ambitious attempt to incorporate the structures and conventions of the World-Wide Web into creative discourse. Impermanence Agent willfully violates the distinctions between browser, data, and desktop, creating a hybrid text that opens a raw seam along the interface, calling some of its fundamental conventions deeply into question.

Five years before Noah's text appeared, John McDaid released Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, a somewhat neglected but nonetheless pivotal work (recently given much-deserved notice by Anja Rau) that did for the pre-Internet computing environment what Impermanence Agent does for browsers. Legend has it that Bill Atkinson saw HyperCard as a way to collapse the hierarchical distinction between programmers and end users. Taking up Atkinson's popular power tool, McDaid delivers copiously on its promise. A first attempt at what the author calls "artifactual hypertext," the Funhouse presents its reader/user with a series of fragments whose assembly demands a deep (indeed, ever deeper) understanding of the Macintosh user interface. Indeed, at one point in development of the Funhouse, McDaid even contemplated building a satiric alternative to the Mac interface called (of course) the Buddy System.

[16] Justify it

All these projects (and dozens of others I have not mentioned) emphatically refuse the transparency of the medium by mimicking and deliberately distorting the second nature of the computing interface. As I have suggested, this practice can be deeply rewarding, at least to certain self-described artists possessed by the Trickster Spirit, and certain political or polemical claims might be made for its social significance; but we (or you) might wonder what virtue it holds for the rest of post-humanity. What story can we tell to stand alongside Murray's teleology of the domesticated machine, or the harbingers of the holodeck?

If we intend to redeem the Trickster, some comfort might be found in the old modernist construction of the artist as cognitive insurgent, or as McLuhan said, "the antennae of the race." McLuhan proclaimed that "Art is anti-environmental," meaning that it disrupts and forces into attention the invisible constraints of our sign-practices; or to switch to John Cayley's poststructualist terms, art in this dissenting vein enables us to resist the tendency of the Symbolic to retreat into the holographic machine. There is at least as much to be said for this raison d'etre as for Janet Murray's--though it is of course much harder to take it to the bank.

[17] Reverse field

Some of us are not in this business for the paycheck. For many years the McLuhan mission statement has sufficed for me, and indeed it still has the familiar foot-stomping appeal of vintage rock-and-roll. But if you're never too old to rock and roll, there does come a point at which you look pretty ridiculous in the act. In other words, even as the rebel operates upon history, history leaves indelible marks upon the rebel. In other words, we cannot overlook time.

Time and technological evolution are not kind to interface experiments. Like all works of the HyperCard era, Uncle Buddy lives on the tenuous edge of extinction, sustained by the transitional "Classic" environment in Apple's OS-X, but soon to become literally unreadable, long after its references to the computing culture of the late 80s have passed into obscurity. The Impermanence Agent does not yet show its age in quite the same way, but the name is hardly promising.

Indeed, interface interventions seem inherently vulnerable to obsolescence, since they begin by rejecting the idea of a final, fixed definition of the media environment. Interstitial designers celebrate the impermanence of texts in their timebound context, the flickering status of the screen image, of words that yield or will not be still. We're intensely uncomfortable with standards, eternal truths, and master narratives. We may be more than a little skeptical about narrative itself.

All of which makes the McLuhanite mission seem more than a little shaky, calling our dissenting enterprise deeply into doubt. What if most people-maybe even most highly educated people--do not share our obsessive concerns about the conditions of digital discourse? If this is so, can interstitial cybertext ever be anything other than a self-validating, largely impotent insurgency? What place can it have in the world?

[18] New formats

Maybe not so ironically, the strongest answer to these potentially terminal questions comes from my constant interlocutor, Janet Murray. A few years after Hamlet on the Holodeck, she declared:

We do not need designers who can produce more-attractive interfaces with the same formats of communications. We need designers who can re-think the processes of communication, exploiting the capacity of the digital environment to be more responsive to human needs. [Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/23/99]

Murray wrote these remarkably important words as rationale for her own brand of interactive design, and they serve that purpose admirably. But I think they furnish an even more significant argument for interstitial design, because workers in that line are better able to find the gaps (interstices) between conventional "formats," and to fill them with new kinds of experience. In fact, Murray's admonition to designers may point a way out of the experimental, esoteric trap in which interstitial cybertext may be caught.

[19] Pleasure principles

I suggest we raise the stakes and expectations for interstitial design, or for whatever kind of creative cybertext or "literal" poetics to which we may be committed; and I suggest we do so in a very particular way. To explain this agenda I need to make one last raid on Murray's wonderfully antithetical work. Trying to explain what is wrong with existing cybertexts, she writes:

...electronic closure occurs when a work's structure, though not its plot, is understood. This closure involves a cognitive activity at one remove from the usual pleasures of hearing a story.... There is no emotional release or perception of fittingness, just a sense of going from the unknown to the known. This is very different from and far less pleasurable than our more traditional expectations of closure, as arising from the plot of the story and marking the end point of an action. (HoH 174)

I do not have time to explain the full significance of this remark in Murray's large, complicated, and often contradictory analysis (except to say that, in my enthusiastically contradictory view, the contradictions are the best part). On the whole, Murray is not as dismissive of cybertext as this passage suggests. But however badly I have distorted it, this extraordinary assertion of an absolute pleasure-principle for narrative leads me to a very strong response. Whenever someone tries to tell me what I should properly find pleasurable, I want to say, anything but that.

In this rejoinder we might find a prime directive for interstitial design.

[20] Games of null-A

Beyond simply revealing environmental constraints, those who would explore the middle spaces should engage in creation of new media environments that are not limited by "the usual pleasures of hearing a story," the ordinary expectations of the print-trained reader, or the basic cognitive instruction we receive from film and television.

Perhaps this means we should find our major paradigm in games, electronic and otherwise, as Jesper Juul, Gonzalo Frasca, and others in the new ludological movement have suggested. Certainly this shift suggests one way to break out of esoterica. As Julianne Chatelain reminds me, "the game interfaces of today are the business interfaces of tomorrow." Beyond this, games, being a multimedia form, provide an important possibility for bridging the yawning gap between verbal and visual aesthetics.

Games do seem to represent the great untheorized frontier. In my sense they are profoundly interstitial, in that they occupy an anomalous position between the major contenders for disciplinary dominance, literature and film studies. Placing games at the center of the new media field might crucially disturb its institutional politics. If we need to kill the literary priest and the cinematic king, the turn to games could provide an occasion.

Perhaps, though, we will need something more profound than a change of dominant genres to provide a future for cybertext. Certainly it would be pointless to substitute games if we seek in them the same reductive, Aristotelian agonistics that have characterized 20th-century narratology. Indeed, I can endorse the new regime of serious play only with certain vital conditions:

1. That we not fetishize existing genres and approaches, such as puzzle-solving and mortal combat, as absolute determinants of satisfaction or value. When we say "game," we had better leave room for simulations, constructive environments, and other non-agonistic models yet to be conceived. We should not re-impose a narrow economy of pleasure.
   
   
2. That we understand any theoretical work as part of a discursive meta-game whose rules and procedures are connected to, and hence no less contingent than those of the games which are the objects of study. In other words, we must maintain the postructuralist ritual of deconstruction even as we borrow structuralist or formalist approaches as needed.
   
   
3. That we remain mindful at all points of the social and material contingencies of game design and production, and that we foster an ability for practical intervention in those circumstances. A theoretical project limited to prose argument seems little improvement over the status quo. In this regard, I for one will be watching the new journal Game Studies with particular interest.

Finally, setting all my gloomy rhetoric of recession and subtraction to one side, I suggest we seek the closure of closure, as Eskelinen ought to have said by now. That particular game is not really worth the candle. The rhetoric of assassination, whether of hypertext, cybertext, or the disciplinary archons, has little to commend it beyond a certain shock value. The real story is always more complicated. As Jay David Bolter has been telling me for fifteen years now, culture evolves by imitation and exchange, not exclusive displacement. Some day, perhaps, I will get the message. Meanwhile the world as we know it goes on, and cybertext goes with it.