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This is going to be a bit different from a normal episode of Giraffe Feels. I picked up copies of the Atari “Flashback Classics” collections over the holidays and spent an afternoon playing them. This sparked a lot of memories of gaming in the days before the NES and how the direction my life, to where I am right now, was steered very early by computers and gaming. This is a bit of a continuation of our episode about childhood gaming narratives, but more focused on how computers in general, led me to where I am today. We also briefly discussed this in our first ever episode about Castlevania III for a moment. 

A version of the rest of this episode can be found on my personal weblog from 2009. It was originally drafted the year before as part of the introduction to my master's thesis. Eventually it was deleted from the introduction, but lived on in blog form. My thesis was about reader agency and the literary nature of hypertext fiction. A point I tried to make over and over on campus was that without computers there is no way I would have loved books or became a college professor. 

We had a Colecovision when I was very young, but I didn't know that until I was a teenager. We had a few Atari systems and I remember playing them a bit. I don't have a lot of connection to Atari games though, because they just lack something intrinsic that I would get from other systems. Nick Montfort's book Racing The Beam is definitely worth checking out though if you want to read more about Atari. 

The Commodore 64 that was the first system I remember becoming fascinated with. Games like Maniac Mansion, Silent Service, and Pirates were enthralling to me as an observer at a friend's house. Winter, Summer, and California Games, as we discussed in our episode about childhood gaming narratives, put me on a path towards connecting my love of books to my love of computers via the sorts of narratives a user could create out of such story sparse games. Watching another friend play Ultima, I don't remember which one, began to nudge me towards my adolescent love of fantasy novels by writers like David Eddings and Terry Brooks. 

Growing up, I had a lot of problems with motor development and coordination.  This led to many other problems including very poor penmanship. A wise teacher, when I was in elementary school, suggested my parents buy me a computer. She claimed that I would end up ahead of the curve because personal computers were going to takeover classrooms before I left for college. Wisely, my parents took her advice and purchased an Apple II for me to do my school work on and, because I did not play well with other children, to have an outlet for play and creativity.

It was the Apple II-C that pushed my creativity almost exclusively towards computers. Long before I became an avid reader in my teens, my creativity came almost exclusively from computers and video games. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s 2009 weblog post about her experience creating detailed narratives out of Apple II games that did not already have them like Summer Games brought back memories from my own childhood. I had a similar experience at almost the same time by creating forms in a word processing program with different countries and names. I created brief backgrounds for each character and had them compete against each other on screen. Scandal, athletic achievement, and other intrigues, played out in this interpretation of my gaming experience. 

As a child I had also played some text adventures, known as interactive fiction, and certainly remember their printed cousins the Choose Your Own Adventure book. I loved how interactive those books were and the agency which readers were given to decide their own fate and reading path. Agency was something that excited me. We have discussed this in our episodes about Legend of Zelda and Castlevania III. Being given choice was not only liberating as a gamer, but it emboldened by creativity and led me to deeper and more meaningful fantasies about the games I was playing. I spent a lot of time pondering game paths not taken and what would have happened if I had not taken the one that I did. I even wrote a bit of what I would find out many years later was called fan fiction. 

This then carried over, for sure, into that love of fantasy novels and certainly led to my fascination of science fiction as a teenager where there could be connections between letting my mind “seek out new worlds” and their relationship to technology. The most exciting part of any Star Trek TNG episode to me was the tech. I loved holodecsk and tricorders and studied starship schematics in books I found at the library. I still have a poster with the Enterprise 1701 D's schematic in my living room as an adult. 

I have been on the World Wide Web since sometime in early 1995 and had access to the internet since the late 80s. Immediately upon joining the web I became involved with participatory online culture by writing fan fiction, posting to newsgroups and listservs, chatting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and, on and off, creating journals which nowadays would be called a weblog. At the same time, I published print based punk rock fanzines periodically and then a music podcast in 2005 that had its final episode in 2014 before we began this show. I had a few websites, but each ended end going down after someone outed me. I often spoke about really personal things including depression, self mutilation, and other issues and it seemed that when I told people about it eventually it got made public in a cruel way. 
It was in college during the late 90s and early 00s that I fell in love with hypertext fiction. I had begun working in a school when I got my associates degree and was quickly frustrated by how banal public school teaching seemed to be. The idea of teaching Julius C easer and The Great Gatsby over and over did not really interest me. Just around the time I started thinking about doing something else, hypertext fiction came into my life.  Everything I found in hypertext fiction upon discovery, the intellectual aesthetic and interplay with computers, which had been my cherished companion since childhood, I had been looking, searching, for in my literary studies.  

My interest in hypertext fiction came to fruition while taking my senior seminar on postmodernism. While being turned onto writers like Italo Calvino, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and theorists like Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva I realized that not only were these fiction writers exactly what I had longed for all of my life from literature, especially Borges, but the bridge between literary theory I fell in love with from Kristeva and Barthes, which I had struggled with until this time, and computers which authors of hypertext fiction bridged via their theories was a dream come true. The beginning years of my college career were filled with frustration, failure, and difficulty. The first step of my recovery came when I embraced hypertext fiction.

I began researching hypertext fiction and exploring the links on my professors weblog. Through these links I was able to explore the work of other hypertext fiction authors and theorists. This experience inspired me to begin my first formal weblog and to purchase a web domain later that summer. These discoveries led me to deep readings of the  hypertextesque works of literature like Tristram Shandy, Infinite Jest, and Ulysses. I was able to tackle these novels and others like Nabakov's Pale Fire on my own terms because of this. Each of these novels exude qualities which are emphasized by an understanding and familiarity with hypertext fiction.

All of this led me to graduate school, where I wrote my thesis about hypertext fiction. I taught a course on graphic narratives a few years ago and had students engage with a numbers of works like The Unknown, These Waves Of Girls, and other forms of electronic literature like digital poetry, and text adventures. We also read some graphic novels. 

Gaming comes up in teaching a bit in general. In composition courses, a handful of students every semester want to write research papers about some aspect of video games. Students write about video game violence, online harrassment, and how gaming makes them better at various things.They can be a reference point in a class discussion in survey courses on British Literature and Women's Literature. Hypertext fiction itself comes up when I teach more non-linear stories by Borges and Calvino. I am pleasantly surprised by how many students are familiar with Twine. 

The open world nature of many RPGs today are, in some ways, the closest comparative version of this. many modern games give the user a chance to interact with a game however they want. I know many people who have played hundreds of hours of Skyrim, but never interacted much with the main game plot. I have often spoke about the joy I get from “going for a walk” in games. I have been significantly delayed in completing Breath of the Wild because I enjoy wandering around and going through every little bit of the game. I think slow moving simulation games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are the true inheritors of this, and I will argue for them in a future episode. 

We'll have to do an episode centered on hypertext fiction in the future. I have plenty to say about the genre and my interest in it was a big part of my personal evolution. 

Again, the Giraffe Feels podcast is written, edited, produced, and performed by William Wend. Giraffefeelspod is the user name to follow on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. We have a Youtube page that is linked on the website.

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