Keywords

1 Introduction

Designing interactive stories and games for children poses diverse challenges, one of them being finding the right balance between free interactivity and guidance. On the one hand, children love to explore and interact (e.g., Minecraft or Choose Your Own Adventure branching narratives), to choose their path and participate in the construction of the story. On the other hand, children also love to hear the same story over and over again, obtaining pleasure in reiteration and the confirmation of their expectations. Choice can offer a sense of empowerment and agency, or it can create feelings of anxiety over paths not taken or disorientation. As it turns out, children are not alone in wanting transcripts or records of their play, as interactors of all ages produce transcripts of all manner of games, from the text-based records of interactive stories to the current live streams and recordings of their gameplay on Twitch and elsewhere. Transcripts are proving to hold a powerful place in play.

Certainly, we are facing a paradox: though the interactive story or sandbox game ignites the pleasure of discovery and adventure, it frustrates the pleasure of re-reading and the fulfilment of expectations. In this paper, we theorize the role of the transcript as the linearization of experience, providing a bridge between the comparatively open world of the game and the linear world of video or text. However, rather than a crutch, or an intermediary object to be discarded upon the interactor’s maturation as a player, the transcript offers a means of re-reading and extending the player’s creative performance in collaboration with the system. We propose that game designers should therefore consider the central role of the transcript in player retention, performance and pleasure.

2 The Habit of Re-reading

Critics of children and teenager literature coincide in attributing a positive value to the habit of re-reading. It has been recognized that repetition allows children to internalize story patterns, which in turn helps them solve linguistic and cognitive puzzles, reinforcing their understanding of the story as well as their cognitive development [1]. These scholars recommend reading the same story repeatedly to children up to 36 months. As children mature, they will learn to dramatize, tell the story to others (4-year olds), recognize hero and villains and compare self to characters (5-year olds). However, even older children yearn for re-reading.

Re-reading the same story also allows children to recognize details they may have missed in previous readings and fortifies their memory. Moreover, re-reading also gives children the time to connect the words they read on the page with those they hear around them, helping them to establish a connection between the virtual world of the book and their life experience.

According to Piaget’s child development theories, children’s cognitive evolution progresses from the concrete to the schematic to the symbolic, offering extensive evidence that children learn through embodiment and by handling concrete objects, such as books, with which they can engaged at different emotional levels, even before they learn to read (from pretending they are reading to others, recognizing colors, shapes and figures, to identifying with specific characters) [2].

The pleasure of re-reading, however, is not only part of children’s reading development but it has also been identified by teachers, authors, and critics alike as a necessary learning strategy that helps readers of all ages transcend a superficial consumption of the text and to internalize its rich texture, its vocabulary, and structural schemas, so they can fully inhabit the virtual world offered by the text [3].

For example, Susan Sontag, one of the most voracious readers of the 20th century, describes in her diaries how repeated re-reading of her favorite classics has enabled her to assimilate the text to such an extent as to feel she has become a co-participant in the act of creation: “For, I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself” [4]. Thus, re-reading becomes another form of interactivity, since it provides the reader with an insider’s glance of the text close to that of the producer.

We contend that interactors with digital stories and games also desire this re-reading and that transcripts, in their role as transitional objects, increase reader engagement, providing another form of cognitive interactivity which complements the exciting and exploratory reading experience carried out in the digital domain.

3 What Is a Transitional Object?

Donald Woods Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, described a transitional object as a tool used by the child to progressively manage the boundaries between the self and the world [5]. Generally an object, though it can be a more abstract entity, like a sound or a space, the transitional object (a security blanket, a teddy-bear, etc.) is closely identified with the child’s sense of self, and, at the same time, is also perceived as an entity from the external world. The transitional object is used to provide comfort and to alleviate the child’s anxieties, providing a source of pleasure through interaction with it.

Winnicott argued that the transitional object functions as the predecessor to adults’ cultural objects since their form of engagement with them also takes place in this transitional space, between the I and the not-I or other. It was the critic Gabriele Schwab who, inspired by George Poulet’s phenomenology of reading, transferred Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object to the field of reading [6]. Poulet describes reading as a form of engagement with an object in which the object ceases to be felt as one: “[T]he extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside” [7]. Schwab found a connection between the type of reading carried out by children and Poulet’s description, identifying, in the “intermediate area” created by the creative production and reception of literary works, a privileged space where we can reorganize the boundaries of the self.

Through the act of reading and rereading, the book becomes a transitional object, at once familiar and distinct from the self, helping the child create an illusory space where he can experiment with his relation to the world.

4 Reading Proficiency and Engagement with Otherness

But how can we measure this proficiency, when reading is in itself a cultural phenomenon and not just a biological skill, like talking or walking, whose development is easier to assess from an objective perspective? In her essay, Gabriele Schwab argues that our internalized patterns of reacting to otherness will influence our reading habits. She distinguished different stages of reading in which this negotiation between self and other takes place through distinct modes of cultural contact: two very early forms –introjection and rejection−, the most frequent one − projection −, and the most evolved one –reflexivity. These stages also help delineate a typology of readers as they progress from either totally immersing themselves in the illusory world of the text (introjection) or rejecting it completely (rejection), then to apprehending its otherness by projecting their prejudices on the text (projection), finally to becoming conscious of their projection and entering a reflexive mode, both in and out of the virtual world presented by the text (reflexivity).

Though the evolution through these stages depends on the reader’s experience and cultural environment rather than on age, Schwab noticed a key to understanding the reading process, that the pleasure of reading is intimately tied to the earlier stage of introjection and to children’s enjoyment of books as transitional objects: a type of immersive reading in which the reader manages to fuse completely with the virtual world, forgetting about his or her own identity and enjoying the reenactment of well-known scenes. A trace of this immersive reading, this “archaic fusion,” needs to be recollected or revived even in the more sophisticated reflexive readings so that the reader can fully experience the power of the imaginary world the story offers.

As readers vary in their acceptance of otherness and in their strategies to deal with novelty and surprise, they also have different degrees of habituation to new digital reading environments, which can represent another form of otherness to assimilate. As Ramada and Reyes argue, despite the emergence of digital literature and the digital media that surround children, “they continue to receive an extremely analogue education,” which affects their ability to process digital storytelling [8].

5 The Role of Transcripts as Transitional Objects

The transcript, what Montfort has called a traversal [9], collects what has happened when the interactor “completes” a work of Interactive Fiction by going from the beginning until no more can be narrated, and thus it provides an equivalent sensation to having read the whole book. Whereas Monfort evaluates traversals in terms of success or failure, we could add that reading such textual (by)products provide a deepened experience of the Interactive Fiction akin to re-reading, allowing the user to revive once again the immersive experience and connect at a more emotionally secure level with the fictional world. These linearizations are not limited to text-based games but extend into recordings of image-based games.

We believe that the transcript, understood as a linearization of experience, which can take on various formats, can provide a smooth transition into digital reading environments for readers still tied to analogue reading. Retaining strategies from print reading, such as rereading, can actually prove to be beneficial, as explored in the study of screen reading carried out by Goicoechea and Sanz, who contend that, instead of a gap between digital natives and non-natives, there is a gradual logic in the appreciation of electronic literature and that reading strategies developed by print readers can be very well-suited to the demands of the digital domain [10].

6 Case Study: Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House

One of the outputs an interactive narrative can produce is a transcript (or “session text”), which may contain “both the text typed by the interactor and the text produced by the program” (Monfort 24). The term “session text” refers to “a single session” with the program. Transcripts are built into contemporary IDEs for debugging but can also serve as records for readers. More broadly, a transcript could be called the linear reproduction of interactive experience.

Transcripts are nothing new to text-based interactive fiction. Parser-based interactive fiction has presented logs since their inception. Even Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA (1966) communicated via teletype, which by necessity produced a typed record. Similarly as users interacted with Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) via print (as opposed to “glass” or CRT) terminals, they would also produce a typed record. Inform games, which pioneered the commercial IF market, had a “script/unscript” toggle that allowed interactors to create a printout of all interactions. Following this legacy, the current major IF authoring systems, TADS 3 and INFORM 7, produce transcripts. However, in contemporary visually based interactive adventures, transcripts are largely replaced by way-point saves.

Nonetheless, even visually based interactive stories can produce a transcript, as evidenced by Façade (2005). While this system offers tremendous variability, at the end it generates a transcript (or stageplay) presenting all of the text of the game that has been entered by the user and spoken by the NPCs. Because Façade allows open input, the transcript in that game functions more like a record of a collaborative performance, archived as standalone artistic creations. Due to the framing of the stageplay as a produced object, this transcript encourages creative player performances while linearizing the interactive drama [11].

Print-based Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories offer the clearest corollary to interactive stories. They are largely designed for continuous forward progress along a branching narrative. However, it is not uncommon for readers of these stories to keep one finger in the last choice point and then to sample the consequences of each choice before moving on. In this case, the physical book itself acts as a transcript of the reading experience, offering that comforting transitional object and a sense of containment of the uncertainty of the reading experience.

While transcripts record these collaborative performances, young readers can use transcripts of interactive reading experiences as transitional objects to help them as they move from traditional print-based stories into the world of interactive stories. To illustrate we offer the example from a series of interactive stories for children called Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House (2013–15) [12], published in three separate episodes on the Undum platform, a free and open-source, JavaScript-based interactive storytelling platform developed by Ian Millington.

In its default settings Undum presents new textual nodes or lexia by extending a continuously scrolling document, leaving readers with a record of their experience on one long Web page. This behavior can be altered by starting over on a new page, but in its basic form a story for Undum will offer a record of what the reader has seen. Similar interactive story systems, like the Lifeline series (3 min Games 2015), also offer continuous scrolls of output. What remains is a single Web page made of the text the reader’s choices elicited with the choices themselves removed.

The Mrs. Wobbles tales are middle grade stories set in a magical foster care home and offer readers the chance to navigate a magical world as children in a third-person choice-based story. The visual design is meant to evoke the feeling of reading a physical book, a characteristic of what Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness,” [13] and the story rewards readers with points for reading (or at least clicking on) additional story links as well as choosing links to poems.

After the introductory materials, the Undum page wipes clean the text and leads into the tale of “The Mysterious Floor” (the first episode) on one un-interrupted scroll. Such a transcript not only offers young readers a record, it also presents the opportunity to re-read the same story. Even if the reader does not review it, this record creates a sense of permanence of the story for insecure readers, who may find the disappearing text produces anxiety. Espen Aarseth famously described the anxiety produced by ergodic texts – discussing what he called the sense of aporia produced by hypertext fictions. The transcript offers the trail of breadcrumbs to aid the reader see the effect of their choices [14].

This ongoing transcript is crucial to the evocation of bookishness but it also offers a comfort to readers and a record of their performance. However, these transcripts are not only crucial components of text-based games. Players also seek the linearization of play as a part of their video-game play as well.

7 Implications for Other Games

Although we are focused on interactive narratives for children, transcripts and traces have proven to be important for interactive play from AAA games to instructional simulations, where the convention of the “debriefing” serves as transcript. Even in the AAA world, players seem to long for the transcript or record of play, a need supplied by “Let’s Play” videos, eSports commentaries, and Twitch. The eSports play-by-play creates a linear verbal transcript of play experience [15], which, though selective, is equivalent to a text-based transcript.

As transitional objects, transcripts offer players some control over the frustration and uncertainty of gameplay. Through transcripts, players create a rendering minus the struggle to operate whereby viewers, comforted with the continuity and stability of the linear record, are freed to observe more elements of play.

Such records appear to be in tension with the aesthetics of frustration that mark game play itself. Jeremy Douglass has theorized the “aesthetics of frustration” [16] as a hallmark of interactive fiction but this aesthetic manifests itself in most gameplay from PAC-MAN to Flappy Bird, where players constantly bang against constraints of the system. Noting the continuity, Douglass has said, “players could stream Adventure directly to printer but now stream League of Legends directly to Twitch” [17]. Along with the interactive fiction transcript, the video record of play comforts because it subtracts the frustration from the experience.

The desire to produce recordings of video logs suggests that even experienced players of video games desire these transitional objects as a part of their overall encounters with these frustrating and complex systems. Rather than “transitional” in the sense of a phase between stages of psychological development, the transcript is a tool for achieving a sense of control of our play experience. Transcripts, as text or video recordings, offer a sense of stability that grounds our encounters with complex, multilinear systems and provides opportunities for reflection.

8 Future Research

This theorization of the transcript as transitional object suggests the desire for a record of play is a fundamental source of pleasure in the experience of computer games. Since players of all levels of experience seem to crave and enjoy such records, game creators should take this desire into account when creating systems, developing more affordances for recording experience.

We are particularly interested in the role of transcripts of interactive stories for young players as a means of providing comfort and stability while also offering a stepping stone to more exploration and increased literacy in the systems. Reading theories that examine books as transitional objects offer a framework for understanding transcripts as opportunities for engagement through re-reading. In order to examine the role of transcripts further, it would be useful to conduct studies of children’s interactions with interactive stories and other computer games to see how these records support the process of acquiring what David Buckingham calls “functional literacy” and mastery of gameplay [18]. Moreover, it would be helpful to test whether transcripts over time provide the means for young readers to transition, to become more comfortable with interactive stories to the point that they no longer feel they need the transcripts.

The re-emergence of the discussions of the transcript as a locus of player activity, in the form of logs, records, or video-capture, suggests that this process of producing linear renderings of play is not merely a way to share play on networks, it is a core component of gaining literacy within a system. While it might be a tool for bragging about one’s ability or a source for mass entertainment (as in the case of eSports), it is also a way that players can find comfort in a familiar and predictable environment of the sort our mothers and fathers provided when they yielded to requests to read us that story one more time, a pleasure we indulge when rereading our favorite books or replaying our favorite game.