Before the writing instrument was born, “interactive fiction” essentially meant face-to-face conversation: one person speaks and the other reciprocates accordingly. Then came pen, paper, and the printing press–fast forward a few hundred years and the personal typewriter transforms into the word processing computer. Technology has come a long way from the computing machines of the 1980s, and with the advent of the Internet, information sharing has lead to phenomenal bounds and leaps in both the creation and consumption of art. The written word of course, when done properly, is just as much of an art form as visual composition. The question at hand, however, is what constitutes the written art form in a rapidly changing and polymorphic digital landscape?

Game titled Zig Zag Flag Shag 1991

According to Assistant English Professor Dr. Lori Emerson of University of Colorado at Boulder, a born-digital literature piece must be an “artifact that generally must be read/viewed on a computer and also makes the most of what the digital medium has to offer” (L. Emerson, personal communication, February, 24 2011). This means that pieces of born-digital literature (also called digital fiction and e-lit) cannot be printed out and have the same effect; the use of code, flash, hypertext, and overall variability that comes with user interaction cannot be translated into the printed word. So, what does this mean to the computer savvy masses that make up the twenty-first century? Literacy is taken to a whole new level—not only must we learn to read words, but we must learn how to read digital literature.

To review an attempt at defining this new form of literacy, “A [S]creed for Digital Fiction”—written cooperatively by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Dave Ciccoricco, Hans Rustad, Jess Laccetti, and Jessica Pressman and housed in the Electronic Book Review—establishes a “creed for the screen,” in an attempt to create guidelines for the exploration of digital fiction as well as to define what digital fiction is and is not. Divided into over twenty components, the [s]creed addresses topics ranging from its use of “close analysis” and “reading” to more digital-specific concepts like “cybersomatics and corporeality,” “nodes,” and “topologies.” Though the [s]creed acknowledges that the act of reading is innately linear, the multilinearity of digital fiction’s medium is also touted, relating to the ideas of multimedial and multimodal awareness in the genre itself. It is this added layer of complexity and accretion of meanings that define the overarching theme of this text, as well as the revolutionary attitude that digital fiction is something to be defined and examined in a very specific manner.

Screen from Nightingale’s Playground 2010

Many questions, however, arise from such a [s]creed. Implicit in the title of this document is the limitation of genre; why fiction and not poetry? Will there be a different [s]creed for digital poetry, and if so, how will it be different, if at all? Throughout the document, the idea of the reader sitting in front of a screen with digital fiction on it accompanied by the clicking of a mouse already sounds outdated—does this document cover touch screens and e-paper? In light of the constant changes in new technology, how can we ever keep up? Will new [s]creeds be made for different types of screens? A distinction is made between reading, watching, playing, and “experiencing” digital fiction. How is experience different from these other active verbs and can this apply to printed texts that incorporate aspects of interactive fiction (i.e. House of Leaves)? Certain diction choices in the [s]creed call to attention its assumptions and limitations as well; is this just a utopian academic manual for “us” and if so, who is this “us”? Does the use of the plural pronoun suggest that this [s]creed should be universal, even if digital fiction is not universal due to its modal limitations? Namely, the access to digital fiction is rarer than access to print fiction, which leads this document to be highly theoretical and hopeful that “we” as “experiencers” will constantly encounter digital fiction. Implicit in these issues is the perennial nature of constantly evolving technologies—it took a few centuries for mankind to step up from the printing press to digital machines, but nowadays new forms of technology and communication are being pushed out every few months. Will this be a problem for English majors who want to embrace e-lit, yet have trouble keeping up with the methods of creation?

Despite these questions that shake the foundations of this [s]creed, it is still quite ambitious and useful in its scope, offering detailed definitions of the tenets of digital fiction and that for which it stands. Particularly significant is its listing of what digital fiction is not: blogs, e-books, and communitarian digital fiction. The cultural significance of having a definition of digital fiction and a way to decipher it is enormous because this reveals that the medium is shifting, and with every medium shift there must be a new paradigm to overlap with it and new scholars to define it.

I am confident that the definition of born-digital literature will stick around, and will gain momentum in the coming years. To many, born-digital literature is just another way to describe text-heavy new media pieces. That definition is not what matters here. It is how we, as readers, react to and interact with these works of art that reflect the mutable and developing nature of our digitally saturated world.

By Pollyanna Macchiano