# garmes and the burden of interactivity in which there seems an often unreasonable inherent demand of interactivity which computers (as garmes) make on us > ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting > ~ brian eno you were going to convert all those hundreds of loose text files you've collected over the years of your research into a garme using twine to create an interactive fiction - but were suddenly and oddly overcome with what might be termed b.o.i the "burden of interactivity" from there you quickly made the link / jumped neurally to the idea of a deep and abiding weariness - a personal equation of uncomfortable dissatisfaction brought about by the so called human-computer interface - in which you quickly perform a rough gestimate and find computers generally wanting **boi math** existential boredom pressure and disinterest faced by having to bother to learn yet another new interface (divided by) the low potential (human) interest generated by creating electronic literature while 'i.f' is just used here as an example of b.o.i and isn't being singled out consider the boredom of interactive fiction - the instant ideological demand of its systemic computerized insistence that you play with it - that you need to play with it at all - almost as though _it_ wants to be entertained through _your_ interactivity at some abstract level maybe paper books also silently feature this clawing demand for interaction - even the act of seeing seems an interpretative (garme-like) act - yet they seem far closer to flowers who care not if you pass by or pause for a moment to realize your essential organic connection the tautological fiction or ideology behind interactivity: that such interactivity is somehow inherently good simply because you're able to interact with it (the capitalist 'whatever exists is automatically good' notion) you however increasingly can't be bothered to play or play around (/w/) these machines or systems and ir unceasing demand for active participation which in your limited human estimation yields very little true insight into your human condition - and indeed too often takes more than it allegedly provides human-computer activity often seems a loosing con garme where the house (parasitical system) always wins the moment those dim space monkeys start button mashing - hence the rise of 'one button garmes' endless flappy bird clones and twitch tv even performing b.o.i math turns one into an instant investment banker: "the idea is to do as little as possible for maximum r.o.i" - all while forgetting the basic human right to be lazy such a weariness might be related to the cultural rise of 'play by proxy' the modern garming equivalent of (zizek's dissection of) canned laughter on tv programs which somehow 'laughs for you' - maybe because you're too damn tired at the end of the day eg. constructing dumb garmes for others to use to pretend they're happy no matter how simple the interface there always seems this basic default level of interactive burden - even watching pewdiepie walkthroughs on loltube is often all you can bare in terms of giving something of yourself over to computerizing virtual entertrainments - some personal spark of life energy you've (currently) no better idea what to do with the flicking command line (parser) cursor at the end of each dark passage of interactive fiction waits for you alone citizen. the real 'command' is a demand on another sharp slice of your life / time the degree to which you yield to its unstated passive-aggressive call for ever more input will depend on the ease you feel as an all-too workable unit of meaning in a matrix (play-space) of strange mis-relationship with (/other) machines in little boxes //image: "if you're willing to play we can use you": neo never left > and one may well ask what's so great about "interactivity" anyway? what's wrong with surrendering deferentially to the implacable linear flow of an author's creative thought ir own particular page-by-page artistic and narrative decisions? all these yields links buttons nets maps: not only are they vexing novelties sometimes they seem more compelling than the text itself as though the ancillas of book culture - the tables of contents the indexes and appendixes the designs and jackets and headers - might have swallowed up the stuff inside. if it takes so much effort just to struggle with procedures how can one find time to appreciate style voice eloquence character story? > ~ from hyperfiction: novels for the computer by robert coover **update patch**: email to chris klimas developer of twine 5:17pm june 18th 2014 hi chris was just wondering who to ask about displaying text randomly in twine 2.0 that is the ability to click on the text as a whole and then display another passage at random - yet without overlap - until the end while the interactive part of i.f doesn't quite interest me as yet (not sure why) the ability to simply display text and images in any order does > fragments are the only forms i trust > ~ donald barthelme sincerely robert what > in cybertext aarseth (1997) warns against claiming an exceptional status for vidyagarmz based on the notion of 'interactivity' or 'action' - ironically perhaps considering how central cybertext is to the ludologist impulses still undermining garme studies. ey notes that 'interactive' is a weasel word that "connotes various vague ideas of computer screens user freedom and personalized media while denoting nothing… to declare a system interactive is to endorse it with a magic power" (p. 48). 'interactivity' does not get us any closer to understanding how vidyagarmz function as cultural artefacts but preemptively defends against any attempt to understand them culturally > ~ journal of garmes criticism: across worlds and bodies: criticism in the age of video garmes by brendan keogh // republic of bob