“You can see Note 23 here.”: Conceptualizing Critical Editions of Interactive Fiction
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
This paper starts from the premise that interactive fiction is a literary genre that is as deserving of careful scholarly attention as that given to other literary genres. It follows from this premise that key works of interactive fiction (IF) need to be made accessible to scholars, teachers, and students of literature in formats that have been developed in textual studies to enable deep and sustained scholarly inquiry. The relevant format here is the critical edition, a version of the literary text that is enhanced by a critical apparatus that can include collation (annotations of textual variation between versions of a text), explanatory notes, glosses, indices, and a critical introduction. ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition (Galey, Forget, and Allen) has done this for a work of hypertext interactive fiction--the companion website to the popular and critically-acclaimed videogame, Portal (2007). Along with pertinent scholarly discussions (e.g., Galey; Young), this edition helpfully provides a ground from which to conceptualize critical editions of other born-digital interactive fiction.
This paper will attempt to conceptualize a critical edition whose object of scholarly attention are works belonging to the parser-based interactive fiction genre, using the example of Emily Short’s Glass (2006), a work created using the IF integrated development environment (IDE) and natural language programming language Inform 7. Besides existing in three versions (an original and two revised editions), each of these versions of Glass comprises both a source code text (the text as written in Inform 7) and a story file text (the playable text) whose interrelationship necessitates the development of an editorial theory fundamentally based on its status as a literary work that is programmed and played, a status which itself must be informed by a poetics of procedural authorship (Murray; Winder). Additionally, as Espen Aarseth has pointed out, the IF IDE-compiler-interpreter system adds non-authorial text and other effects to a transcript generated by a playthrough, and sometimes unanticipated and/or undesired outputs that should be accounted for in any critical understanding of parser-based IF. Furthermore, the third release of Glass is accompanied by a “Walkthrough” and a “Making of…” created by Short, which represents important authorial perspectives on the work that should be incorporated into a critical edition. Finally (perhaps), the entry for Glass on the Interactive Fiction Database contains reviews of the work, which offer insights into its reception history.
As a work of parser-based IF, Glass must be experienced as such in any critical encounter, and therefore a critical edition would have to design an apparatus that was accessible while traversing the work, and that dynamically responded to the inputs of the player and the outputs of the interpreter. As might be inferred from this outline, there are many editorial challenges that would need to be addressed in the creation of a critical digital edition of Glass, which this paper will attempt to go some way to elucidate.
Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Galey, Alan. “Five Ways to Improve the Conversation About Digital Scholarly Editing.” Committee on Scholarly Editions (blog). Modern Languages Association, 1 Aug. 2016, https://scholarlyeditions.mla.hcommons.org/five-ways-to-improve-the-conversation-about-digital-scholarly-editing/.
Galey, Alan, Ellen Forget, and Brendan Allen, editors. ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition. Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, vol. 42, June 2025, https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/42/aperturescience-com/.
“Glass, by Emily Short.” Interactive Fiction Database, https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=29l04xfgii5roq63
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. The Free Press, 1997.
Short, Emily. Glass. Inform 7 Examples, https://i7-examples.github.io/Glass/index.html.
Winder. William. “Robot Poetics.” A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Blackwell, 2004, https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH/.
Young, John. “Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age: A White Paper of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions.” Committee on Scholarly Editions (blog). Modern Languages Association, 2 Sept. 2015, https://scholarlyeditions.mla.hcommons.org/cse-white-paper/.
“You can see Note 23 here.”: Conceptualizing Critical Editions of Interactive Fiction
Hypertexts & Fictions
This paper starts from the premise that interactive fiction is a literary genre that is as deserving of careful scholarly attention as that given to other literary genres. It follows from this premise that key works of interactive fiction (IF) need to be made accessible to scholars, teachers, and students of literature in formats that have been developed in textual studies to enable deep and sustained scholarly inquiry. The relevant format here is the critical edition, a version of the literary text that is enhanced by a critical apparatus that can include collation (annotations of textual variation between versions of a text), explanatory notes, glosses, indices, and a critical introduction. ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition (Galey, Forget, and Allen) has done this for a work of hypertext interactive fiction--the companion website to the popular and critically-acclaimed videogame, Portal (2007). Along with pertinent scholarly discussions (e.g., Galey; Young), this edition helpfully provides a ground from which to conceptualize critical editions of other born-digital interactive fiction.
This paper will attempt to conceptualize a critical edition whose object of scholarly attention are works belonging to the parser-based interactive fiction genre, using the example of Emily Short’s Glass (2006), a work created using the IF integrated development environment (IDE) and natural language programming language Inform 7. Besides existing in three versions (an original and two revised editions), each of these versions of Glass comprises both a source code text (the text as written in Inform 7) and a story file text (the playable text) whose interrelationship necessitates the development of an editorial theory fundamentally based on its status as a literary work that is programmed and played, a status which itself must be informed by a poetics of procedural authorship (Murray; Winder). Additionally, as Espen Aarseth has pointed out, the IF IDE-compiler-interpreter system adds non-authorial text and other effects to a transcript generated by a playthrough, and sometimes unanticipated and/or undesired outputs that should be accounted for in any critical understanding of parser-based IF. Furthermore, the third release of Glass is accompanied by a “Walkthrough” and a “Making of…” created by Short, which represents important authorial perspectives on the work that should be incorporated into a critical edition. Finally (perhaps), the entry for Glass on the Interactive Fiction Database contains reviews of the work, which offer insights into its reception history.
As a work of parser-based IF, Glass must be experienced as such in any critical encounter, and therefore a critical edition would have to design an apparatus that was accessible while traversing the work, and that dynamically responded to the inputs of the player and the outputs of the interpreter. As might be inferred from this outline, there are many editorial challenges that would need to be addressed in the creation of a critical digital edition of Glass, which this paper will attempt to go some way to elucidate.
Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
Galey, Alan. “Five Ways to Improve the Conversation About Digital Scholarly Editing.” Committee on Scholarly Editions (blog). Modern Languages Association, 1 Aug. 2016, https://scholarlyeditions.mla.hcommons.org/five-ways-to-improve-the-conversation-about-digital-scholarly-editing/.
Galey, Alan, Ellen Forget, and Brendan Allen, editors. ApertureScience.com: A Critical Edition. Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, vol. 42, June 2025, https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/42/aperturescience-com/.
“Glass, by Emily Short.” Interactive Fiction Database, https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=29l04xfgii5roq63
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. The Free Press, 1997.
Short, Emily. Glass. Inform 7 Examples, https://i7-examples.github.io/Glass/index.html.
Winder. William. “Robot Poetics.” A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Blackwell, 2004, https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DH/.
Young, John. “Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age: A White Paper of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions.” Committee on Scholarly Editions (blog). Modern Languages Association, 2 Sept. 2015, https://scholarlyeditions.mla.hcommons.org/cse-white-paper/.
Bio
Associate Professor, Department of English, Toronto Metropolitan University.