Coercing Contribution: Navigating Involuntary Authors through a Mountain of Sleep
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Interactive fiction’s reader-text dialogue masks structural coercion that enhances ludic coercion’s effectiveness. Like a Mountain of Sleep postures as a random VHS of an unrealized slasher film set in a Florida MTV Spring Break forgot and leverages IF’s generic conventions, exploiting the closed-play of designer-mediated control to subjugate and frustrate users per the expectations of Twine. Building on Multi-User-Dungeon’s explicit parser rejection, LaMoS aetheticizes frustration as a readerly experience through artifice as the text gradually reveals a capacity for hostility, rejection and reappropriation in a desire-rebellion dynamic reminiscent of Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty. Bogost’s procedural rhetoric establishes how computational systems make arguments through operational logic rather than representation alone, and LaMoS renders Foucault’s regulatory author-function experiential through procedural entrapment. The rules governing how this system behaves constitute a text consuming its readers per Hayles’s cognitive assemblages, as meaning emerges from human-machine interaction, while building from Brian Kim Stefans’ “Privileging Language,” as the system strips interactive fiction’s agentic conventions and makes readers involuntary authors. Foucault’s author-function’s “disappearance” then becomes auratic experience as players discover the “perpetual loss state” of their obliterated input through systematic recontextualization. Genuine responses slow narrative corruption and evasion attempts accelerate it, creating temporal pressure compounding coercive prompts. The (un)supervised operations multiply: players expect themselves unsupervised authors while the system surveils and appropriates their contributions. A comprehensive transcript feature reveals how words were captured, transformed and redeployed, revealing the textual control mechanics that literary theory typically describes abstractly. This transparency distinguishes LaMoS from both MUD’s explicit rejection and contemporary IF’s theatrics through its post-entrapment “gift shop,” demonstrating how interactive fiction’s coercive power may subvert users’ initial belief toward IF to enable systematic appropriation, creating involuntary authors who discover they have entered a contracted relationship of textual domination without recognizing the power dynamic until after subjugation has begun.
Coercing Contribution: Navigating Involuntary Authors through a Mountain of Sleep
Hypertexts & Fictions
Interactive fiction’s reader-text dialogue masks structural coercion that enhances ludic coercion’s effectiveness. Like a Mountain of Sleep postures as a random VHS of an unrealized slasher film set in a Florida MTV Spring Break forgot and leverages IF’s generic conventions, exploiting the closed-play of designer-mediated control to subjugate and frustrate users per the expectations of Twine. Building on Multi-User-Dungeon’s explicit parser rejection, LaMoS aetheticizes frustration as a readerly experience through artifice as the text gradually reveals a capacity for hostility, rejection and reappropriation in a desire-rebellion dynamic reminiscent of Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty. Bogost’s procedural rhetoric establishes how computational systems make arguments through operational logic rather than representation alone, and LaMoS renders Foucault’s regulatory author-function experiential through procedural entrapment. The rules governing how this system behaves constitute a text consuming its readers per Hayles’s cognitive assemblages, as meaning emerges from human-machine interaction, while building from Brian Kim Stefans’ “Privileging Language,” as the system strips interactive fiction’s agentic conventions and makes readers involuntary authors. Foucault’s author-function’s “disappearance” then becomes auratic experience as players discover the “perpetual loss state” of their obliterated input through systematic recontextualization. Genuine responses slow narrative corruption and evasion attempts accelerate it, creating temporal pressure compounding coercive prompts. The (un)supervised operations multiply: players expect themselves unsupervised authors while the system surveils and appropriates their contributions. A comprehensive transcript feature reveals how words were captured, transformed and redeployed, revealing the textual control mechanics that literary theory typically describes abstractly. This transparency distinguishes LaMoS from both MUD’s explicit rejection and contemporary IF’s theatrics through its post-entrapment “gift shop,” demonstrating how interactive fiction’s coercive power may subvert users’ initial belief toward IF to enable systematic appropriation, creating involuntary authors who discover they have entered a contracted relationship of textual domination without recognizing the power dynamic until after subjugation has begun.
Bio
Glenn S. Ritchey III is a PhD student in Texts & Technology at the University of Central Florida whose research investigates how to democratize who gets to make meaning through computational literature and constraint-based generative systems as democratic alternatives to corporate AI. Drawing on decolonial epistemologies and open-source principles, Glenn's work positions transparent, rule-governed systems as tools for technological sovereignty.
Glenn's creative practice includes Francoism, a 100,000-word Markov-based novel forthcoming from Inside the Castle Press, and Recapitating Massive, a collaborative algorithmic critical edition. Their work has been accepted at ELO 2025 Toronto, SCMS 2026, and the South Asia Research Colloquium in Kolkata.
Glenn's academic career is indebted to a background in DIY music and arts and likewise emphasizes building democratic alternatives rather than solely critiquing existing systems. Their research operates at the intersection of computational literature, digital humanities, and decolonial technological studies.