The subsequent folder details Gijsbers’ exhaustive (and probably exhausted) attempts to justify his art and clarify his vision. We have him defending his idea of collaborative community artmaking to Stephen Bond, we have a content warning type discussion (no doubt apologetics for De Baron ) entitled “I Will Not Abandon You” which, ironically, ends abruptly beneath the eponymous section title, and we have several unfinished essays about the nature of IF as an artform. Sometimes, in these freewheeling aesthetics treatises, Gijsbers can be profound, as in this very thought provoking idea about recursion: “And of course, if they do come back, and find out more and more about what is going on in the game, and experience more and more of the endings, the reality of that first ending decreases quickly until it is merely one of many possibilities. It has been “de-realised”, robbed of its reality. It is no longer what actually happened, but merely what might happen.” There is a remarkable yet strangely enervating truth in this intriguing concept that I wish Gijsbers would write a whole essay on. What does replayability mean in interactive fiction? In traditional literature, we reread, we notice new things, but there is only salient continuity; what if, every time we read, we noticed new things because the things were genuinely new, the continuity has changed, we are a part of a different drama?
Sometimes, however, Gijsbers can be provocative without sufficient reason: “Analysis of interactive fiction should be judged by a single criterion only: will it help us to write better pieces?” I hope there’s a much wider purpose to analysis, otherwise all the words written here will certainly be worthless! I actually conceive of literary analysis as a fundamentally human endeavour, of trying to come to terms with the immanence of humanity beyond your abandonment within selfhood. Indeed, it is analysis itself which is the greatest form of savouring art, without which art would in some sense be worthless, like a fine vintage poured onto the floor. I don’t even know what it would mean for analysis to facilitate greater interactive fiction if the quality of IF is somehow a nameless or self-evident thing that doesn’t need to be articulated beyond pedagogical awareness of its self-evidence.
I share, of course, Gijsbers’ fascination with the idea of interactivity, rather than an incidental element of a work that functions primarily as literature always has, as being the enabling construct that allows for fundamentally new kinds of literary functions. This isn’t a solved issue, in many ways it is a question that hasn’t yet even been properly asked, and much less so was it in the time period from which these essays originate. The problem I think he runs into is that, in developing his idea of the “player’s creative agenda”, he ends up thinking narrowly about what interactivity even is; that is, he seems to consider interactivity as what the player can add to a narrative design, whereas, in my mind, anything that can be added to a narrative design is fundamentally a different thing than the design itself, which is therefore elided. He seems to be trying to conflate experience with response, but I think bleeding those two realms together simply dilutes them. Anything I can add to With Those We Love Alive is possible only insofar as that artwork can be understood and integrated into my spirit, which can then be added onto, not just by any ideas or worldviews that I contribute, but by the countless other artworks I encounter. I am already the creature grander for having reckoned with the artistic immanence of other creative souls, including Gijsbers, and in everything I do that cocomposition pertains. However, I only achieved such a cocomposition by first having taken the time to understand those artworks on their own terms. The “solution” to Hamlet isn’t to approach it with an “agenda” that I need to dilute it with, such that my experience with Shakespeare successfully reproduces me, that because I’m a rough and ready go-getter I can make Hamlet slay Claudius in the first act so that we can get on with something else, but rather my task should be to understand what is happening in itself and of itself aesthetically, humanly, conditionally of an iteration of our metaphysical predicament, such that, in my own irresolvable binds, I can evoke of my existence the thematic resonances of Hamlet as if they were innate, emanating from the core of my own being.
Beyond this, we get a number of reviews, some included in this folder, others included alongside blog and forum posts in the Various folder. Because I’ve gone on for way too long and am tired, I will simply let the infinitely wiser and wittier Mike Russo sum up Gijsbers’ reviewing technique in this excellent post.
So what are we to make of Victor Gijsbers’ archive? I personally believe it to be a fascinating resource that lets us connect the dots about the nature of his artistic mission and his oeuvre in ways that simply IFDB delving his games would have never made possible. I am awed by his bravery in releasing such a sensitive but comprehensive file for the perusal of the IF community, and I am thankful for the ways he has spent years fighting for interactive fiction as not just an artform that can be integrated into literature but as an artform that can fundamentally broaden the horizon for literature as a radiantly eternally developing unity. He has spent years fighting for a vision of interactive fiction that uses the possibility space of the digital to radically reinvent what art can be and how it can be experienced. He has fearlessly delved the terrifying underside of humankind in works that can be profoundly disturbing and disturbingly profound. His style engages with questions of received gender tropes, the perception of choice, the cruelty of social expectations and norms, and the unbearable heaviness of being. The operatic tenor of his philosophical disgust combines with a ruthless honesty in its longing for a sincerity strong enough to weather abuses. The heart of his style lies in casting gijsbersions on heightened persons .
I hope others follow in his footsteps in creating similar archives. I know Porpentine has done so with Eczema Angel Orifice, and maybe someday when I get in the mood to rave for another 10,000 words, I’ll examine that archive.