10.13125/2039-6597/4204
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2039-6597
4204
20
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urn:nbn:it:unica-26938
Hans-Joachim Backe
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between
Game Studies
Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity. On the Challenges of Hypercomplex Objects
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Essay
2020-11-21
2020-07-13
2020-11-30
2020-12-07
1-26
1
Hans-Joachim Backe
2020/11/21
10.13125/2039-6597/4204
1
IT University of Copenhagen
2039-6597
20
Game Studies
en
26
urn:nbn:it:unica-26938
Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity. On the Challenges of Hypercomplex Objects
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/4204/4530
10
         Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and
           Hybridity. On the Challenges
            of Hypercomplex Objects

                             Hans-Joachim Backe


Abstract
      Through the analysis of several hypercomplex objects – Mike Carey and
Peter Gross’s The Unwritten (2010) and Inkle’s 80 Days (2014), as well as Doogie
Horner’s Die Hard: The Authorised Colouring and Activity Book (2016) and Chuck
Palahniuk’s Legacy (2017) – the article demonstrates the challenges intermedial
studies of texts without conventional profiles face. The argument presented
here is that a careful hermeneutic analysis is needed to overcome these
obstacles, despite the universal applicability of some media studies concept and
a recent opposition against hermeneutics from posthumanist theories. The
analysis of the examples unearths their aesthetics of hypercomplexity and
argues for why facile categorizations of them would be detrimental to their
interpretation. The conclusion suggests to draw more strongly on play within
the intermedial discourse, both as a verb denoting autotelic activity and as a
noun denoting inevitable or necessary imprecision, in order to engage with the
intricacies of such examples.

Keywords
   Play, Hermeneutics, Posthumanist, Affect Theory, Electronic Literature,
Comic Studies, Game Studies




Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4204
                                  Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)




    Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and
      Hybridity. On the Challenges
       of Hypercomplex Objects

                        Hans-Joachim Backe


    Introduction: Not ‘conventionally distinct’ media
     One of the central, and potentially unsolvable, challenges of any
comparative media study is the question of what we consider a distinct
medium. Intermediality is commonly understood, in Werner Wolf’s
terms, as «any transgression of boundaries between conventionally
distinct media” (Wolf 2011: 3). ‘Conventionally distinct’ is a heuristic
category, not a sharp definition. For most inquiries in inter- as well as
transmedialilty, this heuristic is inevitable, productive, and in many
cases sufficient. Even my argument here can, despite striving for critical
distance from it, not avoid operating with it. That independently
developed alternative concepts such as the Media Mix (Steinberg 2012)
despite some marked differences (like its departure from the primacy of
narrative) share this soft definition, seems to support this observation.
     Yet whenever we probe the idea of the ‘conventionally distinct
medium’ by studying particular examples closely, a problem occurs. As
Lars Elleström points out, the question of what should be considered a
distinct medium as opposed to a blend of media – in his terms, a
multimodal medium – is salient for the oldest and newest cultural forms.

        However, theatre and computer games, two examples of
     strongly multimodal media, are conventionally understood and
     rather well defined as qualified media, so in that sense they are
     coherent media rather than examples of pronounced intermedial



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Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



      crossings of conventional borders, although they may be said to
      fuse a multitude of qualified media that also exist in their own right:
      music, for instance. (Elleström 2010: 38)

      In other words: once we look closely enough, the epistemological
idea of a ‘conventionally distinct’ medium becomes just as shaky as an
ontological notion of pure, original, basic media.
      This fundamental challenge to comparative media studies has been
primarily tackled in research on ‘New Media.’ At the turn of the century,
the «metamedium of the digital computer» and its «takeover of culture»
(Manovich 2002: 33) were identified as the central challenge to media
studies: «The computerization of culture not only leads to the emergence
of new cultural forms such as computer games and virtual worlds; it
redefines existing ones such as photography and cinema» (ibid.: 35).
Since then, North American research has foregrounded the
development of visual language (Bolter and Grusin 1999) and
participatory behavior (Jenkins 2006) in digital and networked culture,
while their European counterparts theorized relations between media
based on studies of traditional, high culture encounters between music
and literature (Wolf 2002) and (post-)modern theater practices
(Rajewsky 2002).
      That attention to both high culture and computing technology has,
of course, been more than justified; the latter’s ability to digitize, process,
network, and recombine linguistic, visual, auditory, and participatory
forms of communication is doubtlessly staggering, and creates
intermedial encounters that are unique and extremely complex. There
is, however, a significant number of phenomena that remain
unobserved, or at least undervalued, by these perspectives, although
they pose unique challenges to the most fundamental of questions –
what constitutes a ‘conventionally distinct medium’ that intermingles,
conflicts, or synergizes with others. Beyond the ‘New Media’ of the
1990s and also the ‘New New Media’ (Levinson 2013), i.e. Social Media
in its different manifestations, we find forms of cultural expression that
appear to deliberately undermine concepts of ‘conventionally distinct
media.’ I will discuss here some examples that appear less aimed at


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                                 Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



undermining an existing or establishing a new qualified medium (in
Elleström’s terms) than at creating an individual piece that relates to
‘conventionally distinct media’ in an out-of-focus, parallax, not-quite
way.
      To avoid established genre or media terms, I will refer to these
artefacts in the following as ‘hypercomplex objects.’ While this term
might appear hyperbolic, I will offer an argument for why I think it is
justified and productive. In abstract terms, hypercomplex objects are
media objects which combine traits of so many qualified and
multimodal media that they cannot be meaningfully identified with
conventional media terms. To demonstrate what that means in practice,
I have selected four paradigmatic examples. Only one is digital, while
the others are in different ways beholden to the technical medium
(again, in Elleström’s terms) of the book; none of them are social media,
and even among popular culture artefacts, two of them might appear as
particularly undeserving of attention. Yet those are precisely the
reasons, I argue, why Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten #17
(2010), Inkle’s 80 Days (2014), Doogie Horner’s Die Hard: The Authorised
Colouring and Activity Book (2016), and Chuck Palahniuk’s Legacy (2017)
deserve earnest academic discussion. They are marketed and sold as,
respectively, a comic book, a computer game, and as adult coloring
books, yet on closer inspection, they problematize not only these labels,
but media categories in general. I will discuss the first two examples at
greater length and use the two others to round off and contrast some key
aspects, most importantly to show that this phenomenon is indeed not
limited to one particular type of qualified medium.
      In the following, I will introduce the examples and why they defy
conventional approaches, putting them into a critical conceptual
context. After that, each of them will be analyzed to demonstrate why I
consider them emblematic of hypercomplex objects, before finally
suggesting contemporary theories of play and playfulness as a
productive lens for approaching them in more depth. The goal is not to
present a conclusive argument for why we need additional intermedial
concepts, but rather to contribute some epistemological and methodical
suggestions to the ongoing debate.


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Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity




    Hypercomplex Objects as a Conceptual Challenge
      The reflections presented here are a continuation of a critical
engagement with the notion of ‘media hybrid’ (Backe 2020). In an
excellent and thorough study of the intersection of computer games and
comics, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (2017) posits that there is a well-
defined class of media artefacts that are true ‘media hybrids’ between
comics and games, «a game comic [which] must exhibit some of the key
characteristics of games and some of the key characteristics of the form
of comics» (ibid.: 126). I have argued that the notion of hybrids is not a
particularly productive way of discussing the questions involved, as it
cements media essentialist ideas of pure ‘source media.’ As an
alternative to potentially limiting a priori categorization, I proposed
deep hermeneutic engagement using fundamental intermedia markers
(e.g. a detailed discussion of the media involved) to study individual
objects in their relation to the different domains they draw on. In other
words, the categorization of an object as a ‘game-comic’ is useful as a
broad descriptive category and expressive genre, but it is not inducive
to a detailed analysis and glosses over potentially crucial points of
rupture. Instead of labeling an artefact before study and thus predicting
the direction of the following analysis, taking stock of all involved
elements and the aesthetic principles of their combination seems more
productive.
      Many of the examples discussed by Goodbrey and me in the
context of hybridization could be considered hypercomplex in the sense
I have proposed above, and the conclusion I will offer at the end of this
argument is basically the same, namely a call for attentive close readings
of examples as artefacts ambiguously situated in complex media
networks. The argument presented here is meant to demonstrate the
universality of the previously observed principles and theorize them
further.
      The first example is both the most conventional and the most well-
researched. Part of a critically acclaimed comic book series running from
2009 to 2015, issue #17 of Peter Gross and Mike Carey’s The Unwritten
(Carey and Gross 2010) is, for all intents and purposes, a comic book.


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                                   Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



What sets it apart from the rest of the series is, simply put, the order of
its pages. Instead of appearing in regular, linear order, they are arranged
in a hypertextual fashion, and the reader has to follow instructions on
the pages to find the next page in the story. It therefore initially appears
as a hypercomic, «a comic with a multicursal narrative structure»
(Goodbrey 2017: 87), but on closer inspection, it does not adhere to the
conventions of this rare medium, either. In terms of its publication
context, the second example, Inkle’s 80 Days (80 Days 2014), is similarly
straightforward. Distributed through digital distribution services for
games and bound to computer platforms (albeit a lowest common
denominator, running on smartphones as well as PCs), it is
unquestionably a digital game. The fashion in which it adapts Jules
Verne’s classic Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours into a postmodern
piece of electronic literature still problematizes its mode of reception.
Stand-up comedian Doogie Horner’s Die Hard: The Authorised Colouring
and Activity Book (Horner, Die hard 2016) and novelist Chuck Palanhiuk’s
Legacy are even more openly idiosyncratic examples which will be
discussed briefly to illustrate the diversity of the phenomenon. Where
Elleström in the passage quoted above describes an aporia for
intermediality scholars – should theatre or computer games be
considered to be combinations of other media or rather media in their
own right – the examples discussed here challenge even the layperson’s
categorization attempts. While Unwritten and 80 Days pass at first glance
for comic book and computer game, yet become more problematic upon
closer inspection, Die Hard: The Authorised Colouring and Activity Book
leaves one to wonder what one is dealing with in the first place.
      The argument I want to make here is that hypercomplex objects
require in-depth hermeneutic engagement before we can even begin to
discuss them adequately. Their complexity amplifies the bias towards
the well-known inherent in any given approach and conceptual
framework. Take Bolter and Grusin’s ‘remediation’: their distinction
between immediacy and hypermediacy, the hiding or exposing,
respectively, of the imprint left by other media, is often taken to be
universally applicable to contemporary media. While their theory is
explicitly not limited to digital media, much of their argument revolves


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Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



around digital user interfaces in the late 20th century and the discourses
connected with them, such as that «the desire for immediacy is apparent
in claims that digital images are more exciting, lively, and realistic than
mere text on a computer screen» (Bolter – Grusin 1999: 23). Their
concepts are suffused with the ethos of universal applicability even
when they speak specifically of «the last several hundred years of
Western visual representation» (ibid.: 11, my emphasis). The examples
discussed in the following surely have properties that allow for them to
be discussed in terms of a tradition of visual representation, yet doing
so would limit their study to aspects based on an a priori and ad hoc
categorization which is, as I will show, not productive.
      Explicitly privileging hermeneutics might be seen as something of
an anachronism, particularly given that newer developments –
Posthumanism, Affect Theory, Actor-Network-Theory – not only offer
productive approaches to complexity, but often do so in active
opposition to the “scapegoat” terms (Gumbrecht 2004: xiv) of
humanistic traditions, hermeneutics and interpretation. Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht suggests a dialectic between meaning, the domain of
hermeneutics, and presence, the domain of affect:

         all cultures and cultural objects can be analyzed as
      configurations of both meaning effects and presence effects,
      although their different semantics of self-description often
      accentuate exclusively one or the other side. (Ibid.: 19)

     What Gumbrecht proposes is a radical re-fashioning of analytic
practice by emphasizing the bodily dimension of human world-
appropriation. The primacy of interpretation and communication is
supposed to be overcome by embracing mysticism, penetration, and
eating as not only traditionally formative modes of cultural
appropriation, but as methods for post-humanistic analysis (ibid.: 86-90).
As stimulating as such radical proposals are, they appear paradoxical to
adherents of more traditional concepts (Israelson 2017: 44), because their
envisioned paradigm shifts are contingent on internalizing a
comprehensive philosophy. Neocybernetics (Clarke 2014), to take just


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                                   Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



one example, is a fascinating approach that considers aesthetic artefacts
as elements of whole media ecologies, without subjecting them to pre-
judgements beyond that of being part of a system. Beyond the mental
hurdles of all posthumanist thinking (e.g. conceptualizing non-human
agency), its application is complicated because it builds on systems
theory, a wholistic approach in its own right, yet does so by
undermining its central premise, the inviolable boundary between
system and environment, through the idea «of a system-environment
hybrid» (Israelson 2017: 52). No matter how powerful the resulting
approach is, its involved nature makes it less than ideal for an initial
analysis of a hypercomplex artefact.
     The following reflections propose to draw on the rich and evocative
concepts of post-humanistic approaches without requiring one to follow
along with their paradigm shifts. The analyses presented here will show
that going through the hermeneutic circle of evaluating the elements of
an artefact vis-à-vis the whole as well as that of situating the whole
artefact within a wider context of a genre or a media ecology are
inevitable. The examples discussed here are both ontologically and
epistemologically challenging. The question of how we make sense of
media phenomena that elude facile categorization and easy recourse to
generic principles of engagement and understanding is one of involved
epistemological processes that involve chiefly an intellectual
interrogation which cannot eschew hermeneutics.

                            The Unwritten
       The Unwritten is a limited comic book series, published by Vertigo,
an imprint of superhero publisher DC comics. Throughout its existence,
Vertigo targeted adult readers with publications originating in early 90s
‘edgy’ themes, yet infusing these stories of the dark supernatural with
much literary ambition and skill. Gross and Carey’s The Unwritten is a
quintessential Vertigo title: Set in the present day of an alternate reality,
it tells the fantastic story of Tom Taylor, the son of a best-selling author,
Wilson Taylor. Wilson has written a series of children’s and young adult
novels about a group of kid wizards which build on the Harry Potter


                                                                                7
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



craze of the late 1990s and early 2000s. While openly epigonal – like in
Rowling’s novels, which also exist in this world, two boys and a girl
from a wizard’s boarding school are the nemesis of an evil, undead
archmage – the books become the world’s most successful fiction,
propelling not only the reclusive Wilson Taylor to world fame, but to an
even greater degree his son Tom. In what appears initially as a shrewd
marketing move, the titular hero of Wilson’s novels is kid wizard
Tommy Taylor, making the ‘real life’ Tom the focal point of a devoted
fan cult and a conspiracy theory proclaiming that Wilson’s novels are
not fiction, but the true history of his son’s magical childhood. The series
begins with a journalist claiming to have proof for these outlandish
sounding claims, which sets Tom on a journey to find out the truth about
his father and his own identity. In the world of The Unwritten, the
boundary between fact and fiction is porous. Tom Taylor’s companions,
Richie Savoy and Lizzie Hexam, exemplify this radically: Richie is
turned into a vampire by a character from a book, and Lizzie believes
that she is not simply named after a character out of Dickens, but is a
fictional character come into the real world. As to Tom, he appears to be
stuck in a sort of ontological parallax, simultaneously being and not
being Tommy Taylor, remembering his past as a real person while being
able to work magic like Tommy.
      The series uses this fantastic setup to explore topics of identity and
power in a lot of depth, and before the backdrop of literary and pop-
cultural references, chiefly among them Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and
Winnie the Pooh. These literary allusions have been studied in depth
(Almeida Cardoso 2017; Katsiadas 2019; Varis 2019), as have been the
thematological roots of individual characters (Di Gennaro 2017) and the
explicit metafictionality of the series (Thoss 2015; Mellier 2017; Israelson
2017). The complexity of The Unwritten results to great part from the way
that the comic book presents its several ontological levels as permeable
and tangible at the same time: «the porosity of this limit helps shape the
secondary world as essentially different from the first while remaining
accessible» (Mellier 2017: 310).
      The most extreme formal experiment in the whole series occurs in
issue #17, entitled “The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam” (Carey and Gross


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                                    Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



2010). Unlike any other part of the series, issue #17 is executed in
hypertextual structure, i.e. as a hypercomic (Goodbrey 2017). Instead of
linearly progressing through the pages, the reader is instructed at the
start of the issue to follow the indicated path (or choose between several
options) by turning to indicated target pages. In the last panel of the first
page, a children’s psychiatrist is debating with herself whether to refer
young Lizzie to a clinic or look for support in treating her. Each option
has a number attached to it that points towards the pages on which the
story continues, depending on which option is chosen.
      The choices offered to the reader are, as Per Israelson points out, in
most cases less about changing the actions of characters than their
motivations. Making such a choice on behalf of a character «affects the
ethos of the whole comic, and naturally influences how it is read and
interpreted, but does not pose insurmountable problems of continuity»
(Israelson 2017: 96). Given that Israelson’s focus is on the fantastic, it is
unsurprising that he understands the hypertextual structure first and
foremost as a textual manifestation of the indeterminacy of the fantastic
according to Todorov:

       the moment of hesitation, of vacillation between two different
     paths through the narrative, is presented repeatedly as a choice
     between textual units. And what is more, as opposed to the
     hermeneutical vacillation Todorov discusses, here the choices
     materially alter the reading of the comic book. (Israelson 2017: 96)

     Israelson contextualizes this hypertextual structure in two of the
standard theories of non-linear expression, Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext
(1997) and Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations (2006). Aarseth defines the
eponymous cybertexts as structures that are ‘ergodic’, i.e. the traversal
of which requires “non-trivial effort”
     He understandably limits his application of those two theories to
the obvious intersection with his topic and approach, highlighting the
performative, agential nature of ergodicity and the posthumanist
egalitarianism of the category of ‘unit.’ To him, what is important is that




                                                                                 9
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



         Rather than as a text to be read and interpreted, issue no. 17 of
      The Unwritten presents itself as a site for configuration and
      embodied cognition. The comic book becomes a configurative text,
      involving the reader in a cybernetic feedback loop, in the
      perception-event of sympoiesis. (Israelson 2017: 97)

     Despite the reliance on the idea of media ecology, Israelson does
not engage with the narrative tradition and, thus, the generic
conventions issue #17 refers to. The second title page of the issue 1
identifies it as a “Pick-a-Story® book”. Despite the registered trademark
symbol, this is not an established term; on the contrary, Carey and Gross
carefully select a wording that is reminiscent of the (copyrighted) genre
names ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, ‘Choose Your Path’, and ‘Pick a
Path’. The books published under those titles, many of them parts of
long-running series, follow the same kind of hypertextual, multicursal
structure found in experimental literature, most famously Julio
Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966). As game-books targeted at boys and young
men, they were very successful throughout the late 1970s and early
1980s. Published around the same time as the development of the
‘adventure game’ genre of computer games as well as the literary genre
of Interactive Fiction, they form a network of mutual influences with
these digital forms (Montfort 2003: 71). The lesser known history of
hypercomics, reaching back at least to the 1980s (Goodbrey 2017: 89),
remains unmentioned. This seems a conscious omission, as it adds to the
ambiguity of the issue’s structure, which appears to be carefully
constructed in more than one respect.
     The first major difference from the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’
tradition is the absence of any randomizing elements. Many, if not most

      1
       The hypertextual structure only begins a few pages into the issue. This
section has its own title page, followed by a page of instructions about the
conventions of navigating the rest of the issue. In a sense, the hypercomic is
therefore a book within the book, adding another layer of metalepsis to the
complex interpenetration of different ontological layers that characterizes The
Unwritten at large.



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                                  Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



traditional gamebooks require a die or some other method of random
number generation – the choice their title promises is therefore not
completely free. Carey and Gross do not employ such a device. Equally
apparent from the start is the relation between player/reader and text:
Where such texts will usually address the reader in a second-person
narrative with a strict focalization on the protagonist-cum-reader-
vehicle, Carey and Gross make the story explicitly about Lizzie,
ostensibly sticking with a more conventional third-person narrative.
     Another aspect in which hypercomics and literary hypertexts,
including ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ gamebooks, differ, is the
synchronoptic one. In a physical gamebook, we will catch glimpses of
other segments than the one we are supposed to read when searching
for the right passage, and even those individual terms (particularly
names) that catch our eye influence our knowledge about the world and
events. This dimension of the reading process is greatly amplified with
a hypercomic. Comics in general are, in Goodbrey’s term, «spatial
networks» (2017: 50–52) of images and framings that live from being
perceived, alternatingly, in isolation and conjunction. In the print layout
of Unwritten #17, with four to six panels per page, it is virtually
impossible not to see developments in the story too early or be reminded
of them at later points.
     One further significant deviation from norms is the nonlinearity of
Carey and Gross’ structure itself. While there is some variety between
the gamebooks of different authors and publishers (Hendrix 2011), one
can observe a general tendency to offer ample room for decision-making
of the reader and reflect the consequences of these decisions in a range
of endings – a structural principle also employed frequently in computer
games to further the player’s sense of agency (Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009).
In a unique qualitative study, Christian Swineheart has coded and
analyzed a representative corpus of game books. The wealth of data
allows him e.g. to categorize endings into five classes of desirability
(great, favorable, mediocre, disappointing, and catastrophic), and to
render tangible the range of agency the books afford.
     While Swineheart’s metrics don’t translate perfectly to a
hypercomic – the sections and pages of gamebooks have a different


                                                                              11
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



character than the panels and pages of a hypercomic –, some larger
trends are unmistakable. The most noteworthy discovery when
approaching Unwritten #17 in this manner is that it only has two endings,
which in Swineheart’s terminology would be considered great and
catastrophic. That this is not more obvious is due to a very clever
structure, where the ‘losing ending’ – protagonist Lizzie spends the rest
of her days locked away in an asylum – is positioned close to the
beginning of the narrative, a mere two ‘wrong’ decisions away. The
remainder of the hypertextual structure is far more linear and, as
previously discussed, primarily suggests differing motivations for
characters instead of changing the course of the fabula.
     Following Swineheart’s coding to distinguish between the
elements that are connected by choices and those that are not (because
they are consecutive or have only one path out of them) as well as
endings, it becomes apparent that only 11% of elements in Unwritten #17
allow the reader a choice, and only 3% of elements are endings – the
remainder of the structure forces the reader to trace the nonlinear
distribution of panels, but without more than trivial effort. For
comparison, Swineheart lists one canonical game book with as few
choices as Unwritten #17 (in which, however, 17% of elements are
endings), while a more typical distribution would be 40% decisions, 25%
linear connections, and 34% endings (Swineheart n.d. [2009]).
     Drawing on game books in comic format for comparison, it
becomes clear that Carey and Gross could have very well adhered much
more strongly to a cybertextual paradigm. CED and Boutanox’ Sherlock
Holmes Et Moriarty Associés (Boutanox 2015), a part of a series of
hypercomic gamebooks, makes extensive use of its inherent
nonlinearity. As the focus is a traditional mystery, there is only one
ending; it is, however, diversified through measuring success on a 20-
point scale, where points are accumulated by finding hints and correct
solutions, rendering the ending much less binary than it is in Unwritten.
While the number of panels per page is comparable between both books,
the latter example uses a more granular approach in its distribution of
choices. Where The Unwritten offers a maximum of one choice per page,
CED and Boutanox frequently have up to 15, distributed over up to six


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                                 Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



panels that each lead to a fixed destination or even need puzzle-solving
to decode their destination. Not only does this multiply the number of
paths through the book, it also mitigates the risk of perceiving too many
panels out of sequence, because the smaller font and more dense
information make it much less likely to glimpse something significant in
the proverbial blink of an eye. The book even offers, in the tradition of
one famous ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, Inside UFO 54-40 (Packard
and Granger 1982), a panel (no. 81) that has no regular way into it, but
is only stumbled upon by accident, mistake, or voluntary ignoring of the
rules.
      Unwritten #17 takes a very deliberate approach to hypercomics,
using that format in an ambiguous way to underscore the ambiguity of
its subject matter. They use the hypercomic gamebook, an already
unusual format, as a point of departure, but instead of ‘only’ presenting
this unusual combination of two traditions in any established form, they
play with the format even further, taking their readers on a unusual
experience that in the end is not only no common comic or hypertext,
but not even a regular hypercomic.

                               80 Days
      80 Days draws on many of the same traditions as Unwritten #17. Its
creators, the small software company Inkle, made their name through
digital adaptations of classic ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’
gamebooks. 80 Days is their first game based on ‘original’ material: As
the title suggests, it is a loose adaptation of Verne’s classic travel
narrative, radically updated and expanded by writer Meg Jayanth. The
treatment of the source material follows, in her words, the question:
“How can you take a story of two white dudes going around the world
and decolonize that and make it interesting?” (Torkington 2014)
      At first glance, it appears as a hypertext narrative or interactive
fiction: Though beautifully illustrated with art deco-style vignettes and
supplemented by a map and a graphical user interface, the characters,
places, and events of the game are presented in evocative, terse prose.
The events are transposed into a steampunk setting full of retro-


                                                                             13
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



futuristic technology, from submersible trains to wandering cities. The
politics of this world are modernized in a similarly idiosyncratic fashion:
while parts of history parallel ours (e.g. the Franco-Prussian war’s
immediate aftereffects), many small and big revolutions have shaped
the societies of 80 Days to be more diverse and colorful than those of
Verne’s novel. In Jayanth’s words:

         I like making games and creating worlds where women, queer
      people, people of colour and those who are under-represented in
      mainstream games and culture can be heroes. And worlds where
      they can be villains too, and everything in between. (Parkin 2016)

     The narrative is vastly expanded, because the player is given the
freedom to choose the route for Fogg and Passepartout, and can easily
get lost in parts of the world barely mentioned by Verne, such as the
Arctic or Sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a game that, when considered
purely from a literary angle, acts as a text generator that draws on a
script of half a million words to produce a vast number of distinct
voyages around the world, some of them as fast as 30 days, some of them
unsuccessful, but with each completed journey running to about 60.000
words, the length of Verne’s novel (Parkin 2016).
     Given the game’s topics and runaway success, it comes as little
surprise that it has become the subject of analyses focusing on feminine
historiography (Toma – Rughiniș 2016), postcolonialism (Mukherjee
2017) and neocolonialism (Harrer 2018). The question of whether to
consider 80 Days a game, an interactive fiction, or something else, is
mostly only touched upon in passing, with some studies using it as an
example for «reading with a touch of gameplay» (R. Rughiniş – C.
Rughiniş 2017). This somewhat offhand treatment of the medium and
genre question is all the more surprising as the categorization of
artefacts as ‘Games’ is a loaded issue within the tense identity politics of
game culture that have come to the fore in recent years (Consalvo 2019).
     There are a number of factors that contribute to a perception of 80
Days as primarily a literary text. The already mentioned length of the
script and the unquestionable amount of deep engagement with the


14
                                   Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



source material give is as much literary credibility as the well-paced
plot, the vivid characterization, and the subtle, yet deft language. Yet
above all, it is a perfectly realized application of hypertext poetics. In
stark contrast to Unwritten #17, 80 Days has dozens, if not hundreds of
distinct endings, and a mind-boggling number of decision points in-
between: «We could attempt to make a graph of the choices, but it would
have 10,000 branches. Every location has its own web. From a
programming point of view, it’s much more like an AI» (Torkington
2014). In addition to the vast number of explicit choices, there are also
implicit ones, moments in which the game will select one of several
possible paths based on an earlier decision of the player.
      80 Days is, however, not only remarkable for the number of
branching points it offers. Passepartout forms the nexus of the literary
and computational aspects of 80 Days: he is the constant focalizer for the
player/reader, but not an avatar for them to embody. Like Unwritten #17,
it replaces the customary second-person narrative of interactive fiction
is, in this case with a first-person narrative. What takes this change in
pronoun and perspective from the linguistic to the ludic is the way in
which Passepartout’s choices are kept somewhat his own. His choices
are characterized by multiple dimensions of unpredictability. The player
only sees the first few words of each of Passepartout’s possible replies,
which frequently leaves room for surprises.
      The very first choice in the game exemplifies that already, giving
the player a taste of how their choices will not give them full control over
Passepartout: Upon Fogg announcing the plan for a journey around the
world, Passepartout can react with an inquiry or an affirmation. When
selecting the affirmation – “‘Very good, Monsieur’” – the game shows
us that Passepartout signals unflinching support despite grave doubts,
because after selecting the reply, its context is revealed, complementing
the direct speech with the narratorial «I murmured dutifully, not
believing a word of it» (80 Days 2014). Beyond this uncertainty about
Passepartout’s ‘own mind’ as a character, the player can only
hypothesize about the effects the character’s replies or actions will have.
This goes both for the resolution of immediate challenges and longer-
term effects. Sometimes, the game goes so far as to give the player the


                                                                               15
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



choice between outcomes – e.g. when Passepartout participates in a
bicycle race, we can choose whether he wins or loses – yet these still have
unpredictable repercussions. At the other end of the spectrum,
completely mundane decisions, taken many times along the journey –
e.g. reading the newspaper vs. having a conversation – will have an
accumulative effect on the characterization of Passepartout (as reliable,
polished, courageous etc.) and the relationship with Fogg. It is, however,
never transparent to the player which of these actions will have what
concrete effect, what the precise value of these parameters is, or when
the game makes use of them.
      While in this fashion, the interactive fiction component of the game
removes the player from Passepartout and his choices, it collapses all
difference in the significant and impactful play elements: In standing in
for the resourceful valet with the responsibility of arranging the
practicalities of travel, the game requires a significant amount of
resource management from the player. The two most important
resources are, as to be expected given the subject matter, time and
money. The player, through Passepartout, has to carefully balance
Fogg’s funds with the speed and comfort of travel. The game introduces
this challenge already at the outset of the journey, too: When packing for
the first leg of the trip, the player has to choose between bringing either
a timetable for public transport in Europe or an item that can be sold for
profit along the way. The former will give additional possibilities for
finding routes in the first days of the journey, while the latter will
replenish the constantly depleting funds. Both options come with
potential drawbacks beyond their influence on each other: Whether the
public transport routes are feasible (and not too slow or too expensive)
will only become apparent when visiting cities connected to their
network, while the luxury items will only fetch high prices in particular
cities, which might be badly connected and less than ideal for the
purpose of circumnavigating the globe fast.
      Other factors further complicate the way we make meaning of 80
Days, like the handling of time. While in the literary passages of the
game, we are at leisure to act at our own speed, the strategic decisions
of planning the route and acquiring provisions happen under time


16
                                    Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



pressure. Time passes at a rate of one real-time second per in-game
minute, which results in a surprising amount of stress. Means of
transport run on fixed schedules, and it is easy to miss a train or boat by
spending time on the market or simply by comparing different routes.
     Where Unwritten #17 challenges categorization by recourse to
different traditions that result in omissions and incompleteness, 80 Days
takes a similar route that confounds through over-achievement. It is a
significant work of adapted literary fiction, an intricate hypertext, and a
fully realized computer game, in a way that makes each of these labels
insufficient and misleading.



                               Conclusion
      The two examples might give the impression that hypertextuality
or game elements are central to my argument. That is not intentional;
the selection was based on the richness and vividness of the two
examples, in the hope that they would be best served to illustrate a wider
phenomenon. There are numerous other phenomena that could be
discussed in a similar fashion.
      A genre predisposed towards hypercomplexity is the adult
coloring book. After being considered for the longest time «an activity
often reserved for children, coloring books for adults rose from hipster
trend to global phenomenon beginning in 2013» (Blackburn – Chamley
2016). Since then, adult coloring books have become the subject of
serious psychological studies (Mantzios – Giannou 2018) and even
clinical test as tools against depression and anxiety (Flett et al. 2017), and
they seem to be completely agnostic with regard to subject matter, as
evidenced e.g. by the IEEE’s engineering coloring book (Knurek 2018).
      One way in which the coloring book has been enriched and
problematized is the addition of narrative. Novelist Chuck Palahniuk
recently published a collection of short stories (Bermejo et al. 2016) and
a novella (Morris – Norton 2017) accompanied by black-and-white
illustrations of well-known comic artists, both ostensibly as coloring
books for adults. In interviews, he has stressed the interdependence of


                                                                                17
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



narrative and coloring book format. As a pure prose piece, the cynical,
picaresque novella Legacy seemed to him too grandiose: «My only
solution was to embrace that quality of the story and present it in a child-
like medium: A coloring book. That cuts the profundity down to a
manageable size» (Semel 2017). Not only does he consider the
illustrations a vital part of the books, he also sees the readers as active
co-creators, as «the people who eventually finish the book by coloring
it» (Shannon 2017).
      A very different form of narrativized coloring book is Doogie
Horner’s Die Hard: The Authorised Colouring and Activity Book (2016).
Horner has published several adaptations of 1980s Hollywood movies
(e.g. Horner, A Die hard Christmas 2017), and even though they are
unmistakably thoroughly commercialized products often sold as part of
novelty gift sets, they are also part of egalitarian fan culture. The
adaptation of the movie is very liberal, a re-working the subject matter
through iconic vignettes and fan-favorite moments, drawn not from
reference but from memory (Purdy 2016). Even given the wide range of
subject matters found in adult coloring books, the gunfire and
explosions of the story are clearly not in line with a mindfulness context.
The liberal, tongue in cheek approach to the coloring book genre extends
to the inclusion of additional activities that aren’t reading and coloring.
Some of these activities, particularly simple geometrical puzzles, are
references to the traditions of children’s coloring books, while others
apply the same principles to more adult-specific activities (like a bingo
or a gap-text parodying the censorship of the movie on TV). Horner’s
book not simply adds things innocuously on top of each other, as its
subtitle suggests, but puts them into contrast with each other, partially
through emphasizing just how incongruous the activities offered by it
really are.
      My proposal to consider the examples discussed here a particular
kind of phenomenon might be met with skepticism; they might be
considered nothing more than complex, artful specimens within an
established medium. After all, art generally pushes against established
definitions and breaks continuously with conventions. My reply to such
a contention would be that the examples discussed here are built around


18
                                   Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)



their hypercomplex allusive structures and gain their meaning in great
part from their recipients’ epistemological struggles with their
indeterminacy. This aesthetic should rather be considered a transmedia
phenomenon in Rajewsky’s sense, i.e. a strategy found in different
media, largely independent from technological and communicative
affordances, such as irony (Rajewsky 2005). And if one was to accept the
category of hypercomplex objects, then a great number of
metareferential works of art would be part of it. Most importantly
though, the category of hypercomplex object is not a new genre,
medium, or hybrid, but an umbrella term for particularly challenging
phenomena that oppose the linearity of traditional, patriarchal,
hegemonic structures with play and exploration.
     Because of these shared tendencies, the analysis of the near-endless
chain of allusions to both content and style of other media needs to go
beyond the obvious, i.e. the thorough hermeneutic analysis of modes
(Elleström 2010) and involved media (Wolf 2011). What we are facing in
these experimental popular texts are playful connotations that emerge
out of conceptual parallaxes and not-quite adherence to standards.
     That makes play a productive concept, both as a verb and as a noun:
On the one hand, the examples invite playful engagement and draw not
only on comics and books, but also on games, while, on the other hand,
hermeneutic flexibility allows to introduce some play into otherwise
rigid frameworks that would run the risk of flattening the difference
between the examples.
     Play is not only a diverse activity, but it is ambiguous, both in itself
and in the ways we talk about it (Sutton-Smith 1997). Play has been
identified as a common factor in transmedia franchises (Harvey 2015),
and is shared not only by people of all cultures, but even by human and
non-human animals (Jørgensen – Wirman 2016). Going beyond play in
a narrow sense to the playfulness found in many serious, goal-driven
processes and products (Sicart 2014), play can be said to be a dominant
meaning-making force in contemporary culture. Play, then, is
instrumental in engaging such phenomena in two ways: Only by
playing along are we completing the text and allowing it to produce its
meaning, which we then decode during and after play. This cognitively


                                                                               19
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity



and intellectually complex process apparently comes naturally to
humans, yet is difficult to operationalize and explain, and has
consequently led to involved theories of the game-as-played (Leino
2009) and real-time hermeneutics (Arjoranta 2015).
     The reflections presented here will necessarily remain suggestions,
yet hopefully timely ones. For too long, the locus of intermedial
innovation has been sought in the digital arena. To assume that ‘new’
equals ‘digital’ is not only to succumb to an unfortunate tradition in
media history, where reliance on widely documented phenomena tends
to «reproduce dominant narratives» (Uricchio 2003: 34). The study of
presumed minority phenomena, activities, and perceptions serve as a
reminder that «technological change is not a laboratory event or a
corporate strategy but a fully social practice» (Gitelman 2003: 62).
Looking only towards digital culture for innovation is also to challenge
humanistic media theory on only one front, forfeiting an opportunity for
re-appreciating widely applied methods and positions. The aporia of
hypercomplexity enriches these discourses, because it suggests a shift in
perspective from the work to its reception, bringing into relief
connections of inter- and transmedia approaches to both reader-
response theory and fan studies.




20
                                      Between, vol. X, n. 20 (Novembre/November 2020)




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                                The Author
Hans-Joachim Backe

      Hans-Joachim Backe is Associate Professor at the IT University of
Copenhagen. He holds a Master’s degree and a PhD in Comparative
Literature from Saarland University, Germany. He was chairperson of
the ICLA Research Committee on Literature in the Digital Age, was a
co-founder of the German Association for Media Studies’ SIG on Comic
Studies, and is chairperson of the Games and Literary Theory
Conference series. His research focuses on game studies, comparative
media studies, and literary theory.

      Email: hanj@itu.dk




                                                                                 25
Hans-Joachim Backe, Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity




                                   The Article


Date sent: 15/07/2020
Date accepted: 15/10/2020
Date published: 30/11/2020



                          How to cite this article
Backe, Hans-Joachim, “Beyond Dominance, Mixture, and Hybridity. On
the Challenges of Hypercomplex Objects”, Transmediality / Intermediality
/ Crossmediality: Problems of Definition, Eds. H.-J. Backe, M. Fusillo, M.
Lino, with the focus section Intermedial Dante: Reception, Appropriation,
Metamorphosis, Eds. C. Fischer and M. Petricola, Between, X.20 (2020),
www.betweenjournal.it




26
