The stories humans tell and are told about climate change matters in our understanding of the phenomena, and have an impact on how we act in relation to it. However, climate fiction video games are few in numbers. This project presents the development of “The Testing Bureau”; an interactive fiction game with a story inspired by climate research. The research used is that of the shared socioeconomic pathways: five scenarios that present different socio-economic and political movements and their impact on mitigating and adapting to climate change (O’Neill et. al 2015). The game has been created as a response to the lack of climate fiction within video games, as well as being a way to make climate change research visible outside of scientific circles. Playtests indicated that the game held the potential of spurring personal reflection and engagement on the topics of the policies and possible endings.

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The purpose of this thesis is to apply the adventure formulas laid out by John G. Cawelti and the dramatis personae written by Vladimir Propp to the traditional adventure books Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jour (1874) and Treasure Island (1883) and the interactive fictions The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and 80 Days (2014), both in the adventure genre. After they have been applied, I will compare Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jour with 80 Days and Treasure Island with The Secret of Monkey Island by how the formulas and dramatis personae work and evolve in the fictions. To start things off, I will present the four works and then go through the relevant parts of Cawelti’s formula and Propp’s dramatis personae. Thereafter, I will explain what interactive fiction might be by using Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext. Important concepts will be clarified as well.    The analysis in this thesis starts afterwards. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jour and 80 Days will be the first two works to be analysed after Cawelti and thereafter Propp. When that is done, I will conclude what I have found. The same process will be done with Treasure Island and The Secret of Monkey Island. After that, I will make a concluding comparison between 80 Days and The Secret of Monkey Island and finally conclude whether Cawelti and Propp can be applied to interactive fiction.

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman’s 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these ‘interactive’ texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly ‘infinite’ text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the ‘naturalness’ of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader’s/player’s desire for a high level of perceived agency. The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise propose l’amorce d’une étude poétique et narratologique de la forme textuelle communément désignée par la périphrase « roman dont vous êtes le héros », qui enjoint à ses lecteur·ice·s d’incarner le·la protagoniste de son univers diégétique et à participer à la constitution du récit au fur et à mesure qu’il est lu. Comment la narration y parvient-elle à devenir le lieu d’une multiplicité unifiée de récits, phénomène pour le moins oxymorique, dont les virtualités s’en remettent aux décisions d’un·e lecteur·ice-personnage afin d’être actualisées ? Comment caractériser la poétique singulière de ces textes par le prisme de cette pluralité fondamentale ? Il s’agit, dans un premier temps, d’établir des assises méthodologiques qui puissent fournir une manière de taxonomie de la fiction interactive. L’approche cybertextuelle d’Espen Aarseth constitue cette base principale et permet notamment la mise en relation du roman-dont-vous-êtes-le-héros avec la forme numérique de l’hyperfiction, genre auquel il est souvent comparé en raison d’un fonctionnement hypertextuel commun. Le genre est ensuite examiné à l’aune du concept narratif de multiversalité, ce qui révèle que, si les romans-dont-vous-êtes-le-héros ne constituent pas des exemples parfaits de narration multiverselle, la pluralité des réalités possibles y est souvent thématisée ou poétisée au point où il est possible de parler d’effets de multiversalité ou, du moins, d’une téléologie multiverselle. Dans un second temps, il s’agit d’étudier chacune des trois œuvres du corpus, La nuit je suis Buffy Summers (2007) de Chloé Delaume, Nils Jacket contre l’Agent X (2007) de JFM et La Salamandre (2000) d’Emmanuel Aquin, et sa manière propre d’investir la multiversalité et le concept de réalités possibles ou virtuelles. Ce mémoire est ainsi l’amorce narratologique d’une étude poétique plus approfondie d’un genre liminaire, ni tout à fait récit ni tout à fait jeu, n’ayant joui d’aucun examen systématique. Ce faisant, il vise, de plus, à remettre en question l’application fréquente aux romans-dont-vous-êtes-le-héros, souvent hâtive ou rudimentaire, de cadres théoriques élaborés pour des formes fictionnelles plus consacrées, qui s’avèrent donc inaptes à représenter toute l’étendue poétique du genre. / This master’s thesis is the first step in a poetic and narratological study of the textual form commonly referred to as “choose-your-own-adventure books”, which invites readers to identify with its diegetic universe’s protagonist and to engage in the building of the narrative as it is read. How does narration become the site of a unified multiplicity of narratives––an oxymoron, to say the least––whose virtualities depend on the decisions of a reader-character in order to be actualized? How can we characterize the singular poetics of these texts through the prism of this fundamental plurality? The first part of the thesis is dedicated to the establishing of methodological foundations that can provide a manner of taxonomy for interactive fiction. Espen Aarseth's cybertextual approach constitutes this main basis and allows for the relation of choose-your-own-adventure books with the digital form of hyperfiction, to which it is often compared due to a common hypertextual functioning. The choose-your-own-adventure genre is then examined in the light of the narrative concept of multiversality, revealing that while choose-your-own-adventure books are not perfect examples of multiversal narrative, their thematisation or poetisation of the plurality of possible realities reaches a point where it is possible to speak of multiversal effects or, at least, of a multiversal teleology. The second part of the thesis examines each of the three works making up the main corpus, La nuit je suis Buffy Summers (2007) by Chloé Delaume, Nils Jacket contre l’Agent X (2007) by JFM and La Salamandre (2000) by Emmanuel Aquin, and each’s specific way of exploiting multiversality and the concept of possible or virtual realities. This thesis is thus intended as a narratological entry into a more in-depth poetic study of a liminal genre, neither quite narrative nor quite game, that has not yet been the object of any systematic examination. In so doing, it also aims to challenge the often hasty or rudimentary application to choose-your-own-adventure books of theoretical frameworks developed for more established fictional forms, which then prove unfit to represent the full poetic range of the genre.