Interactive digital short story about humans, points of view, and nature
When I was working on my BA presentation in 2009 I read Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) and wrote a short story based on what I thought was the most interesting thing about Aarseth's text, and how they used the language of programming as an integral part of the key theme of their own short story.
This was much more interesting than branching narratives, and the first time I encountered the idea that coding could be expressive as an element of storytelling.
Coming on my own again after a 15-year-old long career writing more or less very linear stories for games (with many important detailing alterations based on context) (and the linearity was of course perfectly justified by multitudes of reasons) it was like my brain threw itself back to 2010 and suddenly I found myself thinking about Espen Aarseth and expressive coding again.
In order to bolster my portfolio (work in progress) I started to doodle a new digital short story, The Valley of Birds, after a 15 year break. It's set in unknown woods (which are inspired simultaneously by Southern Finnish woods as well as a bird on GalĂĄpagos islands) where two characters of opposite mind sets are hiking in late August.
I started working on it with Twine, but then one of my excellent testers pointed out that since this is a story about differing points of view, it would be nice to see both characters' stories on the screen at the same time, I had to abandon Twine, go back to JavaScript after quite a long break, relearn CSS as well, and now I'm slowly digging at creating a story of alternating points of view that you can read side-by-side.
The language of an interactive digital short story
The story was more or less finished months ago but the coding part itself is changing the story in details (which is where god resides) and I find myself thinking often when I'm not working on it about how minimal and utilitarian language is in video games, and how much poetic freedom of expression this format is giving me.
A screenshot of an early version of The Valley of Birds.
The first version of this story had a very "video game" writing style; Follow Ulla [...] or Follow Tove [...] - which are no longer needed since now making a branching choice is gone, and you can see both characters' points of view simultaneously.
Because I'm still in the process of coding it (with my brain questioning things like; how much help would I get from functions, if so many events are unique; and oh no do I need to have a cancel choice -button [that feels like something that might benefit from a function] the text keeps on living.
Because I'm stylistically making a choice to make it feel like a printed story (for which I also received very positive feedback from my test readers at Arbis where I wrote the first version of the story in their Twine course) GUI elements also feel risky and out of place.
Branches and expressions in the story and in the woods
This is not a branching narrative in the sense people are used to thinking about them. The story has a meta level of points of view also given to the participant, who can click on interactive things in the text that change the text body, bringing the reader closer to the characters, and so they are changing their own relationship (emotional distance) to the story.
The expressiveness of coding here isn't about possibilities of different outcomes, but highlighting how differently one can read into something by knowing more about the; and about synthesizing two different points of view in a story.
Essentially it's still a short story.
But it's not a short story you could tell with printed text.
The story is also a gift to my dear hiking friend Anna, inspired by our past and hopefully future hikes together.
Anna and I had tea inside this wood shed during a hike in Eastern Finland in spring 2025.
