Choose your own closure

I’m surprised that dropping this class never occurred to me.



Every Wednesday afternoon, I clambered out of the pool around 1:50 p.m. and waddled, shivering, to the locker room. After I rinsed off the chlorine, changed into clothes, and threw my hair under the hand dryers for a few seconds, I dashed across campus, weaving around traffic in MIT’s Infinite Corridor. Half a mile from swim class, I arrived at Interactive Narrative promptly at 2:05, my damp hair in a ponytail and drawstring bag (it’s a metaphor for emotional baggage) in hand.



This class is what’s called a CI-M. First-semester-me barely knew what that meant, but a subject considered communication-intensive for writing majors sounded doubly difficult — and targeted for upperclassmen. In high school I was younger than my Latin and calculus classmates, but experience hadn’t made me better at taking these situations in stride. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t know how to get to know anyone, and felt like everyone was judging me. Class lasted three hours, once a week.



We spent the first few weeks covering narratology, a surprisingly precise set of terms and tools for thinking about narratives. Our (textbook’s) working definition of narrative was a representation of events. Someone’s life, i.e. the events themselves, is not a narrative, but a photograph or the sentence “the child fell” is. We read Exercises in Style, which tells the same story in dozens of different ways, emphasizing the distinction between content and narrative discourse (how events are conveyed).





For our critical essay assignment, I focused on Neither Either Nor Or by Joey Dubuc, a disturbing spin on the classic children’s Choose Your Own Adventure series. I didn’t come up with anything to say until the night before it was due: I was in a ritzy Seaport nightclub for HUBweek with my former high school teacher, passing time before I was to give a speech about a project we were working on together. All I could focus on was sheepishly but insistently asking her for help with my essay, trying to conjure insights.



I also had no idea that the class would focus on fiction and games. Halfway through the semester, I chatted with a girl in my dorm also taking the class. It was obvious to her that “interactive narrative” would be about fiction, but I’ve been brainwashed into associating anything “storytelling” with marketing and memoir. I was also projecting my own interests in interactive journalism, which actually falls under documentary instead.



For my first project, I wrote Transient, a choose-your-own-adventure booklet where each page featured a scene inspired by an MBTA station and was connected to other pages as the stations actually are. I only included stations around downtown Boston, all of which I visited one evening with my friend Emily (though I’d love to go to all the stations at some point). I even included the concourse between Downtown Crossing and Park Street. As with the several other ideas scrapped in the making of this, I think it’s a cool concept that deserves better execution than I could give.





In the next half of the course, things got harder. We read Meanwhile by Jason Shiga, which is a comic that’s also a riddle. I never solved Meanwhile by myself, as we were required to do, or fully wrapped my head around The Garden of Forking Paths by Luis Borges, a 1941 short story that foreshadowed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and is sort of a hypertext. I actually ordered Meanwhile the day before we needed it in class. And guess what? I ordered the wrong book. I got some children’s book that was so disposable that when I tried to return it, Amazon told me to keep it.





Our second and final project was digital. People made really cool shit I wish I could adequately recall and describe. There was a game that began with you, the protagonist, stuck in a time loop and repeating a scenario 30-something times until you can convince the airplane passenger beside you to act in a way that breaks the loop — complete with custom art, music, and hints at a world where some government-associated brain enhancement is all the rage. Someone created a zombie apocalypse story, we deciphered someone’s codes in a workshop session, and I think someone wrote from the perspective of ants.



I made Storyfolio, which was supposed to be a collection of personal essays linking to each other, showing that different threads of our lives are highly connected. Some pages would have interactive visualizations, embeds, graphics, or stylistic distinctions (e.g. handwriting typeface for a scrawled note). I felt really embarrassed when I needed to present drafts of it. It was poor writing, a comparatively boring idea (interesting genre-wise though, not quite autobiography or memoir), and it was all about me, in a space where I felt it didn’t make sense to center my life experiences. I never finished Storyfolio. I got an A in the class and felt averse to touching or reading it again.





Yet, this class has kept on giving. Separating and examining content, discourse, and medium is how I look at the world now. It’s hard to imagine the way I would think without these ideas that feel so fundamental but can technically be labeled as media studies perspectives.



No college class for me so far has gone anything close to ideal. Even when I get a high grade, I experience cognitive dissonance because I only ever feel like I learned a fraction of the content. What I get from classes seems to lie largely in the process (and the pain?), as clichéd as it sounds. This seems to apply to many experiences I have, especially if they weren’t great by standard metrics. I’ve had internships where I barely contributed anything, but I learned about workplace preferences. If I struggled with a class, perhaps I engaged with the content more, ruled out this particular topic/teaching style, or simply planted the seeds for something to grow.



I’m grateful that dropping this class never occurred to me.



Originally published December 2, 2020