Many Paths Through the Forest: Exploring Arborescence and Ecological Themes in Digital Interactive Narrative

In this article I reflect upon the process of designing and constructing a digital interactive narrative using elements of biomimicry as an intrinsic part of the ecological themes it wishes to dramatise. The ‘branchiness’ of this modern iteration of the chooseyour-own-adventure style of game is supported by a complex substructure of coding and wider ecosystem of coders, mirroring a forest and its exoteric and esoteric networks and labyrinths. Published by West Coast start-up, Tales: choose your own story, Hyperion: tower of the winds (2020) is a 24-part, 96,000-word digital novel set in the storyworld of my fantasy series, The Windsmith Elegy (2004-2012). I argue that Fantasy has a role to play in cultivating ecoliteracy and in modelling alternative modalities in response to the multiple challenges we face in the Climate Emergency. I posit that the design, playing, and prosumer discourse such ergodic texts generate have a mycelial quality to them—rhizomatic structures, which, as Deleuze and Guattari advocate, are
non-hierarchical, resilient, and reciprocal. Acknowledging the compromised entanglement of the digital, I critique the affect and ethics of gaming platforms, which can both raise awareness and be part of the problem: the dirty ecology of every electronic device and virtual noosphere.