Footnotes

Editor's Note: The text below are the footnotes from the game, reformatted for readability. As these footnotes are removed from their surrounding context in-game, it's the author's recommendation that readers first attempt to discover them through gameplay for a fuller understanding of these reflections and a fuller experience of the text as a whole.

Inventio: Abstract

perimortem [in (theoretical) rigor] is a creative–critical parser game that enacts Eelam Tamil diasporic–disabled repairing composition, extending Aaron Trammell's (2023) "repairing play": a Black phenomenology of play that begins with the idea that torture is play for people of color who share collective histories and ongoing experiences of racial and ethnic violence. I propose a similar corrective: that torture also inheres in composition for nonwhite/non-European diasporic and disabled scholars who can't predictably "pass" and whose experiences of racism and ableism are embedded in shared collective histories of colonization, ethnic chauvinism, and mass atrocity without justice or accountability. Mapped using kolam geometry, perimortem is a parser game designed to simulate the pleasurable and painful affects of composition and challenge the Euro-Western moral and aesthetic aversion to tortured embodiment in scholarly writing by explicitly illustrating the presence of torture-and/as-play in academia.

Inventio: Session Transcript and Research Journal

If players choose to save the session transcript when prompted at the start of play, the file will silently record all input and output in the order of encounter, including player actions, expository and descriptive text, error messages, and notes for the Inventio section of Kairos. The final version of the file translates South Asian classical aesthetics into Euro-Western composition and illustrates the relational, kairotic, and painful nature of composition.

This transcript includes player input in the research journal, where players can take notes on game text and write annotations, highlighting how writing is as intersubjectively coconstructed as the interpretation of "legitimate" pain and trauma. Its contents can be retrieved at any time during play. Although the journal is limited to 20 words per input, it's possible to copy game text into it, as well as write down anything else.

The result is a doubly interactive creative–critical text whose game session transcript attests to a highly individualized, affective experience of composing and engaging with scholarship.

Inventio: Numeric–Thematic Concordance

I assigned Cartesian coordinates to each pulli in the kolam and a theme to each Cartesian quadrant, axis, and modular kolam. The quadrant themes are: Composition (Quadrant 1), Disability (Quadrant 2), Genocide (Quadrant 3), and Play (Quadrant 4). The numerical concordances (+ and -) are: Origins (0), Haunting (1), Spite (2), Pleasure (3), Emergence (4), Luxury (5), Torture (6), Navigation (7), Design (8), Contingency (9), and Healing (10). The themes of the modular kolams reflect relationships with their counterparts and neighbors: Threshold, Relationality, Syncopation, Chronicity, Rigor, Memory, Desire, Beauty, Power, Hands, Constraint, Exactitude, Object, Safety, Thought, Assimilation, Resistance, Disguise, Flight, Appendix, Teratology, Perfection, Anomaly, Contagion, and Eyes.

A text is associated with each pulli, with its location given as "(x,y): theme of x, theme of y, theme of modular kolam." Each text is designed to work alone and in different relationships with other points in the design, suggesting that elements in the text are relational and exchangeable.

The result is a representation of the topological structure of the text that allows players to visualize multiple, shifting relationships—thematic, numeric, and spatial—across its contents.

I chose to render the kolam notation as the basis of a world map, to suggest the movement involved in kolam art and the lines of flight created by geographical and cultural displacement. I sequenced the text in one order, but like these lines of flight, it's not the only way. Players can finish drawing the incomplete map and differently 'solve' the kolam, yielding another variation of the text.

Inventio: Narrative Environment

Parser games resist assimilation into scholarly composition, while choice-based IF [interactive fiction] tools like Twine—which more closely resemble Euro-Western reading orientations and familiar genres like hypertext—enjoy greater popularity and legitimacy in digital composition. Parser games involve open-ended inquiry, directional navigation, and attending to the writer's craft.

I designed a bounded setting with open-ended exploration and narrative details that, like the kolam text, reinforce the relationships between play, torture, digital composition, and racism and ableism in academia.

The autopsy chamber is a so-called safe house where people like me are flayed of our aberrations; the implication is every university has one, and you might have done a turn in it, in either role.

Inventio: Organs

For narrative reasons, I needed the dissected subject to be hollow—an Easter egg referencing another scholarly game I wrote—but in a way that implied the possibility of revival. The bag of organs interjects literal viscerality. It's a fitting artifact. Our profession doesn't explicitly call on its BIPOC, diasporic, and/or disabled practitioners to lay down our lives for our work, but it profits off our evisceration.

Inventio: Information Management

Writing with Inform is primarily an exercise in information management and presentation that stays mindful of its relationship with the player and can be manipulated to progress in a kolam pattern. I implemented tables to track information and modify the player's state of contagion and presented that information to the player through mundane research objects like a file folder and digital voice recorder.

Unlike academia, where forgetting a famous scholar's name or common rhetorical concept can lead to a public execution, Inform tolerates my inelegant code without impeaching my writing skill.

Inventio: Keycard

I initially implemented a keycard door because exits are an expected feature of IF prose. Strategically, I needed to prevent players from straying from the scholarly text without making the game world too unbelievable. I realized while drafting that I could rebuff exit attempts with endings that simulate the affects and sensations I have to endure when conforming to normative digital composition formats and tools.

There are two different endings to this "demo" game. Escape attempts earn an ending that represents the experience of BIPOC disabled rhetoricians who cannot leave academia, aren't protected while they stay, and are fated to be consigned to the garbage heap once their value is fully extracted. Even digital composition can become this cage.

Inventio: Cutting Room Floor

There was no cutting room floor for this text, only different versions of it.

The keynote version: The textual equivalent of a 50-minute reading, or 54 texts whose corresponding 54 pulli were the first to be sequentially enclosed by a line that eventually encircles all 441 points. The path I chose is not the only possible path, but it's the first one I completed after many errors and therefore the one I settled on.

The full version: 441 individual and interconnected pieces mapped onto a 21x21 kolam whose dots represent thematic intersections on a Cartesian plane.

The "demo" excerpt: The game you're playing now, comprised of the first 10 pieces interspersed with descriptive and expository text, characteristic of parser games.

Inventio: Economies of Harm

It was important to me to confront academic players with their complicity in the cycle of harm perpetuated in academic writing. I encoded "cutting" as a special action with an associated damage system to enact how I have to accept extra harm, without reciprocity, to compose scholarship. I settled on a hand auger as the primary tool of vivisection. A scalpel, a symbol of clinical objectivity, depersonalizes the cadaver, whereas a hand-cranked drill presses the tactile sensations of torture into your hand. It also felt significant that auger is a homophone of augur, a word I learned as a child from folklore. Here, the prediction concerns whether you will stay the course with the spiral blade, understanding that you already engage in violence, or exit without looking back. You are helpless to change these options, if the text is to be read.

Inventio: Embodiment

Repurposing kolam geometry using Inform 7, a doubly labor-intensive process, might seem counterintuitive for the fibromyalgic composer who has to conserve her energy; but the two forms mimic the structures of my diasporic-disabled prewriting and writing processes. Diasporic-disabled composition anticipates the reading habits players bring to the text; composing with Inform requires an anticipatory stance. In parser games, exposition must be rationed into manageable pieces, which is conducive to my instinct to map textual fragments onto a kolam pattern whose topology reveals the shape of the full text.

Inventio: Anomaly

My process of invention is always affected by the intrusive sensations and limitations of my body. I can't persuade. I can't endure (9 months with appendicitis, 10 years with a hermetically sealed abdominal infection, 20 years of academic abuse, 41 years in the shadow of atrocity, a dislocated? shoulder? right now), and I must.

I found solace in Inform's limitations and hoped to generate a frustration in players like mine when I read, write, teach, live. Defining objects and actions through conditions and properties mimics how I compose through physical and spiritual pain. Runtime errors caused by attempting to access an undefined property echo my need to define my bodymind's properties to access care for "undefinable" pains. My printed output might look pretty, but only after many rewrites, as the backend stuff of my creation isn't.

Inventio: Terrorism

Content Note: dismemberment

Human landmines usually refer to anti-personnel mines, ranging from small tripwire explosives to command-detonated directional claymores. Claymores were used extensively in Sri Lanka during the conflict. Soldiers, pedestrians, busloads of civilians. The first photograph I saw of its swath of destruction was a leg, circled in chalk, intact to the fleshy part of the thigh, trousers indistinguishable from charred skin. It's a strangely bloodless scene, but in the background there stands an apparently uninjured man, stained from waist to head, wild eyes stark white in a face dyed dark.

That the objectified diasporic-disabled body in pain retains an inherently destructive force is my analogy for the common BIPOC, diasporic, and/or disabled experience in academia. Our interventions are lauded when it suits the field, but at other times—most times—must be thwarted before our corruption spreads. I designed the landmines, and their distribution of damage (or vitality) on accessing their associated texts, to illustrate this.

No matter how much I feign assimilation in my written work, I never leave the realm of suspicion. I feel barely a step away from being reframed as terrorist. I composed this text wondering if it would unfavorably tip the scales.

Inventio: Rooms and Maps

In Inform, map connections are created by joining rooms at their edges, which forges pathways between them in the eight compass directions. By default, traveling to a distant room means passing through every room on the way. But in kolam art, the swerving, looping line can't be neatly mapped onto compass directions, as it frequently bypasses its neighbors and intersects itself many times before enclosing a point.

I wanted players to have a sense of the scale of the full kolam text and the embodied movement involved in drawing it. Thus, I designed the Minefield—the region of the game world that contains the geometric notation of the kolam composition—with 120/441 points, each understood by Inform as a single room, replete with map connections where adjoining points have been encoded.

To avoid tampering with Inform's room and map system, I incorporated the special action "continue", which effectively transports the player from point to point in the order the line enclosed them. Finally, I used Inform's map feature to generate a visual map of the kolam notation.

My hope was that players could experience the text on multiple planes: "linearly" on the visual grid; sequentially in the preprogrammed "kolam pathway" in gameplay; or interspersed with parser messages as the player encountered them in the session transcript.

Inventio: Embedded Suggestion

In IF prose, all text potentially poses a suggestion to the player. The art of IF prose involves balancing literary aesthetics and functional design, subtly directing the player through hints embedded in description and exposition. This legitimizes attention to craft and poetics in scholarly IF, as every word carries weight in the form of clues, the affective charge the writer infuses into the text, and the audience's embodied response to that text.

Inventio: Concept Phase

I began with an idea about what the player's experience should be: in this case, a locked-in story where players interact with an NPC to assemble a kolam text, with process reflections included throughout; a damage system where accessing the text reduces the player's hit points and increases the research subject's hit points while describing her pain; a world map that reflects the point lattice and the pathway through it. There are formulaic expectations around academic writing. The genesis of a research article is supposed to start with a "point," but I struggle with this kind of linearity; I start with "points" that make instinctive sense. My composition process is shaped by Tamil literacy frameworks, intergenerational trauma, fibromyalgia. There are no beginnings or endings, just places in the weave where a reader enters and exits.

Inform isn't a new platform, and parser IF isn't a new genre, but it doesn't adhere to Eurocentric notions of readability. It can be torture. By contrast, digital multimodal composition often transfers the (relative) linearity, coherence, and synthesis of traditional, print-based prose to forms that seem like an afterthought. The content of the digital multimodal text must crave its medium, to the point that it becomes a poor imitation of itself if its medium is rendered print-based and static. So symbiotically enmeshed, that sundering them is a bloody act.

Inventio: Fibonacci Kolam

I settled on this kolam design for symbolic and strategic reasons: 21, an auspicious number in Hindu thought, becomes the number of dots in the grid's diameter; the Fibonacci recursion is one of the earliest mathematical formulas I remember Appa teaching me; and 441 seemed like a large enough number to contain a book chapter. Its size also reflects the tension between holistic and traditional approaches to medicine and writing in Euro-Western practice, as it becomes impossible at this scale to figure out where you went wrong if you make a mistake. After drawing the kolam notation by hand, I encoded it into the parser game environment as a series of rooms, each containing a landmine encased in flesh. After cutting the nodule open and examining each landmine, the player receives a unique textual fragment, while their hit points decrease and Vali's increase.

Like so much in academia and healthcare, one error can permanently derail you.

Inventio: Paths of Least Resistance

I usually suppress my authentic process and presence to conform to normative expectations around the scholarly writing process. Word processors make composition an act of frontend development only, without a sense of the backend. Inform's default composing view represents the text as a side-by-side view of the source code (where I write) and the story (the output after the code is run). When writing with Inform, I can begin with descriptive text, a bridge between machine logic and my pained thought processes. In Inform, the option to release the game as story file and source code links process and product, form and content, much more tightly.

The parser is a visually and textually meaningful composition environment. I surface from composing this text with the same nomadic aches, rickety heart, essential tremor, lethologica, breathless exhaustion. But for a while, composing in Inform quiets those intensities.

Inventio: Anticipation

Content Note: explosives

I perpetually rehearse disaster when I move through the world. Pain sensitization makes every object and person in an environment a credible threat or potential resource. Every action is laden with consequence. I run mental simulations like a combinatorial soothsaying, estimating my odds of falling or of being struck. Composition is an embodied act, so I rehearse disaster when writing as well, obeying my instincts because it's dangerous to ignore intuition.

There's a family story about an uncle in Sri Lanka who impulsively changed his route home from school on the day that a mine was detonated on one of his usual biking paths. I have a story about catching an earlier train to campus on the day that a pipe bomb exploded at my transfer stop. It's a complicated pleasure, to want to communicate, recognize, and form affiliations based on species of pain, expecting to be called selfish and unethical for wanting it by scholars who believe non-Western/diasporic pain is "too political" and "sadistic" for academic spaces. I am so rarely reflected in the craft of scholarly writing, which replaces chance with fixity, intuition with logic, Otherness with disembodiment.

What choice will hurt the least? What kind of writing can my soulbody, styled by catastrophe, frictionlessly produce? Writing with constraints. Digital, multimodal, interactive writing that requires an anticipatory stance. Writing that provokes readers to confront their preconceptions about the act of academic writing and reading. Writing that allows me to perform my culture in ways outsiders can access.

And so, I arrived at kolam geometry and Inform.

Inventio: Inspirations

I've been plotting a creative–critical text like this for a long time, since I was first attracted to parser-based interactive fiction and computational writing, where the text is digitized through numerical indices and a geometric notation (Psarra, 2018). This interest came out of a confluence of circumstances: discovering Italo Calvino's (1986) Invisible Cities and Charu Nivedita's (2008) Zero Degree; learning to cope with chronic illnesses and the biomedical algorithms that left no room for uncertainty in defining them; and watching online as violence in Sri Lanka intensified in what would become the final phase of the ethnic conflict, culminating in the Mullivaikkal Massacre.

Before that, I grew up with parser games like Zork and Infidel, graphic point-and-click adventures like King's Quest and Myst, and console games like Final Fantasy and Mega Man. All of these things informed my orientation to (digital) composition and explicitly introduced me to the relationships between play, torture, writing, and reading that I discuss in the kolam text. And before that, I listened to cultural and familial stories, where reality and fantasy commingled in matter-of-fact ways, and mystery, not resolution, was the point.

perimortem is the culmination of all this.

Inventio: Drawings

The process of composing perimortem began with a drawing I couldn't get right: a 21x21 labyrinth pulli kolam, in which a single, continuous, uninterrupted line loops once around 441 dots without retracing itself to form a closed, geometric figure. I spent days meticulously failing at this endeavor, tempering frustration with patience with each X'd-out attempt, compelled to persist—as with so much of my composing process —by intuition alone.

I was drawing a Fibonacci kolam—a modular design using Fibonacci recursion, comprised of smaller square and rectangular kolams—to serve as the geometric notation of the text, or a computational matrix or "map" with an indexical relationship to the text (Psarra, 2018). I privately called this kolam rhetoric: composing a text in an algorithmic structure with cultural significance and connections to land and now also war, a design that could be digitally traversed, that was physically, cognitively, and spiritually painful and pleasurable for me to produce. I also felt that the parser-mediated design would amplify the cultural resonances of kolam art while visibilizing my diasporic-disabled composition processes and critiquing the reification of Eurocentrism in our craft.

The completed 21x21 Fibonacci kolam design forms the geometric notation for the full version of perimortem, and diagrams the two smaller excerpts before you right now: 54 points that can be linked to the fragments I read in my keynote address at Computers and Writing (C&W) 2024; and the first 10 of those pieces in mapped, playable form.

Inventio: Oulipo

This game implicitly asks a question about the relationship between restraint and potential, like the one posed by the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) or Oulipo writing movement: "What possibilities exist when the writer is freed to break one system of rules by imposing another, one that more perfectly aligns with her cultural and embodied sensibilities?"

That form and content are inseparable is a cultural expectation and, influenced by pain, a craft precept for my digital composition. Inform helps me evocatively stage a meta-performance of engaging in poorly understood modes of scholarly composition. How the story is told is part of the story itself.

Inventio: Inform 7

Composing the text for perimortem was a painful, protracted process of false starts, missteps, and fortunate accidents. I couldn't initially articulate my rationale beyond this is what the piece demands; this is what will hurt me the least. My most obvious design choice is the use of Inform 7, a programming tool for creating interactive fiction (IF) that uses natural language syntax for reading and writing code. It comes equipped with a limited vocabulary, lexical relations and semantic classifications, and grammar that is unapologetically partial, idiomatic, and directive. It simplifies many complicated tasks (e.g., implementing the act of writing) but makes Goldberg machines of seemingly easy ones. Out of the box, it knows cardinal directions but not relative ones; that the game world has rooms but not their names or locations; that rooms contain objects but not what those objects are; that a container can be enterable and openable but a human body can't be. It sidesteps violence, but its reliance on descriptive text makes it easy to include.

Composing in Inform is an exercise in collaborative worldbuilding. I have to anticipate the range of players' potential input and the limits of the parser's knowledge system to construct believable narrative responses in a believable world.

By default, Inform contains the bones of an invisible, half-built city, unfinished as Armilla, but doesn't cede architectural oversight to you so much as invite collaboration (Calvino, 1972/1974, p. 49). In Inform, you always enter as a coauthor with the machine and the player, in media res.

I worked with and expanded Inform's preexisting knowledge system to create rooms, things, and people; define their relationships and functions; identify synonyms; redefine commands; modify parser error responses; organize descriptions, conversation responses, and atmospheric messages; and place 'Inventio' process reflections for the throughout the game, in hanging files, dictaphone recordings, pulli text fragments, and object descriptions. Keeping in mind that players might not uncover all of the text, replay the game, or complete it at all, I repeated ideas I considered unmissable in multiple places to ensure their discovery and limited important objects and scenery. Still, a careless player, or a player focused on the pulli texts alone, could ultimately miss a lot.

Inventio: Modifying Messages

What's most frustrating about composing (and playing) Inform games is that the parser promises to understand player input—but doesn't. Players have to trial-and-error verbs and nouns to ascertain the parser's vocabulary. My composition process involved imagining the range of words that players might enter to access the text, defining likely inputs that aren't already included and words I need the parser to recognize in specific ways (like "landmine" or "continue"), and redefining existing actions as needed. It also included modifying many of Inform's clumsily written default messages, like "Action would achieve nothing" or "Noun has better things to do." Having to explicitly encode what I anticipate about my audience aligns with Tamil literacy frameworks and with how I'm already forced to anticipate my audience's repulsion to the experience of chronic pain—and amputate my compositions to shield them accordingly. As for genocide-related trauma, as either poetics or subjective experience, "it has no place in academic work."