Archive Highlight - “A Word of Thanks” (Patreon)

Celebrating 1 year of Patreon, and 2 years of the Telelibrary

Hey everyone,

Don’t touch that play button yet!

It’s a little something I’d like to give you, but it wants to live in context with the piece below. This is a piece of writing I had planned to release later, but since today is officially the 2 year anniversary of the Telelibrary and the 1 year anniversary of my Patreon, it seemed an appropriate time to highlight Gratitude. It feels very vulnerable to even try to express the degree to which my life has been changed by this piece, and by your support; the weight of the sentiment feels too large to put into words. I’m in a place I couldn’t have imagined possible 2 years ago, and one that makes so many hopes and ambitions I’ve held for a long time feel newly possible.

So I want to take this moment to repeat a familiar phrase, with the hopes that maybe the words have been repeated so often that you can finally read them as a strange, unusual, and meaningful offering:

Thank you

In celebration of my 1-2 year anniversary, I’ve posted a playtest at this link; it’s a remote piece, accessible from anywhere, designed initially as an Easter Egg for Almanac’s The Fleecing. I’ve also sent out a small gift of gratitude to everyone who at any point was at the “Get Hands On” or “Pay-It Forward Levels.” Shipping times may vary, but if you haven’t received yours by the end of the month, please do reach out to me. And of course, we’ve got a special, on-theme Archive Highlight today, available to all Patron Levels.

As with previous Archive Highlights for the Telelibrary, Spoilers are ahead - though nothing one wouldn’t be likely to encounter in their first 1-3 sessions. For those of you just joining the Telelibrary Conversation, you can follow this thread from the beginning, or see part 1 and 2 of a discussion over the opening 5 minutes of the piece. Otherwise, you can jump right in and see the ways that Gratitude and User Creativity combine to inform the last few minutes of The Telelibrary.

Thanks for everything you’ve made possible. Here’s the story of just one of those things
~

A Word of Thanks; Finding An Ending in a Space for Reflection (carved out of an overgrown take-a-penny/leave-a-penny dish)

“How does this … end?

I’ve done over 1152 calls for the Telelibrary, and this is a question that has come up in quite a few of them. The System is programmed* to respond by asking some variation of the clarifying question “what is an end?,” and to invite the person asking to consider their thoughts and feelings about endings. Outside the piece, (when I feel like being obnoxiously artistic) I am inclined to argue the piece doesn’t really end**, but for the purposes of our time together on these pages, we can assume that “ending” refers to the last few minutes of a given Session for a User in the Telelibrary—in which case, a lot of thought and design have gone into that decision. The experience of a Telelibrary call is both highly structured and entirely flexible and responsive; as a result, “landing the plane” can sometimes be quite a challenge in the final minutes of a call, and while I work to resist a sense of finality, I find it very helpful to have assembled a tool-belt of many “styles'' of endings for a call. To understand more, it’s helpful to look at three particular styles, and how they developed over time.

When I first began testing the Telelibrary in March of 2020, it was very much an open question to me how best to “end” a Telephone experience. As a rule of thumb, I hate applause in theater - when a show is just a damn good time, or ends in triumph or an absolute party, it can be empowering to let the audience cheer and shout and join in the joy — the RSC in London has long been exploring the Shakeseparean tradition of ending even heavy, bloody History Plays with a “jig”). But if you’re attempting to leave an audience member with any kind of lingering curiosity, question, uncertainty or even stillness, I find the convention of turning on the lights and having everyone clap is roughly equivalent to politely opening the door for your guest with a wrecking ball.  And since one of the many advantages of Telephone theater is that someone’s hand is often too busy to clap anyway (and since clapping while alone in one’s room is almost immediately distressing and I don’t recommend you try it), I knew I’d need a different closing for my time with Users.  

Occasionally, a User will by chance pick the perfect selection that uses all of their remaining credits and time at once, and also somehow acknowledges or resolves all the themes we’ve been serendipitously exploring together. We can call that Ending Style #1 - “the Neat Bow.” A natural resolution has arrived, and there’s no need to put a hat on a hat; I can just step away and let the call end in a simple, seemingly pre-recorded message:

Thank you again for using the Telelibrary today. We hope you have enjoyed your time. Goodbye.

But for all the other calls in which lightning didn’t strike, I initially explored the abruptness of being suddenly cut off by this same message, highlighting how impersonal and mechanized it could feel. This was one of many “hard edges” to the fictional technology running the System, which I initially built in to underscore how inhuman the System really was. You can think of it as a cousin to Brecht’s Alienation Affect - instead of breaking a 4th wall to highlight the theatricality of the moment, I’m jarring your growing comfort with the system to remind you of the premise of the piece: you’re speaking to a System. As with many hard edges in nature, time has softened most of these moments, and none more so than the ending. User inventions like the Clock menu (first for checking remaining time, and eventually the ability to add time) quickly allowed for some anticipation and control over “the end.” More pressingly, as the Library began to receive and reflect a broader range of pandemic emotions, the increasingly vulnerable and emotional nature of some calls necessitated creating at least an invitation to begin decompressing before returning to the world outside the Telelibrary walls; as the space inside got bigger and denser, the piece began to need an airlock.

Fortunately, Users had already created a useful tool for that. On April 1st, 2020, User #17 ended their call by requesting that their credits be passed along to the next User. The next three Users (including one returning caller) kept up the Starbucks-Line-Style Pay-It-Forward idea, and only one day later, User #19 requested to be able to add a note to the credits being passed along, thus creating Comment 1 of User Logbook Volume 1:

“Please donate as many credits as possible to the next caller, so that someone may listen to the 100 credit selection 19. It deserves to be read.“

By the time we got to User #25, this Logbook already contained 4 comments, 1 User Tip, and 2 Threats. One of those comments included a request for other Users to “share the full exhaustive list of things they can see outside their window,” which quickly inspired the first of many expanded features driven by User contributions: “the Go Outside Simulator.”

Because adding a credit is the primary way for Users to unlock new content and add content of their own (and one of the few chances I have to let Users really set the tones and themes for our time together), it was important that all these “free credits” kicking around in the Logbook not be unlock-able until a User had already explored and upgraded the basic layout of the Telelibrary menu. Often, this means that most Users (especially those without credits) spend their final minutes in the Telelibrary in the User Logbook, which brings about Ending Style # 2; “The Open Mic.” Users are invited to leave a comment (or anything else they like) in the User Logbook - directly authoring both the closing thoughts of their own Session and the experience of future Users. Many of the messages written in this kind of ending are directed to other Users; since the final third of a standard session is where a User discovers the multitude of other voices in the piece, it is no surprise that when prompted to consider the end of their time, these Users think about callers still to come. But as early as User 44, a different kind of comment began to emerge:

“This has been great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate all this.”

At the time I didn’t quite know how to categorize this comment, so I labeled it User Review #1. But this choice to take time out of a session to speak back to the experience would prove to be a fairly common one; a search for the Phrase “Thank you” in User Logbooks 1-7 reveals over 55 results. Some are addressed to the System name of the User’s choice, some to me directly, some even to future or past Users— some seem to be directed to anyone at all. Still, what they seem to share is a common impulse—one of the few good arguments for holding space for applause at the end of a performance—the audience’s desire to give thanks.

“Before the inevitable end of all things, I'd just like to say — thank you, Bob.”
User Logbook Volume 5, User #589

By the time I got to User Logbook Vol. 3, I began using what I now think is a better category for these comments: Statements of Gratitude.

“Thank you for this experience today. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it but I am thinking a lot about it. Comment over.”
User Logbook Vol. 3, Statement of Gratitude 2, User #205 

Of course, not everyone feels inspired to create or give voice to feelings at the end of their sessions — and even those who do may not feel capable of putting feelings into words. Here again I’ve found the User invention of the Logbook gives me a helpful tool. Users who run out of time with credits to spare are presented with 3 options: They can hold their credits on their account for future use; they can donate their credits to the “User Logbook Donated Credit Fund,” or they can choose to create a new option for using/leaving credits in the Logbook by saying “something else”. Taken together, we can call this a third style of ending: “Roll Credits;” all 3 invite Users one last time to use their credits to somehow change their experience. The first of these choices functions as an invitation to the User to return, or consider their experience in some way ongoing, while the third option is reminiscent of our second style of ending, presenting another open canvas, this time using credits as the medium. However, I imagine it comes as no surprise the second option is far and away the most frequently selected in these scenarios.

I think one of the greatest things you can do in interactive design is to give participants choices that are simple to make but nevertheless feel eloquent, graceful, powerful, or otherwise Good to make in context. Moments like this give participants a feeling of having achieved a kind of understanding or even mastery of the experience, and can even function to encourage the participant to value the choices they’ve made throughout their time, which is hugely important for such “open-world” games. In light of this, and to increase the perceived impact of making a donation, I like to affirm donations by rewarding a User who makes them with the offer of a “Free Pre-Selected Parting Selection.” This is one of the few times I really permit myself as a performer to “curate” or make a suggestion without a User specifically requesting or giving voice to a relevant “keyword,” and early in 2020 I selected a small number of brief selections that felt like a proper “off-ramp” and culmination of a Telelibrary Call. However, sometime around Logbook Vol. 3, User #236 left “Statement of Gratitude #7:”

[If you’re reading on a device, you can finally hit play on the embedded media player above]

“There's a popular phrase right now that's thrown around the idea of being alone together. Which I always thought was a little bit silly. I mean how could you be alone together? How is that possible? Yes you can sit in the same room reading, but there's still the comfort of another person, and once you remove that, if you don't have — well you really don't have anything. You're just alone. But I do think that, hearing another person's voices like this, like here, other voices, at the end of a telephone —which is really just the voice in essence, nothing else, no other empathetic cues to guide you— it at once reminds you of how lonely you are —one is— I am —and also, I think, makes a little bit of room for hope. Thank you.”

At the time, I was struck by the vulnerability and honesty of the Statement, as well as by how specifically it addressed the tension of how far one can be in company with others over the phone. I realized it could serve beautifully as a bridge, guiding someone out of the Telelibrary, and I added it to my roster of “final selections.”  Pretty soon the overwhelming majority of these final offers were User messages and sentiments: statements of gratitude, blessings, musings, and more . Most Users who face this third style of ending and choose to donate will receive whichever parting selection has been most recently added*, though I still grant myself the license to curate this final word of thanks, comfort, or wonder, should inspiration strike. But in all of these cases, I am allowing Users to be the ones to give voice to these sentiments, underscoring one last time what has been shared in this intensely individual experience.

“This was really fun, and well thought through, and a little bit absurd. Thank you. End, uh, comment.”

User Log Book Vol. 3, Statements of Gratitude 14, User #328

~

*as ever, I will repeat the caveat that what generally happens and what can happen are two separate issues. Most of the scripting I do for my own work operates under a “say/do this unless something else needs to be said/done instead” principle, which is to say there’s always a plan for when inspiration or necessity don’t strike, but when they do, they take right of way.

**See future Archive Highlights for discussions on when long-form, iterative solo-audience works end—but be prepared to skim, because hoo boy do I have thoughts on this one.