The Hitchhiker's Guide to an Active Archive
The Hitchhiker's Guide to an Active Archive is the sixth radio show (including the Holiday Special) of the radio program XPUB: Protocols for an Active Archive on Radio Worm. The show aired on 2023 - 10 - 24 and was part of Special Issue 22.
Flowchart
Links
EtherPad for communicating with the Caretakers during the show: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SI22-shownotes-week5
How this Wiki was used during the show
The Hitchhiker's Guide to an Active Archive was a radioshow broadcast on Radio Worm on 2023-10-24. It is an interactive radio play that was performed live by XPUB students Rosa, Anita and Thijs. They each voiced one of the three voices present in the script. The show could be recreated using these wiki pages and a fresh channel of communication (e.g. another EtherPad). Click 'START BROADCAST' to enter the beginning of the script. It is not linear, most sections allow for several follow-ups, depending on audience decisions, dicerolls, time requirements and performer intuition. The overall structure is captured in the flowchart above. Throughout the script, clickable links are placed at the places where the narrative branches. Also, soundeffects, audio fragments and musical clips are inserted in the script at the place they would be played (often accompanied by an instruction).
References, inspiration and further reading / playing / listening
This show was made in response to / inspired by several works, some of which are presented below.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: a 1978 BBC radio play written by Douglas Adams, that was later adapted into books and a movie.
- Georges Perec, his works Die Maschine and The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, and this text on these works by Hannah Higgins (chapter 2 of Mainframe Experimentalism)
Also, here are some follow-up links if this show resonated with you and you'd like to experience more choose your own adventure adventures, branching narratives, etc. These were also part of our conversations when preparing the show.
- Her Story: an interactive film video game in which the player sorts through video clips from a set of fictional police interviews to solve the case of a missing man.
- Heaven's Vault: a scifi branching narrative game about an archeologist deciphering an ancient language.
- In class we also briefly discussed text adventure games -- and CYOA books -- like 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure and 1977's ZORK. These then also evolved into MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), which in turn evolved into a plethora of other video game genres.