The submission is for the first-ever exhibit of the interactive, hypertextual radio show "The Puffball" (Purchawka) by Artur Sosen Klimaszewski and Przemysław Frankowski (aka DJ Jah Jah) that aired in Poznań’s Radio S for 12 episodes in 1999 and 2000. The show represents a genre of radio hypertext that is non-digital yet not fully feral.

• Interactive narrative; • Non-linear storytelling; • Live radio performance; • ;

interactive radio, participatory storytelling, feral hypertext, netprov, non-lineaer narrative

ACM Reference Format: Mariusz Pisarski and Artur Klimaszewski. 2024. "The Puffball" (2000) – a participatory radio hypertext. In 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’24), September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3676181

The emergence of hypertext as the technology of modern writing and the hyperlink as a punctuation mark of contemporary discourse [2] made a lasting impact not only in the digital realm but also in the existing, traditional (or analog) modes of storytelling in arts and entertainment. In Central and Eastern Europe, where the digital revolution arrived around a decade later than in the West, the transformative force of hypertext was initially much more fully expressed in analog environments and with the use of existing media. The "Nondescription of the World" (1995) by Radosław Nowakowski [5], a non-linear visual book composed of "tales-maps, sentences-streets, phrases-branches, parallel clauses" , is an example of a hypertext in the realm of expanded print technology. "The Short History of an Accident" (1997) by Małgorzata Dawidek-Gryglicka [3], a nonlinear narrative where segments of text were hung across the walls of a room and connected by actual woolen strings that readers had to follow renders the hypertext freedom of choice within the context of gallery space and artistic installation.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). HT ’24, September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0595-3/24/09 https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3676181

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Figure 1: "The Puffball": original comic strip

"The Puffball", an interactive, collaborative radio show, stands out in the landscape of hypertext-inspired interactive storytelling in analog media. Despite its local popularity and cult status among the initiated, it remains largely unknown while Nowakowski or Gryglicka-Dawidek’s works gained critical acclaim and re-editions over the next decades. By bringing this work to the international community, we highlight a fascinating point on the timeline and on the map of contemporary digital storytelling. It’s a point of intersection of media (analog and digital) and of genres (participatory radio drama, interactive comedy, live broadcasted Role Playing Game). With a unifying foundation made of a hypertext structure, The Puffball marks a separate genre of hypertext radio, with its own history, predecessors, and remediations in the era of Web 2.0 and post-Web. It’s a hypertext narrative experience that needs to be fully acknowledged by scholars focusing on digital media or on early examples of hypertext storytelling (proto-hypertexts). "The Puffball" was originally a comic strip published in a national student magazine OMS ("Ogólnopolski Magazyn Studencki") between 1997 and 1998. When Klimaszewski started working in Radio S, Frankowski proposed that they adapt the comic strip into a show as a part of DJ Jah Jah’s weekly night program. Klimaszewski decided that the radio adventures of his Puffball would be interactive and non-nonlinear, with active participation from the audience. The show was broadcast in irregular intervals and ran for an hour. DJ entries during which Klimaszewski and Frankowski picked up phones from listeners were interspersed with songs. After the introduction of the central theme and setting, and after the first listener

HT ’24, September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland

was on the air, a "transformation" jingle was played that turned the current participant into the eponymous Puffball. The task for the listener was to stir the Puffball’s adventure into the best possible outcome within a pre-designed fictional world. These universes were highly conventionalized and made a witty, postmodern playground for pop-cultural references, puns, and wordplays. Themes included space travel, disco polo (Polish urban fol electronica), gangster and Western movies, a haunted hospital, and Brazilian soap operas. The two presenters – in roles similar to RPG game masters – decided on the success or failure of a single walkthrough. The longer it lasted, the more satisfactory it was for the player. Another listener would pick up the adventure where the previous one left. As many as 12 participants could take up the challenge of making the Puffball’s life as adventurous and happy as possible. Yet in the end, the mushroomy character’s lifespan was always too short, and the Puffball died at the end of each episode to be reborn in the next one. During each episode, the hosts started by outlining the narrative and gameplay plan on a map of the creature’s adventures for the current episode. Hand-crafted by Klimaszewski, the map included major narrative hubs of an episode. The map was a reference point for both DJs. During each improvised session with individual participants, potential connections between the outlined narrative nodes were realized so the hosts of the show could update the map and the position of the Puffball on it. Decisions that led to blind alleys, traps, loops, or shortcuts were punished at the end of the session. In practice, each gameplay had to end abruptly so the call with a current listener could end and the next participant could be transformed into the Puffball.

After 12 episodes, due to the restructuring of the Radio S program and the shift in the general direction of the station towards the formula of a "formatted radio," The Puffball ended its life on the airwaves. Three years later, theatre USTA USTA performed "Alicja 0700" [4] during the International Street Theatre Malta in Poznań. The drama relied on the theatre audience actively calling in a 0700 number and redirecting the recorded voice-over narration into its possible outcomes by dialing the numbers on their phones’ keypads. Both "The Puffball" and "Alicja 0700" represent an intriguing case of hypertext, which is not fully feral [6]– or found in the wild as a species not aware of digital technologies and new storytelling systems – and not fully analog or proto-hypertextual. Both, at the same time, serve as an example of a radio hypertext: an area of interactive storytelling with a multitude of forms and expressions across languages and cultures (for example radio works and audio elements in the works by John. F. Barber [1] are just most known examples) that are not yet fully explored as a distinct genre.

The proposed set-up for the Interactive Narrative Exhibition: – one poster stand displaying a couple of "The Puffball" comic strips – a map of the gameplay – one laptop with: A) 2 recordings of the show, B) 2 transcripts in English C) A selection of jingles – cut-out figurine of the Puffball by the laptop

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Acknowledgements go here. Delete enclosing begin/end markers if there are no acknowledgements.

[1] Claus Atzenbeck. 2020. Interview with John Barber. ACM SIGWEB Newsletter 2020, Summer (2020), 1–4.

[2] Mark Bernstein. 2018. Links: Exercises In Style. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Web Studies. 5–11.

[3] Piotr Marecki. 2017. Textual Caves: Expanding the Literary Writing Space. Przegląd Kulturoznawczy 33, 3 (2017), 334–349.

[4] Eliza Matusiak. 2021. Interaktywne słuchowisko „Alicja 0700” jako dzieło po wielokroć otwarte. Analiza i interpretacja. Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica 61, 2 (2021), 101–111.

[5] Radosław Nowakowski. 2020. Non-Description of the World (part one). http: //www.liberatorium.com/books/ns1/nw1.html. Accessed: 2024-07-23.

[6] Jill Walker. 2005. Feral hypertext: when hypertext literature escapes control. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Salzburg, Austria) (HYPERTEXT ’05). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 46–53. https://doi.org/10.1145/1083356.1083366

Received 20 February 2024; revised 12 March 2024; accepted 5 June 2024