As the princely son of the King of All Cosmos, I've spent many an hour rolling my damancy (a mysteriously sticky ball) around; I've collected paper clips, traffic cones, screaming schoolgirls, and whaling ships. Katamari Damancy, the trippy Japanese game enabling my collection fetish, has also wormed its way into my academic life—it attracts a datacloud, to use Johndan Johnson-Eilola's term, that suggests some different ways to think about writing in the digital age.

I have been thinking about this game in three contexts:

1. New interfaces. One thing about new media that fascinates me is the invention of new interface metaphors. Each semester I have my students in my Writing for New Media course experiment with interface metaphors as they work their way through Manovich.
2. Database Logic. The conundrum of writing the database has always been a noodle-scratcher for me. I love the notion of writing Benjamin-Arcades style, but the organization throws me for the loop. Ulmer once characterized one trait of new media as moving the burden of conclusion from the writer to the reader. Working in a rhizomatic way seems to necessitate that. As you write, you may or may not want to organize your bits and pieces into a single line of progression. If you don't want to do that, though, how do you give your reader the information?
3. Photogenie. The “lost” film theory that tapped into the aesthetic, photogenie provides a different perspective about how composition students can engage with image-writing. Is there an opposite to the rational “design” approach? An irrational image approach? Writing from the gut?

The Lost (or Not Yet Found) Interface – Writing Damancy

Katamari Damancy inspires in me a new interface. I imagine a digital project laid out like a Katamari town. Different ideas, or icons representing them, are scattered around in a semi-reasonable fashion, but no discernable order. The reader rolls from one to the next, rolling to the objects/icons/ideas that interested her. The screen would have a two part layout—the left would be the katamari ball and town, the right would be a scrolling/scrollable frame with the chunks of text attached to those objects that have been rolled, like this:

As the user rolled around the town, the text chunks would appear in the right menu. Clever programmers could produce some sort of active linking system that would build links between the chunks that relate or hook up especially well, so that as the page went along links appeared between chunks. The reader could stop rolling at any time and scroll the right window up and down to read what he/she has collected. There could also be an 'export' function that allows the reader to save a clear .html version of the katamari they rolled.

My phantom interface haunts the project that follows. The nodes on the next page are organized in a semi-reasonable fashion, but are designed to draw your aesthetic sensibility more than your rational faculty. There are links back to this introduction and to the conclusion, as well as a “cheat sheet”, but the elaborate flash interface I'd imagined will have to wait for another time.

Consider the project that follows an experimental test run. Drawing from six scholars (and a bit from one novelist), I've assembled a Katamari town that attempts to enact the ideas I'm exploring. Included also are links back to this introduction, to my 'conclusion', and to the 'cheat sheet' that allows you to re-visit nodes you've already seen (since they vanish from the main page after you view them). Now, if you're ready, it's time to Roll the Katamari