Abstract: A young man goes on a trip to paradise but finds that not everything is as it seems on the surface.
Tips: Feel free to explore. And never be afraid to go backwards.
The Garden
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
E-Lit Review Assignment
Savoir-Faire
Emily Short
Text Genre: This text is a work on interactive fiction within the genre of a text-based puzzle game. A treasure hunt.
It seems to follow the literary tradition of mystery novels or detective fiction. It presents you with elements of a story, snippets and clues, and also offers an objective you mean to reach. In this case, you are trying to find out what has happened to your father and sister as they are missing from your childhood home. As the story progresses, you find more puzzles to solve and clues to obtain that, overtime, make things (or should make things) clearer in the end.
Textual Elements: The story uses a varied number of elements to create a pretty immersive environment. The descriptions given to you from room to room are short but give you exactly the right amount of information that you might need to proceed. Almost everything is able to be interacted with one way or another and many of them give you more clues or important items you'll need.
One of the most interesting, and sometimes confusing, elements of this story was the "link" function. Basically, you were able to link certain objects that shared characteristics with each other making it so that when an action was performed to the one, it also happened to the other. For example, if you linked two boxes together because they were yellow or both had the same symbol on them, if you opened one box, the other would automatically open of its own accord. This was a sort of "magic" introduced into the story and ended up being very important in the endgame.
All in all, these elements create a world where everything has a connection to something. Where no pin or loaf of bread is useless but can be used to solve puzzles that stop you from moving forward. However, it can also be more than a little overwhelming at first. This being a text-based game makes it difficult to keep everything in order without having to take copious notes. you have to imagine the world Emily Short is writing about very clearly to get a sense of what to do, but thankfully she does a good job presenting that world to you.
Reviews: Overall, this work of interactive fiction has been received very well by critics as can be seen here in the interactive fiction database.
"Savoir-Faire is an excellent game, featuring a strong sense of place, an innovative backstory & magic system, and a protagonist whose idiosyncrasies are charming"
Blog 4
Blog: Write about your work on the Hypertext Assignment thus far. Post a map of your site (so far) and your writing/plans for how you are going to create your hypertext. The more you post - the more your classmates and I can give you feedback on.
I suppose one of my biggest questions I have right now is whether or not I want to keep the story in one location or divide it up amongst three. I think I want to do the latter only because it presents more opportunities for varied lexia within the genre I'm trying to keep to (horror/mystery/thriller(?)) I think that for now, I want to keep it to just a series of google sites because it's the simplest option and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew on the first project. I might have more of it settled by the time we have class tonight so i'll levee things there for now and update it once I have more going.
I suppose one of my biggest questions I have right now is whether or not I want to keep the story in one location or divide it up amongst three. I think I want to do the latter only because it presents more opportunities for varied lexia within the genre I'm trying to keep to (horror/mystery/thriller(?)) I think that for now, I want to keep it to just a series of google sites because it's the simplest option and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew on the first project. I might have more of it settled by the time we have class tonight so i'll levee things there for now and update it once I have more going.
Blog 3
Blog: A) Post your early ideas for the Hypertext Assignment (Project 1). B) Post your experiences with your demo google.site thus far - try to identify what kind of help you are going to need. C) Also, start to collect images you might want to incorporate into Project 1. Think of this week as the "image blog" -start collecting images on your Google Drive.
For my first project, I was thinking about the similarities between a lot of electronic literature works and those "choose your own adventure" books from when I was a child. Basically we want to create something that no two readers will find exactly the same way. This made me automatically think of the horror genre (for whatever reason). All the times I've watched one with my friends and screamed at the screen, "Why are you doing that?!" or, "Don't go down there!" so I wanted to create a story where, as much as possible, the reader can choose what the character in the story does and potentially how they react to certain things. Essentially, I would like the reader to feel as though they are the character in the story.
Another aspect of this project that I'd like to implement is one full story being told through three different areas of the world within the story. For instance, One will be a house, the second would be a forest, and the third could be a church (I think). If the reader only went down one path, finished it, and never went back to go down another, they would not get a full story. These are just some preliminary ideas i've had rolling around in my head.
Also, some pictures I might would be:
For my first project, I was thinking about the similarities between a lot of electronic literature works and those "choose your own adventure" books from when I was a child. Basically we want to create something that no two readers will find exactly the same way. This made me automatically think of the horror genre (for whatever reason). All the times I've watched one with my friends and screamed at the screen, "Why are you doing that?!" or, "Don't go down there!" so I wanted to create a story where, as much as possible, the reader can choose what the character in the story does and potentially how they react to certain things. Essentially, I would like the reader to feel as though they are the character in the story.
Another aspect of this project that I'd like to implement is one full story being told through three different areas of the world within the story. For instance, One will be a house, the second would be a forest, and the third could be a church (I think). If the reader only went down one path, finished it, and never went back to go down another, they would not get a full story. These are just some preliminary ideas i've had rolling around in my head.
Also, some pictures I might would be:
Blog 2
-Write about some of the pieces you have been exploring in the ELC.
The first piece of ECL I looked into was redridinghood by Donna Leishman. I gravitated towards it because I've always been a huge fan of fairytales and wanted to see what one could look like through the medium of electronic literature. The description described it as the story being told through a feminist perspective, but I have to admit that I didn't really get that impression.
I went through the relatively short story several times so that I might be able to see as many variations of the narrative as possible but found that although there were different items with which to interact in the world, only very specific ones worked to move the tale forward. For instance, in the beginning when you see an apartment building full of windows that you can highlight when hovering over them, nothing happens if you actually click on any of them. Only the one specific window that is already colored yellow will take you to the next part of the story.
The rest seems to be pretty self explanatory. Red's mother sends her to her to (presumably) her grandmother's house, she meets a "wolf" which appears in the form of a young man, she goes into a field of flowers to pick some, then ends up at the grandmother's house after the wold has already been there.
There was an interesting part of the story that I didn't really see the purpose of, however. When Red is in the field of flowers, she becomes overwhelmed by the spores and falls asleep. Then two options appear at the bottom of the screen. Either to have her dream or to wake her up. I automatically when to the first option but found that, no matter how many times I clicked on it, nothing ever happened. No new sequence of events took place and all i could do was wake her up. I wonder if that was a technical glitch or purposefully designed to make some sort of point. Why give the option to dream if she's incapable of doing so?
The last thing I wanted to mention is the fact that it was described as being told through a feminist perspective. I didn't really see that given the fact that Red falls for the bad guy and, without much thought, becomes pregnant by him.
----
The second piece I looked at was Into the White Darkness, by Reiner Stresser. I thought this one was extremely powerful. It was described by the author as representing the fragility of memory in the minds of those suffering from Alzheimer's. You are given a series of dots and as you clock on them, you are given snippets of memory, some clearer than others and/or appearing with text. I have to say that I actually became frustrated with this piece but not because I didn't get it or disliked it but actually because of how realistic and true it felt. I thought of how it would feel to have a mind like this, where your memory is not in your own control anymore, and how it would feel to only have pieces of what you lived left. Some images were clear, and others were not at all which represented the clarity of the memories in question. Overall I just thought it was a very impressive use of the medium and really made it easy to immures myself.
The first piece of ECL I looked into was redridinghood by Donna Leishman. I gravitated towards it because I've always been a huge fan of fairytales and wanted to see what one could look like through the medium of electronic literature. The description described it as the story being told through a feminist perspective, but I have to admit that I didn't really get that impression.
I went through the relatively short story several times so that I might be able to see as many variations of the narrative as possible but found that although there were different items with which to interact in the world, only very specific ones worked to move the tale forward. For instance, in the beginning when you see an apartment building full of windows that you can highlight when hovering over them, nothing happens if you actually click on any of them. Only the one specific window that is already colored yellow will take you to the next part of the story.
The rest seems to be pretty self explanatory. Red's mother sends her to her to (presumably) her grandmother's house, she meets a "wolf" which appears in the form of a young man, she goes into a field of flowers to pick some, then ends up at the grandmother's house after the wold has already been there.
There was an interesting part of the story that I didn't really see the purpose of, however. When Red is in the field of flowers, she becomes overwhelmed by the spores and falls asleep. Then two options appear at the bottom of the screen. Either to have her dream or to wake her up. I automatically when to the first option but found that, no matter how many times I clicked on it, nothing ever happened. No new sequence of events took place and all i could do was wake her up. I wonder if that was a technical glitch or purposefully designed to make some sort of point. Why give the option to dream if she's incapable of doing so?
The last thing I wanted to mention is the fact that it was described as being told through a feminist perspective. I didn't really see that given the fact that Red falls for the bad guy and, without much thought, becomes pregnant by him.
----
The second piece I looked at was Into the White Darkness, by Reiner Stresser. I thought this one was extremely powerful. It was described by the author as representing the fragility of memory in the minds of those suffering from Alzheimer's. You are given a series of dots and as you clock on them, you are given snippets of memory, some clearer than others and/or appearing with text. I have to say that I actually became frustrated with this piece but not because I didn't get it or disliked it but actually because of how realistic and true it felt. I thought of how it would feel to have a mind like this, where your memory is not in your own control anymore, and how it would feel to only have pieces of what you lived left. Some images were clear, and others were not at all which represented the clarity of the memories in question. Overall I just thought it was a very impressive use of the medium and really made it easy to immures myself.
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