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.
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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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