Jeremy Douglass describes the history and meaning of interactive fiction, using Andrew Plotkin’s Shade as both a typical and an innovative example. Shade is a hypertext game where the reader is the protagonist. The reader is in room preparing for a desert vacation, but as the reader slowly unveils more details through exploring the room, they realize that they had already taken the trip and are stuck in the desert hallucinating about their past life. We have explored several interactive fictions in class, but Shade reminded me most of The Baron. Both require extensive exploration through space in order to solve some puzzle, and at the end, the reader comes to a realization about the meaning of the work.
I recently read an article for my game development class that argued how game developers’ ability to create emotional connections between the game and the player is what sells the game. I see Shade as a clear example of this. As I played Shade, I continually felt frustrated because I kept using invalid commands and couldn’t find any clues, yet I was compelled to continue for almost an hour. No matter what my emotional reaction to the game was (frustration, joy, anxiety), the important point is that I made that connection and became hooked. Interactive fictions are particularly skilled in doing this because of their internal interactivity and second-person mode of address. As with The Baron, I felt personally obligated to reach the ending of the story.
Douglass presents a rather thought-provoking analysis of the ending of Shade, where the reader sees a dying figure in the sand which is supposedly also the reader. Douglass argues that the second-person perspective could be transforming into a third-person perspective that views this interaction from a spectator’s point-of-view. This analysis only complicated the ending for me and brought it to a more abstract level than I’d like. However, it did prompt the following question: what are the affordances of using second-person versus third-person in this story?