In Porpentine’s howling dogs, the idea of form mirroring content is present in the recurring scene of the room. After any plot occurs, you are always placed back in the same room with the exact same options. Similar to how a person in a hospital or prison is subjected to the same routine everyday, playing through this game you are forced to eat and drink before entering the activity room just as the character in the story has done for the past 360+ days. This fact highlights the idea of grasp mentioned in Sam Ashwell’s “A Bestiary of Player Agency”. This rule isn’t obvious right from the beginning. However, by the second day in the game, I knew to immediately go to the nutrient dispensers before doing anything else. In addition, the images that appear once the visor is used simulate what the character sees when they ingest the fluids.
The use of this game layout works to place you in the character’s position. I was surprised the first time I tried to get more food and was met by the abrupt message that I had reached my rations for the day. The fact that the game allows you to click on the link knowing the action is no longer available contributes to the empathy one feels for the character when playing. I’m sure the feeling I had when I was denied was similar to how the character felt the first time they were hungry and tried for more food but couldn’t get any. This game layout and lack of areas to physically explore also create a sense of confinement. While there is the sanity room, and activity room, and a bathroom, there is no mention of any external doors to lead elsewhere. This is evident in the fact that all actions return you to the same room. This limits the exploratory agency and agency of possibility that we’ve seen in other types of digital literature such as interactive fiction and hypertext.
At the same time, the virtual world represents the opposite of confinement. It represents a world where you are in control of the narrative. It can act as an escape from the real world around you. This could be why the time in the virtual world grows longer and longer as the days go by. As the character continues to experience this alternate world, they want the experience to last as long as possible as a way of escaping their reality. When Porpentine wrote this piece, she had just started hormone replacement therapy. Her experiences during this process probably manifested themselves in the escapism seen in this game. While not explicitly stated, the idea that the virtual world is more pleasant than reality is evident throughout the game.
The one aspect I questioned was the importance of the “{*}” that appears right before sleeping and right after consuming the fluid to enter the virtual space. I imagine this placeholder before entering and exiting this virtual world exists to represent the barrier between the real and imaginary. Since the game ends with you being unsure what world you’re in, I would assume it would end without the “{*}”. However clicking the last “{*}” brings you to a blank screen which I figured was intentional before the last quote comes up. Never going to sleep then waking up leaves you in a state of limbo where nothing is certain and you feel lost and confused, feelings that probably led you to want to escape in the first place.