While playing howling dogs and Destroy/Wait I realised that I saw a similar theme in those two ‘games’ as I did in most of the other IF we have seen, played and discussed. They all have some dark, mysterious and (Technologically) futuristic aspect to them. Whether it is the pitch black backgrounds with the brightly colored fonts or the snippets of photographs and drawing (like we saw in My Boyfriend Came Back from War, My Body – A Wunderkammer or even Uncle Roger) or even the actual content itself, they all discuss a weirdly dark, unknown and even uncomfortable situations and circumstances that remind you of some sort of sci-fi thriller.
In Emily Short’s review of the howling dogs, she explains how Twine is often experienced or referred to as a CYOA book. I realized that the Return to the Cave of Time (1985) by Edward Packard, which is the book I read for our project, had a very similar pattern – any mentioned of the future and the whole plot became weirdly dark, strange and extremely futuristic. What I mean by “extremely futuristic” is the fact that any time I had to ‘time-travel’ to the future it never lead to something ‘simple’ like a flying car or a super high tech phone, but rather I would find ‘myself’ in a fully blown out production of humans living on different planets, in special egg capsules, living of off tubes connected to who knows what and swimming is some sort of special liquid to survive. Similarly, these IF game narratives describe circumstances where it is never really clear exactly what is going on. The rooms you are found in are never lit enough, survival is crucial; for some reason you never have enough energy and you usually lack water, nutrients and food, oh and weapons or spooky clue that have been left-behind are always an added bonus.
I wanted to connect this with the thought that IF started appearing during a time were technology and computers also started gaining more and more fame and the realisation that they can be something so much more than we had ever imagined. The combination of all the aforementioned definitely reminded me of dystopian worlds presented in Fahrenheit 451 by Red Bradbury or Neuromancer by William Gibson, where worlds of the past and the future create hazardous worlds where culture is based of off the old/ancient while using the new. In this situation IF has been able to combine the existence of a narrative or a story traditionally found in hand-held books or other form of print with the rise of high-tech technology (computers, AI, VR, etc.) that is so transcendent, it has been able to be depicted in the actual IF narratives themselves. The fact that authors, artists and creators no longer need to be ‘confined’ or ‘restricted’ in a limited space (of a traditional book bind), has allowed them to create pieces where they are easily able to get away with providing only fragments of a story, give limited context and make it completely spooky and dark. However, they are also encouraged to connected it with futuristic elements because of the fact that the reader/player is not longer confined to follow actual page but can click away to any link, page, image, or sound that is connected to the plot itself. Changing the definition of “narrative” also changed its context and possibly its meaning and its goal.