Throughout this semester I have written five blog post and there were some recurring themes and topics in my writing. Firstly, I wrote about limitation of choice and the consequences of it for two out of the five blog posts .In my second blog post, I wrote about the limitation of choice in “Cactus Blue Motel” and “Will Not let me go”. Both of these twine games represented how limitation of choice can be used as a technique to “increase empathy and create emotional connections.” In my third blog post about the video-animation Dakota, I also talked about limitation of choice. In this post, I talked about how limitation of choice was a technique used to force the reader to really pay attention to the text itself. As a result, I believe that limitation of choice was a recurring theme in my post. Secondly, I realized that in several of my blog post I compared these games to more “stereotypical” videogames. For example, I compared “Her Story” and the “Cactus Blue motel” to “stereotypical” video games and commented why they are different those videogames. Lastly, another recurring element of my blog post was that I tried to decipher the evocative meaning in some of the games that we played for class . In my post about “Cactus Blue Hotel”, I stated that on an evocative level the “hotel represented a dangerous mindset that people may have, if they want to escape the realities of life”. I also thought that “How to rob a bank” was “a social commentary on much personal information exist on our phones in this modern era”.
In the past 15 weeks, I believe that the nature of my blog post has changed. My first blog post was basically a summary of chapter 3 from Electronic Literature. I did not really write about what I thought about the chapter; I just basically wrote a summary on it. In my later blog posts, I analyzed the games assigned that day and wrote more about what I thought of the game instead of just writing a summary. I realized that Dr. Sample wanted more than just a summary post, but wanted to know what we thought of the game and the connections between the concept we discussed in class or the reading. I was surprised about how much I wrote about limitation of choice and the “Cactus Blue Hotel”. I really enjoyed playing the “Cactus Blue Hotel” and it is probably the reason why I refer to it so many times in my blog post.
I would like to revisit my idea about how “as technology developed, so did the possibilities for hypertext fiction” in my first blog post of the semester. I feel this the statement that I presented in the first blog post was true but I feel like the idea about making my blog post centered around that idea was pretty boring. Instead, I would analyze the two games assigned to us that day “My boyfriend came back from war” and “ My body-AWunderkammer” and then maybe relate it back to how these games would not be possible without technological advancement.
To conclude, I believe that I wrote about some interesting themes and topics throughout the duration of the course, and that the nature of my blog post improved especially between my first blog post and the second one.