Author: asrobinson

PRY, while unlike most of the works we’ve looked at so far, contains components that we have attributed to digital literature since the beginning of the course. What first stood out to me was how Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman made use of interactivity. We have looked at some pieces where form mirrors content such as Bury Me, My Love and Her Story, but the mechanisms used in PRY serve a deeper metaphorical meaning to the work. The act of pinching open James’ eyes to see into his world provides a more intimate connection with the story than simply swiping or tapping could provide.

Furthermore, PRY is encyclopedic. As Gorman mentions in a talk, PRY utilizes a large database of videos to enrich the content of the narrative. This is similar to what we saw with Her Story, or maybe even the images used in The Whale Hunt. Yet, it somehow feels different. With PRY, the narrative isn’t centered on the video. It is instead just as important as the text and audio in the game. You are able to pick between opening his eyes which always leads to a video or going deeper into his consciousness which mostly provides stream of thought text. In between, you are always greeted with text that serves to further you along in the story.

PRY is also unique in that it allows you to return to the game at specific points in order to explore more of the game. A lot of the works we have looked at require you to start over from the beginning each time you engage with the piece. One thing I wondered was if the sparkling red diamonds on each chapter title depicted the amount of story that you’ve uncovered. Providing a clear indication of what is left to discover could compel the user to keep exploring the app, similar to how Her Story provided information about how many videos were viewed.

Overall, I think PRY is a fitting last work to study. It builds off of concepts we’ve seen before but manages to integrate everything together in a unique way. More importantly, it provides a great example of utilizing all of the affordances of digital literature. A work like PRY would not be possible in print literature, and any attempt to recreate it in print would not be as effective in portraying all that it does.

When working on my 3-Passage story for our Twine final project, I became a bit absorbed in Twine itself. I really delved into its documentation to explore all of the options for creating links and usingmacros to modify hooks. I wanted to figure out the best way to piece together my story. It wasn’t until I had a few passages all linked together when I truly started to notice how interconnected everything is. I began to imagine small clusters of links off to the side of the main storyline, similar to the Gauntlet style we saw when looking at CYOA books. Twine allows the user to create side branches that add to the story, but these side branes aren’t necessary to get through the story. In fact, Twine works get a shoutout as “friendly gauntlets” in Ashwell’s post.

When looking at Her Story, we see something similar. Because there is a large database of videos and you are limited to 5 videos per search, it’s is hard to see every video when playing the game. Yet, with enough videos, you can typically put together the story (story being the actual chronology of events). Although you might not have a fully fleshed out story, you have a basic understanding, which implies that the videos you don’t encounter are not crucial to understanding the overall story.

In both Twine works and Her Story, the plot is different for everyone. In Twine, you can see text in different orders depending on how you click the links similar to how you can see videos in different orders depending on how you search the database. Furthermore, the player’s interactivity determine which details are included in the plot. Players are free to click on as many or as little links/videos as they please. In their own ways, both accomplish being disjointed yet very connected.

The eerie and the uncanny are two similar descriptions of situations which invoke a sense of uneasiness. In fact, the two are so interrelated that definitions of uncanny often include a feeling of eeriness (which doesn’t help when trying to differentiate between the two). In class, we described the eerie as something present when there’s supposed to be nothing, or nothing present when there’s supposed to be something. This description is not far off from the one presented in “The Uncanny” which states “everything is uncanny that out to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light”(4). Both involve something being present when it typically isn’t. They also both rely on some degree of unknown. Once that uncertainty disappears and you know exactly what has been presented to you, any suspicions go out the window and take the eerie and the uncanny with it.

However, there are small subtleties that distinguish the two which I better understood after exploring The Flat by Andy Campbell. The Flat is undoubtedly an uncanny piece of work. The fact that you are placed in this unknown environment with no sense of what is going on captures the uncanny feeling of something being oddly familiar. To further push the point, the last line of text states “what you didn’t see was what happened when you weren’t here”. While the setting of an apartment is a familiar scene to most, the fact that you don’t know what’s going on, and the odd placement of certain objects throughout the flat create suspicion. Furthermore, the lone figure outside of the end of the work provides an example of how questioning if “an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,”(5) contributes to the uncanny.

With the eerie, things show up when they aren’t expected and more so contribute to a feeling of fear than the uncanny. With our example from class, you know people are supposed to be roaming our campus, so if one day everyone mysteriously disappeared, that would be eerie. With the uncanny, everyone didn’t disappear, but you notice they seem a bit off. People might be acting differently than usual, or there’s a weird vibe in the air. In the Flat, the eerie could correlate to returning and expecting people to be over but they aren’t. When going through The Flat, I assumed I was alone and not expecting anyone so I wasn’t surprised by the lack of people. However, even without knowing much about the apartment, I had a feeling that something felt off. That is what is core to the uncanny.

In the scope of the class so far, this piece utilizes interactivity as a tool for storytelling like we’ve seen in most of the works we’ve examined. This interactivity gives the reader agency in the sense that they are able to decide which areas they want to explore. Even though there is no explicit end goal, this work encourages multiple plays as the reader tries to understand the story.

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.

In chapter 4 of Scott Rettberg’s book “Electronic Literature, he discusses the beginnings and evolution of Interactive Fiction (IF). Rettberg describes how IF derived from textual based games which allows the interactor to navigate textual scenes. A key component to IF is its riddle-like nature. While the “principal challenge to the reader of interactive fiction, and its central pleasure, is to find a solution,” successful exploration of these virtual worlds require the interactor to input what the text parser is looking for (90). Studying what commands the test parser accepts gives insight to what the author hopes you get out of the literature, similar to how mapping the structure of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books offers insights to what the author views as important. 

An example of this is found in our two readings Photopia by Adam Cadre and Galatea by Emily Short. Both readings offer instruction guides to help a first time user navigate the stories. While the examples they give lend some hints to the main ways to get through the story, the more notable aspect of these instructions are the phrases that warrant abbreviations. The phrases “look”, “examine”, “again”, “think about” and “ask about” demonstrate how these authors prioritize engagement with the characters and items to further the plot. This is a stark contrast to IF works that require navigation to the appropriate places to discover new plot lines. Revealing these priorities through further examination of how the test parser is designed resembles how moral structure is unveiled through analysis of CYOA mappings. In both cases, the impact of your decisions is only revealed through repeated readings of the work.

These similarities between CYOA and IF lead me to wonder what exactly distinguishes them all in the first place? Reading jokane’s post  Interactive Fiction: Text Adventure Games in Today’s Games made me question even further. In their post, they claim that video games are a version of IF just disguised by its graphics and heavy interface. If this is the case, wouldn’t other forms of interactive works, such as hypertext be considered IF as well? Better yet, shouldn’t all digital literature be considered IF in the first place? Considering how interactivity is a critical affordance of digital literature, including a “genre” with the adjective “interactive” seems redundant. This is not to say that jokane was wrong in that video games are a type of IF. I agree, and even propose that video games prioritize certain interactions with the game like all times of digital literature.