Author: Orion

While clicking, looking, watching through Her Story, I felt like I couldn’t distinguish between what I was actually doing (if you couldn’t already tell by the three different verbs I had to use to describe my actions) and the point of the game —if you can even call it that. Most of the electronic literature we have seen and visited until now has had a more distinguished ‘character’, i.e. is it more of a game or more of a piece of writing? However, in this case it took me a while to figure out what was going on. Full videos that have been split and broken down to create a mystery story. But are these real? Are these clips from actual police interviews of this woman?

No. In reality, this is an actual piece of art directed by Sam Barlow and staring actress, musician and gymnast Viva Seifert. It is interesting how two different people can see Her Story as two completely different things. On the one hand, it is a video game where you have to click through video clips, search key words, save whatever you need, play a little game of Xs and Os and chat on the “computer”, all to discover what really happened; who murdered Simon and why? Who is really Hannah and who is Eve? On the other hand, you get a fully directed film with a single actress, written and directed by the artist and creator. It definitely felt as if I was in a modern art museum watching a tv that played the clips of this woman on repeat and in some way reminded me of our own “fracture fairy tale” project where a piece of work/art will also be broken into pieces to create something completely new!

While “playing” The Flat, I realised that it reminded me of the video game Gone Home. However, one is a piece of digital poetry and the other one is an adventure video game; two things that would normally be considered very different from each other. Still, the lines are quite blurred when it comes to the nature of The Flat. It is not an actual video game and for that matter, Gone Home can not be considered digital poetry either. The dulness, mystery, spookiness and darkness of both works creates this characteristically video game ‘vibe’ that we see in The Flat.

In our posts we’ve all used the word “play” to describe the action we are doing when navigating this piece of work. In reality we are never actually “playing” anything, we are rather just clicking to specific areas that have already been indicated to us and are the only option for moving forward. Moving on, what we read are not clues that will help you figure out the game or come to a solution but words of poetry. Yet the combination of the three different ‘layers’ of The Flat; the music and sounds, the imagery and the text, create the whole story behind the meaning of this particular work. The theme of horror the keeps popping up in all of these works of interactive fiction we have seen is, also usually associated with adventure and thriller video games. Those three layers are also the ones found in video games. So could we say that videos games are in a way digital fiction or vice versa?

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.

While reading chapter 4 “Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms”, I came to realize that we never really defined what we mean by literature or what comes to mind when we do. Even though I am not about to fully respond to that (at least not for now) it got me thinking that up until now we have considered everything we have come across to be a part of “literature”. I am certain that if we showed an English Literature expert or writer the My Boyfriend Came Back From War (1996) piece by Olia Lialina, they would most likely disagree. But would My Body – A Wunderkammer (1997)  by Shelley Jackson be considered literature by the same person?

Thinking about the last couple of interactive literature pieces we have explored, I realised that what they all had in common was not necessarily the literary aspect of them but more so some form of gaming nature. The mixture of those two aspects however create a power dynamic that is not found in your typical/normal literature books. The reader knows where he or she stands and the book has a visible start and finish with no prospect of change, whatever is written is written. On the other hand, interactive fiction gives you the option to feel like you’re the one in control. Pieces such as Galatea and Photopia allow you to choose what your next step should be. In that moment you’re the reader, the player, the author. You have the power of how the plot is going to continue. Something you cannot do in actual literary books.

But do you really? In a way it definitely gives you a sense of satisfaction and control, and maybe that is the whole point of IF. The creators give us the opportunity to feel like we are also contributing in the writing process of a piece. However, there are so many limitation of what you can do, type or say. I found myself extremely intimidate and frustrated while exploring both works for Friday’s class, as most of the time the words or commands I typed would not work and I ended up skimming most of the paragraphs instead of reading them just to see where they would lead me.

Ultimately, no matter what you do, there is always a specific path to follow and specific endings and beginning that have already been plotted/coded. So what makes interactive fiction so different than actual books? Probably the experience and interaction between the consumer and the piece of work, but also the sense of power we have been given (by the creators) when we are a bart of a IF piece of work.This might be a farfetched thought, but people like having power and control and like to feel as if they are a part of something bigger, which is why IF seems so appealing and intriguing. IF definitely has a feel of a detective novel, as Mary Ann Buckles explains, which puts the reader/player in yet another position of control – to figure out what is going on. So the power is all in the hands of the creator but the feeling of power is in the hands of the reader/consumer/player.