Author: jokane

PRY, also known as the last work we are looking at in DIG 220.  If I could put a sad face emoji up I would. Pry definitely stood out as its own type of work when comparing it to some of the other works we looked at over the semester. It was definitely interesting to see a story being told in different ways. I’m not sure I got it right but I believe that whenever video was used, it was for seeing what’s going on in the world, and text is a way to show what James thinks. I also found it weird how we were supposed to be prying James’ eyes open at some points in the game, and as I’m typing this I am realizing why the game may have been named Pry. That is probably the saddest thing that will ever be read in a blog post.

Anyway, I did find the ways you interacted with the game very interesting. The story used all of the functions of the IPad making it fully interactive. There is also the fact that the narrator is not reliable anymore. James is losing his sight and quite possibly his mind, which fits the character’s persona since he was a Gulf War vet turned demo man, and the “going blind” part explains why there is braille in some parts of the story. However, it’s an interesting choice to use braille since an actual blind person would never be able to feel it since it’s on an IPad.

So Pry is a great work that shows that completely uses the mobile device’s function as an interactive means of reading. Pry was definitely a good piece of work to end the semester off with in my opinion. It’s bringing the semester together while making us think still about the new things it’s presenting. I would just like to end my last blog post by saying thanks for sticking with me on my crazy blogs.

Her Story is probably the most confusing game I have played in a long time. It’s a great database game and playing this game for three days brought more chills and confusion every day.

So as we’ve discussed in class, there are supposedly two people being interviewed, Hannah and Eve. This is the first thing that threw me for a loop. The first thing that didn’t make sense is no one would’ve known if Eve was real. So bringing up a whole new person in the interview created two possibilities in my mind. Either Eve is real, or Hannah has multiple personalities and Eve is one of them. When looking at the game in chronological order there’s some evidence that Eve is real. For starters on June 27th, Hannah had a bruise on her left cheek. Then on the 30th, the bruise is gone. She says she has a high metabolism and that’s why the bruise is gone. The only problem with that is right after “Hannah” had said that, she touched her wrong cheek. Later on, we learn that someone has a tattoo, and then it’s gone the next day. There’s a lot of evidence saying that Eve is real and is Hannah’s twin sister, but I still believe they could be the same person. I mean if Eve is real then it explains for the tattoo and bruise disappearing, but makeup can also explain that. Also in the end, “Eve” fails a lie detector test saying she’s Hannah. The thing is this game is so detailed, I think the developers would know that polygraph machines are no way reliable. Also, no one has seen Eve because “supposedly” she was locked away. Lastly, both people were pregnant, but Hannah had a miscarriage.

I believe that Eve is a real person and is the twin of Hannah, but I do also think that Hannah may be insane since she possibly murdered Simon. I also believe that trying to put Her Story together takes a lot of time and it’s a complicated process. It’s easy to get mixed up in a different part of the story and it happens a lot. It’s very infuriating, but nonetheless Her Story was an interesting way to see a database game.

At the end of Monday’s class, Prof. Sample said that Andy Campbell’s “The Flat” would provide a jump scare.  It’s safe to say that the only jumping I did while playing “The Flat” was jumping out of my seat to get some water before writing this post. Even though I wasn’t scared, it’s safe to say I was confused by the whole thing, and in the end, I definitely had some questions. Why did I keep seeing a face every time I clicked and saw static? Why did I definitely see a face in the closet? Who’s house am I in, and if it’s mine, why do I still live in a haunted house, and if it’s not my house, then why am I breaking into someone’s house? Lastly, why is Andy still obsessed with The Blair Witch Project 7 years after it’s release? All jokes aside, when you start the game, you start at the bottom of a staircase with words appearing in the air. You have the choice to go up the stairs or wait until that mysterious clock hits zero. If you’re adventurous and walk up the 14 steps,  you’ll be able to go into two rooms and a bathroom.  Each has different things, but you can explore them and get more confused. Personally, my favorite place is the bedroom, since it has more of a sense of mystery than the living room. Once you finish exploring and run out of time, you are dragged to look outside a window, and you see a shadow move past it. You may think it’s a raccoon, a dog, a cat, or even a person, so the sense of adventure tells you to investigate by opening the door. Then you see the cloaked figure on your lawn, and the story ends.

If Sigmund Freud were alive, he’d probably be so happy to see a game that utilizes his thoughts on the “uncanny,” which he talks about in his paper “The Uncanny.” “The Flat” has a sense of something that is seen in day to day life, an everyday apartment and adding a touch of spooky vibes to it. When we combine these two aspects, it looks like the idea of “uncanny” is what the “The Flat” is trying to maintain.

Today we were tasked to read “A Bestiary of Player Agency” by Sam Kabo Ashwell, as well as play “howling dogs” by Porpentine, “Destroy / Wait” by Chevalier, and “Spy Intrigue” by Furkle. All of these were interesting to play and read about. That being said, playing these games at some point made me want to pick up my laptop and throw it out of the closest window. “Spy Intrigue” and “howling dogs” were so long, and the actions the player had to do were so confusing at times that I almost raged quit a text-based game. Luckily I didn’t, and my laptop is still in one piece.

So the easiest (and less stressful) part of today’s assignment was playing “Destroy / Wait.” This game was fantastic since it was so simple to follow, with there being only two options throughout the entirety of the game. The player can either “Destroy” something like love or trees, or the player can “Wait,” which adds to the story. At some point, clicking “Wait” doesn’t become an option for the player; they have to “Destroy” the world. This is the case for every choice the player gets in this game leading to one end, the destruction of the player. Making it my favorite twine game ever, due to its simplicity to keep up with the story. Now tying this into the reading for today was tricky since it’s such a simple game compared to the other ones we’ve played. However, I believe that when Ashwell talks about the reflective agency, his description best fits what’s happening in the game. Every time a player selects to wait, the screen changes to say something new, but at the end of it all, choosing to remain doesn’t affect the game at all. You learn about the player’s life and regrets.

Now, the other two games took so long to complete and took a while to figure out how to win. “Spy Intrigue” supposedly had a tree showing all the paths you can take in the bottom right corner. It took me until the end to figure that out. “howling dogs” was also tricky since there was no map, and you had to find the right combination of choices until reaching a critical point in the story. These games had examples of big decisions as talked about by Ashwell. “howling dogs” also presents challenges where you must take an absolute path to reach the next story point. I do believe these games are similar when it comes to player agency, but a big difference between the two is that “Spy Intrigue” presents a sense of completionism. Seeing as the game remembers the nodes that the player goes to by marking them yellow. Once the player makes every node turn yellow then that’s how they’d know the game is over. The last thing I want to say is a question that I thought of when playing “howling dogs”. How do you figure out which word leads to the correct ending? I have a feeling that one of the words in the ballroom scene leads to a different ending, but how do you figure it out other than clicking every single word.

Reading the chapter “Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms” was very familiar to me already. I once was invested in games described in the reading, like Zork and the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, but that was a long time ago. Even though I was familiar with interactive fiction, reading the chapter brought new information, that in turn, posed further questions that came to mind. The big question that came to mind in the reading was, how did interactive fiction games influence the games we see today?

(I first want to say that I am a person that plays some video game genres, and I believe I have enough experience playing video games to help answer this question.)

Today, we don’t see too many text-based adventure games; with computers getting better processing speeds and better graphics, the desire for text-based adventure games shrank, according to Rettberg. He is right because now people want to play games with better graphics and dialogue, but the basis of text-based adventure games hasn’t gone away, and they will not go away for a long time. I believe that everyone that plays video games is experiencing interactive fiction. I want you to think about the most recent game you played for fun, that wasn’t assigned for this class. For me, I recently played NBA 2K20. Now NBA 2K20 is a basketball game that has no text-based interactions on the outside, making it seem like a horrible example for this. The reason it’s a good example is that what we’re looking for isn’t on the outside, it’s on the inside of the game, or the code. That’s the one thing all video games have in common, code. Imagine playing a game like this, and strip away the graphics so that all that is left is code. If you keep playing the game with no graphics, the code will still be running, and it will be looking for what the next command is. If you move forward with the arrow key, the code will send the command to move forward. Now unlike text-based games, there won’t be a text that appears saying what happens, but if you do another action like shoot the ball, the code will receive the instruction to shoot, and then the game keeps running just like games like Zork and Galatea. These games will keep running until you do all the actions necessary to win.

That may be a stretch to some people, but take a look at a game like Galatea. All one needs to do is set arrow keys to send commands for a move to the north, east, south, or west. Add all of the characters, and if you walk up to someone and start interacting with them, then that would be the same thing as typing talk.

This shows that just because computers have better graphics and higher processing speeds, doesn’t mean that interactive fiction games are dying out because those games are seen in most of today’s games. The only difference is there are less text and commands in today’s games, but text-based games and modern games both use the same kind of code. So when Rhettberg says, “the market for text adventures shrank drastically.”(Rhettberg 87) He is correct in the sense of pure text adventure games, but the market for these games, in reality, has been growing for decades.