Author: zanussbaum

Pry, the last work we are examining, seems to be the work that ties everything together of what we have talked about all semester. There are other works that have used similar attributes, but this work to me stood out as a way to intimately look through someone’s eyes. In her video, Samantha Gorman talks about how they tried to emulate a book in a browser and tell a story through the browser. She mentions how early e-books emulated page turns, but being a digital form, she wanted to integrate new ways that a reader could be moved from passage to passage instead of relying on the metaphor of page turning. I though this was very interesting because to me, e-books generally seems a little bit off to me. I always find it hard to pick up an e-book and stay with it. Maybe it’s because when reading them, there’s tons of other distractions and places I can go, whereas a regular book I am only really afforded what’s on the page. I think that trying to think outside of the box really gives this work it’s magic.

One fascinating thing I thought she talked about was the silent guiding hand through the story. Even though the reader has much of the control, I think it’s cool that they have almost a checklist or a guide on what plots they want a reader to hit. In a way, everyone can then experience some of the same story, yet have unique experiences reading the story and still have the feel of reader choice.

Her Story is one of those games that I most likely will remember playing for a long time specifically for how it made me feel the whole time. Admittedly, I did this right before bed (poor choice) which added to the ambience and spooky music. But the lack of coherence in the stories of Eve and Hannah really made the story more interesting. Similar to how the chronological timeline of Momento is frankly boring (according to Dr. Sample), I think this story would be less interesting without the holes in the story and cohesiveness. Additionally, one thing that really made this game more interesting to me was the aspect of playing detective. There aren’t many games, or media, where the audience gets to play an almost active role in figuring out who, what, where, when, and why. The obvious connection of Her Story with other movies is Momento, but these twist endings remind me of a few other movies: The Usual Suspects and Inception.

(SPOILERS)

The ending of The Usual Suspects is, in my opinion, one the greatest twist endings. In short, a witness testimony of a ‘small’ character in a criminal group ends up telling a fabricated story based on images and words in the agents room. This twist ending was similar to how different pieces of Her Story unravelled for me. For example, when I initially heard the testimony of how she wanted to kill her sister was when I first started to have doubts of what I thought was going on. The aspect of flipping the plot on its head works so well in both works. Additionally, the ending of Inception still throws me through a loop, as I still wonder if Cobb is in a dream or not. These unanswered questions of what the truth is has led me to rewatch the movie over and over again, hoping to find a missed detail, similar to Her Story. Each video in the database presented more information that I wanted to look up. One thing that especially fascinated me was the use of Morse Code, which turned out to spell ‘loveu’ (from a quick Google Search. These little details make the game addicting and almost persuade you to keep playing to make sure you didn’t miss anything at all.

The first work that I looked at was The Flat. The interactive game starts with you at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The screen almost looks like you are watching this through one of those old TVs, where the horizontal lines flicker, reminiscent of early 2000 televisions and electronic sets (from what I remember). Words flickered occasionally on the bottom, with hints of self doubt and generally just creepy sentiments. The music/ambient noise added to the suspense of the scene. There also was a clock in the upper right corner counting down how much time you had. I was initially confused on what the purpose of the clock was. Was I supposed to find something/someone? Was I supposed to escape the room? Some of the floating words talked about how the house was always stuffy/closed up, increasing the suspicion that something was going on. The “surprise” at the end added to the creepiness of the whole narrative/game. I found that this game really reminded me of The Blair Witch Project, where people go into the woods to look for a murderer and some of the film is portrayed through a handheld video camera. The creepiness of both the house in The Flat in woods in The Blair Witch Project were amplified by the lo-fi aspect of the filming. I think that this allowed the stories to seem more believable, as it could’ve been made by anyone. The idea that this could be real is what really terrified me. Without the authenticity and amateur style of the videos, these films/games wouldn’t have been as haunting. Another aspect that I found similar between the two was the lack of answers. Not knowing the full story increased the suspense.

This idea of creepiness in the mundane was something that Freud talked about in his essay Uncanny. The idea of something familiar being creepy directly ties to The Flat as at its core, the game is really just exploring someone’s apartment. There is nothing inherently creepy about the apartment itself, but the situation surrounding the apartment make it creepy.

While playing Destroy/Wait, I was confused at the initial goal of the game. I didn’t totally process what was going on with the initial noun and the choice to destroy or wait. What was I destroying or what was I waiting to do? Eventually, I figured out what was going on after pressing wait a couple times in a row. I found it interesting how it started off with physical things to decide on, such as cities or trees, but then moved to love and then eventually yourself. I played this game a couple of times and was interested if there were numerous outcomes, like some CYOA, but it seemed that the game always ended in the world ending with nothing left, which I found intriguing, yet dark. It seemed like there was an inevitable end to everything as even if you waited to destroy something, you were just prolonging the end of it anyways.

The second game, Howling Dogs, was even more dark. It seems like every time you enter the activity room, darker and darker “dreams” occur from strangling someone to death, to eating someone alive, to even being burnt alive. This game was a little hard to navigate in the beginning but I found it interesting to keep playing the game to see what the next “dream” may be, however dark it may have been.

I found it interesting as well how other people, like myself, found the game confusing, yet cool and kept them playing, like Emily Short cited. Being a hyper-text game, she found that this one was one that kept her thinking, which I agreed. I wondered, why were there so many different realities for this person to explore and what were they escaping from? It almost seemed like the person was using these dreams as a way to distract from sort of inner trauma, as the dreams they were interacting with were extremely dark and graphic. To me, it could almost be a sort of prison-like sentence, where someone is sent to spend the rest of their life living out other horrific acts and events. This made me think of Ashwell’s thoughts when he talked about protagonism as a way to drive player agency. In every dream, the player becomes a “new” protagonist and is the center of attention within that event, or at least their actions contributed to the story.

One thing that I questioned was why Howling Dogs had limited choice in the actions that you could take within the narrative. Salter talked about how games that had limited choice tended to increase user empathy. Were we supposed to feel empathy for the main character that is stuck experiencing all these dreams/VR interactions? Additionally, I felt it interesting to have such little choice for the user. If empathy was not the goal, was limited choice more of a style choice? I came away from this game with more questions than answers.

The chapter by Rettberg gives a nice introduction and background into what interactive fiction is and how it has evolved over time, starting with Adventure, evolving with the creation of Infocom, and expanding from an open-source-like medium being shared for some games. Although these text based games aren’t as popular now, they do seem to bring back a sense of nostalgia for me. When I play these games I am especially reminded of PC games I played growing up, like The Oregon Trail, which had similar elements of story telling and decision making to what many of these text-based games have. Although they lack solely being a text-based game, I feel that they are the same at heart. These games all have an “interactor” that is working toward a definable goal that’s to be solved through some sort of reasoning. In a sense, most video games now can be resolved into a ‘flavor’ of an interactive fiction.

I thought the other readings were great examples of interactive fiction, and I had a lot of fun playing them. I think that these games have allowed for a new age of interaction that people didn’t have a lot of before. I almost see it as a Choose Your Own Adventure that’s been ported from a physical version to a digital version. One thing that may be lacking though is that it would be hard to find all possible outcomes, as they may even be infinite. Contrary to the affordance that books are finite, this medium allows for an infinite, or almost infinite, medium as a user could replay the game many times without scratching the surface of all possible outcomes.