Category: Group B

Bury Me My Love combines many of the themes we’ve discussed this semester into one game.. Just like Her Story, in Bury Me My Love, the form mirrors the content. Bury Me My Love tells the story of Nour who is a Syrian refugee and is trying to escape to Europe. The most unique aspect of this game is how the story is told through text messages between you (her husband, Majd) and Nour. The player is able to choose between different responses and the form of communication (text message, photos, emojis). Players must also wait in “real time” in order to receive a message from Nour. Notifications are sent to your phone – truly blurring your world with Nours. This suspense combined with the agency granted to players forces us into Nour and Majd’s world. Unlike Her Story, where the player’s role was a foil, in Bury Me My Love the player’s role is a protagonist –  a conventional main character with a backstory and motivation. The interactivity of the game paired with the user interface makes the story of Nour and Majd more compelling and intimate.

The nature of text messages are slow which mimics the anxiety that Majd faces as he tries to stay in contact with Nour. Not only that, there is a bit of dysfunctionality within the game. I wanted to scroll back up and reread my previous messages with Nour but was unable to do so. If this was intentional, it was to emphasize how important Majd’s text messages are and the time-sensitive nature. Not only that, it could also represent the poor connectivity between Majd and Nour. There were also times where the text messages wouldn’t send and the frustration I felt must’ve been similar to Majd trying to get into contact with his wife. These quick decisions that I had to make reminded me of our CYOA book and how after we made a choice, we were not able to go back. 

Finally, the most impressive aspect of Bury Me My Love to me was how no matter which options you chose – the story was clear. The relationship between Majd and Nour is clear and the environment that Nour is fleeing from is also very obvious.

I was going to begin my blog post with something along the lines of “While participating in the work, Bury Me, My Love I found that…” but then I realized “participating” may not be quite the right word. I think of participation as an active thing, a way we contribute, perhaps with some degree of intentionality. In some important ways, the user does participate in Bury Me, My Love; we receive the messages on our phones and then we have to choose how to respond to Nour. Our replies in turn influence the trajectory of Nour’s journey. 

Although we participate in the game through our responses, I felt as though this contribution was mediated in certain ways. Or, if not our participation, perhaps our full-immersion in the work. For example, I found myself distracted by my assumed identity as Nour’s husband. While I may not have made different choices if I were playing as a female friend of Nour’s, I did have to remind myself that I was supposed to be participating as if I were sort of responsible for Nour because of the nature of our relationship. I also felt that my participation was mediated at the level of the text(message). Sometimes I felt like neither of the options were what I might say myself, mostly because of tone or word/emoji choice. Additionally, when some texts were sent without my decision, I felt as though my active participation waivered. However, some of these instances seemed to try to mirror human behavior. For example, at one point, we send a typo, “Hang in tree!” instead of “hang in there.” Could we view such events as instances of dysfunctionality? How else is Bury Me, My Love an example of the dysfunctional? Perhaps political in its individualized depiction of the refugee crisis, which disrupts the popular portrayal of nameless masses far away from us. 

What remains a topic of international conversation now takes place as a dialogue between two imagined people through an app for a small fee. Although the work’s intention may be to expose a wider audience to the experiences of refugees, I’m curious if others felt vaguely voyeuristic while interacting with it? Is there a danger of essentializing the refugee experience through these generated text messages? Can an argument be made that the work commodifies the experience of a refugee? 

Bury me, my Love tells the story of Nour and her journey from Syria to Europe to escape Syria’s civil war. In the story, the user plays the role of Nour’s husband, Majd, and is able to interact with her through texts. The user is also given multiple options of texts to send in certain cases. I found the game to be very immersive and it gave me the feeling that I was actually texting someone, particularly with the app’s notifications turned on. The fact that Nour would be unavailable for periods of time also made the game feel real.

The game offers a window into the journey of Syrian migrants and the risks they face. In the story, Nour’s texts detail the challenges she faces on her journey, such as not being able to get to a border. At certain times in the game as Majd, the reader must decide on what to advise Nour to do, such as to stick with their original plan to get to a border or to find a smuggler both come with risks, decisions that real migrants face on a constant basis. I also found the dialogue interesting because it makes the characters feel like real people. For example, you see the characters’ personalities, humor, and worries. The dialogue also includes emojis and photos. All of this makes the dialogue natural and allows you to relate with both characters. I had not known that texts could be a form of storytelling and was surprised at how natural and personal the story felt.

After starting Bury Me My Love, I was intrigued with the text conversation format. Texting is something that I take for granted and experience every day. Often when I’m texting I don’t think twice about a message that I’m sending. Since most of my texts are mindless it was interesting to see how texting can be used to tell a story. The interactivity also made me think deeper on what I was texting and how it was going to affect the story. One quality that stand out to me about texting is the carelessness of it. The carelessness of texting made me think of the connection to cyber-bullying. It is extremely bold to say something negative to someone’s face. However, is only takes a few seconds and very little consideration to send a hateful text. And if the sender regrets it, they can just delete it from their phone and erase the memory. It is also easy when texting to not realize how someone could interpret a text.

Another connection I made from the text conversation style of this interactive fiction game was how texting can make you feel so close to someone you might have never met face to face. In the game you are playing the role of the husband who is texting his wife. On online dating apps or chatting apps, people often talk to people they only know through one picture if that. The show Catfish became popular because of how many people were faking who they were on online dating sites. The victims of cat-fishing never suspected anything because their relationship was built from texting.

Last class, we discussed the various roles that players can have when interacting with interactive fiction. In Her Story, I would argue that the player’s role would be categorized as a foil. In her blog post, “An Alternative Taxonomy for Her Story“, Emily Short describes this role as “the player-character’s interactions with the real protagonist serve to reveal and/or develop her character, but our own character remains something of a cipher.” In Her Story, the player’s goal is to figure out the role of a woman suspect in the murder of Simon. Unlike many other interactive fiction pieces we’ve looked at, in Her Story, the player serves as a third-person looking in. I imagined myself as a detective trying to pull information out of someone who wanted to trick me. Her Story as a game relies on the player not having all of the information. If it was told through the suspect’s perspective, I’d assume the focus would shift from trying to figure out the story to trying to successfully confuse the interrogator, making Her Story  a completely different game.

Another unique aspect of Her Story is the user interface and how the form mirrors its content. As I went through the videos, it was clear that there was a detailed investigation occuring. The player has to work through a computer database where the questioning of the suspect has been stored. As a detective, when there is a mystery, the instinct is to continue digging for evidence. One thing that particularly stood out to me was how players were limited to 5 entries – even if their “search term” resulted in more entries. This is part of the rule of significance, which is one of the rules of reading we spoke about earlier this semester. The rule of significance is interpreting the things you notice. Limiting the player to only 5 entries per “search term” ensures that the reader continues to search the database. Not only that, it increases the interactivity with the player. For me, this limitation motivated me more to continue searching through the database. Another example of the rule of significance are the dates on the video. By providing the player with this information, it allows the player more agency to put together the story of the suspect. 

In The Language of New Media, Manovich compares databases and narratives. He explains that “the database represents the world as a list of items” while “a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items” (225). He goes on to state that “… web sites, and other new media objects organized as databases correspond to the data structure, whereas narratives, including computer games, correspond to algorithm” (226). I have found that I do not follow the narrative structure of some of the works we examine.This may be because I was not exposed to databases in their creative form before this class. However, narratives cannot compete with a database’s ability to constantly add more data.

The Whale Hunt blends the narrative and database well. I really enjoyed the collection of photographs because of their narrative and the story they told. The photographs can be characterized as a database, but also have a clear narrative. One common theme from the photographs that stuck with me was the constant daylight in Alaska. I was trying to categorize this as being part of the eerie and uncanny or the sublime but was unable to do so definitively. On one hand, I would not say this constant daylight invokes feelings of uneasiness or uncertainty. At the same time, I do not think it is overwhelming in any way, such as in size or magnitude. As someone who has not experienced constant daylight, I think it would cause a feeling different from either the sublime or the eerie and uncanny.

Manovich’s “Database” touches on some of the questions or issues I’ve had with some of the electronic literature we’ve encountered. Mainly, I feel as though I often comment on how a work does not seem to have much of a narrative structure, or that I don’t feel compelled to continue exploring the work if it seems incoherent. In his discussion of database and narrative, Manovich argues, “why should an arbitrary sequence of database records constructed by the user result in ‘a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors’?” (228). Manovich concludes that “database and narrative do not have the same status in computer culture” (228). My understanding of Manovich’s argument is that he does not think narrative is as critical to understanding digital platforms as is the database, which is the root of any narrative that may form. 

In my previous post, I referenced Rabinowitz’s “Rules of Reading” and I think they remain relevant here. One of Rabinowitz’s rules is that of Coherence, which encourages readers to be generous in their evaluation of a work. I’m curious if others think that Manovich is asking us to disregard this Rule of Coherence when we discuss computer culture? If so, I might counter his point that the Rule can still apply but that we must become generous readers in a new way; instead of giving allowances to the text’s coherency for example, maybe we can extend our generosity to appreciate the database itself, that thing he argues is the backbone of these works anyhow. 

I enjoyed Harris’ The Whale Hunt for a few reasons. I’m definitely a visual learner so databases don’t often appeal to me. Therefore, I really appreciated Harris’ innovative take on what he refers to as an “experiment in human storytelling.” Through the photographs, Harris has created a sort of database but it is still grounded in a narrative or connecting thread, depending on how a user chooses to navigate the collection. The images could likely stand alone as a visual medium but the captions, heartbeat timeline, and metadata certainly enhance how we experience the database. The project reads almost as a very advanced 1 Second Everyday project, which I think makes the work seem more accessible and engaging.

The Manovich chapter challenged my pre-existing conception of a narrative. In my other English classes, I work to identify and analyze the narrator or narrative in a given work. The computer world, conversely, introduces an entirely new construction of retelling existence: the database. With so much going on, a database is a complex structure with the capacity to contain immeasurable amounts of content. By adding new components as well as enlisting the resources that already exist in a given space, each database surpasses any narrative’s wildest dreams. 

Just because we understand narrative as our main route to access doesn’t mean it’s the only one, or even that it’s the most efficient one. The computer world’s version of cataloguing introduces a new vision. A database presents the world as a list of objects— with no preference for order, it automatically is placed at odds with narrative. Interestingly enough, because it lends itself to randomness, the database became the center of the creative process in the computer age. We have seen this truth in several of the games and programs we’ve encountered thus far in our class. Sea and Spar Between did a fantastic job of drawing attention to the epic scope that randomness allows in a creative setting. 

That being said, I wonder how the computer age and its development of the database coexist alongside the established narrative to which we’ve grown so accustomed in traditional schooling. Despite their being “enemies”, according to The Language of New Media, isn’t it possible for one to inspire the other, or are they truly as separate from one another as oil and water? Additionally, what are the various fields that alot merit to each of the two? Meaning, is one preferred in an academic setting? A professional one? And what about recreational activities as well as innovative ones?