Category: Group E

Unfortunately I was unable to play Pry, as I don’t have an iOS device. While watching Samantha Gordon’s video, though, I was struck by how the creators of the game(?) tried to simulate the main character’s mental state as closely as humanly and technologically possible. They weren’t as interested in portraying a certain interesting series of events as most stories are, though they did privilege certain events over others. Rather, they wanted to capture the full range of James’s thoughts, emotions, memories, and experiences, or at least those that relate to his trauma. (Then again, doesn’t trauma make everything relative to itself?)

Did they succeed? In my opinion, I think it was impossible for them to. Humans are infinitely complex and we are unable share the reality of anyone other than ourselves due to us not being a hive mind. I also think the goal of fiction is not to achieve absolute realism but rather to push the limits of our imagination. Any character is ultimately a vehicle for that purpose and thus an archetype, an intensification of a select few traits tied to a select narrative. That isn’t realistic, and that’s okay. Fiction isn’t meant to substitute for genuine human experiences and connections.

That being said, I don’t think Pry was pointless in the least. It is in fact extremely successful in pushing the limits of not only our imagination but also the very medium it was delivered on. That is the most, however, that it and other works like it should hope to achieve.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.