Category: Reflective Post

One thing I noticed right off the bat in terms of my posts were my titles. I often chose to pick a creative title that related to the works we were dealing with.  After looking at my posts in more detail over the course of the semester I noticed I did not do well with games that involved thinking.  And yes, that does sound rather pathetic, but what I really mean by that is the games that required a lot of clicking and figuring out also came with a lot of frustration- and it was through that frustration did I not enjoy playing.

Cactus Blue Hotel was probably one of the most frustrating games we played in my opinion.  I talked about this game in my second blog post in saying, ” I found that I was clicking on certain words to move forward, when I was actually moving backwards.  I began to feel like I was clicking in circles.  I then started to click more so to end the loop rather than to understand the context of the storyline and find the actual end of the game.  I really did not even make it to the end of the game.  I ended up quitting when I became too frustrated with my clicks putting me in a viscous cycle.”  It is clear from this post I need to work on my patience!  I also referenced “Shade” in which I felt like I was clicking in circles.

One thing that changed over the course of my posts were the way I would relate the games to overarching ideas we talked about in class.  At first, I would just walk about I how felt about the works and what I thought as I played the games, but as we learned more I began to relate the works to broader themes.

Works Cited:

Andrew Plotkin, “Shade” (2000)

Astrid Dalmady, Cactus Blue Hotel (2016)

After reading over the five blog posts I made throughout the semester, I noticed that I made similar analyses and comments for each post. Even while writing the posts, I realized that I took a personal approach and often wrote about digital literature in relation to my life experiences. This ranged from courses I’ve taking at Davidson to the hobbies I have. I also often talked about my perspective as a computer science major with interests in data science. Digital literature has strong ties to these fields, which explains one reason why I wanted to take the class in the first place. Topics like ELIZA, interactive fiction games like The Aisle, and databases thus piqued my interest as it correlated directly to my personal intellectual pursuits.

One change I noticed from the beginning of the semester to now was what I considered “electronic literature.” In both my posts and my mindset, I grew an open mind about what electronic literature could be from the varying examples and genres of electronic literature we discussed in class. As the semester progressed, I could reference other forms of electronic literature and discuss works more correctly and eloquently. Overall, I saw a huge improvement in my posts as they progressed, and my appreciation for this field definitely grew.

The first thing I noticed while going through all my blog posts, is that there is a similar style in the way I titled them. All of my titles were direct and concise so you know exactly what the blog post would be discussing. I think I could’ve been more creative with my titles, but I decided to keep them straight forward. This can also be seen as a reflection of my personality. Usually, I don’t like to beat around the bush. I am a very blunt, direct person, so it makes sense that my writing reflects that.

Additionally, I noticed that most of my posts included me comparing the current topic to past topics or works. I use this technique because I like to make patterns and connection, to better understand information. In The Affordances of Perspective on Players Interaction, Understanding Combinatory Poems & Their Unique Form, and Exploring the Dysfunctional Through Games I compared the structure, elements, and techniques of different games to show their relation to the concept of the week. It actually surprised me that I used this technique in most of my posts. It allowed me to realize that no matter how different the two works may be they were still able to portray the same theme. I also focused on how these relationships would affect the player/reader of these games/works.

As time progressed, I noticed my blogs became more detailed and were longer. I wasn’t just making general connections, but I allowed myself to become engulfed within the topic. I looked for deeper connections and points instead of surface-level discussions. I also questioned the reader more, to force them to also think deeper. I also feel as if this created somewhat of a conversation between the reader and the author. In summary, the goal of my blog posts was to cause the readers to look for hidden messages within works, different perspectives, while also gaining an understanding without actually playing the games or reading the literature.

When I looked back at my previous blog posts, I found it important to focus on how the game affected the user. While the message from the author is important, and I did put emphasis on it, what is more important is how it comes across to the user. A message that cannot resonate or deliver itself to the audience properly is a failed message. For example, in my body – A Wunderkammer, a story is told through a mix of text and strong evocative images which I made explicit references to in my blog post. The message is able to present itself through these images and descriptive text. However, in Dakota, I observed that while specific messages are delivered based on format, further messages are lost through the absurd speed it’s presented at. Therefore, a lot of what I focused on was how the audience was impacted through interacting with these pieces.

Another interesting aspect with my writing was that as time went on, I focused more on the game itself and the story it told, rather than specific messages or styles. In the first three blog posts, I made a point of prioritizing the structure and messages of the story rather than the story itself. However, the later pieces made me more focused on the story itself due to the format it was in. The last two pieces had the uniqueness that one felt like a movie (How to Rob a Bank), and the other was a broken apart movie (Her Story). This meant that rather than focusing on the structure, I became more involved with the story which showed in my blogs.

It is clear that my attention shifted throughout the process of writing these blogs. At first, the story was very superficial to me and I was more focused on the author’s messages and their way of presenting them. As time went on I became more invested in the stories that were being told because the last two pieces had a compelling story that did not feel overwhelmed or overshadowed by the format they took place in.

After reading and reflecting over the blog posts I had made over the semester, I felt that I focused on a few main themes. One of the first themes that I talked about was player choice and how it impacted the game for me as a user. The games that especially captivated me were the The Flat and Her Story. I think my background as a CS major influenced me in the way I looked at all of these games. I think coming from this background gave me a perspective into how the games may be made. Knowing this made me think of how many users may interact with the game and where some parts of the game may be confusing to someone. I think that this was a main focus for me since a lot of software will eventually be interacted with the public and I have had to think about how/where people may get confused. In a game the way the author creates the game and allows a user to interact is even more important.

Another big theme I talked about were the cultural connections to the games that I found. I think that every blog post that I wrote included some cultural connection, whether it be another game or a movie or something else. I think that a lot of these games build off of the familiarity of the cultural connections, whether they are coincidental or on purpose.

Over the course of the semester I felt that I was able to articulate my thoughts a lot more coherently and how they connected to what we were talking about in class. I felt my blog posts especially improved from the first blog post and on.

Throughout this semester I have written five blog post and  there were some  recurring themes and topics in my writing. Firstly, I  wrote about limitation of choice and the consequences of it for two out of the five blog posts .In my second blog post, I wrote about the limitation of choice in “Cactus Blue Motel” and “Will Not let me go”. Both of these twine games represented how limitation of choice can be used as a technique to “increase empathy and create emotional connections.” In my third blog post about the video-animation Dakota, I also talked about limitation of choice. In this post, I talked about how limitation of choice was a technique used to force the reader to really pay attention to the text itself.  As a result, I believe that limitation of choice was a recurring theme in my post. Secondly, I realized that in several of my blog post I compared these games to more “stereotypical” videogames. For example, I compared  “Her Story” and the “Cactus Blue motel” to “stereotypical” video games and commented why they are different those videogames. Lastly, another recurring element of my blog post was that I tried to decipher the evocative meaning in some of the games that we played for class . In my post about “Cactus Blue Hotel”, I stated that on an evocative level the “hotel represented a dangerous mindset that people may have, if they want to escape the realities of life”. I also thought that  “How to rob a bank” was “a social commentary on much personal information exist on our phones in this modern era”.

In the past 15 weeks, I believe that the nature of my blog post has changed. My first blog post was basically a summary of chapter 3 from Electronic Literature. I did not really write about what I thought about the chapter; I just basically wrote a summary on it. In my later blog posts, I analyzed the games assigned that day and wrote more about what I thought of the game instead of just writing a summary. I realized that Dr. Sample wanted  more than just a summary post, but wanted to know what we thought of the game and the connections between the concept we discussed in class or the reading. I was surprised about how much I wrote about limitation of choice and the “Cactus Blue Hotel”. I really enjoyed playing the “Cactus Blue Hotel” and it is probably the reason why I refer to it so many times in my blog post.

I would like to revisit my idea about how “as technology developed, so did the possibilities for hypertext fiction” in my first blog post of the semester. I feel this the statement that I presented in the first blog post was true but I feel like the idea about making my blog post centered around that idea was pretty boring. Instead, I would analyze  the two games assigned to us that day “My boyfriend came back from war” and “ My body-AWunderkammer” and then maybe relate it back to how these games would not be possible without technological advancement.

To conclude, I believe that I wrote about some interesting themes and topics throughout the duration of the course, and that the nature of my blog post improved especially between my first blog post and the second one.

When I look back at my blog posts from the semester, I notice that I always talk about how everything confused me at first. Whether it be the reading for that day or game, I always seemed to have gotten confused by them. To help ME understand the material better, I wrote a paragraph that analyzed the game or reading. This has been the way I wrote all of my blog posts for the entirety of the semester. Along with an analysis of the material, I always put in my reaction for each blog post. For example, in my last blog post about Pry, I talked about how fascinating it was to see a story be told using modern means, but I also talked about how the different aspects confused me for a period of time.

I also noticed that once I got to a certain point in my blog posts, it started to come off as me just getting every thought I had into the blog post. After a paragraph and a half of writing, it felt like I was having a conversation (You know, the type of conversation ever person has with the FBI agent living in your laptop). I also tried to put some of my witty Texan charms in each of my blog posts, most likely to give the reader a bit of a distraction from the long post or to get me back on track. Throughout the course of the semester I never really changed in my writing styles, and the fact that there is little change in my blog posts interests me.

Looking back at my blog posts this year, I noticed how a change in how I approached them and how I wrote them as the year progressed. At the beginning of the year, in my posts I would just analyze the games or readings and then find pieces of that game or reading that stood out to me in a good or bad way. I would also sometimes try to connect them to other themes that I had learned about in class and find a way to relate them to subjects from earlier in the year. However, I noticed that as the year went on I started to approach the blog posts more casually and write about my immediate reactions to the subject and what thoughts I had during or after interacting with it. I remember when I was writing the blog posts for the last couple I would start rambling on in my head about connections I had to the subject and instead of just ignoring my thoughts, I would just try and write them down. I tried to start being a little less formal in my posts and write them like I was discussing the subject in class.

For example, I remember when I was writing the post about the sublime, I immediately made connections to weird feelings I had in the past with the sublime and I made some connection to the idea of time and even though it somewhat didn’t seem relevant, it made sense to me. It was easier for me to write about the sublime because I was able to make connections to my own experiences with the sublime. Whereas with my first two blog posts, which were about an introduction reading and Shade, I didn’t have any connections to them and it was difficult to write a post about them. So I guess another thing I noticed with my posts is that I found the posts easier to write when I enjoyed the reading or game because I was genuinely interested in them. That’s another reason why I felt like my posts were easier to write as the year progressed because some of my favorite subjects came later in the year, like dysfunctionality. Overall, the biggest change I really saw in my posts throughout the year was just how I approached and how I wrote them.