In the mobile game Blackbar, the meaning of its story and the gameplay are very closely tied together. It is full of censorship and it is up to the player to figure out what is being covered by the black bars. My first reaction to it was that it felt kind of like Mad Libs. The difference is that there are specific correct answers. The key to figuring out what the censored words are is by using the context of the sentences they are placed in and how long the black bar is. This sort of progression system is the only thing that keeps this format from being just like the more traditional format of text. That is why it is so engaging. Device 6 is a more complicated interactive story. Rather than being presented with traditional paragraphs, the user must slide the text and other content all around and solve puzzles. The solutions to these puzzles are found within the content itself. They require thinking, but not as much guessing. For both of these games, the extra time I spend thinking about the solutions of the puzzles oftentimes passively make me consider the overall themes of the works.
“Electronic literature can be thought of as situated somewhere between a number of related practices and cultures, including print literary culture, arts practice, computer science, and performance.”-Rettberg pg. 88
When I was reading “Galatea”, or rather talking to Galatea, my experience quickly became one of exploration of a very small portion of the story. I seemed to kind of go in circles while I was looking for ways to continue to conduct the interview with Galatea. I ended up starting over the story several times, starting from where I had left off the previous time, in order to try and get further to within the story. To me this seemed like a definite part of the way the narrative is meant to be experienced. The story dealt with someone interviewing an inhuman intelligence and the difficulty of engaging in conversation within the story program could be representative of understanding a highly intelligent computer program and the challenges of accepting it as human or not. Overall the interactive element worked very well in this story because it was so open ended much like a conversation in real life would be.
“Howling Dogs” and “Those We Left Alive” were very good at establishing habits for the reader to participate in in order to progress the story. In ” Howling Dogs” particularly, the reader had to do five distinct steps before accessing the activity room. The activity room was were most of the meat of the story was but the steps you had to take to get to the room were what created the atmosphere of the story. The protagonist of the story is concealed to a small area on a long running mission and defining the limited amount of things to do in this space places the reader in the protagonists shoes, which in turns place them deeper into the narratives within the activity room. “Those We Left Alive” was similar in the way that the reader had to sleep in order to progress the story. After a while I found myself just sleeping the days away in order to get to the next part of the narrative. This actually added to the dark and depressing atmosphere of the story in my mind because the world described within the story isn’t one one I would be particularly fond of living in. I think the interactive elements in these stories functioned very similarly to the way VR functions. When wearing a Virtual Reality headset people are more willing to do things that they would otherwise find routine and boring just because they are experiencing the headset. A second reasoning for this is that I believe that people just like to complete tasks. By giving the reader a set of tasks that the protagonist must complete, Porpentine effectively gives a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of their characters to the reader.
When looking at both “Galatea” is the level of choice the user has in deciding what to talk about. To me it comes across as a perfect example of multi-linearity. If you want the story to have some semblance of linearity, there are defined paths that a user can take.
What path the user chooses is ultimately up to them. What I noticed quickly as Rettberg did is that the artwork is not necessarily a puzzle intensive experience, it isn’t an incredibly challenging piece. What Emily Short does that I love is really focus in on the writing of the story. Quality of writing is an incredibly important element and Emily Short really does a fantastic job on this front. Galatea has wit and a unique character as she is carved from stone. There is clear inspiration and reference to Greek mythology which I must confess, makes me like the work even more. Who the sculptor was and why he hated everyone, the idea of love, etc. all create a beautiful tapestry. With all of that said though there were some problems. One in particular was the text options. At times I would feel limited in my options despite it being a relatively open experience. However it wasn’t a big enough problem that it brought the entire experience down with it. Rettberg discusses how Short doesn’t create games to be won or lost, but rather stories designed to create an experience. In this way Short differentiated herself from the rest of the crowd during the time, using the framework of interactive fiction to explore different narrative paths. (Rettberg 100)
A less enjoyable story that I explored was Jason Nelson’s “Game Game Game and Game Again.” It wasn’t necessarily a bad IF, there was a clear point and statement. For example, while there is an “objective” which is the door, you don’t really feel like you win much of anything. Nelson is exploring as he described it, “artists changing worldview lens.” In this way it, like Short’s Galatea, utilizes the IF framework as a method to explore different ideas and forms. The problem derives primarily from the visuals. As a person who is obsessed with visuals, the design of this piece is just ugly. Now its pretty obvious that this was intentional on Jason’s part, as he explained that it was an anti-design statement; but it doesn’t make it any less easy to engage with.
It didn’t help that the writing was not the best, and often times I was left more confused than satisfied. Perhaps I ought to take a few more looks at the work to see if I can decipher any more meaning out of the piece.
I will say though his line, “Come on and meet your maker,” is now stuck in my head.
As technology progresses, the toolbox of content creators gains ever more tools. As we saw in Grammatron, Hypertext fiction could be integrated with multimedia, sound and video, to enhance and create unique experiences. Distancing itself from the roots of Hypertext fiction, video games as a form of interactive e-literature can offer yet more tools to be utilized; through the mechanics of the game and the way the game interfaces with the interactor, the game experience add another layer of nuance.
In Game, Game, Game and Again Game, the interactor engages would could be considered, at least in a mechanical aspect, a typical platforming game such as the classic Mario Bros. games. However, while the interactor is probably used to the shiny graphics of professional games, they instead find themselves confronted with intentionally raw and handmade graphics. The interactor moves through levels, named after different world views such as “capitalism” or “fundamentalism,” gathering objects and navigating to the door at the end of the level. Whenever an object is collected, a piece of text or an image appears on the growingly cluttered and chaotic screen.
A screenshot from Game, Game. Game and Again Game, showing the many media objects that can be discovered in a typical level.
Rather than clicking on links to progress the text as one did in Hypertext, it is instead by navigating the game environment that the experience is pushed forward. Once all objects in a level are collected, an icon appears that allows the interactor to start a video while the finish the level. Sometimes, arrows appear as one interacts with the game, guiding them towards the end of the level. The levels themselves probably won’t be a challenge for anyone who’s played other games in the fashion, and any difficulties arise more frustration in the interactor than feelings of genuine challenge. Between the old home videos, showing sincere moments of humanity, and the snarky cries of “Come on and meet your maker!” at the sometimes frequent incidences of player death, and the scattered bits of text and level titles that hint a larger philosophical design, the interactor is merely left to wonder, what is the point of the experience? Is it a metaphor for life, the struggle for meaning, to understand truth? Is it a game? An interactive art piece? Is there a difference? At the end, when answers would normally be given in a game, the interactor is left with a bizarre, rambling video that begins “In the beginning, there were five potatoes…” but no answers are found.
To contrast, Howling Dogs is a Twine experience that borrows heavily from Hypertext and Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. The game paints a bleak story of a person living a tedious life, surviving on the bare minimum and spending all their time in digital simulations. Dark, atmospheric, poetic, the interactor has a chance to explore a logical space, unlike the abstract thought-space of Game… and of which Grammatron wove in and out. The narrative branches and allows the interactor to experience a story, character, and places rather than concepts, but the experience is almost entirely done through text, fading in and out on the screen as the player clicks through.
A screenshot from Howling Dogs that shows the choices available to the interactor as the explore the virtual space of the story.
The focus on the words ensures that the interactor doesn’t loose valuable information in the chaotic mash of multimedia, putting complete emphasis on the prose of the creator.
In the end, we have two very different examples of e-literature. Game… explores a synthesis of ideas and mediums to find what emerges in interactive gameplay. Howling Dog tightens its usage of media down to text and links to focus the interactor’s experience on the presentation of a cohesive story. Both are examples of different tools content creators can use.
I chose to play Howling Dogs, and Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw; both of these kept me engaged by allowing me to click on objects or text. I kept clicking to try to find out what was going to happen next. The experience was like playing a video game and trying to get the high score. I must admit, I quit Howling Dogs, because I could not understand the point of the game. The goals of the game were not clear. While playing Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, I clicked until I could not click anymore. I assume I completed the game.
Howling Dogs, is a different animal altogether (pun intended). The game was engaging at the start. As I advance into the game, I felt like I was descending into madness; and then I clicked on the text “food and drink dispenser” to advance into the room with the ceiling fan if I am remembering correctly. This event leads into pulse which changed color every time I ended back at this point in the game. I quit after ending back at the point of the game after 10 times. I did visualize being in what I assume to be an insane person’s head, while playing Howling Dogs. The player character appeared to travel to alternate timelines (or imagine they did). I did enjoy having to visualize characters and setting while playing this game. This experience was like reading a novel. I just wish I new what the game was about.
A big fan of the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ text-based game format, I was very excited for this week’s assignment. The games I chose to explore were Galatea, and Ad Verbum. While Galatea drew my attention more, Ad Verbum made me nostalgic for the ‘Escape Room’ games I used to play.
Ad Verbum gave me more of an ‘open-world’ sense than Galatea did, seeing as Galatea is set in one room only. I did not explore ALL of Ad Verbum; I got up to the fourth floor and mostly stuck to the first and second floors to see what I could find. I kind of put me off that there were some rooms that, if I could not find a way out (I never did), I was sent back to the foyer to start over.
As I mentioned, Galatea definitely had more of my interest, primarily because the point was to interact with another character. My first and second play-throughs were quite short before I realized that I should not ‘walk away’ as it ends the game. The first time around, the conversation was light and informational. But as I kept on playing, the course of the game grew darker and darker; her artist committed suicide, she has a sense of dependency on him, so what is the point of her existence?
Ad Verbum gave me a goal once I tried the front door (which was the first thing I did) and realized that I had to find a way to complete the game in order to escape. Galatea, I was not so sure about, apart from just getting as much information as I could. It absolutely challenged my imagination, as my own writing is more character-driven than by setting. I would definitely go back to this game.
For this post, I will be analyzing Howling Dogs by Porpentine and Galatea by Emily Short. Porpentine’s work imposes ideas of struggle and hopelessness by using darker tones. Through artful writing, Porpentine engages the imagination by painting gloomy pictures with words. Though she experiments with a range of themes by including multiple narratives within the story, they all imply a darker message. The work is also engaging because she utilizes various techniques that help move the narrative along, which Rhettberg states can be represented
“through shifts of narrative voice and point of view… pacing… use of grammar, and its patters of association.” (Rhettberg, 56)
In addition, Howling Dogs portrays struggle and hopelessness by presenting repetitive actions and responses to the user. Despite the player’s attempts to improve the quality of their character’s deteriorating life, the drudgery of the same daily routine eventually takes its toll on the users, who lose hope of finding any meaning within the story besides the themes I listed. A third technique Porpentine uses is offering limited options when it comes to navigation. Users can only click on the hyperlinks shown on screen, limiting their ability to explore the world freely. By utilizing repetitiveness, a dark tone, and limited freedom for exploration, Porpentine imposes ideas of struggle and hopelessness upon the user.
However, Emily Short utilizes interactivity and exploration to portray hopeful ideas. Because Galatea is an interactive fiction, players can enter their own commands, involving them more deeply with the story’s possible meanings. In addition, Galatea’s personality and reason for existence are not initially specified, offering the player power over determining these factors through the dialog choices they make. And when Galatea relates her personal experiences to the reader in fragments, the player is further engaged by trying to put the pieces of the story’s puzzle together in their imagination. By allowing players freedom and providing a complex NPC to interact with, Short portrays the idea that fate is not predetermined, while simultaneously encourages them to seek out conversations and establish new relationships.
One similarity between these works is the lack of a player “goal”. In Howling Dogs, the player merely watches on as things decay around them. And in Galatea, the player simply speaks to Galatea until some conclusion is drawn. The works are mainly focused on using their frameworks to explore literary ideas. Porpentine’s goal was to experiment with presenting multiple narratives to the player that were different yet cohesive to the story. And Short’s goal was to explore the potential of NPC interaction as a deeper, more complex process.
To conclude, both Howling Dogs and Galatea utilize varying levels and modes of interactivity to get their messages across. Despite being so different, I found both works equally intriguing to explore.
Some of these games I felt where really enjoyable in their own way but the two games that really stood out to me would be “Game, Game, Game, and Again Game” and “Howling Dogs”, both giving up deep meaning to each activity we make from within the game though.
Game, Game, Game, and Again Game is this interactive, side scrolling platform game that immerses you into a world of random stuff that happens when you collect items that are wildly spasming out all over the level and when you collect one it gives you, what I think, are riddles as well as little music clips of his life throughout the years.
As you can see. Depending on the items in which you collect can give you more to receive as you progress throughout the game which is what I really like about it is that in order to get more information you would have to progress and work for it.
Howling Dogs, on the other hand is quite a bit different than the other. Howling Dogs is more of a Narrative Game than it is an Interactive Fiction. The game starts you in a room that gives you several room to choose to go in and “explore” and depending on your action will see if you progress further or circle back to the room you start in. I like it because it’s a more settle game than Gamesx4 and instead of your characters actions being tracked it’s YOUR actions. These games try to see what YOU would do in these situations. It was a real daring experience for me.
Sources:
Image capture is “Game, Game, Game, and Again Game”
I chose to look into With Those We Love Alive and Deviant: The Possession of Christain Shaw. The first thing you will notice when playing these games is how they choose to tell their story. Deviant uses graphics an animation, similar to an amateur flash game, to showcase the reader what is going on while music is added to establish an atmosphere. The music changes as you progress throughout the game and things take a turn for the weird. Characters’ mouths move but no sound can be heard, monsters appear and disappear with the flick of your mouse, for something so simple it sure does a good job of being creepy. When I first played this game I was a bit unsure of how to progress but when I played through it the second time I had a better idea of how to progress. Little X’s would take you to the next “scene” but sometimes you just couldn’t help but feel like you missed something important.
The gameplay in Deviant relies entirely upon hovering your mouse and/or clicking on things. Hoovering over flowers makes them wilt and causes berries to become demonic supposedly? According to the text provided at the end of the game Deviant: The Possession of Christain Shaw is based on one of the most well-known cases of ‘demonic possession’ in Scotland’s history that happened in 1696. The game illustrates this by showing the interactor some disturbing events that supposedly happened in 1696. As you go through the story, Christain’s condition gets worse and worse. She has a rash on her stomach, her eyeballs start sinking into the back of her skull, and at one point she pukes up a lump of coal that is extremely hot to the touch. One could argue that the goals in this game are unclear. While you could say the imagery for Christain’s condition is your “health bar” it is rather unclear whether or not you were helping Christain or not. Sure, in the end, she turns out to be fine but according to the event that this is based on
“She, an 11-yr-old child, was able to sustain herself against and repel the devil from her body”
So were we the savior or the demon?
In the IF With Those We Love Alive the narration takes a different approach. Unlike Deviant, this IF depends entirely upon words and your imagination. The music in the background is calming, as if oblivious to the giant bug queen. The goal in this game is to make the giant larvae queen happy by crafting items for her. Progression through this game takes a little while to figure out but it almost plays like a modern game. You can either explore the area or fast forward to the next day by sleeping. Not much of your surroundings changes other than what the queen’s hounds are doing. Other than giving the queen gifts on the occasionssion there isn’t much else to do. The game doesn’t offer the reader any puzzles, they aren’t pressured to do anything until the queen demands it, it’s almost as if the game is lacking in areas. The game loves to pick at your brain. From customizing the queen and her accessories, to the idea of what’s real and what isn’t. Although the game may be lacking in “objectives” the story really pulls the reader in, especially after the queen releases her spores. The little details and the anticipation as the action begins to pick up really grabs the reader’s attention.
Although hypertext fiction brought the avant-garde audience to the computer in the nineties, interactive fiction brought the future gamers looking for story-driven interaction in the seventies. Despite being older, IF has actually managed to stay more relevant than hypertext fiction over the years, likely due to it being easier to approach as the player, or interactor, has more control over the story.
Scott Rettberg describes the term “interactor” in his novel Electronic Literature, which is basically a term for a person playing a piece of IF: “as the interactor moves through these environments, he or she interacts with objects and characters within the space, and those interactions determine how the story will unfold” (Rettberg, 89). Interactive fiction and hypertext fiction hold many similarities, but interaction fiction often has the goal of trying to put the interactor into the story for an immersive experience.
In order to accomplish this, a common stylistic choice of IF is second-person writing. Two examples of this are Emily Short’s “Galatea” and Porpentine’s “With Those We Love Alive”. “Galatea” is based on the Greek mythology story of Pygmalion of Cyprus, who fell in love with an ivory statue he carved, resulting in the goddess Aphrodite bringing the statue to life. In “Galatea”, the interactor talks to an android who knows little about herself and her creator other than that she is not human and, therefore, is treated differently. As the interactor, commands can be made to prompt the character to talk to Galatea, ask questions, look around the environment, and more. What is so fascinating about “Galatea” is that despite having around 70 possible endings, the entire story takes place in one room speaking to one person, Galatea. The amount of different pathways and conversations that the interactor can prompt by trying all sorts of various commands makes Galatea stand out as a prominent and influential piece of IF.
In Porpentine’s “With Those We Love Alive”, the interactor works as an artificer for an alien queen, trying to please her by crafting items for her all while exploring the palace and inserting glyphs into yourself. During my playthrough, I chose to insert the glyphs prompted and build the items requested by the queen, but there is a lot of variance in how the interactor can move the story along and choose to interact with the environment. With the addition of music and a wide range of colors, “With Those We Love Alive” is an immersive and emotional piece of IF.
What these two examples of IF have in common are their focus on story. While many pieces of IF resolve around game mechanics like puzzles, these two pieces set out to make the interactor feel something. Short’s focus on storytelling, narrative, and character arcs draws the interactor into crafting the story that they want to be told, while Porpentine’s bittersweet piece that could be read as commentary on government and more makes the interactor think carefully about every choice in customization and behavior they make.
Both of Porpentine’s Twine narratives engulf the interactor into the work, immersing them in the fiction as their eyes trace the words along each line.
Porpentine’s earlier work, “Howling Dogs,” truly portrays a dark sense both with the language used–the way the first line alone reads the moment the user goes to read the work–and also by the colors on the page, immediately opening to an inverted color scheme as though the thin white letters on the page would be sucked in to the massive darkness surrounding them. Not too far into this work, the interactor is provided with a sort of map or at the very least a text description of the environmental layout.
Upon exploring the various areas, more times than not a dead-end will be reached, providing a sense of stuck-ness or being trapped. Visiting the lavatory then the shower within gave an even stronger sense that reinforced that very feeling of confinement.
The shower is a peaceful time for you, a way of demarcating space within extremely limited space, moisture and temperature standing in for spatiality. This is wet space, warm space, flowing space.
Porpentine is very purposeful about what type of language to use in certain situations. Even so, when it comes to goals or puzzles, the text itself is a giant mystery to be unraveled. The user must explore various areas and put the pieces of information together to simply figure out what is going on and then what they feel they are supposed to do. This is true of both “Howling Dogs” and “With Those We Love Alive,” both of which were created by Porpentine.
The difference between the two however, is how complexly they are laid out, the stories themselves, and that the later created IF (“With Those We Love Alive”) also uses sound and various other color schemes to immerse the interactor and communicate certain, very specific feelings and messages as they explore the work.
They are both a matter of solving the big unanswered question by finding and putting together the puzzle pieces hidden throughout the text. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes you just have to try again. Can’t that very same thing be said about everyday life?
Sources:
Porpentine’s “Howling Dogs”
Porpentine’s “With Those We Love Alive”
Over the years, hypertext has been non stop evolving. With Afternoon, a story being one of the earliest forms of written hypertext, now in the modern day it has evolved into something as simple as someone tweeting a hashtag. This has all happen just within a decade. Before that it was just links on websites such as wikipedia, but know you can find forms of hypertext within video games. One game industry that I absolutely love takes the idea of hypertext into their storytelling creating multiple games with many choices that the player gets to make that will affect how the story will be told. They produced games coming from the universes of The Walking Dead, Minecraft, and Borderlands. However very recently I discovered that their Minecraft game that the produced has been put up on Netflix. This surprised me when I saw this so I of course wanted to try this to see how they brought a branching narrative game and put it on Netflix. Turns out you would click links that would cause what the main character would do or say and I was amazed. I was hoping that this was some sort of test and was wanting more hypertext stories to come onto Netflix. Shortly after Netflix introduced Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch. I interacted with it multiple times getting multiple new stories from this work. This is where I think the future of hypertext literacy will evolve to. It’s so interesting and new I believe that within a decade we will find a lot more work similar to this on a lot more platforms and mediums.
Over the years, hypertext has been non stop evolving. With