Month: February 2019

Blog Post 2

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Image result for the babysitters club books

When I read The Babysitter I felt I followed along the story pretty well. I could tell whose perspective was whose and what was happening in the story despite the random time changes. But then as I got to the end I got completely lost. I read through the ending again and it seemed like there were multiple realities going on all at once, some good and some really terrible. This made me think that if I read this story on twine or some other form of hypertext, it would be a lot easier to follow. The story seemed very cluttered in this regard. There are multiple narrative paths and through hypertext, with just a click of a word or phrase it could take you on a different path.  Though because The Babysitter wasn’t written in hypertext it allowed the story to be mysterious. As I read it I, I would read each new paragraph and try to figure out whose perspective it was whether it was a main character or even something just playing on the TV.

Blog 5 – 2/15/19

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After sifting through these games that I would not consider ever playing if I had not taken this class, I found two that were very well created. I felt all the other games besides Blackbar, and Device 6 was lacking a great structure and were very obnoxious. Device 6 to some may not be a game in the most real sense; it requires a strict amount of attention. A series of short stories combined with interactive riddles.

Device 6 starts with a girl named Anna who seems to have a bit of a problem remembering how or why she is in a castle. Device 6 the game is full of strange devices and cryptic clues. Strange audio sounds and tons of locked doors to open divides this game into six separate chapters. The game has a minimalist art style and fantastic audio. What’s unexpected about this game is it is mostly just text, but the story opens up like a book in that you swipe through words, but the structure is very abnormal. The text shifts to suit the gameplay. For example, the text will stagger like a staircase when you are moving down and will even split, twist and turn.

there are moments you will have to solve interactive devices that are password protected or need a code. There are audio clues throughout the game so you must have audio enabled. This game gives you many different ways to interact through text and audio, but those aren’t just the things that keep the story moving, the text is also the game’s map.

As for the game Blackbar, I found it was a bit slow and somewhat frustrating. If you are able to get something right, you will advance through the story, if you get the answer wrong you sit in limbo until your next guess. It’s a touching and somewhat difficult game about loss and language, and while it doesn’t seem like a game of the normal stature Blackbar gives us a story of communication between two women and parts of their letters have been blacked out by a dictator like system, like censorship. You must fill in the words that have been blacked out. Some of the words are a common sense solving Other parts of the game will have you solve a word puzzle, or put your memory to the test from an earlier conversation. Some puzzles are a bit mysterious, but there’s enough reasoning behind them that, when you FINALLY figure out the HARD ones, you can breathe again. The narrative is what really makes this game. It’s about the importance of language and the price of censorship.

Blog 4 – War

0alloldusersOne Comment

The piece I chose for this blog post was My Boyfriend Came Back From the War. I was intrigued by the simplicity of the first page and the imagery that followed. It appeared to have a happy ending, although there was a section where the soldier may have suspected the woman of cheating with her neighbor, I believe. And she begs him not to kill the neighbor. Throughout, they talk about the idea of a guy being able to change his ways so perhaps the war affected the boyfriend in ways that the woman is concerned about. At the end someone asks the other to marry them but they don’t want to marry right away, how about next month?

I am familiar with the format of graphic novels, Japanese or American, so it was easy for me to pick up on a way of reading the story that made some sense, it just wasn’t clear to me at times, who may have been speaking, when. The girl asks if he likes her new dress, amongst the section where they talk about if he could change as a person. Is there a way someone could love him? I got the sense that perhaps the boyfriend had been deployed for a number of years and hadn’t seen his girlfriend since he left for the war. The dialogue seemed disjointed at times and it gave me the impression of perhaps a strained relationship. The way that I was forced to track what was happening made imagine that perhaps the two in this relationship are unsure of each other, after all this time.

My Boyfriend Came Back From The War

0alloldusersOne Comment

What I really liked about the story “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” is the story. From what I can gather of the story it appears that the story is that the boyfriend comes back from the Gulf War, and him and his girlfriend are sitting next to each other, with their backs turned. Neither are looking at one another which is a powerful image that really sets the tone for what is to come. The use of visuals in general is incredibly important and well done. I like how on the right is the girlfriend and on the left is her boyfriend who returned from deployment. Between them is a frame, which (I may be reading into this) I argue signifies the rift that has been created, as displayed by the fact that there is a picture of a helicopter off in the distance; representing how war has ultimately created a rift between them. Her cheating on him also creates that rift.

One of the things I noticed was that as the dialogue progressed, the frames continually grew smaller and smaller, this was pointed out in Net Art Anthology’s piece about this hypertext story. Like what was discussed above, this fragmentation serves as a way to further represent the breaking down of the relationship between the two of them.

What is nice is that unlike earlier hypertext stories like Victory Garden is that it isn’t huge walls of text. Olia really utilizes the visuals to tell the story, the dialogue is more an addition to it all. Olia could’ve just used visuals alone and I argue that the general story would’ve been just as easy to follow.

The only issue I took was with the ending, because it doesn’t show who is talking I had a hard time figuring out who was talking and who was not.

 

Does Net Art Equal Net Difference From Hypertext?

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Katya FarinskyOne Comment

Farinsky Blog 4: Net Art

Related image
A page from “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” by Olia Lialina

“My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” by Olia Lialina is work classified as net art, but looks incredibly similar to hypertext fiction. To read this work you click on links which subdivide the screen as each story path propagates new text and images. One significant difference seems to be that all the narrative paths seem to stay on screen, and accessible to the reader, unlike most hypertext which rarely gives map, or an overview of where the reader is.

Like hypertext “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” carries many linear narrative paths that exist at the same time. Each segment of the screen represents one path, and divides to show complexity quickly as one box becomes 2, 4, or 8 as represented by the image above. It is overwhelming to track each piece but still intriguing as the narrative plays out in the reader’s imagination and on screen through snippets of dialogue. The pace of this story is quick- often boxes contain less than 15 words so reading and clicking the next link is significantly less spaced than typical hypertext works. It reads like a conversation by mirroring the speed of a in-person dialogue.

Perhaps net art and hypertext are the same thing, but only separated because they did not exist within platforms such as Story Space like many other famous works of hypertext fiction. If what truly separates net art from hypertext is self publishing through java script perhaps a better name should be “independent hypertext” rather than “net art”. Calling this type of work net art leans credibility away from connotations of the word “literature” because they resemble art with literary features just as much as hypertext resemble any traditional example of literature. Self-publication of a book or a website is significantly different than going through a traditional publisher or using a program with prescribed layouts to create stories however it is not necessarily different enough to call the product a separate entity if publication method is the only significant difference as it appears here.

What is Grammatron?

Joel ClappOne Comment

I spent hours last night, lost in the surreal world that is Mark Amerika’s Grammatron. Not knowing how to approach this unique piece, I did the only thing I could think of and dived right in. I looked at the “about” page, clicked begin, then  clicked the first link I was prompted with, marked ‘high bandwidth version,’ because heck, compared to the internet of ’97, I should hope my rig will hold up. A new window pops up, blaring surreal synth music and artificially altered vocals, I’m redirected to a web page with bright, clashing colors, distorted cyber-punk images, and text that appears just a little faster than I can comfortably read them. The assault of strangely retro-future-cyberspeak and neologisms, along with trying to process the unusualy pictures and understand the voice playing in the background, created an uncomfortable disorientation as my brain struggled to keep up with all the information being presented. Then just when I became accustomed to it, it stopped…

The rest of my experience with Grammatron what, in comparison to the previous multi-media onslaught, could be called a more traditional HyperText experience. Text appeared on the page in front of me, only periodically punctuated with images and audio. The blue hyperlinks in the text prompted me to continue the narrative, but as I struggled to understand the meaning of the words in front of me, I found myself clicking links randomly, hoping to progress the story in some way and hopefully find clarity.

The text seemed to circle in on itself, never quite the same, becoming more legible as time went on. Looking back, I’m unsure how much of the actual text changed and how much of it was merely my perception with my growing understanding of the strange world of Grammatron. My previous experiences with kabbalah and cyberpunk tropes helped me little at first as I attempted to reconcile the metaphysical and digital aspects of the story, as well as the overtly sexual aspects of the narrative. But sure enough, it started to make a strange sort of sense.

The next day, I’m looking back and trying to remember my experience going through Grammatron. The details of the narrative still seems largely unclear to me, as well as the finer aspects of the world-building. What I’m left with is more an impression, an impression of being lost in a sensory whirlwind, a struggling for clarity that seemed to mirror the bizarre protagonist.

HyperText fiction has a unique ability to allow us to tap into and interact with the experience of a story. In Grammatron, the viewer is thrown into the stream-of-consciousness of Golam’s inner thoughts. The use of multi-media, both audio and video, are made of excellent use to help reinforce this. Although chaotic, the experience is certainly carefully constructed, and I know I’m hitting just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.