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I have had the pleasure of viewing this work last semester in another class and I think it is absolutely brilliant. This work is about a guy named James, a former soldier of the Gulf War, who works as a demolition consultant. James is going blind and also likely suffers from PTSD. Understanding these key details about James affects how the story is told and understood. The author’s use of all the different multimedia elements are what I think make this work so intriguing. The way that text montage segments were used to illustrate his subconscious are a perfect way to describe how erratic memories can be triggered. The use of video gives the user a first-hand look of what James sees in both present time as well as events that are parts of his memory or subconscious. There is also a lot of kinetic interaction used in Pry. This helps to tap into the user’s sensory modalities, which helps tell the story and influence the way that the user experiences the work. These kinetic interactions also give the user the feeling of a first-person point of view. The use of sound in Pry helps the story to unfold as well. It aides the user’s feelings of being immersed in the story. Spread and hold, pinch and hold, touch and drag are some of the actions that are required by the user in order to experience this work. The spread and hold action simulates the opening of the eyes. It is almost as if you, the user,  are “prying” the eyes open. The pinch and hold actions initiate memories or flashbacks. I would compare this action similar to when people squint or squeeze their eyes closed when they are trying to remember something or trying to not see something.

One of my favorite parts of chapter two was when the building was being demolished. This moment connects James’ present vision, current thoughts, and memories of his subconscious. It was at this moment for some reason that it really clicked with me how I am meant to understand each of the three spaces (eyes open, closed, and pinched to reveal his subconscious).

At one particular moment, what is seen when his eyes are opened, when they are closed, and when we are peeking into his subconscious all display same type of event, but in different settings.

This is from the scene when his eyes are open and he is viewing the building is being demolished and an explosion occurs.

This is from the scene when his eyes are closed and he is having flashbacks of his time playing video games during his down time while he served in the war. Explosions are occurring in the game.

This is from the scene from his subconscious. Video montage of explosions are occurring in this scene.

Pry is unlike any work I’ve ever seen. It utilizes the affordances of a touchscreen device to tell a story through tearing, pulling, pinching, and spreading out. It also reflects the nonlinearity of digital information (as many of the works we’ve previously examined have) by telling the story in seemingly random fragments. By combining video and text, Pry reflects the differences between memory, imagination, and present reality, which are the three things that James is trying to come to terms with. 

One of the moments that intrigued me was the moment that James falls off of the bridge and into the water below. For a moment, I had tricked myself into thinking that I was actually falling off the bridge. I think that after playing the story for a long period of time, I began to feel like I was the main character. I could relate to the protagonist’s struggle by having to trudge through the work: to progress the story, I had to physically pull text apart, fight to keep the character’s eyes open, and try to mentally piece the story together. These three factors created this sense of immersion that I have yet to experience in games that aren’t VR, and I found it rather enjoyable to play.

I found the text to be just as intriguing as the video montage. I usually find books to be immersive because it engages with the imagination, but having to physically manipulate the text took it to a whole other level. It added another layer of conversation about the narrative itself by reinforcing my understandings of the text. It also helped maintain my interest because I could choose which topics to more deeply explore (one of my personal favorite ways of doing this was by tearing open the text). 

Overall, I found Pry to be an incredibly immersive work and intriguing to explore. I look forward to seeing the direction we’ll take literature from this point. 

The first half of Pry was really enjoyable, and I’m really excited to go through the second half now. In the prologue, I didn’t really understand what was going on and even after going through the first four chapters, I’m still not sure I understand it. However, Pry was so immersive for me I found myself sucked into the story and it really feels like you’re actually there. The way you “open” the characters eyes to see the world around him and “pinch” the screen to go further back into his mind is such a unique way if viewing the story that adds so much to the storytelling. There were also multiple points that just had me mesmerized staring at the screen. I dont remember exactly when it was, but at one point there was just a load of words flashing into the screen changing rapidly. I caught myself just staring at it completely entranced by this and it was insane. I think I can honestly say I’ve never been as invested in a digital story before.

One of the coolest parts, which I’ve already seen a couple people comment on as well was the Braille chapter. The idea that as you scroll your finger across the Braille on the screen it actually reads it to you was absolutely genius. I love the effect that has, not only does it contribute to the story and the characters vision loss, but it helps you relate and further pulls you into the story making you feel like you are the character in the story.

I’m still not completely sure of the whole story, from what I can tell it’s about someone who used to serve and he’s dealing with life after. Some of the things he’s struggling from are his PTSD, and like mentioned before, vision loss. Overall, I think this app does everything right. It’s really just an amazing work of art and I can tell the people who made this put a lot of work and thought into it. I also really want to know who the girl in the beginning was that (I think?) killed him.

Pry is a story about a war veteran struggling with PTSD, on the iOS App store that rethinks the way an eBook is created. The story was created mainly for use on a tablet but also works on the iPhone.  Pry is fantastic as it uses haptics, expanded cinema, and interaction design from which methods and functions are intensely intertwined. Pry gives us a relationship of touchscreen clickables and text that uncovers reading as a unity of haptic and thinking processes. Pry provides the reader with the feelings of the main character’s thoughts through literally pinching the screen as if you are opening your eyes from a dream and haptics that give you a sense of being in the story.

The goal of the piece I think is to give the reader through, and touchscreen gestures a new way to feel the story’s content instead of just reading and imagining. Touching and tilting the screen gives us the feeling that we are the main character. Readers can decide how long to focus on the character’s thoughts. The period of focus changes the parameters of the next available scenes. The thing that makes this story great is that we get to feel the inner world of the main character through floating text, animations, and video flashbacks as well as experiencing the and the outer world of video that details the main character’s day-to-day experiences. This story is incredible for all readers young and old that would like a new way of immersion in storytelling.

I think of all of the divergent streams that Rettberg discussed in this chapter, the one that interests me the most are interactive installations. I think what interests me most about them is that the narrative unfolds in an interactive physical space. As the viewer, you are able to physically experience the story in a very real and tangible way.

I recently went on vacation to Las Vegas and decided to visit the Real Bodies Exhibit at Bally’s. If you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend it.  Some may not really consider this an interactive narrative installation, but I would kindly disagree. Each “room” or area of the exhibit sets a scene that tells parts of the multi-level story about the human body. As you travel through the exhibit, you are able to explore various objects, specimens, and art pieces that coincide with narrative text written on the walls. As interesting and cool as it was to see all the various organ and body specimens, I think that the writing was my favorite part. It was very poetic and beautifully written. I think I ended up taking more photos of the written text than I did the actual specimens. Below is one of the photos I took of some text. I realize that the text is difficult to read from the image, so I included the text in the image caption. 

As far as literary possibilities in the virtual and augmented worlds, I think there is a lot of potential. Along with new VR/AR literary works, I think that a lot of pre-existing works could also be recreated in the virtual space. In fact, the work that I wrote about for my ELD entry, Queerskins, which is an online multimedia novel, has a version that was created as an interactive installation that included a virtual reality experience. Viewers were able to interact with real life objects in real life spaces as they were described in the novel. I think that the interactive installations give the viewer a truly immersive and interactive experience. Click here to read more about these installations.

I am going to be putting together a Twine project based around the storytelling one of my favorite video games, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. The game has become known for being a massive facelift of the Zelda series and revolutionizing the open world genre. It gives the player complete freedom to travel its world and discover things in any order. Because of this, cutscenes that tell of the game’s story also must be discovered during your own exploration if you want to see all of them. In fact, many of them don’t have to be found to finish the game. There are instances where a character that progresses the story will say something different to you depending on what else you have done and who you have met. Much of it is about revealing story rather than creating it. It is possible to walk straight to final boss and finish the game under an hour if you are that good. Because of how scattered the story is the player may decide to put it all together and interpret it as they want. Because the game and its story are so open every player has a different experience and many have shared them online or with friends. Breath of the Wild also tells its story passively through its setting as the player travels a world filled with ruins. The Twine will be organized in a way that that resembles the world map. It will feature important landmarks, spots that show how parts of the story are structured.

Final Project Description – Jake Martin

For this class’ final project, I will be doing a team project with Elaina. We’ve decided we wanted to further research hypertext fiction and collaborative Electronic Literature by creating a work of hypertext fiction within Twine. The style of the game is going to take inspiration from past interactive games such as Colossal Cave Adventure, and ZORK. Like these games, our version of the game is also planned to have an inventory system. We’re not sure yet how or if we can incorporate a scoring system into this in Twine. We also plan to include some sort of tribute or easter egg in our version of this game to the originals. However, since we are using twine we will not be using the text parser aspect of these other games, instead it will be a piece of hypertext fiction, where the player clicks through the stories by making certain choices that will be laid out for them. This piece of work is going to be based off of Little Red Riding Hood, and will contain many aspects of that story. The story will start out with the player (Little Red) being tasked with delivering a basket of goodies to her grandma. Before leaving the house, the player will be given the option to explore inside and outside the house to collect key items before leaving. After leaving the house, the player will tumble into a cave, where they must work their way through the puzzles to reach grandma’s house. Once you reach grandma’s, she asks you to venture back into the cave to collect her lost treasures. Reaching grandma safely will all the tasked treasures results in winning the game, with various different ending based on what items you took from the house in the beginning of the story. We do also plan to incorporate the wolf into the story as some kind of antagonist, possibly finding him down in the cave will cause him to attack you. For this project we’d like to explore the idea of passing back and forth the twine project and each of us adding our own ideas into it, so while we have a storyline and gameplay laid out, the journey to get there will end up being a surprise to both of us. We also like the idea of using Twine because the unique way the player can go into the actual Twine project, and look at the multiple paths lain out like a map.

This chapter of Rettburg is especially unique in the sense that he discusses some of the more modern and advanced methods and technologies used to create and enhance electronic literature. The section of the chapter that interests me the most pertains to locative narratives and how the incorporation of data regarding our locations assists in the creation of narratives.

As stated by Rettburg:

“The majority of locative narrative projects share a common interest in the relationship of physical space and geographic location to the narrative and poetic dimensions of literature” (185).

The addition of the element of location can enhance the narrative of a work by giving the reader a sense of visualization to base their understanding of the work on. For instance, if a given work of electronic literature takes place throughout Portland, Oregon, the addition of a visual representation of where the story takes place on Google Maps adds to the overall narrative of the work. The incorporation of something such as Google Street View would also add a visual element to a work and would thus add another narrative layer to the work.

The fact that Google Maps is an open API that anyone has access to and may use for their project grants authors of electronic literature the ability to incorporate elements of location into their work. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood for instance is a set of stories that are tagged with a location on Google Maps, and each story is located on different points on a Google Maps view of New York City. Being able to see on a map where each story happens to be pinned adds to the narrative and gives the reader an idea as to why each particular story is written as it is.

Virtual Reality has recently risen in popularity in recent years. A type of technology that in theory “transports” you into the world of whatever game you’re playing, movie you’re watching, or story you’re reading is a very interesting concept that has been around for many years. We’ve only recently started to get the technology to actually be able to create this in a way that is effective and works how it should. Virtual Reality was also the basis of the movie “Ready Player One”, which is set in a future world where basically everyone lives in a VR world, because the real world is corrupt and slowly deteriorating. The idea of being able to actually enter and interact with your favorite worlds is a fantasy that most of us have wanted since we were little kids. Didn’t you ever want to be in the world of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Percy Jackson, Eragon, etc? With VR this will eventually be possible. Video game companies are already capitalizing on the world of VR. Such as the PlayStation VR with motion controllers and a headset that will transport you into the world of a video game. This isn’t the first time a VR set was created by a company. The first time I actually learned about VR was when I was doing a timeline of the history of Nintendo consoles for a school project. One of the ones I found was called the Nintendo Virtual Boy, which was a system that had the idea of using VR to play games. However, the console was a massive flop mainly because of the technical limitations there were at the time. Mostly the fact that the only colors you were able to see were red and black.
The idea of VR is so cool and has been around for quite a while, so it’s going to be awesome to see what we can do as technology only progresses. Augmented Reality however, is far more common. While Virtual Reality transports us to other worlds, Augmented Reality effectively puts other things into our world with the use of camera or other device. AR was really big on Nintendo’s DS Systems, most notably I believe the DSi was the first to start using AR through the use of its camera. The 3DS expanded on this by giving us 3 dimensional augmented reality. As a kid, this was really cool to play with and something I used all the time. Of course, the limitations were still there so most of the games were just little minigames and weren’t too amazing, but it was still something very new and fun to explore. The use of AR was then made extremely popular through the use of the app Pokemon Go, which came out in 2016. The use of AR in the app is optional, but many fans of the game were loving the idea of seeing Pokemon in their every day life. There were so many posts on social media of funny places people had found Pokemon and everyone was having a ton of fun with the idea.

Reality is what we agree on. My shirt is blue because light waves bounces off of it at around 650 THz, and we agree that that color is blue. My perception of this color may not be the same as your perception of the color, because we have no way of knowing if our brains color code these light ranges differently, and anything I point to that’s approximately the same frequency will look like the same color to you. With that considered, if we can’t even be sure about colors, what can we be sure of? Well, while we may have our minor differences in how we perceive our individual subjective realities, we put anyone who deviates too far from the norm in a nice safe space where they can’t disagree with us anymore. Until now, I suppose.

Virtual Reality, GPS, portable computers (or phones as you may call them), and Augmented Reality together have the ability to change our perceived realities. The notion of Virtual Reality and being able to roam in “cyber space” like some separate world is no stranger to popular fiction, and arguably isn’t far off from modern tech. What with products like Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, developers are already playing with creating entirely new virtual 3-dimensional spaces to explore and interact with.

Games like Pokemon Go however overlap these virtual spaces with real ones. With the use of a camera, you can even see the cute little guys appear in your living room. For now, these digital sprites float around unanchored to the backdrop of reality, but don’t expect that to be the case for ever, and while Google Glasses were a flop, smart watches have shown that wearable smart tech isn’t going anywhere. These days, everyone carries a personal computer in their pocket, linked up to a global network, and it seems like you can’t get away from digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. The “digital world” isn’t something that’s separate from the “real world,” they’re overlapping and beginning to bleed together, so who knows what could possibly come about in the future as these and other technologies continue to evolve?

Also I lied, my shirt is gray. Blue just sounded like a better example color.