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.

 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.

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.

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.

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Des, Deborah, Christine, and Sydney

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