Eventually, I came to a dead end in Photopia after spending about 45 minutes to an hour playing around with it. However, after becoming accustomed to what commands the program could process, it became a relatively easy process overall to navigate through Photopia. I enjoyed the fact that I played a relatively passive role in my outcome—I was more focused on exploring each scenario as much as possible, making the program less plot-based and more interactive in the sense that I had the illusion of choice-making. As the person interacting with the text, I was able to “explore the field of the possible” (211) as Marie-Laure Ryan discusses. By typing commands such as “listen,” “go north,” “examine ____,” et al, I felt included in the reading of a story, and I was allowed to make choices in terms of the order in which I learned elements of the story.
I feel that Ryan would place Photopia in the category of “electronic, interactive, nonergodic texts” (209), because of the inevitable outcomes of the various scenarios presented, though the allowance exists for the reader to make certain choices in the ways in which these scenarios unfold.
I am curious about the intentions of the author, however, due to the abrupt changes in plot lines. A screen will appear with a block of color that is somehow related to the story to come. For example, an all-black screen with a yellow bar that reads “gold” proceeds to lead into a story where the landscape is a shore with golden sand. Perhaps it is as simple as the author wanting to create a distinct barrier between each differing story line.
I understand that Krisztian felt that there was something left to be desired in Photopia, although I am a novice to almost all interactive text and enjoyed many of the elementary aspects of the program. However, I was deeply unimpressed by the lack of graphics and visual stimuli. In MBCBFTW, though I was disinterested in the story itself, I felt that it was greatly enhanced by the multimedia incorporated into the text.
Photopia does not seem to lend itself to a deep level of interpretation, especially since it seems intended for a younger audience. I felt that this was indicated by the fact that several words were defined for the reader of the text. Additionally, there’s very little that’s aesthetically stimulating about Photopia, as I mentioned earlier. It is an extremely simple, straight-forward presentation of text, with the only added creativity being the incorporation of different color schemes. It was almost like reading a book online (though one is able to interact with it personally) due to the large amount of narrative that will frequently pop up after a user command. The program also seems to act as a rudimentary video game, with the user collecting an inventory of items, such as a seed pod and a shovel.
Eventually, the game does exhaust its ability to be entertaining. It seems to become repetitive, even as different story plots emerge after “missions” are completed. Each story is a version of another story in which one must gather information, collect additions to one’s inventory, and complete some sort of mission. By the time I had come to a deadlock in the game, I felt like I understood the game well enough to understand its purpose as a source of interactive entertainment, rather than cyber art (i.e. MBCBFTW) or more complex hypertext, such as Hegirascope.