So it took me awhile to mull around what I was going to write as a response to Afternoon. I really like the stream of conscious style of narration. It seems to me that no matter where you click or what you type or if you answer yes or no you are still somewhere in the narrators brain thinking about a million things a minute. That brings me to the timeline of the so-called story. There is no definite setting or period you can place all of these characters in. They are infinite beings running around telling about their lives, experiencing a few moments together and are in no way stagnant. I don’t even know if you can refer to them as definite characters. Sometimes they just seem to be ideas in whoever decides to narrate the story at any given times head. There is also some weird love triangle (square?) also in circulation of these characters which deepens the story-line (if there really is one. I feel like I may have just contradicted myself saying so.).
Getting into more technical terms of the story-line, if you simply click on words from the start until as I have found you get bored, you have a somewhat circular plot, not really resolving itself and mostly presenting you with information you have already come across. If you utilize the input option and the y/n option you are able to yield more results and to learn more about the characters. I feel that this whole story and what the reader gets out of it is completely due to the level of involvement put into it. And really, isn’t that what makes interactive fiction great? The ambiguity and the possible outcomes and what can be said of books can truly be said of it that no one reads the same thing and you can definitely never really read the same thing twice. I feel like it’s a beautiful thing.