Focus on: Electronic Literature, pp. 59-70
The type of work Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story represents is summarized on page 62, when the author notes, “like afternoon, they employ branching structures that create irreconcilable ambiguities centering on violent events.” As I have chosen to read this text prior to reading Twelve Blue—on page 63, it is noted “playing is one of the central metaphors”—hopefully it will be more enjoyable than Afternoon, at least for myself.
A useful characteristic that is said to be found in Twelve Blue is revealed on the bottom of page 63, “Every screen contains at least one instance of the word blue.”
Michael Joyce, Twelve Blue
Initial comments for Twelve Blue—I appreciate the author description, I wonder if it will be more helpful than Joyce’s description in Afternoon. Something else I think that is unique and should be mentioned—HyperCard was included in MacOS 6 in 1987—and the proprietary software he used to write Afternoon was also written around this timeframe. In the late 1980s—hypercard peaked, evidence is shown in the HyperCard Wikipedia entry: ‘During HyperCard’s peak popularity in the late 1980s, a whole ecology of vendors offered thousands of these externals for everything from HyperTalk compilers to graphing systems, database access, internet connectivity, and animation.” In Twelve Blue, even though HTML was created by CERN in the tail end of the 1980s and early 1990s, it really did not “take off” until the mid 1990s. I find it interesting he chose the years of the most “explosive” growth for both HyperCard-like software and of the web to release his works of fiction—perhaps for these reasons alone is why we are reading about them today. Overall, I found the reading from Electronic Literature much more comprehensible and I was better able to understand it than traversing Twelve Blue.