Author: Salali

If learning to become a soccer superstar has enlightened me of anything, it is that I must first instigate a fight, run from a bully, then avoid scholastc pursuits. The process of my particular CYOA found its grounding first in a sequence of events that is completely unavoidable followed by the typical dead ends found in most maze-like narratives. As the choices are presented, much of what follows is the result of luck rather than strategy. On this point, I disagreed with the writer in making the decisions lack gravity. Most choices were not of ethical quandry or anything of that strain. Quite often, the choices were simply dependent on the whim of the reader since the outcomes of many actions could not be readily deduced. As such, many choices made by the reader are arbitrary and, by chance, will either further the story or force it to end abruptly.

The appeal of both Hegirascope and Lialina’s project My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is grounded in not only the bizarre strings of thought that only serve to confound but also in the innate fascination of clicking one’s way deeper into an electronic rabbit hole. Though they share the medium, there are stark differences between the two projects. Hegirascope, as far as its programming goes, is far simpler than Lialina’s expressive use of technology which utilizes movable frames, flashing graphics and, in one case, a scaling picture of a window. Conversely, Hegirascope has several, very convoluted streams of thought that seem arbitrarily linked whereas Lialina’s project has a single story line, a central thought, with different aspects of the story which can be viewed in several frames at any given time. What is interesting to note about My Boyfriend is how nearly every frame cuts to black, the finals word being either a pronoun (most often “me”) or a time word (“forever” and “now”). In a few cases, the frame’s penultimate message is an image. What I find intriguing in My Boyfriend is how the text behaves when manipulated by the frames. When forced to adjust to a horizontal move, the words wrap; when faced with a vertical move, the words simply crop. Additionally, with the exception of the window, all the graphics crop when met with a frame. However, My Boyfriend’s rabbit hole only goes so far before the story reaches a conclusion, when all the frames have been tapped out and there’s just the couple, a window, and darkness. Hegirascope, not to be outdone, can loop over on itself, one of the four choices possibly leading back to a prior page. Indeed one recurring page drops its link options after it has been chosen. Though the link still exists, it hides.
Along this thought, there are several Easter Eggs within Hegirascope that make it more than a simple little game of clicking around aimlessly. Whereas My Boyfriend contains only one instance of hidden text, Hegirascope leads one to believe that an empty slide is simply that. With judicious highlighting, however, one quickly finds that there is more going on in those pages that appear to contain nothing, leading to, if one is lucky, the Index page, the inner workings. It’s these little treats for the reader that keep goading one to continue instead of causing a cascade of hands thrown in the air out of abject frustration.