textual media

So, yeah.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.  The big debate concerning interactive fiction – story, game or both?  I think Photopia could be considered both story and game, because it uses both narrative elements and interactivity.  However, I would argue that Photopia is leaning more towards being a story than a game.    Photopia  is a story about a girl named Alley.  You can think of the colors as the glue or “narrative arc” that holds everything together.  It is interactive in the sense that the user assumes different roles as the story progresses.  You become Alley’s mom, Alley’s father, even the boy who asks Alley to the school dance.  The point of view shifts and changes, but that’s something that can happen in a narrative too.  Photopia is also interactive in the sense that the user has to connect the dots, but the story ultimately remains the same.  In other words, the user cannot change the outcome of the story. 

So, I went into Photopia searching for this “big secret.”  I went through it, waiting, waiting, waiting… and nothing.  My big revelation didn’t come at the end, like I was expecting, but it came in the middle, a little bit towards the end.  I didn’t even notice it until after I was finished.  I think after you’ve gone through Photopia once, you should go through it a second time.  All of the pieces seem to fall into place after that.  Anyway, I think telling the story in the form of an interactive fiction piece definitely makes the reader or player think outside the box.  The fact that you assume these different roles means that you can look at the story from a variety of perspectives.  In this way, the text engages the user.  It keeps us interested.  It’s just a bit frustrating when you can’t get the story to progress.

After going deep into all of the IFs I really began to notice a progress in my ability to function in such virtual worlds. The first IF I attempted was Photopia. After 10 minutes I was too pissed off to continue. I wanted to go into it with little context and instruction as I do with most works, yet it became pretty clear it was necessary to obtain some form of explanation of functioning within IFs. When we did the single ending IF in class, it really helped me understand how IFs work and I began to have more confidence in working with Photopia and the others.

I decided to work with Pig first and worked my way through it fairly well. I really enjoyed myself with Pig because it was funny and laid back. I felt no rush or anger as I had previously with Photopia. I think that whatever character the user must be plays a large role in how they go about going through the IF. With Pig, I felt like nothing I did was wrong, I felt little responsibility in my actions. This (along with the HELP page telling me there’s no way to get stuck) also lead me to have more fun with the commands since I tried to do a lot more from burning everything I see to kicking and singing as I pleased.

After playing all the IFs I was inspired to find my MYST online and play it. I remember when my Brother and I were little kids we used to play MYST constantly and loved it. As I play it almost a decade later, I realize why we had such a fascination with it. It has all the attractive elements of CYOAs and IFs. It takes user interaction to a new level from a visual standpoint. Basically, for those not familiar with MYST, it’s an old PC adventure game. I wouldn’t say it was the first of its kind, but it was a major frontrunner in the genre. The game works just like a CYOA and IF by allowing the user to explore a virtual world. The different being it’s not based on a text but visuals. The virtual world is comprised of a large series of interactive (and many times “alive”) views/pictures. On each picture the user clicks on objects in order to examine and work them, while moving throughout the massive world by clicking places in the distance in order to walk around. When the user clicks a place in the distance, they will move there and be given a new view in which more paths, puzzles, and/or objects are present. In an essence, this takes CYOA and IFs to a new level. Unfortunately, with the addition of such visuals some freedoms are taken away. While many adventure games contain dialogue, such games like MYST lack an amount of characters due to its isolated context. However, there is a very strong narrative presence with all adventure games and MYST is no different.

Undoubtedly Lewis Carroll used this engine while writing his stories about Alice.  Those stories and poems definitely have a special place in my heart, and you have to admit that the language he uses is definitely innovative.  Jabber seriously amused me for a while.  “Jabber realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules” is how the introduction page reads.  What a great idea!  I’m not much of a science person, but I can appreciate the comparison between language and science.  Think of how instantly you are able to equate language, symbols, to concrete objects or ideas or feelings.  That has to be some form of science, rapid computing.  Jabber does nothing to really provoke anything completely profound or earth-shattering but it is a fun way to make up new words in combinations I would never begin to imagine.  I found it to be representational of language!  It could be almost satirical of how we place such a symbolic value to objects and ideas with the meaning of words.  Words are only valuble to us because of their relation with what they represent.  What if a desk was called a koiestre?  Or a pen an estrami?  Desk and pen would be the weird words and the other two would evoke an image of school or an office or wherever.  Some combinations of letters and vowels are so significant while others, as in the Jabber engine, are combinations that are nonsense unless we assign them meaning. Just like good old Lewis meant when he said, “and the mome raths outgrabe”.

136 actions

What aspect of the CYOA book did your map or the mapping process crystallize?
When I was doing my mapping I had done it a section at a time on paper over a few days. I really did not get to see the complete picture until I was done. That’s when I noticed that the stories have similar endings and are intertwined. What else surprised me was how many different endings the book had especially considering the number of pages the book contained. Another surprise was how much time consuming constructing the map was.

During the mapping process of CYOB the thing that presented the most challange and provoked the most theought was how to define the endings. With my book there where a few different ending that could take place; you could straight out die, you could die and save the planet, you could live in a peaceful exsistance, assuming everything would be okay, amoung the chaos of these evil metal dragons attacking this planet, you could return back to earth safely, or, everyone’s favorite, you could save the world and be a hero. The ending that seemed most odd to me was the ending that wasn’t really and ending at all, the instances where your character just decided to stop his journey for whatever reason.

Through mapping out my Choose Your Own Adventure book I obtained a stronger grasp on how these types of books are set up. Although these books are obviously an easy read, it seemed like creating one would have been a daunting task for an author. With the formation of my concept map I learned certain techniques the authors used to format these books. I remember as a child always running into the same plots over and over again, but through mapping my book, Deadwood City, I realised just how many possible endings the authors had to create (my book alone having 38 seperate endings). Although there were quite a few stories that connected together, I was also surprised at how many seperate plots there really were in this barely-over-one-hundred-page book. It’s intriguing how simple and yet so complex these books tend to be.

The process of mapping my CYOA book made me realize the inherent differences between the structures of interactive media illustrated by Marie-Laure Ryan.  The tree structure provides a degree of interaction without being overly obtuse, thus allowing the various choices to form a coherent narrative altogether more conrete than those achievable in the other types of interactive media.  Concerning The Great Easter Bunny Adventure itself, mapping out the book revealed the somewhat limited degree of choice achievable in this particular text and the altogether uniform endings in spite of the choices made.  However, the text does touch on something interesting within the medium — that given the format’s tree-like structure, and its different paths telling very different stories but all leading ultimately to the same end, the effect becomes an appreciation more for the journeys themselves as opposed to the outcome, which seems counter-intuitive given the design but is a compelling re-imagining of the format.  Comparing its structure to a tree then becomes difficult as the narrative arcs branch out but ultimately collapse back in on themselves, something akin to a much more limited form of the standard network defined by Marie-Laure Ryan.

The aspect that was most crystallized by my CYOA map was the potential of finding out more information about the characters through the different storylines. While I don’t think that this was used to its fullest extent, it was interresting to see what could be discovered about the characters through the different threads. I think that if the author had given the reader something to gain from each individual storyline, it would encourage the reader to try a different path to better understand the overall story.

As soon as I began to map out my book, I realized that the process would be more difficult that I initially anticipated.  The assignment seemed simple enough, and the reading material was quite simple as well, but the process of actually making the map was far more time consuming than I originally thought it would be.  The book was more complex than I had thought, and there were far more branches and paths than I ever imagined would be contained within 90 pages.  Reading through all of the paths and possible endings was  deceivingly difficult;  it was relatively hard to retrace all of the paths that were given to me throughout the book, which is not to say that the reading was hard at all, I was able to make it through all of the branches and endings in a fairly short period, but going back and documenting these paths was a far more tedious task than simply reading through.  I recall enjoying these choose your own adventure books when I was younger, but this assignment was something that I did not quite like.

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 main point that impressed me about the CYOA books was exactly how many options there were in such a short book. By mapping, we as readers can actually see on paper how many choices there are. My book, for example, only had one overlapping page (as in single, dead in page, not full path), but still managed to have several different paths and many different endings. Also, by mapping we could see which paths and ends were “positive”, “negative” and indifferent.

Mapping also made me see how graphic and morbid this (older) childrens’ book is!