Twine-Based Final Project

April 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

For my creative project, I replicated my apartment in inform 7 and made an adventure game involving keys and locked doors.  I felt like the basic commands that inform understood were too limited.  Although I am happy about the way my creative project turned out, I didn’t like having to work within the confines of inform’s understood phrases.

So, for my final project I decided to use Twine to take the reader on a more extensive journey.  I don’t want the readers of my final project to feel like they are just clicking a series of links to get to the end of the story.  Instead, I want the reader to be actively engaged in the story and I want them to feel like the words they chose to click on actually make a difference in the outcome of the story.

We didn’t look at many works that use Twine in class but I would like my game to feel kind of like the work of interactive fiction “Everybody Dies.” I liked how the game was in third person and you were directing a character around rather than pretending that the reader is the character in the game.

By having the game in third person, this adds another element into the game: the interaction between the player and the character.  This way, it will almost feel like a team effort to guide the character through the story.  In a first or second person game, the reader is the player and you lose this exchange.  I really liked in “Everybody Dies” when the character you were guiding would say something directly to you.  I think that  the other points of view attempt to be more realistic.  But when the character, in a third person game, speaks to the player it becomes more realistic.

As far as theme, I’d like the character in the game to come across multiple examples of works of interactive fiction that we’ve discussed in class.  The themes of those games will reflect the current theme of my game depending on the route the character has travelled.  Also, I would like there to be a scenario where the game ends in the player realizing he’s in a game and the virtual world he lives in sort of collapses in on himself.

 

This is my first time working with Twine so I am welcome to any tips that past users may have for me!

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Inanimate Alice and our Reliance on Technology

February 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I just finished playing/watching/reading the short work “Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China” by Kate Pullinger and Babel.  The work was an eight-minute glimpse into a young girl’s life in Northern China.  Despite its brevity, the work is surprisingly intense.  The girl’s father is missing and the family is unsettled.  The reader can pick up from other context clues that there may be some other issues, possibly social, that weigh on the family but since the narrator is a young child, she may not be completely aware of them.  The use of technology is prevalent in the culture that the young girl is describing.

The description of the work that the ELit blog directed me to said the following:

“Inanimate Alice depicts the life of a young girl growing up in the early years of the 21st century through her blog and episodic multimedia adventures that span her life from childhood through to her twenties. It has been created to help draw attention to the issue of electro-sensitivity and the potentially harmful pollution resulting from wireless communications.”

This gave me an idea for what themes to watch out for while experiencing the work of interactive fiction.  The opening of the game has a lot of static-sounding noises and other electronic beeps and tones that our everyday technological devices emit. They are loud and off-putting at first.  As the work progresses oriental-sounding music starts playing at the same time as the static.  The soundtrack is very important in this work.  At first, the static is so overpowering that it made me want to turn the sound off.  But as the music started to play, the sounds became intertwined.  The mixing of the electronic sounds with the native-sounding music gave a sense of the technology becoming part of the culture.

We are dependent on our technology nowadays.  We’re always on our laptops, phones, cameras or mp3 players.  As a matter of fact, technology has come so far that those can all be found on one device.  The main character is also dependent on an electronic device, her “player.”  She takes pictures, plays games and tries to contact her missing father with it.  It gives her a sense of comfort and when her mother asks her to turn it off, she becomes upset and is reluctant to do so.

Screenshot from the game depicts the young girl's "player."

The father, who was lost, was found in a “dead-zone.”  A dead-zone is something we all fear, a place with no signal for our cell phones.  With no contact to the outside world, we feel helpless.  It makes us wonder how people got by before the days of the world wide web.  This reliance on our electronic devices has grown deeper and deeper the more advanced the devices get.  Just watch any movie from before the new millennium, in how many of those movies could the whole problem be avoided if one of the characters had cell phone?  A lot.  Technology is rapidly changing and we are becoming more dependent on our devices daily.

The description of the game that I quoted mentions the dangers of pollution due to wireless technology.  I think this isn’t exclusively referring to an environmental pollution but also a pollution of our minds and our social and communication skills.

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