Touching on the computer?

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Playing Toucher by Serge Bourchardon, Kevin Carpentier, and Stephanie Spenle, brought up a point that I hadn’t realized previous to playing it. When reading electronic literature, as opposed to reading physical literature, one part of the experience that is missing is the ability to physically touch what is being read. By playing this game, I was able to experience different sensations of touch. Toucher allowed a work of electronic literature to be multisensory. Previous to playing this game, I had not even noticed that the aspect of touch was missing from accessing works of literature on the computer.

When playing the game, there are six sensations that Toucher allows you to experience; brush, blow, spread, hit, caress and move. The first sensation that I experienced was “Hit”. When discovering this, there is a game that must be played. In this game, there is a fly that flies over a piece of paper, covered in glass. In order to win, you must hit the fly by trying to click it with your mouse. It was very interactive and added a lot to the game because every time I attempted to kill the fly and missed, there would be a loud cracking noise and it would appear that glass was broken at the exact place that I clicked. In my opinion, the most interesting section of Toucher was “caress”. When discovering this sensation, I had to spray paint on a canvas. This canvas would only let me paint in certain areas. As I kept trying to paint, it would eventually fill in the area of the silhouette of a woman. Each time a stroke of painting was done, the woman would make a sexual sound. It was interesting how many different aspects sensation this game was able to bring out.

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The Graveyard

April 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

This was by all means a boring game. I understand the underlying messages the game has but still very uneventful. I could not bring myself to pay the five dollars just to see the old woman die. She may have seemed like she was only waiting for death while sitting in the graveyard, but that doesn’t mean that I want to see her die, let alone pay to see her die. I watched a clip of her death on youtube to save the money and still experience every aspect of the game but it didn’t add very much for me. The game was depressing from the beginning and to add her death to it would just make it morbid. Though when I look at the game from a literary standpoint, to read this woman’s journey through the graveyard would be much more interesting. The song was a good choice, it added an interesting dynamic to the game. The recounting of all these other people’s deaths through songs was a nice addition. It made me feel that it was her remembering how all the people in her life had died. Again very depressing but the song was the best example of literary value in the game. All in all I don’t think I have gained much understanding of life from this game but perhaps I am not looking deeply enough into the game.

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Skyrim is it Interactive Fiction?

March 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In the world of Interactive fiction you can make choices, these choices decide how far you get into the story. Games like colossal cave adventure are a text adventure, you type in where you want to go and you go there. You make decisions to pick certain things up, you can even kill a bird in the cave but that effects your outcome undoubtedly. Games like Skyrim follow a similar construct.

 

Instead of typing where you want to go you move a joystick, people ask you questions and you make decisions about which quests to undertake. The game follows no set path just like a text adventure, often in text adventures there is more than one way to reach your end goal. A game like Skyrim is set up the same way, you make a choice of who you are, what clans you join, where you go in the world and how your story ends. Of course dying in a game like Skyrim does not carry the same consequences as dying in a text adventure. When you die in a text adventure you usually have to start all over. When you die in a game like Skyrim you just start from the last checkpoint or the last save point. Perhaps if video games were set up with more drastic consequences when you die people you start playing more conservatively. Role playing games or RPGs as a gamer would say allow the user to take on the role of their character. The user can go as far to choose what their character looks like, with seemingly little limitations.

 

I used to play a game called Way of the Samurai, in which a series of questions would be asked by character you forcefully ran into at the beginning of the game. You usually have up to three choices to choose from as your answer. The three choices represent who you will turn out to be a good character, an evil character or an independent working for both sides of the spectrum. This game was incredible. It basically becomes three games in one. There are three paths you can take each ripe with different decisions and outcomes to those decisions. Interactive fiction and text adventures paved the way for an incredible interactive experience. Instead of looking at words now you have a movie to go along with the words, a movie that you decide the plot. (to an extent of course)

 

 

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More of a Story Than a Game

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Wow.  That’s all I have to say after playing the Interactive Fiction game Shrapnel.  I decided to check it out because we had talked about it in class and I wanted to learn more.  I was so frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t quit the game, that I felt like there had to be more to it.  After I played a few minutes in class, I became hooked, went back to my room and played all the way through it.

You “play” as a character who is from the Civil War era.  You have been in war, you have been wounded, and you keep on dying.  It’s infuriating.  It doesn’t matter what you do; you will always die doing it.  However, you keep waking up in different places and as different people.  (Warning:  Spoiler alert).  As you go through, the time periods also change as well as the places and people.  After dying several times, you go into more of a story mode than a play mode.  You come in contact with Green who really reveals he is from the future and is in love with your daughter.  He reveals all about you.  He knows that you are a father who was wounded, went into a risky business venture, raped your own daughter who later hung herself, and he was trying to go back in time to save you from getting injured, so you wouldn’t do any of these things.  He used a time machine in which to do this but while he was trying to save you from the shrapnel, his time machine got destroyed by some shrapnel of its own.  This sent the two of you into a limbo like area, where you find yourself, blipping back and forth between times in your life until you eventually just die and the game ends.

You have no control much like the main character in a lot of this game, if you can even call it a game.  Adam Cadre not only gave you the story part of the game, but he used the little parts of the game, like the fact that you can’t quit the game when you die or sometimes you don’t have a choice as to what happens next, to show you how frustrating it can be to not be in control of your destiny.  It is a very easy game to play.  You do not have to do much to try and figure out what you are doing.  There are few movements to the game, in which you are almost trying to die so you can learn more.  The point of the game is to just figure out what the heck you are doing and what is happening to you.  There is a lot of reading involved but I was so into the game that I didn’t care because I was so confused that I wanted to know as much as I could.

I loved it.  I loved the slap in the face realization at the end.  Cadre did the same thing for me in his Interactive Fiction “Photopia”.  In both “Shrapnel” and “Photopia”, Cadre does every scene out of order.  This causes more confusion but it makes the ending that much more of an eye-opening realization of what was really happening.  I would recommend everyone playing through “Shrapnel” and experiencing it for themselves.  It was awesome.

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Explanation for Shade: DMT and the Afterlife

March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The class briefly talked about hallucinatory experiences found at desert festivals like Burning Man, and just how prolific finding those kinds of experiences are at festivals.  Going beyond the expected substances like lsd and magic mushrooms, there is a more correlative hallucinatory drug (or rather, a chemical process) that may explain the character’s blending of his comfortable reality and his slow death in the desert.

Shade presents the player with a glimpse into a near-death experience: a mystical dissolving of warm memories of the home and the fateful reality of dying in the desert into one experience that becomes a blended reality.  According to recent studies in holistics, researchers have and are looking into DMT.  Supposedly upon near-death experiences, the chemical Dimethyltryptamine naturally floods the brain, causing the person to go into an immense hallucinatory experience that makes the deathbed person fall into an experience that is relative to their subconscious and firm beliefs.  The experience can often blend past memories, tightly locked beliefs in the subconscious and even the real surrounding to create a dream-like sequence.  As the reality of the character is masked by the apartment, which is supposedly a reaction from the DMT, the imminent death in the desert causes the brain to release this chemical as the character is about to pass away, easing the stress of him as he inevitably passes on.  The game doesn’t explicitly give clues as to whether or not the character had taken DMT or is experiencing the effects of DMT as a result of dying, but DMT is certainly the creation of the distorted reality.

If the character had willingly taken the DMT to “transcend” his experience in the desert, that form of argument can be defended.  Among a group of desert-dwelling music lovers, those concerts have a propensity for being a land of milk and honey for the person looking to have a “transcendent experience” in the hands of colossal artwork and spell-inducing music.  Though certain myths and stereotypes do exist when talking about these kinds of events that people may consider hippy-infested music events, a quick search on Google will be a testament to drugs having a home there if a person is looking to open that kind of door.  If the morose character of Shade had taken DMT to transcend his experience at the desert festival, the flashback into his dimly lit apartment and melancholy life would attest to the character having taken the hallucinogen.  The melancholia within the lonely apartment is a reflection of the character and the dark, lonely soul.

An interesting fact revealed by studies on DMT shows that DMT, which can also be found existing in some plants, originates and is produced by the pineal gland during experiences of death and birth.  It is associated with the 7th chakra, which is commonly denoted as the 3rd eye.  Taking DMT as recorded by certain researchers attests to the experience as the opening of the 3rd eye, as a kind of fear of falling into death, but as the body slowly falls back into reality, the user feels a kind of rebirth into the world.
So determining the use of DMT as having been a willing one or one caused by the slowly dying character is one that is too opened ended for answer, but certain clues do point to the experience being one excited by DMT.  Whether or not the character was looking to open his 3rd eye and transcend the lonely life of the doleful apartment or the character is in fact experience DMT as a result of dying, it does seem likely that the author intended to express that DMT was floating around the brain of Shade’s character.

But talking about hallucinations in the desert, this isn’t an uncommon idea among people looking for illumination.  Jim Morrison famously had done this, so thinking this kind of knowledge was knowingly floating, the character may have been trying to excite one of these experiences to go beyond himself.  The end is just a a hallucinatory death.

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What is RSI, you ask?

March 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Separation

By: Annie Abrahams

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have read the text that is shown before playing the piece of literature. These few sentences explain exactly what the purpose of the work is, and what the ending ends up revealing. With this aside, I found this piece of work very creative as well as informative.

In order to start and proceed with the literature, you must click each time you want the next word to appear. As you are reading through it, it would be easy to assume that the entire poem is centered upon how one person feels about another person. (If I hadn’t read the text at the beginning, I would’ve thought this exact thing.) Even though the tone of this poem is very depressing, there are many parts to it that are very exciting and innovative. Every few lines, the poem stops and a picture and description of an exercise pops up. If studied carefully, it becomes clear that the lines in the poem make some mention of what kind of exercise is shown. Not only do these exercises tell you how to do them, but also time you so that you have just enough time during the poem to do them. At the end of the poem, it becomes clear that the poem isn’t about two people, but about one person’s addiction and feelings towards a computer.

If I hadn’t read the text previous to playing it, I don’t think that I would have thoroughly understood why these exercises were placed in the poem. The reason that these exercises were placed in the poem is because they are exercises that people should do in order to prevent getting RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury.) One way that people get RSI is from being on the computer for an extended amount of time. It is comical to me that the author would do this because in order to play this game, one must be on the computer.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of this game was what happened when I got impatient. When I got impatient, I started clicking my mouse faster to make the poem show up quicker. It gets very frustrating clicking each time you want to read the next word. If the player begins to click too fast for the game’s liking however, a pop up window comes up and tells you that “You don’t have the right attitude in front of your computer.” It then lists four reasons for why this pop up came up. This is really interesting because it explains that you are using too much energy and force when clicking and that you must slow down. It then makes you replay the last few lines of the poem that was just read. I believe that the reason the game wants the player to play at such a slow speed is because that is how somebody with RSI would play. Since you have to go slow and you cannot skip anything, it really gives you the idea of how somebody with RSI feels when on the computer. I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game because it informed me about RSI while keeping me interested and making me think. This is definitely one of the most creative works I’ve experienced.

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Dreamhold

March 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I thought I would look at some of the other interactive fiction stories that were on the website that “Shade” was on.  I found some really cool ones.  There was one where you were a sailor in an extraterrestrial planet.  It was hard because you had to type in sailing instructions which lost me quickly.  Anyway, I found this one called “Dreamhold” by Andrew Plotkin, which I found fascinating.

In the story, you find yourself in a cell, not sure of who you are or what you are doing.  Once out of the cell, you find that you are in a dreamhold, or a wizard’s house, and have the chance to explore the rooms of this quite unique house.  There are more than 60 rooms in all of the game.  It took me three days to complete but it was well worth my time.  The most central rooms that seem to be ones that you continually go back to are the Curtained Room, Crowded Study, and the Sitting Room.  In the Curtained Room, which sits off the Crowded Study, there is a mirror.  If you look into this mirror, you find that your face has no reflection.  After you find a mask in the Crowded Study, it becomes clear that your objective is to find all seven of the masks that lay around the house.  These masks help you to find out who you are if you try them on.  Each time you try them on, a piece of your memory comes back.  There are also smaller tasks you can complete that help you to get extra points.  Both of these objectives help you to know who you are but all of them have some sort of riddle to it.  The smaller tasks are designed to retrieve all of your various pieces of your wardrobe that also lay scattered around the house.  By the end of the game, you find that you are indeed the wizard and it is your house, after you put all seven of the masks in the mirror mentioned earlier.  Interestingly enough, there are also three different endings that you can reach depending on what you do after you find out that you are a wizard.  In the ending I reached, I found another mask and learned even more about myself, specifically my mistake of killing an entire army.

Instead of getting fed up and quitting in this game, there was an italicized portion that was strictly devoted to helping you with the game.  If you typed in too many commands trying to complete a task, the italicized words would ask if you wanted a helpful hint or would make a suggestion.  It may sound intrusive but, in my opinion, it helped rather than hurt.  It never took away from the story and helped me out on one or two of the riddles.  You can also type in “help hint.”  This action gave me a hint but also told me that it was reluctant to do so.  This game is a good starter game for those who want to play interactive fiction.  It helps beginners to learn to play and holds their interest by giving them help when they don’t get it right.  This game also has an expert mode for those who want to turn off the game’s “helpful hints.”  Andrew Plotkin made a game that caters to both the inexperienced and experienced.  Not only that, I really enjoyed the story, despite its vague nature.  It was complex and enticing, adding an air of mystery even at the end of the story.  His images were vivid which made me all the more interested in the story.  So, if you want a good interactive fiction game, this is it.

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Still Standing/Text Rain

March 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Wow, I am absolutely amazed at these two pieces of electronic literature.  First off, Still Standing was found through the Electronic Literature Volume 2 page on our website and a direct link can be found here.  The information about Still Standing can be found here.  From the description, Still Standing invites participants to use their bodies as reading instruments.  My mind was blown when I read this.  This is LITERALLY interactive fiction and puts all other works to shame IMO.  Although we are unable to do it ourselves, the best that I could find were videos of others working through it.  Text Rain is another version and seems to be more interesting to me.  The website for Text Rain can be found here.  There is a video of Text Rain inside that link.

Okay, so Still Standing is basically this.  You move in front of the screen and you move the text that is on the screen.  If you stand still long enough, the letters copy your image and create a piece of a poem.  It’s absolutely brilliant.  Words cannot describe how amazing this is.  You just have to check it out for yourself.  A description of Still Standing is “the viewer must remain perfectly still, her stillness causing the video-projected text to assemble as if attracted to a magnet.”  Text Rain is similar in that you interact with the letters on the screen but in Text Rain, the letters fall and actually stop on you or whatever you hold up to it.  I can’t really explain it either.  A description of Text Rain is “Text Rain is an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical—to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Raininstallation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling letters. Like rain or snow, the letters appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The letters respond to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will ‘land’ on anything darker than a certain threshold, and ‘fall’ whenever that obstacle is removed.”

My goodness that sounds like so much fun!

In the links above, I have provided ways to watch what is being done.  I wish that I could do it from my computer and maybe someday I will be able to.  It just seems like such a cool idea and, in my opinion, sets the bar extremely high for any other form of electronic literature.  This takes the interactive and the electronic and crushes the two together to synthesize into something that is absolutely mind-blowing.

Here are two pictures that may help with what I am talking about.  Still Standing is first and Text Rain is second.

Still, pictures do not do a justice.  You HAVE to watch the videos.  I believe that this sort of interactive aspect mixed with electronic literature is extremely important to electronic literature as a whole because of how involved it makes the user.  Instead of interacting with something on a computer screen by clicking, you are literally interacting by moving.  What’s neat about this is that words, sentences, phrases, and even entire lines from poems are being reconstructed through the act of either ‘standing still’ or holding the text long enough in Text Rain.  It isn’t just letters moving around on a screen, there is actually substance to it and a poetic element that can’t be found elsewhere.  In this instance alone, this form of electronic literature is crucial to the development of further electronic literature in the future.  I’m not sure how to put what I have witnessed into words other than you need to watch the videos!  They are about two minutes a piece and you really should listen to what they have to say about each of the works.  I hope you gained as much from it as I have!

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My Mind Is Blown.

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I decided to play “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein; (to be played with the Left Hand)” by David Clark.  This was by far the most interesting work on electronic literature I have encountered yet.  Everything about this was intriguing to me.

When starting this piece of literature, you are instructed to use your left hand.  At first, this meant nothing to me.  Once you click ENTER, an introduction is given to you.  This introduction tells you over and over again to “join the dots”.  Hearing this didn’t make sense until the introduction ended and I was forced to click on a constellation, where the dots were connected.  After the introduction was over, a screen of various constellations are shown, allowing you to pick one.  The first one I chose was called “Limits of Language”.  When clicking on this constellation, I was overwhelmed and impressed by the amount of information thrown at me.  To top this off, the music was unique as well.  This section of the game shows you, through moving objects and words, a conversation between two people.  What struck me about this conversation is that it was all about language limiting the world.  Questions such as “Did existence exist before we existed?”, and “Is the ending of language the beginning of existence?” were asked.  To go along with these deep and intellectual questions, the narrator talks about the limits of language, and compared that to a cup of coffee.  He explained that the limits of language are the limits to the world, just as the size of the coffee cup limits how much can be put inside of it.

After clicking on only one constellation, I wasn’t convinced as to what this piece of literature was trying to get across, so I clicked on another constellation called “Fly Bottle.”  This constellation’s purpose was to explain that the purpose of philosophy was to show the fly the way out of the bottle.  The narrator explained this way of thinking by describing, (through words being spoken, words on the screen, and pictures), a monkey who is given a box with a banana inside of it, with a hole just big enough for the monkeys hand to fit inside.  When the monkey reaches for the banana, it then cannot take it’s hand out of the box while still holding the banana.  In this situation, the monkey will not realize that if it were to let go of the banana, it’s hand would be able to fit out of the box.  Just like the monkey not being able to grasp this concept, we as humans are not able to ungrasp things either.  For example, humans are not able to ungrasp the meaning of words.

After exploring these two constellations, I realized that this work of literature must have been explaining different ways to think about parts of life.  Directly after clicking on Fly Bottle, I realized that there was a button, “I”, on the bottom of the screen.  After clicking on it, an ‘information screen’ came up and showed me that I could type words on the keyboard and it would effect how the constellations were played out.  It also should me that I could click on different stars in the specific constellations I had picked, and more stories would come from that.  To me, this added a while new level to the literature because the choices seemed to be endless!  After finding out this exciting news, I tried these out.  I found out that by using buttons on the keyboard while a constellation was playing, the visual images would respond to my typing by increasing the amount of movement they were doing during the narration.

Once I was done exploring the game, I found http://olponline.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/net-art-by-david-clark-88-constellations-for-wittgenstein-to-be-played-with-the-left-hand/ , where the author David Clark explained what he meant from the game.  He wrote this game from the point of view of an Australian philosopher named Wittgenstein.  In this game, there are 88 interactive flash animations, which ends up correlating to the 88 constellations in the sky.  Hearing his point of view was very interesting, “music and the night sky both seemed to me to stir up the limits of our understanding of existence.”  Reading this quote from him proved to me that the point of this literature was to make the reader philosophize about the different abstract aspects of life.  My thoughts on why he wanted us to use our left hand when interacting, is because using the left hand is something that without instruction, is not usually done by the common person.  By not using the right hand, a slightly different view might be taken.  He also allowed me to understand that when he repeatedly said that we needed to ‘connect the dots’ in the beginning, he wanted the reader to connect the dots by using the facts of life that he gave us.  There is so much to learn from this piece of literature, and I encourage everyone who gets the chance, to try it out!

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