Inanimate Alice: Russian Chapter

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Look familiar? I just found Inanimate Alice in the Electronic Literature volumes, and was so excited to write my paper on it; however there has already been extensive analysis on the first and fourth episodes. So, I decided to look at Episode 3. If you want to play the Russian episode of this game, check it out here.

 

Inanimate Alice is so profound because of the interaction and graphics, not the actual story. There is so much to discuss but I want to focus on Alice’s reliance on Brad and the movement of the words in the story.

 

Throughout the series, Brad seems to be Alice’s only friend, and this friend is simply a skateboard game on her precious player. This skateboarder represents Alice’s safe place in a world seemingly filled with danger. When Alice hides in a closet, Brad is the one that she goes to for comfort. When Brad is almost taken away at the end of the episode Alice will not allow it. Instead the player has to go back and find all the dolls in order to survive because Alice refuses to give up her precious player, her only friend.  Brad is the one constantly saving Alice throughout the five episodes; her sanity, her family, and her own life. It is no coincidence that Brad is the one that collects all the dolls, again saving Alice from the terror of the guard.

 

The use of movement in this episode further contributes to the action of the story. When Alice is hiding in the closet the words appear from behind the door. When Alice’s parents are fighting, the words shift back and forth, depicting their argument, when Alice later interrupts, her words come from the bottom of the screen, interrupting her parent’s side to side movement of conversation.  Often there is a blurring of the words on the screen. In the first episode, this happened with every screen that included words, whereas this episode it only happened on certain screens. Though this can be interpreted many ways, I believe this directly correlates with Alice’s fear in conjunction with her lack of knowledge about the actual situation.  I compared it to watery eyes, on the verge of crying and temporarily unable to continue with the story.

An ignorant young girl that notably matures from the first episode to the last fills inanimate Alice with symbolic and literal meaning. The symbols become more complex, her mother’s paintings more organized (like the boxes in this episode compared to random shapes in the first), her defiance more noticeable, and her strength maximized as the episodes go on. Though this is a nontraditional way to tell a story, it is novel that everyone should take 15 minutes to complete at least one episode.

 

To see all of the episodes, go to the Inanimate Alice Website. 

 

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Alice and I

March 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Inanimate Alice- Episode 4 takes you through the life and times of a young girl named Alice. Her stories are alright but what is  interesting is the way she presents them. Immediately the user is blasted in the face with some techno music so you get a sense that your traveling around with a girl who is growing into maybe some kind of rebellion phase. The story is also told in a some what scattered and chaotic way mimicking a child’s story telling. She is always eager to show you around her house or around the city. This story is littered with great photos and interesting graphic design techniques to help make her tours interesting. I feel like this sort of story would actually be useful in teaching children about Geography.

I like how it gives the user some sense of interaction even though most of the time it will not change the out come of anything. It still is enough to keep some one engaged, especially with the music. The music always sets the tone of the story, and makes you feel stressed out for this girl who is always having to constantly move from country to country.

 

I would be interested to know how long it took the developers to make this entire story. It takes approximately 30 mins just to play it, but I imagine it took around 30 days to make it…if not more. With all the user options, music, and pictures that had to be collected from these places and sorted out in a rational way. The editing was probably the most intensive part of the project, the way this was all put together was very impressive. I think this is a great tool for children to learn and use multimedia, I expect that Alice’s story will unfold for quite some time. I recommend this type of story to anyone who has a lot of time on their hands and doesn’t have the energy to read a book. The stories are simple but the graphic design and sound effects will keep you playing til the end.

 

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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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