Electronic Literature

This week's discussion focused on Electronic Literature. First we should talk about hypertext. During the break we made Twine Games which use a lot of hypertext. This means clicking on one link to take us to another place. For instance when you read a wikipedia article you usually find yourself clicking on hyperlinks to find out about other stuff. I'm sure this has led to many late nights reading about the eating habits of Pandas or something random like that.

By Xtina Yu, retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/mf94VWJlMwU

The twine games we made this week were very basic so mostly just used hyperlinks to connect decisions to different parts of the story. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. For instance, in my story you could choose whether to move in with a girl named Victoria, or with the main character's mother or father. Each decision led to a different ending.

Hyperlinks are a way of navigating. As Jessica Pressman says in her essay Navigating Electronic Literature, navigation gives each user a unique perception of digital texuality. Since electronic literature is not physical in the way a book is, navigation leads us to different parts of a story that would not exist for us without that decision, unlike in a book where everything is physically written on a page. The input of a command affects the digital world. For most people, the most familiar example would be video games. In World of Warcraft you can experience the entire world differently just by choosing a different type of character at creation. Some characters are on opposite sides to one another, some are strong and wield swords while others are spell-casters. You could also choose to run around and pick flowers instead of slaying dragons. Your experience of the game as a heroic flower picker would be different from someone who chose to play as a dragon slayer. This is not like a book or TV show in which every reader navigates the world in the same linear way (Of course every viewer may have their own interpretation, but they still see the same content).

Sergeant Soup is a professional flower picker AND dragon slayer.
All rights to Blizzard Entertainment. 

While on the topic of games, here's an artwork of an elf I finished recently.

Interactivity is important for these types of things. Interactivity doesn't just mean clicking on something - it means that the reader/user is engaged. Having the decisions that the player makes affect the story is a good way of doing this. Having a challenge for users to overcome is another way. This is advantageous in many ways as it gets the reader participating. Especially when it comes to children, who generally have short attention spans, interactivity can transform learning experiences. For example, I'm sure many of us who grew up during the 2000s know of Cool Maths Games. These games were a fun way of getting children engaged in maths, which most children think of as being something exceedingly boring. However, making maths into a game engages children's attention so they can learn faster.

There are many more things I would love to discuss but sadly I am running out of words. Leave a comment about your favourite video game or non-linear narrative! Ciao!

Works Cited:

Pressman, Jessica. "Navigating Electronic Literature" Retrieved from https://newhorizons.eliterature.org

Twine Games

First of all I want to wish everyone well. These are difficult times and I hope everyone is all right!

This week the focus was on twine games. Twine allows games to be made by a wider variety of people and therefore cover a wider variety of topics. While video games have advanced significantly throughout the decades, as Anna Anthropy says, 'the video game industry has spent millions upon millions of dollars to develop more visually impressive ways for a space marine to kill a monster'. This isn't a concept I entirely agree with because I love to play video games with strong story lines like the Dragon Age series, or games that allow you to write your own story like the sims. However, the stories told by games are often ones normal people cannot relate to. As much as I would like to be a shape-shifter or an alien, none of us can relate to that (as far as I know, my friend does have a cat who looks suspiciously like an alien).

Twine games can let people tell more relatable stories without needing millions of dollars to develop a game. Stories about simple everyday things like a mother caring for a child can be told.

Player agency is something interesting that games can offer in a way books and film cannot, with the exception of choose-your-own-adventure type books. However in games the player can see the effect their decision has on the game world. This can be seen in games like Dragon Age where characters will like or dislike you depending on your actions, and earlier choices impact later ones. Some games even have alternating ending depending on the players choices, such as the Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which if I recall correctly has 8 possible endings. An example of player agency done poorly is World of Warcraft, in which there is a quest where you defeat an elf called Sira. The player can decide to finish her off or can refuse to on moral grounds, in which case she is killed by another character and story is exactly the same either way. This decision is also nonsensical as previous quests have you kill many living beings so it would be strange for the player to only now object.

The lecture this week also spoke of something else important - MDA or mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics.

Mechanics are the mathematical rules, such as how many games have a health or lives system. They govern how the game is played are basically the bridge between the player and the game world.

Dynamics are the actions the player takes, such as fighting or racing. An example of this is the exciting dynamic that defines the Assassin's Creed games - parkour, which allows the player to explore locations and times like Florence during the renaissance from the rooftops.

Finally, aesthetics are why we go to a game. Is it for the challenge of defeating a difficult monster, or to explore a beautiful world? Maybe it's for the fantasy of being able to do things we cannot do in real life - like magic or driving a spaceship.

I am looking forward to working with Twine over the holidays and might post an update on it as I work over the holidays. I cannot wait to expand my story by adding choices to make it more dynamic and exciting! 

Till next time! Tschüss!