Click on the image
After participating in Brendan’s Twine story, Bear Creek, the first thing I noticed is that it operates like an authentic game. What I mean by that, is that at the end of the story there is a consequence to not making the right choices. At the end of the gaming session, if you ended up losing, or deceased in his story’s case, there is the opportunity to try again and make different choices. I am not a gamer, but this reminds me of my Mario days, where I would learn which pipes had killer plants in them and which ones lead to another portal. After dying I would return to the beginning again to redo the level, in hopes that I had learned my lesson. My Twine story Siouxsie’s Office Adventure, in contrast, didn’t teach the player a lesson. When you go through Siouxsie’s Office Adventure, no matter what option you chose, you would end up at the same outcome. Does that make my story operate like clickbait?
Because the main character, or player in the story has the agency to change their outcome at the end of the game, the player is granted a sense of relief after ‘clicking’ on the right series of options. In my Twine game, the player is also granted emotional relief at the end, but by no choice of their own. In this way, Brendan’s protagonist was able to ‘influence events’ (Bolter, 2001, p.123) while mine equipped the reader with different perspectives, but only after viewing two streams in a fixed set of events (Bolter, 2001, p.123). Both of our Twine stories involved building tension through choice, and the ambiguity of where contrasting choices may take the reader (Bolter, 2001, p.128).
When looking at the different forms of media Brendan and I choose, I noticed that we both did not use sound. I used photos in my game, while Brendan’s was mostly text-based. After searching through other student’s web spaces, it made me wonder if the use of images or sound were more effective in evoking emotion. Stories that I had seen with minimal imagery, still felt very realistic if they integrated sound files. Kress (2004) discusses how sound may operate differently as a mode:
We can take, as an instance, the matter of framing and investigate how framing is done in temporal and in spatial representations: in sound by pauses and silences, by lengthening, by intensifying and attenuation…(p.14)
Another difference that I noticed between Bear Creek and Siouxsie’s Office Adventure is the use of hypertext. In Brendan’s story, hyperlinked words are below the main text in the story, while mine are embedded in the text of the story. I question if the order of labels matters anymore in a digital context, Bolter states that:
…the world of textual knowledge is now too complex to be organized by topics; that any topical outline may be arbitrary or confusing; and that the reader will not be able to find topics because she will not know their place in the editor’s outline” (Bolter, 2001, p.87).
Because information is explored in a totally different way by learners now, are digital author’s still responsible for the organization of it?
Another similarity that I noticed between our Twine stories was that the reader was granted accessibility to both of our games in a round-about way. A reader that wants to access my story will have to click on two subsequent hyperlinks and then download a file from there. To access Brendan’s story, the reader has to also download his zip file from a Google Drive link and then open the html file in a browser. Because both of us haven’t enabled instant access to our stories directly from our sites, I question how many people viewed our stories. I know that a majority of people who regularly use technology have a certain expectation for instant access after they click. Not so different from the popular encyclopedia, “…If an encyclopedia is to be an alphabetical sequence of articles, the reader expects that each article will be a self-contained essay”(Bolter, 2001, p.87)
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. doi:https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004