Link #6: Twine Task – Jessica Presta

by markpepe

Jessica’s Twine Task

My team has informed me that I have made the wrong call… too many times!

I was really engaged in Jessica’s cardiac arrest scenario game even though I know nothing about that field. I even made some connections to Miall & Dobson (2001). While going through her game I thought that this must require a large map of screens in Twine. I was correct, it was a lot larger than my 15 screens that was essentially a circle with a few diverging lines. Jessica’s game is a wen-like choose your own adventure with multiple choices on each screen of life or death scenarios. There was the added element of sound, such as a steady pulse to really add some pressure to the experience. Miall & Dobson talk about visual and aural imagery of advertisements, and it applies here too, “to evoke feelings that alter the self-concept of the viewer” (Section 2, para. 6) Jessica mentioned that creating a virtual pathway through the game was quite challenging, though not on the same level, I had to give it some thought too. Jessica’s game is along the lines of Miall & Dobson’s hypertext fiction. “All links in the simulation did not have strong semantic or logical connections to the subsequent material” (Section 4, para. 4). With each slide, the user, a nurse in training, has to understand the data the received from the patient vitals and make the right call to progress.

Miall & Dobson question “to what extent does hypertext change the nature of reading?” (Section 1, para. 2). This made me think of the book House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. It was an interesting experience for me to read because looking back it is hyper textual in nature. There were footnotes and references in the middle of the prose and I often didn’t know what to do and got lost. Admittedly, I didn’t finish the book because it was a lot of work to remember. Miall & Dobson, quoting Charney, say that reading hypertexts imposes a greater demand on short-term or working memory (Section 3, para. 5). In their study, they concluded that hypertext “as a vehicle for the experience of literary reading itself, [it] appears to promote processes of attention that inhibit the engagement and absorption that are its most characteristic aspects” (Section 4, para. 28).

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