What a nightmare. It took me two playthroughs to complete User Inyerface! As if the timer and related pop-ups weren’t distracting enough while I tried to navigate this monstrosity, I kept getting system pop-ups for software-updates and for a canceled daily school-meeting. Oh, and I started getting strange Credit-Check emails and my AntiVirus alerted me of a possible Trojan at the same time.
I had to make some strict decisions in order to curate the Golden Record down to 10 songs. At first, I wanted to show an evolution of music, progressing from the more traditional tones to Rock. However, I quickly realized that doing that made most of my tracks originate in the West. I changed tactics and instead made my criteria focus on global and temporal diversity, and the human voice. I could not find a playable version of the Pygmy girls’ initiation song, but I chose to include it over the percussion music from Senegal as it seemed likely to include vocals (which the latter lacks).
When I saw that we were returning to our first task, I wanted to see if I could take what I had previously constructed further. Ernesto had commented that how I approached the first bag task said more about me than its actual contents. I wanted to push myself to make something I hadn’t before. It only seemed logical, still thrilling as I was from my remixed Twine-game, to attempt to make my animation interactive through code.
In a way, this task is a response from my inner-teen, who was submerged in the Internet when many of our readings were being published. It is a reply to the academic examination of the cyberculture I was part of. There was a charm to those early days of Web 2.0… something gritty and experimental, celebrating personal expression without standardized filters. Seeing a profile page with coloured text, animated backgrounds, and auto-playing music demonstrated not only the maker’s interests but also their digital prowess. I miss the bizarre Flash games, the personalized MySpaces, and the wacky CD-ROM games where you clicked things to see what would happen. In that spirit, and with the New London Group’s advocacy for multiliteracies fresh in my mind, I approached this project.
If there is no audio, try switching to a different browser, such as Edge; Chrome can have auto-audio-playing issues. Or, make an itch.io account and, in your Account Settings, turn on “Require a click to run HTML5 game embeds”. I also tested it on my phone, and it works (sort of, it has some trouble with scaling).
I played with Twine once before in ETEC 565D (Digital Games & Learning). Our task was to use it to represent our readings on the power of using game-making for learning. I decided I would create a kind of interactive-experimental-essay. I wanted to make something that flowed like a conversation. I intentionally disabled the back-button and coded options to appear or disappear depending on what had already been discussed (such as the reader’s options after the HOW passage.) In retrospect, I suppose I made the conversation more linear by denying the reader the ability to return to previous passages, but rarely in a conversation do you say to the other person “Could you repeat everything you just told me about how building games strengthens learning communities?”.
