Student Area

1. The little girl and her pillow
You are a little girl. You find an old but beautiful pillow in your attic. You love it and bring it back. You dream a lot after you start using it.

In your dream, you meet a girl who is about your age. Your pillow is also in your dream. It says that it can record dreams and play them to people who sleep on it later, and what you are dreaming is another girl’s dream. However, you are changing her dreams as well. And she might not be in the same time as you…

Possible choices:
You find the girl crying in her dream.
* Sit next to her and comfort her
* Sit next to her and give her your handkerchief without saying anything

2. The ice cube vampire
You are in the refrigerator. There is a huge ice cream next to you sleeping. You hear some one’s voice and you see brightness… You fall on the ground.

Eventually you find yourself melting. You start to feel the extreme thirst for cold. You come across a snow ball on the street. She says hi to you. But you cannot resist yourself and bite her. You suck the cold out of her and you see her melt in front of you. You sense yourself grow bigger. Finally you don’t feel thirsty anymore… but you are scared of yourself…

Possible choices:
You see a huge snow man across the street.
* Go bite him
* Ask him if he knows anything about your “disease”

The Garden of Forking Paths

Albert seemed to pick the example “a stranger knocks at Fang’s door” on purpose, or just on Borges’s purpose. Tsuan, who didn’t know Albert that well, knocked on Albert’s door. And Albert “accidentally” mentioned in his example that Fang had a secret of making up his mind to kill the intruder. Just like what he said, “To eliminate a word completely, to refer to it by means of inept phrases and obvious paraphrases, is perhaps the best way of drawing attention to it.”

Naturally there would be various possible outcomes. In this dimension of time, we could only see one outcome. But I believe Tsuan had went through all of them in his mind when he was talking with Albert and sensing the pullulation. Maybe because of the fact that he was existing in this dimension of time, the time already made the decision for him. Or maybe because of his decision, he had to be in this dimension of time.

CYOA

I was fascinated by how the author analyses the data from these games. The visualization of the game flow makes it much easier for the people who haven’t play the game before get the interest curve of the game.

Text-based pet simulator

This game will be a text-based tamagotchi. You are in charge of the wellfare of some sort of pet. The only interface with the pet that you have is a parragraph of text,  the last sentence of which describes the pet’s untimely death. By editing the parragraph before the last sentence, you can delay and change the pet’s cause of death. The ultimate product of the game will be a biography of the pet’s monotonous, useless existence.

| ASDF died dry as a husk, the sides of its cage scratched bare in a desperate search for water. He only lasted a few days.ASDF was given some water. | ASDF died of terrible hunger, tiny ribs showing through his patchy fur as he feverishly gnawed at his own body. ASDF’s life barely lasted a couple of weeks.

ASDF was given some water. Then, ASDF was fed. | ASDF died rotting alive in his own fetid waste. ASDF didn’t even make it through a month of your care.

>> Wash

>> Feed

>> Give water

Modular sex explorer

This game is an interactive sex game where you chose from a cloud of words to construct an invented reproductive process in a modular fashion. This cloud generates an animated representation of your non-traditional (or traditional if you are a complete dullard) sex-act. The words you choose from are a combination of organs, actions, and adjectives.

Fleshy + torpid + tendrils + stroking + entwining

1) Th Vwls r _W_L

This game will start out as any generic choose-your-own adventure story but after the player makes their first choice the vowels will start disappearing.  At this point the player has the choice to continue with the story or to look for the vowels.  If the player chooses to continue with the story, gradually the other letters start to leave the story to look for their friends.  Eventually the story will get so unreadable that it forces the player to finally look for the vowels, if the haven’t chosen to already.  At this point, the choose-you-own-adventure becomes about figuring out where to find each of the vowels by learning the characteristics of each vowel.

I’m unsure currently of how this will end but I am more interesting in the puzzle aspect of the game than the ending itself so it may be somewhat anticlimactic.  Also, I like the idea of the narrative being self-aware, i.e. knowing that it is missing the ability to provide the reader with the necessary information to continue the generic CYOA (i.e. legible words to describe what’s going on) and is forced to make it known that it is self-aware.

2) Lightbulb

For this idea, I am interesting in generating narrative from very simple actions.  The player controls a lightbulb in a busy room in a house (living room, den, etc.) and has only two options at each choice point: turn on or turn off.  The interesting part of this story will be observing as the lightbulb how such a simple action pushes the storyline forward (or backward0 in different ways. I think that I may want to add a third option that the lightbulb can choose like ‘dim’ to make the storyline more dynamic but am unsure at this point.

I know I want to do graphics for this idea but am still deciding what specifically.  I like a few ideas which could be used independently or in combination: 1) using basic icons instead of words to indicate the choices (i.e. a lit up bulb), 2) drawing newly introduced characters from the vantage point of the lightbulb, and therefore warped in the way things would look as if looking through a fishbowl, 3) drawing some entire scenes through the vantage point of the lightbulb.  Right now I think I’m leaning towards a combination of 1 and 2.

I also imagine that this one will have a lot of hypertext embedded in the narrative itself: since the entire story takes place in one room and the player is controlling a static object in the room, the player should have plenty of time to observe and explore as the narrative goes on.

CYOA

I tend to be a very visually oriented person and seeing breakdown of these choose your own adventure books was rather fascinating and raised good questions about their video/digital counter parts.  Some of these novels were meant to be read and find the ultimate ending, the best outcome.  Like many video games today, there is a lot of dying and sub par plots, but there is always a time when you know you made it all the way.  The question it raised for me was, If you found the “best” ending, woud you go back knowing that no conclusion you found now would beat it?  I liked the authors last example from UFO 54-40 where the true ending has no connection to the choices you make.  It is the ultimate loop hole to keep a reader interested and frustrated.  However, I came to wonder if this is even possible in a video game?  It works as a physical novel because the Ultima ending and the rest of the story exist in a universe where you can step out of it at any time and scramble the story to reveal new information.  I believe this is a unique trait to these CYOA novels.  In a video game everything the player does directly effects the character and environment.  There is no way besides hacking the program to shift the story so much as to find a hidden conclusion that the game designers intended.  If it is possible, I am having a tough time imagining what the experience of that game would be like.  There are plenty of frustrating main stream games, but none designed well enough to provoke the player to delve deeper into their own thoughts and search for an unexpected conclusion.

1) CYOA – One Book, Many Readings

In this article, the author goes into great detail on how CYOA books create a great sense of spatial understanding necessary to read through them, through movement rules.  He explains how, in this way, CYOA differs from other literary forms by swaying the reader to focus more on finding different ways through the story’s space and less on the story’s actual conclusion.  From this standpoint, reading this article made me reflect on how to approach CYOA as an author, in particular when it comes to conveying one’s intent for creating such a story.  From my understanding, this intent can be conveyed through the movement rules themselves.  A good example of this I think is one of the homeplay games, “Everybody Dies”.  Playing this game, I found that I learned about the character development mostly through the narrative, but I discovered more about the author’s perspective through the limitations and later “freedoms” (such as the ability to control multiple characters at once) of moving through the story’s space.  This is also evident in the article’s example describing UFO 54-40. Here, as with every other classic CYOA layout, the reader can move around by following the rules of CYOA but eventually these typical rules must be broken to “finish” the adventure; in other words, the author creates a hidden rule that says break the typical rules of CYOA to “play” my story, and you won’t really get anywhere until you accept the author’s intent of creating a rule-breaking CYOA.

2) Computer Lib/Dream Machines

One of ideas that stood out to me the most in this reading is the following:

“The designer of responding computer systems is creating unified setups for viewing and manipulating things—and the feelings, impressions and sense of things that go with them. Our goal should be nothing less than REPRESENTING THE TRUE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF HUMAN THOUGHT. ”

This thought too addresses the question of motivation behind designing these branching systems for data and where that motivation is most evident.  Nelson is also presenting the argument that the answer is the structure of the design itself (just as in the CYOA article, the rules themselves express the purpose of the author).  This idea is interesting in this larger context of presenting information about our entire world, in particular because this structure is, according to Nelson, supposed to mirror the way human thought works; how it makes connections across information, subjects, and disciplines.  This is intriguing when the same line of thought is applied back to the CYOA branches that occurs in the discipline of literature.  What can then be suggested is that presenting a story in such a way is a better mirror of how the “narrative of life” plays out; nothing is actually pre-determined, but rather every so often there are choices to be made that lead to different consequences.  Even with non-CYOA narrative there is a larger branching structure that may be unapparent to the reader but is intrinsically buried beneath the surface that connects all the thoughts, influences, and decisions that lead to the creation of the narrative in the first place.

I don’t have this idea as fleshed out as I would like it to but the idea is pretty simple. You have very minimal control over this lifeless stuffed animal and this child and world interact with this little bear, often treating it as alive. The choices you make are subtle and do not directly control the stuffed animal because it is of course lifeless. I would love to have interesting illustrations for this story that I make myself but I currently don’t have any that are worthwhile using.

Mr. Bumpy Lumps is sitting quietly on a shelf in a bright pink room. Black glass eyes stare widely at the open door and a huge grin is set on his face welcoming anyone who enters the room. Far off in the distance the indistinct murmurings of a little girl’s voice can be heard from somewhere outside of the room. The window above the shelf is open and a strong wind begins to seep into the room.

>> The wind tips Mr. Bumpy Lumps over off the shelf.

>> The wind shuts the door.

>> Nothing happens.

This wouldn’t really be an enthralling story but I thought it might be a unique way to approach a story.

For my second idea I was possibly thinking of taking the context of the choices completely out of the story. So the reader would choose a bunch of seemingly random choices at the beginning and then the story is revealed and as they read on they can see how their choices made a difference in the story. In a way it is playing with the idea of taking the control out of the readers hands in which interactive stories are known in giving. I did not think that visuals would be necessary for a story like this and I am also at a loss at what the story would actually be. Off the top of my head it would be a story of a little girl who has lost her teddy (I like teddy bears okay!! Gosh!) and goes around this unearthly city in search of it. She interacts with a multitude of characters during this search and the reader unknowingly does stuff to them since they were not given the choice in context.

CYOA:  As far as the readings went I tried to briefly look at all of them but I was most attracted to CYOA most likely because it was not a white onslaught of pdfs. As a visual person I was very grateful for the straightforward and simple visuals that accompanied the text and made it easier to read because of the brief breaks. The reading itself I thought was mildly interesting and I felt as though it covered it’s bases as far as history and thoughts altogether about interactive stories. I also thoroughly enjoyed the animations and galleries of the visual choice paths. It was fun to see the choices taken out of the story and plotted in an appealing way.

Borges reading:

I find it very interesting that this story basically laid out the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics well before it was brought up in the scientific field. It seems to be a very influential story, too; I can think of quite a few works that include alternate timelines in which different decisions have been made as a story element (at least one of which used a literal labyrinth, actually.)

CYOA:

The main thing that jumped out at me here was the description of CYOAs as a finite state machine, because really that’s what they are. Which makes me think about what else to do when writing one on a platform that can handle more information than just state; with a computer, you can track other elements like the whole path the player/reader has taken and whether certain events have been met, which allows you to throw another layer of variance into the story. Gives me some ideas for the project. I’m not sure Twine can track variables besides state though… will have to look in to that.

The garden of forking paths

The thing I loved most about Borjes’ story is the way he frames it. The true revelation of the story has nothing to do with the actual narrative. The branching book only gives the characters’ actions context. We are forced into branching the spy’s narrative with our own imaginations. Albert mentions this possibility in saying that there are many different timelines where they are not friends, unwittingly foreshadowing his own death. As a narrative where every decision is crucial and changes outcomes dramatically, the spy story serves as a much better example of the possibility of branching narratives than the short excerpt we are given of the philosopher’s labyrinth. Borjes turns what could have been a dry explanation of the concept into a fascinating case-in-point.

COYA

I thought this essay mostly consisted of an uniteresting data visualization. I think it either should have been more impersonal and really delved into visualizing COYA books on a massive scale or focused on his own personal experience. The only part that was new to me or really very interesting was the last parragraph about UFO 54-40. I wish he had dissected the tropes and the books that break them in more detail.