Interactive Fiction/Gamelike Forms - Gwen West

     Playing Zork was so incredibly frustrating. I was trying to hard to orient myself and figure out what I was looking at and what objects I could pick up or use, but it was so difficult to keep track of it all. I could definitely see how people would love this game and become obsessed with it, there are so many layers and spaces within this form of digital literature. It was interesting to read more about Zork in this week's chapter, as well. I found it cool that Zork was one of the first "computer games" to truly blow up in the 80s and 90s. It's so simplistic but also has incredible depth and was ahead of its time. The computer games that I played when I was younger involved lots of designing clothes, dressing up characters and styling their hair, but digital games have come such a far way from their start in the 70s. My brother and I used to play all sorts of things during the early and late 2000s, and the detail of these games and the realistic components are becoming more and more accurate by the year. Especially now with AI, there is a huge potential for online/computer games to become extremely similar to real life. Graphics aside, I feel as though the most vital part of a computer game that classifies it as "e-lit" is the plot, or storyline. If there is a detailed plot with different directions it could go depending on the user's experience, it makes the game "literature" to me. When there is a real purpose or and end goal of the story, the user is learning something and embarking on a literary adventure to get there. 

    This week, I am bringing "Photopia" by Adam Cadre to the table. This was such an interesting story to read, and the Red and Yellow spaces were a cool detour from the tradition linear presentation of time in a fiction story. I really liked how Cadre used a somewhat linear but very detailed plot while using this unique narrative style to tell this story. I enjoyed the metaphor in relation to Alley's life during this story, through the usage of the Red mars kind of planet and the Yellow beach area of the story. Overall, this was a really cool snippet of the interactive fiction world and I am excited to see what everyone else will bring to the table this week!

https://archive.org/details/photopia


Comments

  1. Abby T.February 26, 2023 at 1:06 PM

    I had a really hard time with Zork too, I think because I was just not used to giving commands like that. But I agree, I can also see how people could get into it, it's just really hard when it's your first time with something like that

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