Final Post

"Justice" an Interactive Fiction Piece by Josh Pierce
Final Essay discussing promoting products through interactive fiction.

Video games and such

I've played a good amount of video games.  Some of my favorites are the Halo, Mass Effect, and the Batman: Arkham series.  One of the best aspects of games are the single player and co op stories.  Multiplayer has never really been my thing.  Compared to other people I am awful at games.  I always play a game for its story or how fun it is with friends.  If it weren't for games, I might be a very different person, but games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Star Wars The Force Unleashed grabbed me into nerd culture.  Nowadays i'm finding myself having more fun with board games, though I haven't ventured out that far.  Its been mainly Mass Effect and Halo Risk and Star Wars Pocketmodels (a buildable miniatures game that went on from 2007-2010).  Pocketmodels are an expensive habit, but not as much as other Star Wars miniatures games such as X-Wing and Armada.

Galatea

Galatea is an interesting piece of IF.  Rather than going on some dungeon adventure or saving a galaxy, all the player does is engage in a conversation with a sculpture that seems to talk back.  The real trick is knowing what to talk about.  The reader must pick out small details within Galatea's dialogue and learn about what she means.  apparently there are over 72 different endings, which is impressive given that so many branching stories try to keep themselves streamlined in order for the author to keep track of continuity.  I never managed to get to the ending of this.  I guess I'm not much of a social person.

MPR, SOE, and TLP response: The Sequel

     I can't really think of what else to say about these three pieces.  I believe I said all I could when looking at them in Digital Humanities.  I guess to rehash I'll say The Last Performance is sort of odd.  That Sweet Old Etcetera is a pretty neat work on an existing poem, and requires a second viewing to see all of it.  Y'know, get the full experience.  Finally Mr. Plimpton's Revenge is pretty funny in its own way, but the payoff is a bit underwhelming (why isn't anyone just whelmed?).

Hitchhiker's Guide

     Well I seemed to have gotten farther in this piece of interactive fiction than any previous ones.  Somehow I managed to survive being run over by a bulldozer after it killed me?  I honestly think I may have broke the game.  I've heard a few times in class that Hitchhiker's Guide is a lot easier is a lot easier if the player has read the book or seen the film, but I have not had that luxury yet.  I went into this completely blind, and it shows in the screencast.  I think I'm lucky to have ended where I did.

Starcross

     Man, for a guy that loves science fiction, I have no idea what I'm doing here.  as seen in the screencast, I barely managed to turn off the alarm.  Every other move I tried to do was not understood.  The game I chose was another Infocom game, Starcross.  Like I mentioned in my last post, it is really hard to play a game with no visuals for me.  Maybe that's due to me being more accustomed to reading comics than books, I don't know for sure, but I tend to give up easily with these games.  Kind of like the Halo games, no control scheme is the same.  There is always something different that throws me off.  Sometimes the game would say there is a small screen, and when I type "look at small screen", it tells me no such thing exists.  I've had this happen multiple times in multiple Infocom games so far, hopefully I get smarter when it comes to playing them.

Zork

     This wasn't my first time interacting with a text-based adventure game.  My interactive fiction class already had a few for me to try out.  But i will admit this is the first time I tried.  I did not get very far though.  In my screencast of Zork I clearly hit a wall that my mind couldn't get over.  I think what helps for me in pieces of interactive fiction are visuals, set choices, or a mix of both.  Dropping someone like me in a fictional world and given no direction to get started just ends with me getting lost (very quickly I might add).

     Games like MNOG have visuals to go by, and they help the player start exploring without directly telling them where to go.  It's the player's curiosity that leads the way.  I'm considering doing five minute screencasts of this and posting them weekly, or filming multiple parts and releasing two or three parts at a time.  Hopefully I can find some way to stitch the videos together, if not I'll just label the videos in parts.

     Set choices are also a great part for me at least to use interactive fiction.  Many works found on inklewriter have this aspect.  Mostly with no visual element to go off of, they give players choices on what to do. There is a set story, one that the player needs to pay attention to.  Text-based adventure games seem to just have a start and a finish, and it takes work to get there, but they feel like a puzzle more than a story.