Meredith Week 5

 I liked learning about how these games came to be. Rettburg writes that sometimes interactive fiction is considered a game if it can be “won” or “solved” and Adventure was the first popular IF game, developed by Will Crowther. I thought it was wholesome that he made it for his kids to be entertained at his house after he got divorced, and it’s also cool that the World Wide Web allowed others to play this game. Without that, a lot of digital creations would be a family home game. The IF games are very community-driven, according to Rettburg. I also learned the difference between parser based games, where there is a parser that responds to the player’s typed instructions, versus hypertext games like Howling Dogs. Those are easier for authors to design using Twine because they just have to create hyperlinks for the next step in the game. I think it would be fun to design a hypertext game, but also stressful because of all the different paths that you have to connect. After reading the article about Zork, I saw the maps that the designers created which made a lot more sense to me as a visual learner. Without drawing it out, there’s no way I could keep track of all my storylines.   

For my digital piece this week, I did a deep dive into Howling Dogs by Porpentine. I know we’ve talked about it in class before but I went to go play it and I thought it was eerily similar to our own lives now. It is a hypertext game where you are in a cell, with food and water to drink, and a bathroom to shower in, and you have a trash chute. Other than that, you have a photograph of someone I presume you care about, and a room with a VR headset that you can put on after you eat and drink. Then, you can enter exciting, colorful storylines, but at the end of them you take the VR headset on, go to sleep, and wake back up in your cell. It reminds me of how when we are unhappy with our own lives, we go scrolling through social media to escape our own reality, only to return to our own lives when it’s necessary.