Final Project Ideas

I'm thinking of using hypertext because it's a genre I am comfortable with. I have been playing around with a few programs to test their versatility so I could also use another genre but It's tough to find a program that is easy to understand and grants the user various possibilities.
As far as the story goes I am planning on using a prose piece that I used for another class. I'm still very unsure how I'm going to tell this story because I have not decided on a program yet. By the end of tonight's class I will (hopefully) have a program chosen.

Galatea by Emily Short Review

Galatea by Emily Short is an interactive piece in which the reader is presented with an image of a woman facing away from them and they ask her a series of questions in order to find out more about her. The game retells the story of a sculptor,Pygmalion, whose statue came to life, but instead of interacting with the artist or playing through the actual myth, this game has the reader interact with the sculpture. The reader is playing a character who is a critic of animate art and Galatea is one of the exhibits of AI technology art, however, as the player examines her you realize she is not an AI.

There are over twenty possible stories you can get depending on the questions you ask and the order you ask them in. Galatea is available for download with the image of Galatea but is also hosted on People's republic of Interactive fiction pr-if.org for readers to play online without the image.

Emily Short, a  pseudonym the author uses, provided a walkthrough on mindspring.com that covered about 23 stories that you can play through. However, she states that she didn't want to provide a walk-through of the game because  Galatea is "a dispenser of stories, customized to the individual who is playing at the moment." Galatea responds to the same questions in different ways depending on the order in which it was asked and in what context, however, sometimes she responds differently for no known reason. In her review of the work  on emshort.wordpress.com Emily Short states that "Galatea has what I call a multilinear plot: unlike traditional IF, it has no single path to victory. Instead there are a large number of endings, some more satisfactory than others, of which many could be considered “win” states. It takes only a few minutes of play to arrive at an ending, but considerably longer to find all of them."

The game itself takes about ten minutes to finish one story, however, if you do not focus on one story line you could end up playing it for hours without reaching an ending. A transcript of various endings is available at allthingsjacq.com which shows how complicated it is to get a response from Galatea that leads to an ending considering the variations there are in the order a player can ask the questions. While Galatea is limited as she is the only character you interact with, it is still a complex interactive e-lit piece which requires the reader/player to ask her questions until an ending is reached.

Emily Short published Galatea in 2000 and was her first piece of E-lit. Since then she has published over a dozen other e-lit pieces but continues to get feedback on her first piece, Galatea. Some reviews on Galatea are available on ifdb.tads.org.

Project #2

After trying out a lot of different programs and rage quitting several of them I decided that it would be easier to work with PowerPoint to get my project as close to what I would like it to be. I tried to upload it to GoogleDocs and found out that it basically renders a lot of the interactive functions useless and the layout is a mess. Instead of uploading a faulty project I will have my computer with me in class so that the project can be viewed by the class.

My project is a prose piece and I integrated sound and interactive elements for the reader. Each slide has a link that the reader presses to continue to the next slide. That is the only input the reader needs to do, the sound and the animation plays automatically. I had hoped to do more but sometimes technological issues and time get in the way of the creative process.

Blog Assignment #8

For Project #2 I've been playing around with Movie Edit Touch for Windows. The program is pretty straight forward and there are a few tutorials online that would guide me through anything I can't figure out how to do on my own. I will be using a poem for this project and I'm planning on using the transitions to emphasize key parts of the poem. I would like to try out different ways to transition from each part of the poem. Ideally I would like to work with flash and create something like the work "Faith" we looked at a few weeks ago, but with my limited experience with it there has not been enough time to tackle it and figure out how to create such a text.

Question(s) for Dr. Flores: What are your preferred programs to use when creating electronic literature? What inspired you to create a blog to respond to e-lit poetry?

Blog Post #7

Spine Poetry