Deep Crawl Inset

Bronze chamber,
killed harddrive,
covered in a fitful dream,
She with dead thrown expression.
Industrial crawl of curiosity.
Infidels, remnants and grubby horned beasts.
Deep crawl inset now dragged the watched system out of file.
Electric sigils produced.
The spreadeagled carcass ascended in subspace serene.
“Over transmissions, added precaution…”
The imposing metal operatives,
such leaving in death apparent.

Masked Ball

Dirty Star Trek Limmerick

The Enterprise girls(so one hears)
have chased Spock for several years
His look of disdane
has spared them great pain
For his prick is as sharp as his ears

Journal Wk 9 — Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction(IF) usually has you playing as the sole protagonist of a piece of fiction, either in a role(1st person) or as yourself(2nd person), whose actions within the simulated environment of this fiction, influence the outcome of the fiction. You are usually presented with narrative description of a state of affairs and there are several possibilities as to how to proceed.
IF has its origins in game books such as Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy. Of the four IFs played Slouching Towards Bedlam is closest in form to these types of classic hardcopy IFs while the other three are more of experiments in the form.

SLOUCHING TOWARDS BEDLAM
Being the closest in form of the four to classic hardcopy IF, I found this game the easiest of the four to pick up. Furthermore of the four it provides the possibility for longest play, with its greater sense of time, space, and narrative possibility. Though I doubt it would be playable more than once. I thought the idea of having a prop in the background that further provided further information on repeated visits(the grammaphone) was a novel method of advancing the storyline.

GALATEA
This, given that it primarily served as an exercise in Non Player Character(NPC) interacactivity was probably of the four the most inane use of the IF medium, and given that the NPC is not a particulary interesting character, it made replay, though a prospect, not a paticularly tantalising one. An interesting thing about it though I found was the way in which the storyline was affected by Galatea’s mood in combination with the sequence of actions performed.

AISLE
Given its well thought out starting point(a specific point in time in a supermarket) and the one act nature of the storyline, this provides, of the four, the possibility of most replays. This, as well as the fact that the storyline takes place as much in the psyche of the protagonist as his environment certainly makes this IF interesting from an expert perspective, but as a person just playing another game, I lost interest after the first dozen or so stories.

FACADE
Given that it is a real-time multimedia IF, Facade certainly engaged me the most of the four.
Unlike the other three the action is constrained to a situation, as opposed to an environment. It was also of the four the easiest to control. Though it is enjoyable to be played more than once, it won’t take too many plays for a perceptive player with knowledge of computing and has read about the technology behind the game picks up the points where the narrative diverges and work out for themselves the various endings.

NOTES TO SELF:

• The ideal IF would start off in a setting that exercises the most common commands and which requires some obscure series of commands to get to a new setting.
• Interacting with an intelligent entity is the most natural way for a human being to get their bearings in an unfamilar enivronment. Think of a tourist asking directions from people on the street.

Journal Wk12: Serious games

In the following comments, I considered the added constraints faced in designing a serious game as compared to a game designed purely for the sake of entertainment.
The driver seat game was made to evoke empathy for senior citizens on the road. The gameplay takes the form of a series of driving challenges such as finding your way to a particular destination and finding a parking spot etc. The overall aesthetic of the game reminds me of those interactive exhibits you often find in museums.
Speaking from the perspective of a person of the younger generation, the prospect of playing a game that has been purely created to promote awareness, leaving little room for the audience to
draw their own conclusion, especially one which has an annoying mechanic, is not particularly enticing and may even have the opposite effect of what was intended(i.e. might prompt further discrimnation rather than tolerance which i assume was the objective).
Similarly, Dafur is Dying takes an obvious stance on a fairly morally unambiguous issue, namely the plight of the people in the region, and the gameplay, (which like Driver consists of several challenges) reflects this.
Super Columbine massacre RPG, on the other hand, delves into more morally ambiguous territory(namely school shootings) however with no discernable ‘take’ on the events it risks trivialising or even glamorising the issue.
My favorite of the four by far is the Oligarchy game. Like the Driverseat game the overall feel it evokes is of one of those interactive exhibits in a museum. Not only is it the only game of the four to take on its issue with any sense of moral complexity or ambiguity(provoking the player to think through the issue by having them take on the role of the ‘bad guy’), it is the only game of the four that i played through to the end.

Mockup 9

Mockup 8