Interactive Fiction

When I learned that we would be doing Interactive Fiction for class, I was initially excited; I remembered those books as a kid where you could " choose your own adventure" that I loved and I thought IF would be very similar to that. I had no idea that IF provided the player with many more options during the interaction that those old "create your own adventure" books did. Rather than simply choosing between, let's say, entering the cave or going around the cave, the reader is faced with numerous possibilities for interaction that are not clearly defined. The reader must choose the questions to ask, the path to take, the objects to hold as well as any other interactions. One example of this type of interactive fiction is " Galatea"



When Galatea first begins, the reader is introduced to a statue of a women who is standing alone. This is called the prologue From this point on, the reader is essentially in charge; the scene has been set and the reader must now "create" the story as they see fit. Throughout the story, the reader opens up a complex world that is this women's life. Galatea allows the reader to see into her past, her feelings, and her thoughts about her situation. These responses to the questions the reader poses are called "outputs" according to Monfort.







I began interacting with Galatea by saying Hello. She responded to me, and I began to ask questions ( called inputs) to her such as " tell me about your sculptor" or " tell me about hearing." Galatea responds to these questions and her responses oftentimes lead the reader into a new direction and prompts them to ask new questions. When Galatea first begins talking, her responses are short and to the point. She also gets angry or annoyed if the reader asks the same question more than once, responding curtly with " I already told you everything I know." At this point in the story, I noticed that at the top of my screen it said I had a back view of Galatea. This is an important element to the meaning of the story. When the reader first starts out speaking with Galatea, she is not facing them and her responses are vague and cold. She does not seem interested in interaction with the reader. As the story progresses and the reader gets to know Galatea better, she gains more patience with the reader and even begins to turn toward them. This signifies that she is growing increasing more comfortable with the reader and she is willing to share more of her personal life. Essentially, Galatea is like a date; at first she is a bit skeptical and aloof, but as the reader asks better questions and gains her trust, she begins to warm up to the idea of conversation and accept the possibly of some type of connection between herself and the reader.





After the initial introductions, I began to ask "harder" questions of Galatea. As I questioned her, we began to talk about her sculptor. I think this dialogue was essential to the development of the story and a pivotal point in which the relationship between the reader and Galatea begins to grow. We learn that Galatea has feelings for her sculptor and she speaks of him very fondly. She seems a bit hurt that he did not have romantic feelings for her as well.


I played the story numerous times and each time my interactions brought me down a different path. This is exactly what the intention of IF is; it allows the reader to experience different outcomes based on the questions they ask (or don't ask) and the order in which they ask them. The first time I played, I did not know that I needed to slowly peel back the layers of Galatea before asking personal questions and I jumped right in. She got angry with me very quickly and refused to speak to me. The game ended for me and I was given the directives of " Restart, Restore, or Quit." The next time I played, I was much more successful. After much prodding and picking, she eventually stepped off the pedestal and ran away with me, madly in love. What can I say, I'm a charmer. Another time I played, she turned and faced me within the first couple questions I asked of her which is different from the slowly changing views I had experienced up to that point.



One element of the game that I found extremely useful was the "help" feature. There were times throughout the game that I was confused as to how to phrase what I wanted to ask. I felt like I was running out of options, but after reading the help screen, I realized that not only could I ask Galatea questions, but I could tell her about myself as well. Recap was also extremely helpful. At some points, I had made my way deep into the story and I had forgotten some of the questions I had previously asked her. Rather than ask again and risk bothering her, I simply checked out the recap and got to read all my inputs up to that point in the game.



Ultimately, I think Galatea is more like a game than a story, but good arguments can be made for both directions. Galatea can be seen as a story because the creator obviously put great time into developing the character of Galatea. I ask shocked as to how many of my questions actually had responses. At one point, I even asked Galatea about cheese and she had a comment on it. We learn that Galatea is guarded but she has an interesting past and clearly defined opinions on different topics. She is the only character in the story we get to interact with, but the interactions are filling and rich with detail. When Galatea gets asked a question, many times she goes into great description when giving her response. Many of the IF pieces we have interacted with before give shot responses that lack any real substance, but Galatea provides detail. Galatea seemed more like a game to me because throughout my interaction, I kept thinking to myself that I had to "win.' Winning, to me, was avoiding frustrating her and having her open up and continue to tolerate my questions. As I said before, Galatea was like a first date where I was trying to make a good impression and figure out the "code", if you will, to allow myself another opportunity with her. I knew I was making progress in the "game" as she slowly turned and began to face me more and more. I also thought Galatea was similar to a game because the location never changed and we were never introduced to more characters. I feel like for a story to take place, there needs to be interaction between different people. Galatea was the only person the reader was able to have a conversation with. It also lacked a real plot.

Overall, I enjoyed Galatea more than any other piece we have experienced thus far in class. After reading the help section, my interactions with the piece were relatively easy. The author of the piece anticipated a large array of questions and many of the things I asked about were given responses. Galatea was fun to interaction with and I enjoyed getting to know her better as the work progressed.

Work Cited: Nick Monfort's "Twisty Little Passages"

Powerpoint Interaction

As a Gemini, I have a creative side to myself that I frequently try to express. I love scrap booking, making doodles, making cards…pretty much anything that has to do with arts and crafts. I spend many dollars and devote countless hours to these endeavors. There is one small downfall, though. I may be the worst artist on the face of the earth. Regardless of my desire, I have absolutely no ability. Try and try as I might ( and trust me I do) I can’t seem to get over the demeaning fact that my parents used to throw my art-work out when I was in middle school. With that being said, I highly doubted that my creation of E-poetry would differ much from my the outcome of my creative endeavors in the past. Even with tools such as Microsoft Office and iSpring, I feel inadequate; I just can’t seem to get the thoughts and ideas in my head expressed eloquently on whatever medium I am working with.
I decided, for my first piece, to use a stanza of a song I love. Song is just poetry in motion, right? After having an introduction to Microsoft Powerpoint in class, I felt like I had a basic ( and by basic I mean 3rd grade level) understanding of how to create my E-poem. The poem that I chose is about how children who are still learning about the world have very different views than adults about topics such as homelessness. The author in this poem is describing how she was shocked to see a homeless person on the sheet. She wondered how others around her seemed unaffected by this occurrence but it stopped her small little world in its tracks. She then goes on to talk about how, through our socialization, we learn to just keep “ moving our feet” and ignore the things we really should care about. I wanted to create a general feeling of hurry in the poem yet find a way to distinguish the words of the author from the world in which she lives, which is fast-paced. I began by finding a picture of a busy street and setting that to the background of my slide. I then took the first line of the poem, “ I remember the first time I saw someone “and put it in a text box at the bottom left side of the screen behind a women who was walking quickly.
I then had to decide how I wanted my text to enter the screen. Going with my previous ideas about how I wanted to poem to turn out, I decided to have it come up from the bottom slowly. I highlighted the text and then I went to the Animations tab and then to Custom Animations. A box appeared on the right with numerous options as to how the text could appear on the screen such as " Splash, Random Bars, Split, Wedge, and Wipe." The list goes on. Before this assignment, I truly had no idea as to how many options there were for the entrance of text! It was easy to choose which one I wanted; I simply chose "Ascend" and then I went to the option for speed on the right and chose "Medium." I originally tried slow ( the options were very slow,slow,medium,fast or very fast) but I thought that was TOO slow and the reader would get bored waiting for the text to appear. I then created another text box and placed it after the women which read ' lying on the cold street.' I chose to have this one in bold font to really hit the point home and to have it come in through the "Blinds" effect; I didn't want to make this one fancy because it is intended to evoke sorrow. I also wanted to add sound, which was somewhat difficult to achieve. I wanted to use the sound of a busy street, but there was nothing similar to that in the pre-loaded options. Of course, I could have uploaded a sound of my own, but that seemed like a long process which I did not want to invest the time in experiencing. My first slide was complete!
For my second slide, the lines were " I though, I just can't walk past you, this can't be true." At first I was a little lost as to what to put as a picture, but then I decided on a literal interpretation of the text. I chose a picture of a homeless person. Naturally, there was no pre-loaded pictured for that, so I had to upload my own. I was surprised as to how easy it was to put an image on a slide that wasn't in clip art. After I had my image, I created my text box again, with all the words, and chose to have them "grow and turn" which made the words appear almost one at a time without it seeming like they were separate thoughts.

For my third slide, I decided to get a little more involved with the piece. As intimidated as I was, I decided to utilize the hyperlink feature. I wanted to experiment with a hyperlink that would bring the reader to the next slide.The reader would have to click on the last set of feet in order to move on in the poem, which to me, was symbolic of the last step a person would normally take past a homeless person before they were out of view ( hey, I warned you I'm not creative) and out of mind. I created my new slide and copied 3 identical pictures of footprints. I then added my text, which was " But I learned by example, to just keep moving my feet." and then I began to tackle the hyperlink. Unfortuantly, this was easier said than done. I was met with a screen of options ( pictured below)that I had no idea how to get past.
After some looking around and choice words, I saw how easy it really was. There was an option on the left side that said " Place in This Document" where I could choose the next slide. I immediately felt a sense of accomplishment and moved on to my last and final slide.
This was my grand finale! I looked through a couple options on PowerPoint as to what else I could incorporate into my poem but didn't find anything that quite fit what I was looking for. I decided to try the sound again. This time, I was going to read the final text of the poem rather than look for pre-loaded audio. This is where I had my most fun. I understood the concept of E-poetry before this assignment, but I think this is where I first began to truly understand how different elements can effect the meaning of the poem. I wanted to record the words " It's amazing the things we all learn to do" and it took me a good 10 minutes of pondering how I wanted to say them and another 20 trials before I said it the way I wanted it! I realized that I can say those few words so many different ways. I can be sad, surprised, disappointed, reflective, ... the list just goes on. The tool for sound was really easy to use; as seen below, it was a few simple buttons.After I decided on saying my line in a disappointed tone, I had to find a picture to go along with it. I wasn't going to use words in this slide because the reader was going to hear them. I chose to do a picture representing conformity. In my picture, there are many red balls and one blue ball. The picture has no words. I think it should be noted that throughout the course of my poem, my intentions changed a bit. Although it was short, I decided to make the end a bit of a commentary on stepping outside of traditional actions and choosing your own path. The song lyrics/poem that I chose does allude to that, but I chose to allow the reader to see a picture and draw their own conclusions based on the picture given.
After using Microsoft Powerpoint to create my poem, I would have to conclude that it is relatively easy to use, even for someone who has not worked with it before. I did not know how to introduce sound or a hyperlink before this assignment, but I was able to figure out how to incorporate them with relative ease. The tabs at the top of the page are pretty descriptive and lead the reader in the right direction most of the time. My only advice is to save frequently because at one point, I deleted an entire slide with one click. Luckily for me, I know how to use the "undo" button but for someone who is a bit less computer-savvy, that might be a disaster.
Based on my creative nature, I did enjoy this assignment and I thought the creative process was enjoyable. My poem was relativity straightforward but it took me almost two hours to complete. This is not the fault of the program, but rather my fault. I experimented with many different elements of the poem before deciding which one I wanted to choose, so it did take a considerable amount of time. I can see how someone could easily get carried away in the many features of this program, but I would say that I did not. I think adding too many elements to E-poetry takes away from the meaning behind the poem; readers should be able to interact with the poem on a straight-forward basis ( in my opinion) to prevent them from getting discouraged from reading further. I think PowerPoint added to the creative process well, especially with the sound. I was able to put my own twist on the poem and express it how I saw fit. I also enjoyed choosing pictures to accompany the words on the page, although I used a literal interpretation of the words.
In terms of frustration, I don't think I experienced much when creating this work. I would have liked to add the sound of a busy street, but that was not an option that was pre-loaded. As I mentioned, somebody with more time and expertise than me could utilize that feature, but it just wasn't something I chose to do. I also would have liked to use moving pictures on my E-poem. I believe that too can be utilized in the program, but I could not figure out how. As I've said multiple times already, I really enjoyed recording my own sound which is something I normally would have shrugged off as too difficult.
Ultimately, I think the software changed my muse a bit. I don't think it enhanced it or stiffled it as much as it did point me in a direction I had not considered before. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the ability to record my own voice saying the last line made me re-think the poem and all the different ways those simple words can be spoken. I think, if given the choice, I would use a pen and paper to create a poem FIRST and then use powerpoint to present it after it was completed. I feel like if I were to write a poem using Powerpoint to start with, I would never be able to finish because I would have so many different influences and elements pulling me in opposite directions. Of course, after I wrote the poem I could change it a bit depending on what inspired me with PowerPoint. I think Powerpoint offers a user who has limited computer ability many great options to create poetry and it can act as a great beginner/intermediate program for those interested in becoming E-Poets.