Hypercompendia

Haven’t been here for a long time, but find that the newest student portfolios of animations are absolutely superb!  Ringling College of Art and Design

What talent!  What fun!

Several months ago I downloaded the fabulously organizational software program from Eastgate that is Tinderbox and promptly started a project that was basically my "to do" list.  Unfortunately, I have a tendency to avoid a "to do" list even if it’s magneted (yes, I love to make up words) to the refrigerator door.  The associated guilt is just too much to handle.

There’s another project ripe for the Tinderbox environment though: literary submissions.  In this, the prime time for reading, I’ve found myself sending out stories via online submissions and email, no longer as willing to plaster a couple dollars’ worth of stamps as the cost of rejection. While it’s easy to look up these submissions online, and there’s usually an acknowledging email, both processes that can be categorized on the mail program and the browser favorites, I think it’s time to maybe realize that it’s a job that Tinderbox could better structure given all the dates, stories, places, and feedback that is starting to look octopusal (another one!) in my mind.

Okay, so here’s the deal: the project’s been added to my "to do" list, but seeings that this is time-sensitive, I’m going to make myself sit down and get started–though first I’ve got to clean a couple of those "to do’s" off my schedule, such as "plant beans."

Some neat new pieces over at Alan Bigelow’s Webyarns, including an interactive cartoon that brings in a bit of animation.

It’s been done to a certain degree, is being done each time a user goes online: a story is being written following a series of plot points from hypertext link to link.  But…

What if a story was consciously plotted out from web pages? 

Simple example: A story called Dawn to Dusk with a starting point of a title page set up on a website, with a clickable link to an image, likely one found on Google of a dawn, then…

Okay, ran smack into my first problem: overriding the intended link found on the site. Also, overseeing the "reader’s" path or paths. 

One workable method (though likely not with the Google dawn above) is to carefully select each site to ensure that it not only bears linkage to a possible narrative flow, but also that a "clue" of sorts is given so that the reader is directed or guided on a preplanned thread.

Interesting.  But then again, this could also somehow be done on a single website through pages, but that’s cheating.

Intrigued by references to Outbreak via Mark Bernstein and Chris at Gimcrack’d I got a chance to play with this hyperdrama a bit this morning.  My first thought, just in the five seconds of the opening screen, was Night of the Living Dead.  The original movie made in 1968 was the first time I’ve ever left a movie (or turned off the TV) in all my horror-loving years.  I remember that since no one would see it with me, I went to the drive-in alone and, loaded up with popcorn and soda, sat back in the summer evening to enjoy.  And at the point where I just couldn’t take any more–okay, scared–I unhooked the speaker off the car window and went to hang it on the post but it made a small clink that got two girls in the next car screaming. Just recently I fell upon the movie on TV and in the safety of my own home, with my husband asleep in the next room, watched it all the way through.

Well Outbreak is indeed a zombie movie and not too bad at that. Somehow though, the small screen of a laptop monitor doesn’t project the fear for this–while playing with games such as Silent Hill II did indeed get my pulse hammering. I found myself just as inept at Outbreak as with all such interactive stories I’ve played–including IF.  I got killed several times before I found my way past the danger.

As Chris notes, there’s some odd combinations of outcomes based on moral decisions made, but then, when is doing the right thing always a guarantee of success? This, as with most video games, is geared towards personal survival.  In truth, TV reality shows have this purpose, and sadly, appear to mimic a society that also follows this principle.

The neat thing is that horror is the perfect genre for hyperdrama, providing that ability that’s been kept from us for years: “No! Don’t open that door!”  With hyperdrama, we can indeed lead the protagonist to safety, or if we’re feeling evil, to his doom.

After several plays I did get to a point where the combination of moves kept me alive–but only by backtracking which is a nice feature that I wish life itself would offer.  Via a map (below), the interactor can retrace his steps and make that “other” choice.  In summary, I guess I’d like to see more of this type of hyperdrama; in an age where even commercials are animated based film of real living people, it’s kind of neat to get back to the reality–or pseudo reality, since after all, it’s film–of life in gaming.

Germinating: a hypertext novel based on political intrigue and lies. Depending upon from which character and at what point in the narrative that you read a scenario as to how it affects its believability and the ultimate possible outcomes. Perfect for hypertext; a mapping of events and recall and perspective.

Just too lazy to do it.

Getting antsy to get back into hypertext, or maybe IF as well, but the open season on reading straight stuff is nigh.

New ideas forming, perfect for Storyspace and loops and deadends: a dark political scenario; a trip beyond life and back; a little boy who never grows up; a train that makes unscheduled stops; an old man who dreams himself dead.  All dark, all intriguing, all calling to me at once.

Even though I’ve not worked on this hypertext short story a while, my mind is still on it and I realized that I had written a quickie poem about Pittsburgh that brought out another character that just might show up in this hypertext as a bit player:

Small Change

Oil the focus of a brief conversation
slips into a dream that night
of a one-legged black man in Pittsburgh
still swinging on crutches like a pendulum
through the slick surface of day

Why didn’t I dig deeper than a handful
of change, quarters and copper and dimes?
Even once, stop for a moment
and pull out wrinkled green paper or
simply ask him his name?

What makes memory fly like the swallow
and silverflash upstream with the salmon
what makes me want to return back
to Pittsburgh and talk to an old man
before the cold winter winds come home?

I realize I’ve been fairly silent here of late and when the muse returned it seems to have come in the guise of straight text and poetry, an old fashioned entity that admittedly endures.

When life and time and mood return to normal chaos I shall return with it held in my hand to spread among the paths and pages which hypertext allows.

Deadended with my own work so have wandered back to IF temporarily.  First up: Emily Short’s Glass.

Downloaded Spatterlight to play it in, and true to form, I’ve already married off Prince Charming to the evil stepsister Theodora instead of finding Cinderella.

I’ve long since forgotten the ‘knack’ of IF, and will hopefully get back on track without going through the frustration of Photopia that started me out on this a few years back.  There were a couple of things that did confuse me though.

One was that suddenly I was addressed as "you" so I did not know who the hell I am (maybe Cinderella? — though I did try to claim the slipper as my own and that didn’t work).  The other was that while I had the Prince ask "Where is Cinderella?" and at one point have the word half-spelt out by the program, there is the story line that seems to contradict and says he did not get her name at all (thus, the need for the glass shoe to fit some unnamed someone). 

But this is just the first go-round and normally I’ll put lotsa time in before I give up in defeat.