IF Interaction

Interactive Fiction is a form of literature that is like no other kind of literature, It has a very unique feeling to it. instead of reading all about a character and watching what they choose to do throughout the story, you actually become the character. you choose the path that you have to take throughout the story. you as the character have to reason and figure out how to make it farther in the story. it seems like it would be a walk in the park but IF is the exact opposite. IF has so many little puzzles that can stump you and it becomes very frustrating after a while. for example, say you are stuck in a room, you can not just say leave room, you actually have say things like find the key, use the key, open the door, go outside, etc. i decided to write about my interaction with "all Roads" because i liked that one a lot more than "Galatea" or "Whom the Telling Changed". I liked all roads a lot more than the other two because it was an adventure. you had to be sneaky and find your way around using directions and try not to get caught. when i tried "Galatea" i was bored and confused, i did not like talking to that statue at all. when i read "whom the Telling Changed" i was upset because it was just like a regular story, all you had to do to interact with it was type in "ask" and the narrator told you about the story just like in a novel. the one thing that i did like is that you could choose the narrator but that was the only thing that really grabbed me with this IF. That is why i chose to write about "All Roads". when i first started this assignment, i was very confused as to why we had to why we needed to install a program and download something just to do an assignment. i spent a good half hour just trying to figure out how to get the IF to work. once i got that started, i decided to try this out but i made the mistake of not taking the time to read the directions first. i was very confused as to what it was going to be and i was not ready to have to work as hard as i did to actually get through the story. when i first started i was just pushing random buttons and seeing what happened. i realized that i was not getting anywhere when it kept saying that it did not recognize my command. i exited out of the IF because i was getting so frustrated that i wanted to throw my computer out of the window. i open it up later and i saw "Directions" and i felt like a moron. i opened those and that is when i really started to like IF. when i saw the commands, i got excited about the possibilities that i had and could not wait to get started. When i started "All roads" and i was on top of a building about to be hung and the detail was awesome. it was telling me that there was a crowd of people below me roaring and i did not know what to do when it asked for a response so i just yelled the whole time until suddenly it went back to a menu screen which said press any key. once i pressed a key, i ended up in an empty room tied up and i had no idea how i was going to get out. it specifically said that there was a pile of dust in the corner so i decided to blow the dust away because they would not have said anything about it unless it was important. under the dust was a bottle of wine and a note. when i saw that i had no clue what i was going to do with either of those to get out of this locked room. when you are put in situations like this, you really feel like you are the character and you need to find the way out so you start to think like you would if you were in the situation. i decided to break the bottle to get glass shards to cut the rope but i did not think that breaking the bottle would work, i thought that it was to in depth for the IF. to my surprise, the bottle thing worked and i was shocked. right then i realized that this IF thing was actually gonna be a lot of fun. i thought of it as a video game with all words. as the story went on there were a few parts that i was stuck on. once i got out of the ropes that were tied to my hands, i grabbed the key that was in the room and unlocked the door, once i got out of the door, there was a guard outside. i tried everything in my power to get by this guy, i tried sneaking, running, yelling to distract him, i even tried singing but nothing worked. after all of those efforts i went in the basement to get the glass shard. i was going to kill this guard. no matter how i put it,(cut, kill, slice guard) it kept telling me that he was to big and it was easier another way. then i remembered that there was a note in the basement so i went back to read it. once i read it, nothing happened and i was still stuck from this guard that seemed to be invincible to any action i said. after yelling at least twenty times, it told me to just go and cut him. by that time i was so frustrated that i wanted to give up but something kept me interested, i wanted to see what was going to happen next. i played the story for a really long time until i ended up in the basement again but this time i just yelled until i ended up in a dark hotel room with a random girl. i struggled in that room for at least a half hour and then i gave up. "All Roads" was a very good piece of IF but it was missing a few things. It was more like a video game in that it was all about the actions and reactions and not about the little stuff in between that helps you understand the characters and what is going on in the story. even tthough it was lacking those elements of the story, i would definitely rather read a story with to much interaction rather than a story with too much reading and very little interaction. I feel that this Piece of IF was very interesting and it made me really want to get started on making one of my own.

My First E-Poem

When I was thinking about what I should do for my first electronic poem, I had all sorts of ideas running through my head but I am really happy about the one that i chose to do. I chose to do my first poem on how powerful a smile can be. I had a really good image in my head when I started to work on this poem and I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like. I saw many other electronic poems and I had so many great ideas to what i could have done to express my true meaning, Then I started. I logged onto power point, started a new slide and realized that even though I had all these great images of what I wanted to do, I had no idea how to work this program and that it was going to take me a long time to get comfortable with it. I knew that I wanted to start it off it something dark and gloomy and work from that. after sitting and thinking for a bit, I realized the direction I was going to come from. I was going to start the poem with all of the things that make me frown and upset and end it with how a smile can change all of them. so I brainstormed for a some time thinking about all of the things that make me frown and which one would be great to start with. after some time it hit me, Rainy days Suck! the worst feeling is when its a beautiful day out and big gray clouds roll in to steal all of the sunlight. so I decided to have my poem start as a nice sunny day that gets destroyed by some big gray clouds that roll in and spill rain drops all over my beautiful day. I had no idea how i was going to do this i just knew that is what i wanted and I was going to do anything to make it happen. I looked in the shapes on power point and to my surprise, there were clouds. I selected three of them and colored them gray like big ugly rain clouds. now that I had my starting point, it was time to start playing around. I looked at all the animations and I was pretty comfortable with power point before we started this so I knew what I was looking for. I wanted the clouds to roll in slow and gloomy so I just chose slide in from left and selected slow. once I saw how good that worked, my mind started to jump all over the place with ideas. once I was done with the clouds I wanted to make it rain but I had no idea how I was going to do that. I tried the rain drop shape bit that looked to corny for me. I eventually came up with the idea of blue lines slowly coming down and filling the ground with water but I had no idea how I was going to do that. After trying a bunch of animations, there was one I especially liked because it actually looked like a rain storm, not just lines appearing, they slowly get longer from the clouds to the ground and once they hit the ground I made a blue circle fade in so it looked like the rain was collecting in a puddle. I was really proud of the animation that I had just created and then it hit me, Poetry usually has words in it. I was wondering what I could put to express how these rain clouds made me feel and why they made me feel like. after sitting there puzzling myself for a half hour, I decided to go with a lot more simple approach. I then typed in "Rainy days" and after that my first slide was finished.

After my first slide i realized that i could do a lot more on power point than I had ever imagined. I thought that my poem was going to look like a bad slide show with words flying all over the place randomly in some ridiculous pattern with annoying power point sounds going off, but I was wrong. I was actually able to create a poem that expressed how I feel. I can show visuals that I never would have been able to put on paper in a million years. if i had typed the poem that i am making in this power point and turned it in people would think a fourth grader typed it. The first three lines are, rainy days, getting bad grades, creepy little snakes. That does not sound like a college student wrote that but with the animations, the poem has a complete different feel. After creating my first E-poem I am very excited to see what is in store for the rest of the semester and i can not wait to make another.

Electronic poetry is very new to me and after reading more of these E-poems, i am starting to gain a greater appreciation for them. when we first started the class, i had no idea what electronic literature was. i thought there were going to be normal poems, just on the computer but it was nothing like that at all. you actually have to interact with electronic poetry. you are not just reading words and getting what you feel out of it. You have to sit there and play with the piece, explore it, almost like what you would do with an instrument if you were trying to play it for the first time. The more poems you play with, the better you come at interpreting them. the first poem that i decided to view was "sky" by Mitchell Kimbrough. first there is a black screen and the title of the poem pops up, then it proceeded to go to a black screen again where the words "for my friends" appeared. then the image of a night sky appeared. it started off with the moon starting to slowly rise out of the tree line and the soft voice of norah jones comes on singing her song "Don't know how". as the moon gets higher and higher in the sky, the stars start to come out one by one and the sky starts to get darker. as the moon proceeded to rise higher into the sky, the sky got darker and darker. a few words pop up on the screen one by one and they read, Fragile little didn't might have. as soon as those words leave the screen the black sky starts to over come the trees. then three more words come up, could've, little almost. the tree line disappeared a little more then it says (sweet something) in parentheses then almost had, didn't, and wont appear. now the tree line disappears completely and you are left with a black starry sky. then it says Always tomorrow though, always, a little, almost, might have, next time, then it says (next time). after that happens the screen changes and a little flower pops up. the pedals one by one slowly fall off and float to the bottom of the screen. then the poem ends on a black empty screen. this poem was not an interactive poem but it was definitely a meaningful one. i feel that this poem has a very deep meaning but it is also very straight forward as to what it is trying to say. this poem would not be the same at all without the electronic elements, if i were to read those words on a piece of paper, it would still make sense to me and i would understand what the poem is trying to say but i feel like it would not have the power it does with the music and imagery that goes along with it. even without the sound the poem is completely different.when the poem starts off saying "for my friends" it is pretty obvious that she is trying to reach out to her friends with this poem. the poem starting off in the dusk right before the moon rises is the hope that the author will be there and as the moon raises, it gets darker because the almosts and didn'ts start to come out. it seems like the Creator of this e-poem is apologizing to their friends for not being there, and never following through with things. the sky getting darker and darker seemed to symbolize the creators feelings. as more and more of the almosts, next times, and tomorrows build up, it gets darker and darker. that could symbolize his emotions towards his actions of doing that to his friends and how every time he says those things ,they start to have less and less faith in him. i feel that the flower at the end dying symbolized his friendship dying because he never followed through on anything and he became a liar. in one part it said "theres always tomorrow" which to me symbolized giving up and failure. it meant alot to me because i feel like that sometimes. if you are always saying tomorrow and later, you are never going to get anything done or make anybody happy. when you become like that, you start to be allot less confident because you lose faith in yourself and always take the easy way out. i feel that this was a very simple but expressive piece and without the electronic elements, it would not be as powerful at all. the other poem that i decided to talk about was Nine:puzzling through several lives. i do not know what it was but this is my favorite piece of electronic literature that i have looked at so far. it starts off with eight blocks with random pictures on them and one blank spot in the middle. the pictures appear to be a face, a map, and a letter. to start reading the poem you have to move one of the blocks into the blank spot and the text appears in the new blank spot and reads"born Edward guthrie, seventeenth, December, nineteen sixty seven," then as you move another block it says "reborn, Jason Edward Lewis, twenty seventh, July, nineteen seventy". that right there was the first sign to me that this man is puzzled about who he is. the way this electronic poem was put together could not have been more perfect for the meaning that it is trying to convey. the man who wrote created this poem seemed to be very confused to where he came from. he knew his race but he did not really know what to make of it because he was not raised by either of those cultures. in the introduction he talked about how "a Cherokee woman and an Island man produced a brown baby who was then raised by white folks". he was half Cherokee and half Indonesian but he did not really feel like he was anything. he seemed to feel lost. the way he portrayed his feeling of being confused and lost with the puzzle was genius. it was organized but abstract at the same time. it was in order of a grid but it was all different confusing parts of his life that seemed to all make up his life. the puzzle had a total of thirteen pictures all together that you could make out of the pieces you were given and they all were important in some way. there was a map of Indonesia, there was nature, there were the hills of California, there was a picture of his face, etc.the text only version of this poem gave me a good understanding of what he was trying to say but the puzzle solidified it. the missing block really gave the piece a good meaning because it helped you understand his lost and empty feeling about who he really is. i feel that this E-Poem was a great example of good electronic literature because he used the electronic elements to better portray the message he was trying to give. that is why i feel that nine:puzzling through several lives was a great piece of electronic literature.

My initial response to e-poetry

My initial response to e-poetry based on the pieces assigned so far is that I was not expecting this class to be what it is. I had no idea what I was signing up for when I registered for this class but after seeing the first assignment, I am glad that I did. On the first day of class, I thought that it was going to be old poetry just typed and posted on the internet. Now after reading the first assignments, I realized that this class is going to be a lot different than I expected. The way that the poetry is expressed through the internet is actually pretty interesting. It gives the poems a whole different feeling than if they were just read. I read the last cigarette three times before viewing the action poetry. Once I watched that, I felt complete different feeling from the poem than I got from reading it. It seems like it makes it easier to express the meaning of the poem because instead of just having the words to paint a picture in your head, you have visualizations to actually show you what you are reading about. One thing I can say is that I understood the last cigarettes meaning more than the nine and the mermaid. Those two were a little more confusing but I’m sure over the semester, I’ll be better at interpreting these poems. I am very excited for the rest of the semester and am looking forward to seeing what else we will be learning about.