My final project will be a website about diabetes educators and why they are so important.
November 2006 Archives
Portfolio 2
• Ex 6: Usability Report [Coverage, Timeliness]
• Wikipedia Workshop [Coverage, Interaction, Timeliness]
• Galatea [Coverage, Interaction, Timeliness]
• Photopia [Coverage, Interaction, Timeliness]
• Ex 7: Interactive Fiction Response [Coverage, Interaction, Richly Linked Blog Entry, Timeliness]
I noticed that I seem to follow the same procedure for every Interactive Fiction game that I play. I begin by attempting to kill everything, eat everything, and set everything on fire. Once that’s out of my system, I actually try to play it properly.
When it comes to Emily Short's Galatea, Erin Waite said it best: “Galatea was more about having a conversation than actually getting anywhere.” Galatea was a never-ending question and answer session. I ended up keeping a list and it still didn't get me anywhere. And Adam Cadre's Photopia was just… long.
I played Ninja by Paul Allen Panks and couldn’t get the program to understand most of my commands. I also played Blink, an antiwar game. It had a narrative similar to Photopia. There was also, Conan Kill Everything by Ian Haberkorn. The title is self-explanatory. My favorite was Harlequin Girl by Sean M. Elliott, a horror-genre game where you had to rely on your senses.
The games have a lot in common: they all follow the same conventions, there’s a lot of exploring and examining, but most of all, none of them can make me care about the characters. Though I have felt like killing the main character, I’ve never actually felt like the main character.
I explored the red planet and managed to take the only thing I could: a seed pod. Then since I was about to run out of oxygen, I backtracked to the spaceship and got out in time. Naturally, the parachutes failed to open. After plummeting into the ocean, I wound up in a "home office" where I eventually let some foreign exchange kid drown in a pool. Fabulous.
I was then back inside the spaceship that plummeted into the ocean. I explored an underwater castle, cunningly navigated my way out, explored a beach, found a chest full of dirt, and wound up in a garage. And after all that, the garage is my downfall. I got stuck in the garage and couldn’t figure a way out.
Nearly every word Galatea said was a keyword that you had to ask about. Eventually I started keeping a list. I couldn’t remember all the keywords that I wanted to ask about so I ended up with a messy bit of paper filled with words like “madness” and “chisel” and “anarchy.”
I spent over an hour with Galatea, asked about every little thing she mentioned, and still didn’t finish or win or whatever I was suppose to achieve.
