Screenshots of Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China (You can click for larger views)
http://www.inanimatealice.com/
As quoted from the website:
"'Inanimate Alice' tells the story of Alice, a young girl growing up in the first half of the 21st century, and her imaginary digital friend, Brad.
Over ten episodes, each a self contained story, we see Alice grow from an eight year old living with her parents in a remote region of Northern China to a talented mid-twenties animator and designer with the biggest games company in the world."
Currently only the first 4 Episodes are up, and in Episode 4 Alice has reached 14 years old. I strongly encourage you to watch/play them, and START AT THE BEGINNING!
These interactive narrative is written and directed by writer Kate Pullinger and digital artist Chris Joseph.
The prompt for this week:
"Inanimatealice" has a number of distinctively digital features -- hyperlinks, required user interactions, fading and shifting graphic images, etc. The core of the narrative, however, can be told in text-only terms; it could even be printed as a page in a book. What exactly does the story gain from being presented in the new media format. What does a reader get from the story as told on screen that makes it better than the same story told as a text?
I agree with Hayles when she claims that “To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all” (3). We may approach a work with expectations that are grounded in our traditional experience of printed literature, and out “of necessity, electronic literature must build on these expectations even as it modifies and transforms them” (4). The same considerations must be taken in regards to our experience with its interface. The computer is express, if not instantaneous. A certain anxiety level is reached if the player sits on the same page for so long without clicking/continuing, which has been ingrained through our use of this machine. You just don’t have the patience for it. I really was wondering if I was missing something, if I could find something equivalent to a secret song hidden after minutes of silence on a CD, but I could never idle for very long, no instead I was being pulled along. This is harnessed even further in Episode 3 where the player is required to collect dolls in order to continue the story for a new level of interactivity and responsibility directed at the viewer/player. This is one aspect that I think enables the use of the simplistic text to tell the narrative. Had this been reproduced in print to tell the same story it would undoubtedly prove a failure.
Another aspect is the “enhanced sensory range” that players/viewers of the story experience as they are exposed to moving images, seemingly real-based imagery, interactive gaming experiences, and sound (a very powerful element). Hayles addresses this hybrid nature as a “trading zone” where “different vocabularies, expertises, and expectations come together to see what might emerge from their intercourse” (4). The code, or language that lay behind the façade of the screen enhances the experience of the simple narrative that we read. Simultaneously, I think that this is teaching us to block out many levels of awareness of the outside world in order to teach us to be able to comprehend the many levels of experience within this virtual one.
Maybe this is why Alice seems so simple and static to us. Through the story you soon realize that her human interactions are limited mostly to her parents, and as a result she seems to have invented a digital friend, Brad. Like our computers, her player seems to be a projection, or extension, of the self. And this is what you see develop instead of the narrative. And while we all might interact more with each other, and are connected to more people on a virtual level, is it not fair to say that our social ‘real’ interactions have drastically changed as a result? I myself began wondering if Alice was somewhat socially inept at communicating her story to us through the narrative, which I imagine to be her spoken words directed at us.
*N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
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