English 738T, Spring 2015
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Pirating PG

Posted by Maura-Kate Costello on Wednesday, March 4th, 2015 at 1:04 pm

In thinking particularly about the story section, I thought we could possibly take from Scott McLeod’s comics that allow the viewer to view the story in varying layers of detail by clicking how many frames s/he wanted to read (see here http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/carl/3a/03.html) I think this could work especially well with the story line section, but that it could be used for the other sections as well. It may require us to fill in more detail and write our own parts of narrative in the graveyard/body section.

Also, I was thinking that the way Twine is set up, it still upholds the notion of linearity even if it introduces choice, because in any case you can only ever choose one direction to move. What about being able to choose more than one direction? This would manifest an experience of multiplicity in the reader that I think could be interesting. Is there anyway to get Twine to help us open more than one frame? In the story section, for example, a reader may choose to read the “monster” storyline alongside the “mistress” storyline instead of only choosing one and then (if s/he wanted) going back to read the other one. Also, what if you could read these storylines alongside Mary’s Journal and have three windows open? What would reading be like if a viewer could open all the frames at once? Or if s/he left the frames open as s/he moved through the hypertext?

Finally, and I kind of already began to mention this above, in the spirit of true pirating, what if there was a feature of Patchwork Girl 2.0 that allowed viewers not only to choose which direction(s) they wanted to take but also contribute to constructing the narrative? For example, viewers add their own details to the life-stories of the individuals whose bodyparts make up the female creature, or they add/extend the events that take place in the story section, they add journal entries of Mary while she was creating the monster, for example, or from the interim between her creation and her reencounter with her, or after the creature leaves (or does the creature leave? Mary only thinks that she will… a viewer-writer could change this). Or what about creating a journal by the female creature? Which opens up the further question of who is writing and from which part of the body? Viewer-writers could imagine/contribute all these possibilities.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I think these are ideas that we could at least talk about in class and see if we could incorporate in any way, within the limits of the software we will use/can find.

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