Type:Rider is a really intriguing artefact, and I was hesitant to write about it for IM1 seeing as it’s not necessarily an interactive documentary or anything of the sort – it’s a video game. However, the reason why I think it’s significant to our learnings is that it uses the interactive form to give documentary-style information about the history of typography. I’ve been looking at a few K-films, but haven’t quite got the knack of writing about them yet (which I will need to do for the film essay). I decided to write about Type:Rider in order to get a bit more understanding of the umbrella form of i-docs before moving on to focus more specifically on K-films for the remainder of the course.

My first impression of Type:Rider is that you can tell a lot of attention has been paid to the interface – it is very ‘designed’ and aesthetically beautiful. The game requires you to use the keyboard arrows to navigate your character (a colon, of the punctuation kind…) through an obstacle course of letters and glyphs in order to unlock the page of information about a typeface before levelling up to the next typeface. The goal is to collect an entire alphabet of floating letters, whilst avoiding pitfalls and barriers.

I loved that I was actually using my whole hand to utilise more of the keyboard space instead of just clicking a mouse (which you do in Korsakow). It didn’t quite feel like I was learning because I was gaming at the same time, which I think is a very effective (and sneaky) psychology behind interactive education.

The music is very ‘designed’ as well, developing with the gameplay. Each time you progress to the next level/typeface, the music adds a layer to itself, mirroring the ‘progress’ which the content is showing.

At first I thought there was a good amount of text to keep the audience interested, but it quickly became boring to scroll through (I couldn’t figure out if this was because I wasn’t engaged with the content, or because the scroll function was very slow and I couldn’t read at the pace I wanted to).

There was a great element of adventure and excitedness in Type:Rider, which really drove the content. I really liked that I found myself paying so much more attention to the actual letter forms that I would normally, due to the fact that the lines and circles of each letter were actually becoming the things you needed to utilise and/or avoid in order to progress to the next level.

It is very clever how they designers have incorporated things into the interface of the game – for example, in the level when you are learning about moveable type and the letter press system, a big printing-press machine appears and tries to crush you, which you quickly need to avoid.

The difficulty with a medium such as this is that games cause frustration. A format like this can mean that viewers might not necessarily stay as long as you want them to if they get stuck on a particular part of the game (which is exactly what happened to me!). I’m going to need to keep this in mind when creating the final Korsakow project, and be mindful of our audience with every authorial decision we make.