The last extratextual material on my part is the Journal, which Ali and myself have been debating about the inclusion of a interactive narrative mechanic where the player can write within the journal, adding to the narrative themselves. Our discussions of its possible implementation warranted extra research, which is where I found McErlean K’s (2018:123) Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, discussing linear texts, ‘followed easily as long as the story does not contradict itself,’ and non-linear texts, which can risk being ‘led down a meandering ‘blind alley’,’ potentially creating a problem of redundancy if the player has no reason to write within the journal. To remedy this possibility, I sought a basic deconstruction of traditional games found in Engelstein G’s Game Production : Prototyping and Producing Your Board Game book that meticulously outlined the basic elements of traditional boardgames, leading me to conclude that card games have no long-term strategy that requires note-taking, leaving our interactive journal idea both mechanically and narratively redundant (Engelstein 2020). However, in class, Dan mentioned the book House of Leaves which uses meta-text manipulation to craft a narrative. While I haven’t read it myself, Hansen M’s (2004:598) The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” lists examples, namely ‘making pseudoserious references to the blue highlighting on hyperlinks on Web pages,’ which struck me as genius, inspiring me to scrap the interactivity for a scientist journal that slowly degrades into tragedy through text-manipulation, appropriately utilizing the journal text format to its proper narrative use.
Reference List
Engelstein G (2020) Game Production : Prototyping and Producing Your Board Game, Taylor & Francis Group, https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003110309.
Hansen M (2004) ‘The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves”’, Contemporary Literature, 45(4): 597-636, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/10.2307/3593543
McErlean K (2018) Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling : Creating Immersive Stories Across New Media Platforms, Taylor & Francis Group, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315637570