Photopia

It's really interesting to me as to how interesting Cathy's Book and Photopia were. Both of them were plainly written with zero flare yet it just kept building momentum. When diagramming the narrative of Cathy's Book from left to right on a linear line in class and then putting all of the little side bits to the top and bottom all I could think about was depth vs breadth. The side information to Cathy's Book and other args could be looked at as depth, but the way I saw it was as the narrative being extremely wide with each part not being terribly deep but the sheer breadth of it all makes it great. The main narrative could be incredibly well written and that would be nice, but it doesn't have to be. Photopia and Cathy's Book are both similar in how they use mystery and interaction to propel themselves forward.  read more »

When I first tried Photopia, I was so confused!  read more »

Earlier this week, I beat Photopia. It took me many hours to do this because before this class, my experience with videogames only included Mario Brothers and occasionally watching guys play Halo or MLB baseball.

Every game has rules and also as I found out, limitations. Sometimes I would write, “Pick up shovel,” and the game responded with, “do not know that verb.” Instead, I needed to say, “Take shovel. Dig.” Other times, to amuse myself, I ‘played’ with the game by giving the game instructions such as, “Sit.” The game would humorously retort something to the effect of, “You cannot sit on Alley. You are an adult.” I found that there were a lot of things I was not allowed to do, like eat on any occasion or in outer space.  read more »

I'm not a huge fan of anime, but sometimes watching a Japanese cartoon in Japanese (with subtitles, of course) can really make you think.
I recently saw the movie Paprika, an anime movie that won some sort of Oscar, and it was amazing. The plot mainly focused around the differences and relationships between the imagination (dreams) and reality.
In the movie, there were several dreams that recurred in the minds of the main characters, with many different conflicts happening in each of them, until finally, the dream took over even the reality of the city in which the main characters were living, leading to a final battle in which dreams and reality are pitted against each other to see which one wins out.
Just in case you haven't seen it and you want to, I won't tell you the end, but the movie definitely made m think, especially in relationship to Photopia and Ryan's discussion of fiction and nonfiction.  read more »

To be bluntly honest, I didn't find Photopia to be a particularly noteworthy experience, though certainly unique. I think this may be solely based upon the fact that the game has such minimal interaction. Between puzzle games, side-scrollers, and quasi- RPG adventure games, I've spent a lot of years minimally playing video games where you push a button and things happen right off.

In Photopia- which isn't exactly a video game, but a game all the same - there is a lot of trial and error as you have to figure out commands, which is hardly anything new in the spectrum of gaming. The chance that the action you just took two seconds ago could be rendered completely useless within seconds. Adding to this frustration is the fact that all the dead end running happens in an optically unchanging environment (meaning you're looking at the same basic format of screen outside of the changing colours.) When you run into dead ends at the start of Zelda games, you're probably looking at new, fullscreen, scenery until you start walking in circles or at least seeing your commands in action. In Photopia, some more text and a prompt appears and maybe border colours change - yay.  read more »

I very much enjoyed Photopia's weaving of stories. It created a colorful blanket with almost seamless transitions (the angels in the crystal city and gym scenes, the over and under water moment) in a semi-linear fashion. While the text was, for the most part, presented out of order (except for the astronaut storyline), I was still able to piece it together. Because of this format, the game reminded me of the movie Memento, in which the story is presented in snippets in reverse-chronological order. Photopia's interactivity made the story a little easier to figure out and follow than if it had just been a straight presentation. The fact that I had (limited) options made me feel more involved, though I feel like I need to go back and play again to choose other options (like asking about the wolf, for instance--what would I have learned?). My guess is that none of those choices would change the ultimate outcome of the text, but it is nice to think that there are other satellite bits of info available to enhance the storyline.

Photopia made me interested in Interactive Fiction. I enjoy seeing how writers and artists can experiment with communication and narrative in different media, and I think Adam Cadre is extremely creative in how he works with a medium to interact with a reader/viewer/player/etc.

Although I found Photopia intriguing -- like reading an interesting book -- I don't think it was as impacting for me as it was for other people, judging by their blogs, but I decided that I enjoyed it enough to check out some of Cadre's other work.

The comments about Cadre's "Shrapnel" made the game seem unresistable:

"Unsettling. Brilliant. Damn you." —Ian Finley

"Really good game, but REALLY CREEPY. I honestly woke up with nightmares after playing it." —Sean Gaffney

"This was the most unsettling piece of IF I've ever had the pleasure to play." —Oren Ronen

"I think I'm now warped for life." —Alan Monroe

Could it really be that disturbing? I guess my penchant for trying to scare myself (see my last post about Silent Hill) got the best of me.  read more »

Okay, so I finished Photopia. I thought it would all make sense when I reached the end, but silly me, I'm still confused.

I suppose I should put a spoiler-alert here. If you haven't played the game yet and don't want to know anything about it in advance, then read no further, my friend.

So, there's a bunch of different story lines. Alley's the main character. She makes up stories--one of which is about the astronaut Wendy and her adventures. We seem to be flashing to different points in Alley's life: from when she was a child, to her babysitting the actual child Wendy, to when she gets hit by the car and possibly dies. Then there's the part at the end where photopia is a pretty light display that Alley's parents are showing her as a baby. That's the part I don't understand. Does it negate the rest of the story? Are all the other scenes just dreams induced by photopia, or is this just a flashback? And what about the queen and the wolf and the rest of the story? I'm so confused. I guess I'm off to google or wikipedia to find someone who can tell what the point was...

I haven’t played much computer adventure games in my lifetime but would conclude that Photopia was enjoyable to experience. I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first but as I got the hang of it I noticed that there was more than one narrative taking place. It would seem that these different stories did not relate to each other at all but impressively at the end the stories come together marvelously.

I didn’t understand the color changing until I looked up the definition of Photopia-“vision in bright light” (dictionary.com). It was then that I understood how the title was complementing the game or even vice versa. There’s probably more to it than that but that was enough for to understand the oddity of the color changing taking place between plots. I found it interesting that after certain vocabulary words definitions were interjected. Honestly, I felt slighted that I was being told what 2nd grade vocabulary terms stood for.  read more »

well, now that I have actually played Photopia and not something else, I can say that I thought it was pretty entertaining (more so than adventure or zork). it was more like reading a good book; it didnt really feel like a game either. I did like that fact that you could ask for some clues, especially in the forest. I think that the "game" was very well written, and since I got to play another game by accident, I can definitely see a trend in Cadre's work: sarcastic, humorous, and engaging. I'd have to say this has been my favorite assignment yet!

Photopia really spells things out for you which I find hilarious. If you have a very loose grasp on the english language, you may be able to play it because it really defines words such as depression. Anyhow, I really enjoy the way the game switches back and forth between stories. I loved the explanation from the little girl when she says "I wanted to see if the world looked the same UNDER the water as it did OVER it" and then BOOM! Back to the ship underwater...nice touch. I also find it hilarious that the character is capable of having a long conversation with alley about things in space while she can't swim...that was hilarious.

I enjoy photopia's take on the story and how it focuses much more on narrative rather than puzzles. The story reminds me a bit of "Waking Life" one of my favorite movies (and it also deals with a favorite topic of mine...lucid dreaming). What reminds me about the movie is not the story but rather the jumping in and out of certain chunks of narrative without much explanation.

I would certainly give photopia an A+ and have enjoyed this the most out of all of our interactive narrative that we have dealt with thus far.

So I've been playing Photopia for about 30 minutes now, and I can't seem to get anywhere without getting myself killed. I like this text interaction game better than adventure and zork mainly because it's funnier. the quotes are hysterical, but I'm starting to get frustrated because i can't seem to get to any other color than green part of the game. In adventure, it seems like it was easier to figure out what to do; you pick up a key, grab the lamp for dark places, and unlock doors when need be. Photopia isn't as straightforward in the mission, and whenever I try to get into a guarded place, I get killed. luckily there is an undo button!

the final part where is got stuck was when I was in the tower with the princess, attempting to take off her straight jacket. I can't seem to undo it, but if anyone can give some clues to what to do next, I'd appreciate it!

Photopia, for me, was "Adventure" and "Zork" on steroids, and definitely the first text-based game that I played and did not suffer through (that maze, though...ugh). First, advances in the parser technology made my grasp of commands much easier. And back to color. How is it that a simple coordination of color would make the game not only entertaining, but even suspenseful. An entertaining current novelist whose literature I enjoy reading is Chuck Palahniuk, and his style of discourse often shifts perspective with each section or chapter, similar to Photopia. Many authors employ this shift, but that is one. Often, however, it is difficult to recognize this change until the characters have been introduced (or re-introduced) into the narrative. The change in color is an alert to this technique beforehand, and makes the transition (and thus the ability to follow the story) easier. How much more difficult and confusing would this game be without color in it? There are not as many glaring statements highlighting a specific character. The color, sometimes, is the only tip-off.  read more »

A quote on the Photopia website said, "I feel like I've just waded through sewage and it won't wash off."

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Jebus, Photopia was unnerving. BRILLIANT, but unnerving. It was mind-numbingly clever and just downright creepy how the colors linked the stories together, and the interconnections that revealed themselves as the story progressed were nothing short of narrative genius. I've never seen such an innovative transition in any narrative in my entire life. You would've thought they were all different worlds--and in essence they are, as they're from different people's perspectives. Incredibly imaginative, powerful, influential, and innovative. Literature at its finest. I can't say anything else. It has to be experienced--words won't do justice.

Well I just finished Photopia, and it was a lot less confusing than the other text games so far, as has been mentioned. The only part where I was stuck for a bit was the crystal maze. For anyone stuck there, it's not a non-euclidean space sort of problem, you just have to think outside the box a bit. It seemed to me like Photopia was more straightforward because there wasn't as much to figure out (or maybe I'm just getting used to adventure-game-logic). As the description on the website says, Photopia is more story than game, and it is difficult to get lost or change the intended flow of events in any way. Because of this, I found the Purple "level" much more significant than I perhaps would have if something like it was in Zork or Adventure.  read more »