Gim crack’d

Reaction: The Outbreak and Little Apocalypse

With the approach of October, horror seems to be the genre du jour. Via Mark Bernstein’s blog and Metafilter I discovered two interactive stories… and though they would be shelved in the same section of a bookstore, like apples and oranges they are.

The Outbreak

This one is an interactive movie, which coupled with its subject matter invites unhappy comparisons to Night Trap. Fortunately the production values and the acting isn’t quite that bad… but honestly, not that great. A group of my friends participates in CAmm Slamm, which is a contest where people shoot short films in a 48-hour time span, and I’ve been to most of the screenings in recent years. There is always, always, a cheesy zombie movie in these things. It’s the easiest thing in the world to shoot, as you already have a plot template, you can pretty much ad-lib the dialogue, and it’s easy to get extras — who doesn’t want to get painted up like a zombie? The Outbreak reminded me a lot of these movies, unfortunately — the characters are cardboard-thin, everyone has seen this particular scenario about five hundred times before, and while they made the most out of what they had, it still looks kind of like an amateur production at its edges. (The special effects, as always, are actually pretty good.)

… But how does it stand up as e-lit? Enh. By its nature, it’s pretty short, but even in the small number of nodes they have, there is some sophistication. When you make a bad choice, it sometimes does not become evident until a bit later on, and several the choices are difficult to weigh from a pragmatic point of view. (Sadly, one of them — whether to simply push some furniture in front of a door or try to gather wood to nail up the windows — doesn’t seem to have any real effect on the narrative, though it gave me the most pause.) Perhaps most interesting is that in order to win, you have to act altruistically in one case and not in another. There isn’t much rationale to the distinction, as far I can see; it makes more sense to take the wrong choice to me. But again, these are not deep decisions. I wonder if they had added a timer to the decision points, a la Quick Time Events, whether it would have been a little more effective.

Little Apocalypse

This describes itself as a “hypertext novel,” which begs all kinds of questions. How do you judge the length of a hypertext piece, anyway? But I like it. It offers two entrypoints: the first is a simple travelogue of two characters, Molly and Zim, as they drive westward through America. The second is more elusive, dreamlike — I still don’t really understand if everything that happens in that thread is going to occur in Molly and Zim’s future, whether it’s already happening and Molly and ZIm are delusional, or if it is just a fiction that Molly and Zim are creating as they travel. Because the two threads are distinguished by the color of the links, the piece makes me think of House of Leaves, which I am ok with, I think. The only thing I worry about is that the story’s complexity may collapse in on itself the way House of Leaves’ footnotes did. The nice thing is that whenever you start to feel a bit disoriented, you can hop back onto the Molly and Zim storyline, which at least for now is pretty linear and clear.

Little Apocalypse teems with e-lit nouveau doodads: you can see a Google Map of Molly and Zim’s progress (similar to “The 21 Steps”), there are Flickr sets of photos taken by Molly (I… think), and so on. I don’t think these really materially improve the story experience, though they are kind of neat to twiddle with. More interesting is the use of timers — the story is being released in intervals, which is perhaps a marketing tool to increase engagement with the story over the long term. But looking at in story terms — I do not think this quite places it in the realm of serials, but instead acts kind of like forcing contestants on The Amazing Race to wait for a museum to open before they can proceed. There’s more of a sense of communal reading, that we can potentially discuss a certain part of the narrative without the usual omgspoilers minefields to navigate. The flip side of this is that the site doesn’t really facilitate this kind of discussion. There’s a blog but it seems mostly about site updates, not so much reader discussion. I tried searching Technorati but no luck there, either.

There is one fairly significant misstep, I feel, but otherwise the writing is pretty good and I’m excited to come back to it once there’s more.

— Chris, 28 September 2008

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