The simple act of clicking through pages did a surprising amount to immerse me in these hypertext narratives. I usually don’t think of a website as a game, but with Depression Quest especially I felt really connected to the narrative and I actually wanted to go back and try other options. When you think about it, a text-based adventure is just a series of screens with prompts to continue forwards, so a website works well as a medium to contain that. It’s sort of like a choose-your-own adventure novel, but those are linear by necessity. A website can divide the story into distinct sections that contain different parts of the story. When I was playing Depression Quest I found out by accident that if you open the hyperlinks in new pages, it would come up as an error message. I figured out this was the game’s way of not allowing players to go down branching paths in the same game, which kept it very grounded and gave each choice proper weight. I actually found myself sitting there not knowing which option to pick and wishing somehow I could unlock the struck through options. It was really effective storytelling to show you what wasn’t an option in addition to what was. It added another layer of helplessness to the game.
As an aside, those gamergate articles were really interesting to read about. I feel like gamergate is one of those weird online things I’ve heard about for a while but never really known the context of, even as an internet-savvy young guy.
The other text narratives felt more like pieces of interactive media or an explorable art installation. I got a bit lost in Shirley Jackson’s my body, and I wished there was some sort of way to get back to the main menu and restart the journey somewhere else from in the tab. It got a bit annoying to feel like I was backtracking and getting lost, but maybe that was part of the point of the experience. It certainly felt like I was getting lost around Jackson’s body and in her memories relating to each part of it. And from a writing standpoint, some of her descriptions were fascinating and nausea-inducing. Paths of Memory and Painting seemed to be the least-interactive but was an interesting way to view poetry and the occasionally shifting tiles caught me off guard.