Post 5 : Fighting Slippery Traces of Fantasy

My experience reading the Fighting Fantasy book was a pleasant one as I have been long been a fan of such books, having read the choose-your-own-adventure series. When asked to compare these types of stories with something like “Slippery Traces”, my vote surely goes for the Fighting Fantasy books, even though they are supposedly old media. Reordering of media by the user as they allow in Slippery Traces, to me, fails for a couple of reasons.

1. The lack of a well-formed narrative. By giving limited choices, like in the books, the author was able to reduce the number of possible permutations of the stories and pay attention to making the narrative smooth; by making it consistent in message and flow. In “Slippery Traces”, though there has been effort by the author to select and categorise the postcards, it lacks a sort of flow in the narrative that it presents. This is really an issue which crops up with giving choice. It’s a delicate balance between offering choice and developing a well-formed narrative.
   
   
2. The human need to find a “right” answer. I think this need has been overlooked in our desire to allow people to gain multiple experiences within the same context. In class discussions about the project as well as when we were reading the books, it was quite apparent that people wanted to know what the “best possible” outcome should be. There is an underlying need for people to find the right answer and it might irritate them greatly to find out that there is no “best” answer really. Not all of us are fans of philosophy.

Now we ask ourselves that did having a computer make things a lot better in terms of the work “Slippery Traces”? Well, for one, things like hotspots would have been rather hard to have been convincingly carried out without computers. But I’m not so sure when it comes to the contribution of computers in the well-formed’ness of narratives. The large amount of choice such a system offers may not necessarily be a good thing.