The Attic
The Attic: Author’s Statement Before I began to make my playable story I had a few things I wanted to achieve through
it. The most important one was to incorporate choice and discovery in an intriguing way. I wanted the player to be extremely curious about what would come next. I also wanted to give each player a chance at exploring the story in their own way. There are a number of stories that a player can receive depending on the choices they make. To make this happen, I needed the setting of the story to be filled with objects. The idea of setting the story in an attic came from its obvious meaning: a room cluttered with items that have not been touched in a long time. Cleaning an attic can either reveal boring, old items or interesting family relics that have been hidden away for years. It is usually when cleaning out forgotten areas that we find the most fascinating things.
The story begins when you come home. Your mother asks you to clean out the attic. So, after putting your things down in your room, you go up to the attic. This is where the story begins. You get to choose where to start exploring first and it will bring you to different options. After going through a few things, you will end up at a metal chest, regardless of the path you choose to take. However, depending on the final choice you make, the last page is different.
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The format of the story was inspired by my father’s long, long legs bu Michael Lutz in 2013. I liked that the user had to click on a certain phrase in order to continue the story and wanted to incorporate that into mine. As Lutz’s story continues, you have to choose between family members that take you along a different route of the story. Making my own playable story, I had to decide how to incorporate the key concept in digital storytelling of choice. I like that the choices were laid out in my father’s long, long legs because the players have more information than interactive stories do. You are able to see all of the possible options and make an informed choice. Another thing the Lutz’s story inspired in The Attic is the colour scheme. Lutz used a bold font in order to showcase the clickable links, which was not overly different to the rest of the text. I wanted the choices to be extremely visible, so I made them stand out in pink. I find that the colour pink, contrasting to the black background and white text makes the links more noticeable.
I chose to focus my digital story on the concept of choice because I believe that it is the most important one in interactive storytelling. In fact, “agency is the primary feature that must bee offered players” in order to effectively create a playable story (Knoller 264). The reason that each player will gain a different version of my story is because “most successful games offer... the ability for players to have persistent, meaningful effects on the events of the experience” (Knoller 264). The Attic’s success is based on the agency each player has when experiencing the story. The player should be able to “directly affect the plot” in order to gain any real outcome. Without choice, the story would be too similar to a static story where the audience has no part in its continuance. The interactive element of digital storytelling dictates that its audience has choice.
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Originally, my story was about winning the lottery. After receiving feedback from the first journal, I had to rethink this. I began by googling cluttered spaces. It was clear to me that an attic would be the perfect setting for my story. After that, I went through last year’s entries in order to get a sense of how the assignment should look like. I wrote out the story in small parts, creating a map in order to give the player as many options/routes as possible, but still getting them to the same ending. In order to achieve this, I had to read all of the information on Twine Wiki. After playing on the application a bit, I began to transcribe the story onto Twine. At first, creating the links was confusing, but after playing around with it for an hour I understood how to link boxes together by using other text. Finally, I tested the story out many times in order to make sure there were no mistakes and that it all worked perfectly. The last touch was changing the colour of the links. I enjoyed going through the Adobe colour palette and picking it out. However, changing the colour of the text was much harder to achieve than figuring out the links.
This assignment taught me a lot about authorship. While actively participating with the interactive stories as a reader, I believed that it was extremely complicated, but truly it just requires a lot of planning and organizing. As a reader, I was not privy to all of the choices and information that was in the game. As the author of The Attic, I know every single possible plot route that can be taken. Having that insight is an interesting change. I learned about the degree of agency digital storytelling allows the author and the reader/player compared to neutral literature. It makes for an interesting change to literature. However, digital narratives require more effort because of their inherent nature of coding.
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Works Cited Knoller, N. Agency and the Art of Interactive Digital Storytelling. Vol. 6432, Springer, Berlin,
Heidelberg, 2010.
