Strickland & Lawson


The participants, Stephanie Strickland & Cynthia Lawson:

Please Note: this is a combined reading between collaborators Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson due to Stephanie's repetitive strain injury (making her hand-work difficult).
Dear Donna,
Cynthia and I made, between us, five attempts to read your very interesting piece. And let me say to begin with, that we are both very impressed with the elegance of the piece and with the depth of the investigation/game that the piece represents.

On my first attempt, clicking the digital clock crashed the piece. Getting back in was hard. My second attempt I arrived at the place where 4 little Christians are scattered around the outer background. Each brings up a projection in a different corner of the screen. Each of those projections yields 3 scenes, which change subtly as you return to them. After half an hour of doing that, nothing more seemed to change and I couldn't get off that page.

Cynthia and I on our first attempt crashed the piece with the twig coming off the bottom of the tree. Getting back in was hard. In fact impossible at the time.
Later that evening, Cynthia, by herself, "completed" the piece, i.e. got through to the explanatory text, in perhaps an hour. It felt like a fast progression to her. She had not in fact visited all the locations; I doubt either of us has.

Today, Cynthia and I could not at first access the piece at all. Once we did, we arrived at the same place I did on my second attempt. Even though Cynthia had "broken out" of that location before, after almost 40 minutes of cycling through the corner projections we were just worn out and wanted to quit. Maybe there's a glitch. The scenes seem to be resetting themselves. Each of us had one reading where 2pm went to 3pm and seemed to stay there. On the frustrating readings, it kept going from 2 to 3. The whole bird tied to girl with clockface seemed to undergo very little change altogether.

This last access did not yield any explanatory text up to that point (though both of us had prior experience of such text, in the diaries of the girl and in the end-explanation).

Starting over yet again brought us to the priest's diary-and we were letting each other know about parts the other had not yet seen.

Cynthia found some relation to chat environments, to the look of Sim City, and to games like Myst. She likes puzzle games with a sense of mystery where you are not sure what you are looking for. We both are very interested in the differences in women-designed games, in how and in what way they feel different from other games, if they do. I like mystery games only to the extent that my hands are not throbbing. CS is a VERY hand-intensive game. Even Cynthia's hand got tired.

I liked the continuity of look and main character from the Red Riding piece. My initial impressions had to do with pilgrimage, surveillance, a disturbing atmosphere, a possibly abused child who may have been anorexic and was self-hurting. I tended to identify the authority figures with one another, father, priest, doctor. I liked the use of blemish and bug and bandage and so on.

We also both liked the subtlety of changes as one moved through the piece, the way individual pixels were used to show animation or "visual noise." I loved the slow nodding and slight opening of the fingers of the child in the tree-thicket. That uncanny feel I wish had been prolonged. On other screens the "flat" child, even if she swung her bandaged arm, didn't give me the uncanniness of the nod and finger opening, beckoning.

I encountered the no skin-picking rule early which made a big difference to my reading, but on no subsequent reading did I get the bandaged hand poking out the "door" that I did on my first reading.

Which brings me to my sense of frustration, our sense of frustration. We wanted freer access throughout the piece. Instead of un-accessed links timing out, I wanted revisited links to time out and all unvisited, or un-thoroughly visited, links to remain active.

Though I admire at the visual level the tiny changes to the brushes and trees and abstract kind of organic life, I need more reinforcement in the form of windows on the final text, sound cues, images of more people, to keep dotting every bud into bloom, etc. I also couldn't connect those activities up with the overall theme of the piece.

We both loved the subtle eye and finger movements that kept the screen alive-but I wanted to both hear and read more, I did not want ever to be trapped in a kind of loop even if the point was to make us dot every i and cross every t with the mouse. You will understand that my hands make me feel so much more strongly about this, but it is important to note that Cynthia felt this way too.

We did love all the stuff, the vomiting, etc., that related to the eventual disclosures of the story. I seem to have missed the 6 victimized adults. Have you chosen not to depict them? There seems an intentional flattening of all "characters" as avatars, I guess: cute or demonic little forms, standard authoritarian person, our heroine, the un-Disney-esque flora and fauna.

I remarked to Cynthia that in the case of Red Riding Hood, knowing the story ahead of time made the piece stronger as a commentary, but also without knowing the story (if that can be imagined), the online tale you tell "works." By contrast, knowing this story in advance, I would not have fully explored the possible places to go, because too many of them seemed not relevant to the story. Though perhaps they are, and I would love to understand how. I would love this piece to work in such a way that, as with Red Riding Hood, whether I encounter the "explanation/story" early or late, the reading would work either way, though differently of course.

I wanted to know the connection to the lagoon. I did not at all object to the anachronisms, satellite dish etc. I liked the buildings and trees that grew, especially when their "insides" were revealed. I wanted to know what the little "fish" inside the building related to. In other words, I was quite intolerant of stuff I felt to be merely decorative or ornamental. I took a lot of the tree/apple stuff as having an Eden reference, with a naked woman at the "heart" of the tree of knowledge sort of aspect. I liked the woman-and-madness aspect. I liked, as I said, the overall disturbingness, but I wanted it to move fast, and or fluidly; if there was some point to the way in which I got more links it wasn't clear. I mean some point in the sense that I was becoming more and more sympathetic to Christian for instance, which would let me learn more.

I wanted more music.
I liked the witty stuff like the ladder bending. I liked the irresolvability of sites like the thicket/treehouse, the Pillsbury dough boy hanged ghost figure, and so on.
I'm going to send this to Cynthia, to let her add what I haven't covered.

CYNTHIA BEGINS HERE:
Stephanie is correct in pointing out that my overall reaction on your interface/game/interactive environment is positive. I do like this new format of gaming - subtleties motivate one to continue, without a clear goal, except knowing that there must be one - if not, what would the point be? I think the design, layout, characters, and clever windows within the frames (as opposed to pop-ups) are great. The angled aerial view is wonderful in giving the user a feeling of being able to see it all (but not really!)

As Stephanie said, the first evening I continued playing by myself, I had a very rewarding hour or so with the interface. I became almost hypnotized by the small details in which I found myself (rolling over every single petal, forming buildings out of flowers, making sure every dot is released to then form symmetric cross grids, etc, etc.) There was no frustration, because every time I went back to a different scene, it was just that: different. Enough had changed to indicate that my interaction is making a difference, yet too little to make me want to stop. I had a sense of discovery.

Suddenly seeing this spot-like image on the large sphere in the front was quite rewarding - that led to what I see as the final sequence - with the other characters, the burning of them, and finally, the screen with the text on Christian Shaw. Fascinating story, and in reading the text, I had a series of "ah ha!"s tying the text back to moments I had experienced in the interface.

My inclination was to go back and start over (which is not always present in environments like this one), and was happy to discover there were places I had not visited before. Yet frustrating because selecting one of the 1st icons (cross, satellite, ladder) deactivates the others - I would love to be able to go back to the others - or are they just paths in different order?

After this 2nd play, only for about 15 minutes, I don't think I would've gone back to the interface. But I did, the next day, with Stephanie, which is described above. What had been a fun, hypnotic, experience the evening before, now became a burdensome interaction, clicking and moving, for the mouse's sake. Now that I had read the story, and new what the underlying theme was, I saw no point in all these geometries, rollovers, surreal buildings coming out of flowers, etc.

I wish there were more about the stories, and less interaction just for the sake of it. Maybe if you uncovered parts of the text as one went along, then it would become clear what the goal is, and you could better tie, conceptually, your visual language, with the story.

My favorite parts were the main character and all of her details - the moving little finger, the bandage, her sinking eyes, seeing her large & small, her flying, her demons touching her naked body, etc. All of these were very compelling, particularly now that I know the story. Many of those scenes, I believe, could be integrated into the other little interactive pieces - to make more sense of the interaction, which, as Stephanie said, is very intense on the hands.

Congratulations, Donna, on this great work. I'm particularly interested in your development of this interface as part of an academic program, and look forward to seeing your future iterations, as well as publications which may come out of it.
Warm regards, Cynthia + Stephanie

March, 2004