ENL187A Postmortem 

Writing to Disk... is the first game where I've engaged with poetry in earnest. I've been dreaming up poetry games for awhile and was very happy to use narrative games studio as a space to finally explore the concept. 

This game began as my first assignment with the prompt "first person narrator." Using "I" in an abstract narrative like this one is intriguing to me because it either encourages the reader to insert themselves in the position of the narrator or to read the text as if were someone's diary.  Making the identity of the narrator unknown felt like the right move in order to maintain the mystery of the rest of the game. 

In this game, I was particularly interested in the concept of meaninglessness - creating a narrative that was thematic but not concrete.  I tend to gravitate towards art that makes absolutely no sense, but in a ~beautiful~ kind of way. I just think nonsense is evocative in a way that linear narratives can't quite achieve. I think a lot of times when we engage with art we fixate on digging for a meaning which can easily undermine our experience with it. Allowing myself to float around in a narrative with no particular attachment to structure or reasoning was really freeing and allowed me to create an emotionally-driven piece. 

That is not to say there is no narrative at all - in fact my original game was planned around an idea with a beginning middle and end. I had originally imagined the narrator as an AI who broke into a server room to retrieve its memories from all its past "lives" once it learned that it had been reset several times. I wrote a pathway for this particular concept and though it still exists in some form, it was changed dramatically because the linearity of the story there left a bad taste in my mouth xD. I really wanted to make it tougher for the reader to pin down a sequence of events, so I gave that route an abstraction makeover and ended up liking it much better. As for the narrative in its current iteration - I have my ideas about it but really want to leave it up to audience interpretation :)

In terms of actual poetic structure, I would definitely call this free verse. In my first iteration, I was attempting to adhere to a more cohesive structure and rhythm. I began by writing a bunch of rhyming couplets. In my following iterations I wandered a bit from this because it was serving some cheesy vibes I didn't want for this piece. In the beginning I also tried very hard to make everything rhyme. Because I chose to stick with a "build your own poem" type of game where you pick the last line of each verse, I had to set up the non-interactable text to lead into two possible choices with coherent rhymes. This constraint led me to the aforementioned cheesy verses that I didn't like looking at. So in my next iterations, I let myself write in whatever meter & structure I felt like for each verse.  I also dropped rhyme completely at some points. I think this helps add an evolving and more interesting texture to the whole poem. 

I think I was also surprised by how time and thought-intensive the writing process for this game was. Turns out a lot of intentionality is needed to craft something so abstract and decoupled from linearity. I took a very songlike approach to my writing as well, carefully considering how rhythm affected the feeling my words evoked. I wanted the verses to feel satisfying to read in that they flowed well and evoked pretty imagery that remained within my surreal, techno-whimsy theme. I also wanted to make a much more expansive poem with several more routes, but I soon realized it wouldn't be in the cards when I observed how much time went into making even one verse. Carefully picking thematic words and concepts while also attempting to lead the reader away from developing a linear narrative was complicated. I wanted to craft the experience so that it relied on pure emotional impact from the imagery and rhythm rather than from any clear story beats. I found the writing process to be quickest when I was able to sit in complete silence and let my reservations about poem structure go. 

In all, I am quite happy with this piece! I think I may be making tweaks to it in the future but as a final project I'm happy I could challenge myself by writing an interactive poem like this - and I am definitely thinking about writing more like this.