If Text Then Code

Bringing Linn’s Writing into the Digital Age

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My job for the final project was to design a website that our Linn anthology could live on.  Many of my peers went out and did some excellent analysis of Linn’s writings.  However, if we keep doing what we have done in the past with our studies on Linn, these works are going to be loosely connected with no real description of what they are or why our study of James Merrill Linn is important.  I wanted to make sure that our work could be published in a way that makes it understandable by people outside of our classes.

Before I could do any coding, I needed to generate a diagram of what our site would look like, both at a high-level map view, and a specific page-by-page view.  I did this the old-fashioned way, by creating some pencil-and-paper sketches of what elements I thought needed to be included in the site, and how different pages were going to connect to each other.  At this stage, I decided that a navigation bar would be the best way to organize all of the sections of our site, providing easy-to-find links to both our editorial comments and content.

Using the online color palette generator at Paletton.com

As I was beginning development of the site, I discovered that color is a very important consideration when doing web design.  In the computer science curriculum here at Bucknell, I’ve learned that identifying a bad interface is quite easy, but picking out what’s wrong with it is much more challenging.  As someone without much artistic skill, I needed some help when it came to making the website visually pleasing.  Thankfully, there are plenty of tools out on the web that provide a number of different services for web developers.  The site I primarily used, palleton.com, helps designers generate aesthetic color schemes.  I fiddled with the available settings for quite a while until I managed to find a palette that I thought fit our historical research quite well.

 

Using HTML’s ‘li’ elements and CSS’s built-in classes to create a working navigation bar with a dropdown menu

Another major part of my work was creating the navigation bar that would link all the parts of our site together.  To do this, I followed a standard method of turning an HTML list of links into a functioning navigation bar using CSS.  In order to create elements that respond to a user’s cursor, I had to use the CSS :hover selector to change the properties of elements whenever the cursor was hovering over it.  The most challenging thing to implement was the dropdown menu when navigating to our editorial content.  CSS can recognize some classes, such as “dropdown-content,” and automatically apply certain properties to elements of that class without the designer needing to explicitly code it in the stylesheet.  Learning to use this built-in dropdown feature, and modify it to work the way I wanted it to, took quite some time.  But, the end result greatly benefits the layout of the navigation bar.

Overall, I’m quite happy with what I’ve managed to accomplish in this final project.  If I had a bit more time, my next step would probably be to spend time setting up a genuine image gallery, with the ability to scroll through images and open them up in an overlay screen.  Using Javascript, I could also automatically populate this gallery with every image in a folder, without needing to explicitly code each one of them in the HTML file.  After working on this project, I feel more comfortable with web design, and I look forward for the opportunity to do more work in this field in the future.

Reflection

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In 2022, the player and two other students who have graduated from Bucknell University for two years. The set of another two virtual characters is for giving advice and help to the player, then the player could decide which of guide he or she may follow. The background is about implementation of the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was signed by US government in 2018. The economy situation gets worse and worse for the tremendous decrease in exports and imports for this act, and the unemployment rate gets another highest level comparing to the Great Depression. The three main characters are struggling in living for both student loan and hyperinflation. At this time, all three go back to Bucknell campus, seeking for any job that might be available. They accidentally find a letter lying in the mailbox they used to use. After playing number guessing game, they finally open the mailbox. The letter says: “follow the whale”. They start a journey to work for a gang in Hong Kong to steel an artifact in a museum to make money. The main conflicts are to avoid being noticed for example choose a discreet movement, and to open the safe case using Caesar cipher.

Due to the definition of “exploratory hypertext” by Joyce,  which means the text itself is changing every time with the reader’s reaction. This functions on our project. The player should read the instructions and understand the facial expressions of virtual people. Then he or she might give a corresponding action whether to pass by or to talk to them naturally to cover his or her identity as a thief. “Collaborations are both the work itself and the series negotiations between collaborators that govern the work’s creation.” (Rettberg, P194) Our game ,just like collective work, needs a lot of collaborations between the player and the other two virtual characters which are set by code. While we communicate by codes and series of texts and choices.

There are many benefits to work in Group 2. I am a first-year and this is definitely the first time I deal with computer science, and Dale has experienced a lot with Python, so he is the main director of codes. Ella and I are in charge of thinking and modifying the main story line and writing the text in the game. While, the biggest challenge for me to work collaboratively is to understand what the concept they were talking about. The cultural difference is unavoidable for example when we were brainstorming, they could easily talk about hundreds of movies that I have never heard of before. While finally, we didn’t apply any one of them and agreed with the story now it looks like.

The whole idea is inspired by the game I played during class called “Sherlock Holmes and the Indecipherable Cipher” in playfic.com. So we also put some other virtual characters to give some clues to the player, decreasing the difficulty of the game and directing him or her to what is supposed to do, other than doing a lot of codes to cover every possibilities. Also “follow the whale” and the character’s name “Neo” are inspired by the movie “The matrix”. “Follow the whale” gives the player the direction and clue what he or she needs to do next and shifts the set location to Hong Kong. But why Hong Kong? It is just for the reason that based on my knowledge Hong Kong is the right place to steel artifacts and breeds lots of gang.

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The game is going to be reality.

Literary Gaming: Questioning Traditional Agency in Game-Play

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My group (me, Iris Fu, and Matt Fay) is creating a superhero game in which the player can choose between three superpowers: super-strength, the power of flight, and invisibility. With the limitations of their ability, the player must navigate one of three different scenarios assigned to them by probability/chance. All three scenarios feature the player (superhero) confronting and trying to defeat a villainous force. Each scenario is written to favor one power, thus limiting success by chance and ability (superpower). Even though certain scenarios are more adventitious for a certain power, the outcome of any run of the game is not as clear as win or lose. For example, the player might be successful in saving the day but still end up in jail; life isn’t black or white, but it’s messy and gray.

The Netflix hit show Jessica Jones inspired my scenario in which the player is an investigative journalist trying to get at the bottom of a government conspiracy. Unlike a lot of superhero narratives, Jessica Jones questions traditional concepts of agency and morality. At the end of the season, viewers are not rewarded clear winners or losers and conflicts still remain at large.
The Netflix hit show Jessica Jones inspired my scenario in which the player is an investigative journalist trying to get at the bottom of a government conspiracy. Unlike a lot of superhero narratives, Jessica Jones questions traditional concepts of agency and morality. At the end of the season, viewers are not rewarded clear winners or losers and conflicts still remain at large.

In the introduction of Literary Gaming (2014), Ensslin states that literary games are “designed to make players reflect on conventional aspects of games such as fast-paced action, rule-governed kinetic behavior, goal-directedness, and simplistic friend-and-foe binary thought ”(7). Indeed, our game fits within this framework of literary gaming as our game delineates from traditional aspects of fairness. For example, many traditional games start with players on equal level fields; regardless of the race you choose in Skyrim-whether Breton or Argonian- you will get the same quests. In our game, however, players are assigned scenarios that are easier or harder depending on their power. Even beyond the realms of game or narrative, our game asks players to question their experience of life in terms of the choices awarded to them by chance and/or ability. How does privilege affect your circumstance? What abilities or lack thereof affect what you can do or accomplish? How much “luck” do you reward to your current situation in life?

Like many literary games or really games in general, our game is a collaborative effort. Using Rettberg’s definition, each team member is a conscious participator- we all know the restraints, nature, and our role in the project (137). For instance, each of us is writing one scenario that favors one superpower: Iris is doing super-strength, Matt is doing flying, and I am doing invisibility. Even though we each write a scenario, we have to be mindful to balance our stories in terms of length and difficulty with each other’s. Additionally, we have to be mindful not to make our scenarios to similar to each other. One challenge or difficulty of working in a group of three is that we can’t read each other’s minds; we have to continually communicate about how our scenario is evolving. Also, in terms of the division of labor, our method (we all write and code) is inefficient. It delineates from traditional group work that assigns a role to one person, such as one person coding and another writing the story. On the other hand, our method offers a greater variety of game-play and lets each of us participate in storytelling process. If I were to create the game alone, I would not have the time to create 3 scenarios much less have the creativity to ensure that they each represent different points of view.

My narrative outline of the game. WARNING: contains spoilers.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License Bucknell University Humanities 271 Course by Diane Jakacki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.