Word World

• Upon reflecting on the progression of game design from pinball machines ("The RHIZ-Cade: Ten Multimedia Projects on the Rhetoric of Pinball") to the various forms of high-level programming found in modern video games (Mullaney et al.), I approached this week's creative exercise with the thoughts I experienced from interacting with these investigations. From the default format presented by default by Twine, 
• I remembered my first experiences with parser-based video games where white text is used on top of black backgrounds. In resembling some of the earliest text-adventure games on home computers, this specific color-coordinated format of white text and black backgrounds served as the primary structure for constructing my text-adventure game on Bitsy. As there is a green plus sign at the bottom of the screen, this is, of course, an outlier to the traditional parser-based text adventure. The green plus sign is the player avatar for this title on Bitsy. As time progresses, the player avatar in "Word World" (the title of my Bitsy-based text adventure) transforms between a plus sign and a symbol representing the shape of a person.
• Having a green palette for the avatar was influenced directly by the green-colored text found on the Apple II. 

• The Apple II came to my mind when I was reading Hicks's discussion of the progression from Low-Level Programming Languages to High-Level Programming (HLL) Languages. Being one of the first examples of user-friendly computers that utilized HLL, the Apple II used Integer BASIC and Applesoft  ("16-Languages").  In thinking about how technology has become more accessible over the years and producing changing demographics where technology-based games become more disconnected from the "alien" texts of code to something more akin to a more "natural" intuition, i.e., the image of a "macho" 80's biker teaching a "geek" how to play pinball (Collamati, n.d.), the choice of having the player avatar regularly shift between the two explicit images of a "stick-figure" representation of a person and a four-point plus sign is meant to represent both relationship of text-based adventure games to graphics-based video games at a construct level and the combination of Twine and Bitsy's formats on an operational level.

• On "Word World's" Controls and Rules

Regarding "Word World's" design, the player avatar is meant to be controlled by the player in a similar method to how a mouse cursor is moved (albeit, the avatar is controlled with a keyboard) across windows. As the player moves their avatar between text that exhibits wall-like collision-based properties (Wardrip-Fruin, 2020), they can select choices that enable different traversals in following traditional text-based adventure games. As such, there are three possible endings. (Remember, everyone, can win in this text-based Bitsy adventure!) If you find any ending that seems "weird," feel free to load up the html in Bitsy, you will see a surprise! (I recommend doing this last part after finding all three endings first!)

• On "Winning"

The choice of having "Word World's" on winning is derived from the example of the square game in discussing metagames (Boluk & LeMieux). The methods of obtaining "victories" in the narrative of this game are derived from the themes of survival found in adventure titles such as the entries in the Zork series, where death resulted in a sort of lost game. As this is a common game-design structure found in text-adventure games and graphics-based video games, it is featured as a primary structure in the design "Word World."

 References:

Boluk, Stephanie, and LeMieux, Patrick. "'Introduction' in 'Metagaming' on Manifold @uminnpress." Manifold @uminnpress. Accessed September 30, 2021. https://manifold.umn.edu/read/metagaming/section/ca0c7a57-96bf-41fc-910b-3652b6872404#intro (Links to an external site.).

Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip. Your Computer Is on Fire. MIT Press, 2021.

"What Pinball Tells Us About Gadgets, Groins, and the Galaxy." Accessed September 30, 2021. http://media.hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz22/sf/pinball/collamati/index.html (Links to an external site.).

"The RHIZ-Cade: Ten Multimedia Projects on the Rhetoric of Pinball." Accessed September 30, 2021. http://media.hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz22/sf/pinball/index.html (Links to an external site.).

Virtual Book Talk: Noah Wardrip-Fruin - How Pac-Man Eats (MIT Press, 2020). Accessed September 30, 2021.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w84rhZ_3l5g