Electronic Literature Response

For the reading today, I chose Inanimate Alice. I started watching/viewing it, and I thought it was so interesting that I watched the rest of the episodes of what happens in Alice's life.

The episode that I'm writing about is Episode 1. In this episode, Alice is living in China and is waiting for her dad to come home from work. He travels a lot, and he didn't arrive home when he should have. After several days of waiting, Alice and her mom decide to go looking for him. They head to their Jeep, and they start driving. As they're driving, the suspense builds and builds, because it soon becomes apparent that Alice's mom does not really know where they are going. How are they supposed to find Alice's dad if they don't know where he is or where they are?

I think that the author of the text wanted me to feel nervous/scared for Alice and her mom while reading this piece. The colors, pictures, and words on the page really help convey the worry and panic that Alice and her mom are feeling as they frantically searching for her dad. The background music also helps with creating that worried atmosphere as well.

I think the composer chose not to put this piece together in a "traditional" (not on paper) way, because using animation to tell this story is so much more powerful. The really neat thing that I enjoyed about this piece was that it still felt like you were reading a book; the reader has to turn the page in a sense to see what is going to have, rather than simply be shown a nice little animated story that requires no work. The suspense is heightened because the reader has to click on the next arrow to find out what happens. The use of animation is much more powerful than simply reading the story on paper also because the reader also involves more of their senses. The visual presentation is stronger, and the photos and backgrounds help the story. The sounds in the story that the reader hears are rather eerie, which helps the suspense build. All these things help the reader become more absorbed in the story on a level they might not have gotten with turning pages in a book.

The nice thing about this specific episode of Inanimate Alice was that there was not really anything special that was required of the reader. It was the first episode of Alice's story, and so there's no background information that the reader is missing while they are reading.

What I most enjoyed about this piece was the way the story created suspense. As I progressed through the story, I was almost aching to read what would happen next, but I had to be patient in some cases to wait for the arrow to click on and advance to the next part. In my own work, that creation of suspense and making the reader be patient (without being annoying) is something that I'd like to incorporate. The composer of this text did an amazing job with that... I was so drawn in, I had to watch the next several episodes of Alice's life!