In Donna Leishman’s Deviant:The Possession of Christian Shaw, Leishman captures the viewer, or player, from the moment she/he begins this story. I was immediately swept up into the life of Christian Shaw, a girl that just appears to be depressed at the beginning, and later turns out to be possessed by some sort of demon. This particular piece of media, however, does not make it easy for the viewer to interact with it. It is not immediately obvious as to what you should do or what the goal is. After aimlessly clicking on everything for a minute or so, something finally worked, as the screen zoomed in on one of the buildings in the setting. At every step, though, it took quite some time to move forward. I spent about an hour on this particular piece, and I never came to any conclusion. This got me thinking that, perhaps, the difficulty in navigating this is possibly more the point of this story than the actual story of the character, Christian. It is clear that Christian Shaw is having a hard time, but the difficulty with which I had in moving forward in the story is what truly made me connect with Christian. I became aggravated, angry, and slightly disturbed in a matter of five minutes. Not only was the layout difficult, the images and the music pulled me into these odd feelings. As I interacted with Christian more, I became increasingly aware that she seemed to be feeling these emotions as well. So, perhaps, she was not the one feeling my emotions, but I was the one that was relating to her, through these emotions evoked purely from the layout of this piece.

From this piece, I begin to think that new media is a new (no pun intended) way of evoking emotions from the viewer. I’m not suggesting that this is a better way of evoking emotions than regular literature, but it does seem that new media literature can evoke emotions in quite a different way than a hard copy of literature. Leishman’s piece definitely pulled strong feelings out of me very quickly. These emotions also seemed to fit perfectly with her story. I do not believe that, for this particular story, I would have felt the emotions that I did in the time that I did if I had just been reading this story. The platform that the story was presented within is the key to its impact on its viewer.