Perhaps the Way Out is Within the Way Out

          I have to admit, the assignments for this week made me feel in touch with a “nerdy” side I usually don’t experience. I definitely enjoyed these MUCH more than the interactive fiction of last week, as I felt more in control.

          I got really hooked into I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies; give me a game where I have to complete levels and I’m in love (nerdy side talking). However, I felt like I got too into the actual movement of the game, trying to get through the mazes, and paid less attention to all the surrounding media/literature. Whenever I hit some word that exploded, I’d stop and read it, and then my eyes would avert to the surrounding clips and images; but I felt like I was more interested in getting through it than reading and interpreting what was written as I went.

           However, my favorite piece out of the selection was Genes the Hobo King. For one, I thought the entire set up, the images, videos, text and the genetic display was incredibly well put together; I could every type of media (video, music, recordings, etc.) that I wanted, and it kept appearing in ways that I didn’t expect, like lines of text automatically running across the bottom of the screen. A quick blurb on the oddest gene I clicked on: it was a voice recording that was supposed to be “hillbilly” chatter, sounding like someone was talking with a mouthful of food, and there would be one clear word every so often. I honestly don’t even know what I made of it; I think it just added to the effect of uncertainty that the site gave to me.

          I found the “gene” 4:n.h to be the most relevant to the previous readings we have done in class. This section was entitled the Hawthorne Aimless Way Gene, and each block you clicked on gave a different rotating picture underneath. At first, I just thought that these images were DNA, correlating with the whole genetics theme; however, when you scroll over them, it gives you an aerial view of the picture, which I then saw was a maze. In most of the readings so far, labyrinths or mazes have been addressed, or I have just felt trapped myself. In the interactive fiction (especially Violet), I was so frustrated by not being able to do what I wanted, and not selecting the right verbs, that I didn’t make any progress; it was a verbal maze that I couldn’t complete. In House of Leaves, the hallway literally becomes a maze of life and death, enclosing and killing members of the excavating crew, and mentally entrapping other characters, like Navidson and Truant, unable to escape the mysteries of the hallway. “Perhaps the way out is within the way out, or perhaps wrong” was a quote for one of the red boxes, which just left me feeling even more like I was in a maze.