Fantasy web fiction

[Bainespal]

My Internet Design & Publishing class just ended, leaving me with my final project: A website built to represent a high fantasy landscape that I made up, with different pages describing different geographical locations.

The main "selling point" of my website is its clickable map -- I scanned in a hand-drawn map of the continent, and you can click on many of the features on the map to arrive at the page for that place.

The design of the web pages is based on the presentation of interactive fiction, but my web work is not interactive in the same way, since the reader can only control the order that he or she views the information and can't affect anything. The second-person, present tense prose also reflects the influence of interactive fiction and should hopefully bring at least an illusion of reader involvement, if not interactivity. In fact, this work is probably not even a story, since it has no plot at all (almost all the writing is description). However, it is fiction, and it is high fantasy.

So, here's the link: students.herkimer.edu/~leep518/index.html

[Kessie]

It reads like a choose your own adventure. It's kind of cool, clicking around the map, but not much happens. I kept expecting to be attacked by ogres. :-)

I think it'd be neater if the map showed up on every page, maybe with the pertinent area highlighted. I quickly lost track of where I was in the text.

[yoda47]

Kessie has a good idea there... add a few choices and some plot elements....

[Bainespal]

Thanks for the replies, friends!

Nothing happens, and there is nothing to do, because it is neither a story nor a game. In it's current state, it's really nothing other than an entirely fictional website.

I wish I could make the experience of reading and clicking through the website more interactive. You might have read in some of my older posts that I'm highly interested in theories of interactivity in fiction, and one of my biggest hobbies is a form of fiction/game that breaks the modeled world up into "rooms" that look very much like the pages in my website. I'd like to complete an interactive fiction game with obstacles and story some day, hopefully soon. The concept for the website came from an abandoned interactive fiction idea.

Dec 10, 2011 17:44:45 GMT -5 Kessie said:

I think it'd be neater if the map showed up on every page, maybe with the pertinent area highlighted. I quickly lost track of where I was in the text.

I had not considered including a portion of the map on every page. Even with my small ability, I could maybe put another CSS frame in all the geographical pages with a shrunken version of the map image. The highlighting would be harder; the only way I would know how to do that would be to make separate images for each page. Anyways, the highlighting would break immersion, because the second-person protagonist isn't sitting up there on the mountain with a yellow marker. Maybe I could small portions of the original map image in the box, instead of a smaller map.

I had thought about including a text link back to the map on every page, but I decided against it because I didn't know where to put it, and because I wanted "getting lost" to be part of the experience to some degree. But I like the framed mini-map idea.

I think the greatest use of this website in its current state is as a demonstrations of the limits of interactivity using no programming other than CSS and HTML, which only provide structure and markup. But even without the ability to program in JavaScript or Python or anything, I could add some more interactivity by making mutually exclusive choices, like in a printed CYOA book. There is already a little of this; if you click on the "map" link on the first page of the website, you see a page of narration that you will see only once and will never see on that visit if you click on one of the other two links instead.

I'm not sure if I want to make real CYOA out of the website, but one thing I considered doing is adding blog-like comment boards to each of the geographical pages, allowing readers to post their own tales of the legendary events that happened in each area. Thus, users would generate their own interactivity, creating a collaborative writing environment, or even something like a very primitive roleplaying game.