Adventures in Hypertext

This assignment asked us to take a classical fairytale and change in into an interactive, choose your own adventure style experience using a process called remediation. Austin kindly provided us with a demo in the form of the three little pigs story, reimagined in twine.

Following Austin’s theme of threes, I worked with the story of The Three Bears. One thing that didn’t occur to me while making the twine, but really interested me when it came up in class the friday after the assignment was due, was one of my classmate’s points about having to add content to give a user ‘incorrect’ choices when remediating her story.

Looking back on the process, I’ve actually created a story in which much of the content can be bypassed to complete the story in the ‘best’ way. The tripartite “this porridge is too hot, that one is too cold, but that one is just right” system is imposed on the reader of the original fairy tale as they follow the protagonist through trying each of the three options each time. This hypertext version allows the user to skip all the extraneous choices if they recognize the pattern or know anything about the story.

This shift is really interesting considering the discussion of completionism that we also had on Friday. The ‘complete story’ involves a lot of dead ends that loop back on themselves, whereas the way to ‘win’ this story the quickest is to avoid a lot of the content. I don’t have as strong memories of choose your own adventure stories to know if there are a lot of looped segments in them, but at least the hypertext version makes shifting back and forth across the text quicker. I feel like the most fruitful comparisons are not between this version of the story and an unremediated original, but rather other ways of remediating, and how my process of allowing for optimizing the story differed from others’ need to provide false choices to make the digitally remediated form work. 

For your interactive viewing pleasure: here is the story I put together. I apologize for the size, but considering the fact that at first I was unable to embed anything, I will ask for your patience as I celebrate this small win. The link below will also take you to a fullscreen version of the story.

https://texttech.sites.carleton.edu/hypertext/TheStoryOfTheThreeBears.html

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