Rewind

Interactive and narrative fiction (still in development stage) (2023)

Medium: Twine custom program, AI generator

In this information age, people's lives are becoming more and more exhausting. With the development of technology, the amount of information and the way of media available to people are increasing, and life is becoming more and more patterned. Going back to childhood, or even earlier, can people also have fun with limited information? And what have people lost while being exposed to more and more information? I hope people can experience the fun brought by environments other than technology through these story series.

From my grandfather's childhood to the present, people have slowly detached themselves from the laborious life, and life has become a fixed pattern. With the development of science and technology, different generations bring different speeds of information dissemination. The way people get information is also changing. Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, introduced the concepts of "hot" and "cold" media. Hot media are High in definition and detail, leaving little for the audience to fill in or interpret. On the other hand, Cold media are less detailed and demand greater involvement from the audience to fill in the gaps and make sense of the content. From cold media to hot media, getting information has become easier and easier, life has become more and more convenient, and the information people get is becoming more and more specific, giving people less and less space for imagination. Going back to childhood, is it possible to get more happiness from limited information?


Process and Technique: Through interviews with my grandparents and mother, and calling back the anecdotes of my own childhood, I have compiled and analyzed the context of the lives of three generations and the main modes of media communication. By using the Twine Custom Program, I write the stories that I collected from the interview to make a complete story line.  Start from a normal day in the present, use the media as the key, bringing back the audience to the stories in the 2010's, 1980's, and 1950's. Utilize AI to generate various image styles representative of different eras, then integrate code into the Twine program's style sheet to modify both the background images and text styles within the story.


Potentials: To make the game more interactive and more immersive. VR modeling could be the next steps of the development of the game, by building different maps for the different ages. It would be possible to let the audience walk around the street and meet different people in the fiction, while experiencing the changes brought by the time.


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