does anyone know how to put an indent into the wiki?

if new media authors are going to try to communicate in new ways, readers of new media are going to have to figure out how to understand in new ways also.

well, i finally put some more stuff on the wiki. add to it as you wish. also, i'm interested to know whether anyone gets this reference, so please let me know.

well, i managed to get them to stay together. i don't think they're very happy though. also, i think that very little of what i type in affects the game at all. here's a partial transcript of my "generated stageplay":

GRACE
Andrew, I know what you're hinting at...

ANDREW
lalalalalala

GRACE
about me...

GRACE
Do you two want to hear the honest truth? Huh?

GRACE
Andrew, do you want that?

ANDREW
let's eat

GRACE
No, Andrew, just, yes or no, do you want to hear the truth?

(ANDREW comforts grace.)

GRACE
Trip?

ANDREW
i'm hungry

TRIP
Yes...!

facade is crazy. i've played one round so far. i thought they didn't hear what i said at all, because they almost never responded to me. but then, a little way in, trip said "oh, i've heard what you've been saying tonight" and then pretty accurately listed off a few things i said. the ai can't be that good - they haven't made a program that can come close to passing a turing test yet, i don't think. still pretty impressive. something about the gameplay is really engaging, in a way i didn't find with adventure or zork.

well, i've barely started thinking about my term project and already it has taken a different form. because the romans borrowed so many myths (all of their cool ones) whole cloth from the greeks, it's proving nearly impossible for me to find a myth that exists only in latin documents (i.e. ones that i can read).

i have found these games really, really frustrating. it's not at all intuitive what you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do. it seems like there's a logic to the games that you have to get used to, and it's a very different from how i usually think. i can imagine this sort of game being really, really cool with a better parser, but these early versions make me want to kill the computer. actually a bunch of times i tried to kill random objects out of anger ("kill rainbow," "kill grating,") and the game made some smart-ass remarks. that was probably the most fun part so far.

this didn't come to me in a dream, exactly, but it's still very rough around the edges. i'm hoping to use this space to help me figure out what exactly it is that i want to do and why i want to do it.

this idea for my term project certainly is related to that page i created on the wiki, the one with the very translated myth of io and zeus.

we were talking last week about what sort of "story" takes well to hypertext, and i think that "patchwork girl" provides a great example of what works. i'm having a hard time putting into words what i liked so much about it. i just think that the form and the content (if we're still making these distinctions) complement each other very well. obviously, the whole story is about a girl sewn together from pieces of dead girls, just as "patchwork girl" itself borrows heavily from a pretty old book, by someone who is now dead.

This looks really, really cool. You should read that article. I'm just going to assume that you have and not explain it at all. I do find it interesting that the more immediate the experience, the more time the articles covering that experience point out all of the technological wizardry behind it.

I hope that makes sense. Let me try again.