My final project is a story called Lucidity.  You can read it here.  It’s a little rough, a little incomplete, and I hope it makes some small amount of sense.   The story is set in a dystopian far future and the narrative occurs both in the reality of that fictional world and in the main character’s dreams.  The defining characteristic of the society in the story is that everyone uses neurochemicals (that is, drugs) as a result of major advances in scientific and medical understanding of the brain.  The story follows a nameless main character, a student who begins to have some crazy dreams.  Turns out that the shadowy forces of power in the world are meanwhile plotting their escape from the dying planet Earth and are trying to collect the entirety of human knowledge before they abandon the planet and the majority of the people left living on it.  To do this, they’ve been gradually drugging people, sending them into sleep states where they dream, oblivious to the knowledge that is being extracted from their brains.  The main character eventually tracks down a resistance movement that her sister is a part of, and the story ends as they plan to rebuild a largely destroyed Earth.

This all probably sounds fairly crazy.  Most of my thinking about this project has been largely inspired my English seminar this semester, where I’ve been reading a ton of sci-fi novels by the brilliant Octavia Butler.  Her fiction deals a lot with dystopia and often with some sort of addiction, which is where the idea for the massive societal drug use in my own story stems from.   My other main source of inspiration comes from another English class I’m taking this semester — Electronic Literature — which has had some interesting overlaps with the storytelling going on in DS106 for me all semester.  We’ve looked more at “complete” digital narrative forms — videogames, interactive fiction, hypertext.  I was thoroughly enchanted by the interactivity of these forms and wanted to give it a shot — there’s a different, text-only version that I’m working on for that class.  The structure of the story has ended up a little disjointed, it’s kind of strange to tell a story that doesn’t have a perfectly linear structure, and to tell it with hyperlinks on top of that.

I would consider this storytelling because it has a narrative that can be broken down into elements if you cared to do so — plot, conflict, characters, etc.   And I have nothing against less “complete” storytelling — which is how I think about a lot of the assignments I’ve done for ds106 — and I prefer that sort of storytelling most of the time.  I’m glad that I gave a more “complete” story a shot, because I’m fairly comfortable with the snippet storytelling of a photo or some kind of visual design, but I tend to shy away from full narratives.  I think that sort of storytelling takes a lot of work and a lot of focus, so regardless of much sense this may or may not make, I’m glad I attempted something.

I’m already pushing the deadline, and I didn’t end up with quite as many images as I’d hoped.  It’s more text alongside images than it is graphic novel style, which was the plan at one point.  But anyway, the more detailed stuff about how I made all the images is here.  I made this in Twine, which is a program for making hypertext stories.  It’s pretty simple to use and all the coding and linking uses wiki format.  The making-of side ends up looking something like this:  where all those arrows and connecting lines trace out the map of the hyperlinks.

Credit for all the Creative Commons photos I used: Monk’s Community Forest Cambodia, Century Tower, Tents, Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory 003, Sidewalk, Maze Garden, Maze, Longleat Maze, Maze, Pill Box, City Hall Subway Station, Tokyo Canal’s Edge, Fireworks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), Coat Room, Chalkboard, Wasteland, Forest Fire, Bookshelves, Beds, Campfire, Library, Classroom, Chairs