This week's assignment was relevant for me in many aspects. Playing Depression Quest felt like a familiar experience even though it was the first time I've played the game, as I went through my own journey with mental illness. With experience in seeking out therapy and medication, and putting in consistent effort to get better, I felt I almost had expertise or previous training in which choices to make. I thought the game was well written and the added depth in the choice options that were crossed out and unclickable was a cool addition to show the limtations one feels when in similar states of depression.
In reading about GamerGate and the opinions and situations surrounding it, I was struck heavily by its relevance to today. Very present in my head was the excuse that these very harmful threats and hateful speach was "just trolling" Quinn and other women in the community, and not actually harmful, and as that relates to the current situations surrounding Kanye West. There are many of his fans that take his anti-semetic speach and racist actions at Paris Fashion Week, as this just trolling kind of thing that does no harm and doesn't effect anyone, where that is clearly not the case, especially when he has a decent amount of young fans that idolize him and the things he says. Which I see as similar to the large amount of children that are exposed to the online gaming community and are avid fans of many gaming streamers or youtubers.
I was very intrigued by the hypertext narratives and the different storytelling outcomes from the forms. I especially enjoyed the non-linearity in my body by Shelley Jackson. It felt very much like free exploration in a game, similar almost to Zork in a way, though without the impending need for plot or an end goal. I think Jackson using this form for a piece on her body is really inspired, as it holds the idea of body exploration being an intimate thing that is often shared between people one is close with, but can be something less desired as well. More voyueristic. I also felt close with keeping up appearances as I have written something similar in the past, except it was in a word document and I was exploring with the idea of white text that you only see once highlighted. The only issue with my piece is that it would be more difficult for a reader to figure out the "secret" or something in the piece, where using the links with the hover like Obadike did is very natural to discover.