I think of the 3 readings this was my favorite. I liked how simple it was. It felt easy to navigate, but kept me engaged in the story. I also liked the design of it, again because of how simple it was. It don’t know that it added much to the story, but I liked it. I also thought that the way the interaction worked, and what got cover up until you revealed it, added a lot to the piece and played into the meaning of it. If you read the whole thing without revealing anything, it’s its own poem, and it means one thing, but if you reveal the pink, hidden text, those preexisting words are given new meaning. It’s reflective of the story: the black text poem is the outward appearance, and the pink shows what’s really happening.
It took me a really long time to read My Body, and I’m honestly not even sure if I read the whole thing. But I guess that’s part of the point - the more you feel around and the more you poke and prod the more you get to know about the author and her relationship with her body, and the more intrusive it feels. But also I think it starts to get more relatable as you go and as you read about more experiences. Eventually you’ll find one that you can see yourself and your own experiences in. I went until I got to a point where I started going in circles, where there were no more links to click that I hadn’t seen before, or that led to a page that had new links for me. I still don’t know if that was the end, but I still thought the experience was interesting and fun.
I had a little bit of trouble navigating this one. I thought that the actual site and its structure was really interesting, but I could never get a full grasp of what I was reading. I did like that it felt a little bit like a choose your own adventure at times, and I always felt like I was reading something new. I also liked that if you didn’t want to, you really didn’t have to interact with it, but it would still eventually change. I think that made it so that you could sort of just sit with the piece, instead of try to figure it out. I think it’s easier for me to focus on what I’m reading then, versus when I was clicking around I was caught up in trying to figure out when something looped, or how things connected.
I thought this was a really interesting way of educating people about depression. It’s something that we hear a lot about, especially now, but it always feels like it’s the same information and it can admittedly be a little hard to understand sometimes, but looking at it from this point of view was really helpful. Not really related to the education part, but I liked how the site was set up, too, and how you could get more context if you clicked on certain links. I also liked that it showed you all of the choices every time, even if they weren’t available, because it really showed how limited your choices become, and how the “good” or “right” option really isn’t one a lot of the time. I would be interested to see how it would turn out if I chose different things, and how many different routes there are, or how many different endings.