Mission 2 Process

After looking through the mission available for mission 2 I decided to do Working for the Web! I found this to be the most interesting out of the options and it wasn't something that majority of people where doing such as Meme's. For this mission I partnered up with Edward who also had an interest in the Working for the Web mission. We communicated across a few different platforms such as Slack and Whatsapp.

Our goals for this mission are:
> Learn about the invisible labor issues around technology, particularly around race and gender
> Share an awareness to other about this through a presentation

The end product we hope to achieve by the end of the mission is a power-point showing and explaining what we found out when researching how workers work for the web physically by making the devices or components but also how maybe we work for the web by using these devices and giving away data.

There were a few ways to do this and we decided after researching and brainstorming to go about back tracking an old phone of mine. We will dissect the phone of try to backtrack it back to where it was made, to even where the components for the phone are sourced.

When it come to the resources for this mission. We will research about the phone, the company itself which is Oneplus and try to backtrack using google and what information we can find there. Another resource is my old phone which we will dissect and also the tools used to dissect the phone which luckily I also have.

Mission 1 Reflection

So we have finally presented our interactive fictional story and here's my reflection on how mission 1 went by. I have learned quite a lot in regards to interactive fiction. Basically an interactive fiction is a story or what started out as some of the first computer games, where the reader or player gets to decide the outcome and makes choices that affect the ending of the story or game. A cave explorer named Will Crowther created the first interactive game in 1976. It was first called ADVENT but was later renamed Colossal Cave and it was a game that was based on his cave adventures. It was later developed even further by another guy called Don Woods, after getting Will's permission. From there on Interactive Fiction became to spread all over the internet. Nowadays it has even been developed further to the point where they have made movies on Netflix such as 'Bandersnatch' where you can see the choices you made play out on the screen.

I discovered quite a bit about the mission and enjoyed the process. Coming up with the story was a small challenge in itself where Nadine and I had to plan it out carefully as the story has to be as simple as possible to allow choices to be made but also interesting enough so that the audience or reader is still captivated by the story. I felt that we have done a pretty decent job at that since the story was something that majority of our classmates could relate to as it involved college and our courses being integrated into the story. 

Working in a team, i believe was also a success. We managed to find what our strengths were and split up the work based on that, where we both came up with the story draft or skeleton and Nadine went on to write it up in a more story telling way and I worked more on the technical side of things, inputting the story into twine and coding up the answers.

I found working with Twine to write up the story as being a success. It took me a bit of time experimenting and researching on how to write up stories and code up the choices but i got the hang of it quite fast as the coding language was similar to one i had previously studied a few years ago. That was a big help and let us speed up the process. I liked the twine program most out of all the others as it had the visual diagram where you can see all the parts if the story. I feel this helped a lot as i could see what was happening at all times and it was easy to follow. I definitely recommend twine for such projects and would gladly us it again in the future.

Overall I believe our project went quite well. I was happy with the end result and would rate it as being a good project. I wouldn't give it all the way to excellent for the reason that I felt like we could have maybe researched more on the history of Interactive Fiction and its impact on society then and now. We concentrated more on us creating a story, which we did end up doing quite well in the end.

Mission 1 Product

Our final product for mission 1 was an Interactive Fiction we named 'Unusual College Day'. It is a story about an unusual day in college where you wake up, are given an option before leaving the house and then you arrive at college. There you have to go through a series of challenges where it unlocks the last location at the end where there are three possible endings depending on your choices throughout the story.

Coming up with the story line was a pretty interesting and fun experience. Neither my partner or I really had any experience with writing stories or doing something like this before. We didn't let that drag us down and we were coming up with as many ideas as possible and writing them down. At the start we were thinking to go for a more thriller type of interactive story but we didn't really get anywhere with that. We then started thinking about something that could relate to all of us, and that is where we came up with an unusual day at college where we have included quite a few out of the ordinary fictional elements to make it more interesting.

We created the interactive story using a program called Twine. After looking at quite a few programs this was the one we found easiest to use. We wrote up the story into the program with all the 'coding' needed and showcased it during the presentation letting our classmates choose the available options.

Speaking of our presentation. We made a power-point with a few slides to talk about what we discovered about interactive fiction, our process with making an interactive fiction and we included the interactive story itself in the presentation.

Mission 1 Process

After looking through the missions available for mission 1, I decided to do Interactive Fiction! I've read a few interactive fictions before and have a bit of experience on how they work and its something I've always had a bit of an interest in. For this mission I partnered up with Nadine who also shared a similar interest.

Our goals for this mission are:
> To learn about the history and evolution of interactive fiction and text adventures
> To practice writing in an interactive format
> To explore different platforms used to create interactive fictions
> To make a presentation showcasing our research and end product

The end product we hope to achieve by the end of the mission is an interactive fiction story that we can present. I'll work with Nadine to to hopefully make a great interactive story that will catch the attention of our classmates and will be fun to read and make decisions in.

When it come to the resources we can use to help us with this mission, we will research on google as much information about interactive fiction as we can and also find the best programs to use. We'll search for them on google and try a few out until we find the one we think is best for us to use! Moving on we will get started on generating ideas for the interactive story itself and what available paths would be available.

Some ideas we can work on for the story would be to adapt a scene from a novel or story we already know, we could make up our own fictional story, we can also re-create a a moment from our lives into an interactive fiction story.