Chapter 6 |
Chapter 6 of Erik Loyer's Chroma radically changes the user's degree of control over the text. It begins to complicate the verbal and visual axes of the text, especially through its user interaction, by using more text and less iconographic animation than the previous chapters. The reader wanders around a maze, much like a player in early dungeon/fantasy adventure games. Duck extends the fantasy metaphor to talk about the constructedness of race as something out of
...A role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons,
where every character is conjured
from a few elemental abilities:
Strength, Dexterity, Charisma.
My parents were playing an American variation on this kind of game
that was all about race.
The reader's interaction is compounded by perceiving multiple sources of information at once, much like a film or a video game. There is a voice-over narration, a first-person perspective view of the maze, an overhead (partial) map of the maze, a "status window" (like one from an adventure game), and a small sketch of a cityscape. In addition, in the first-person view, simple human-like figures walk towards you and "say" things in speech balloons. Since it is impossible for the reader to keep track of all of these inputs at once, she or he must choose what to read and when.
Not only does the text force the reader to split her/his attention between two modes of navigation (the map and the first-person view), he/she must make constant decisions about what stimuli to pay attention to, and if that wasn't enough, each time you read Chapter 6, the maze is different (I assume it is dynamically generated by its software) and the text you are reading in the speech balloons is different. (Even after several readings, I still see a few new balloons every time.) The speech balloons question, complicate, and contradict the voice-over, offering two clashing opinions as you traverse a maze that has no solution.
The actual sense of disorientation the reader experiences in the maze combines with the confusion of conflicting voices in the text. None of the individual parts of Chapter 6 have the same meaning by themselves. Loyer proves the importance of the visual axis by actually challenging the verbal one.