10/6 blog entry

For this Blog entry i am going to discuss the In A Dark Wood work from the website Furtherfield.org. This Project is a video game based around the little red riding hood story. However this game takes the story through a horrific tale of six girls from the ages of nine to nineteen. The game starts in a red room where the player chooses one of these girls to take to grandmothers house. The player is told to stay on the path, but that is no fun for anybody. Throughout the story one can wander from the path finding random objects in the woods that the character will or will not interact with. Some of these objects include decrepid chairs, flowers, teddy bears with two heads, a burnt car, and more. As the character finds and interacts with these objects cut scenes take place with flashing pictures, sounds and lines of text that show hints to things that may have happened in the past of the character. When the player reaches the end of this path they find that they are at grandmothers house. However there is something very eerie about this place. Depending on how much the player has explored and found objects with his character there will be rooms open with creepy images, or scenes. The last door, that is grandmothers room opens to reveal a cutscene of a girl with her "wolf" and a creepy scene of somehow that the girl died. The player is then transported back to the original room with the girls to choose from, however there is less and less girls to choose as the game goes on...

This game has some possible motives behind the work put into it. The girls can represent different life styles or choices that a person can make, or just different types of people. There are a range of girls from innocent young girl to goth, and all the way up to the 19 year old mother-like figure. When you are told to stay on the path on the way to grandmothers house it is like saying that you should do what people expect you to. Or otherwise follow the social norm. By leaving the path you make your own choices and ultimately affect your own ending. as you search in this endless forest you can interact with separate things, but not everything. In the game this is tempting as it adds to the story at the end. All of the different interactions could represent irresistible temptations in life, also making it so that not all the girls can interact with all the objects, it represents different interests and ideas behind the girls lifestyles. As your character interacts with these things more and more the story becomes more creepy as though you add depth to the bad things she has done or her bad choices. At the end of the game when you finally reach grandmothers house the player may enter many of the rooms. However these rooms you can enter depend on how extensively the player has explored the forest. These rooms may represent a looking back over the life the characters have lived, or the "path" they have taken in getting where they are now. Finally the character reaches their end in the last room, and the player has a chance to start over... unlike the character they have brought to their fate.