The piece of electronic literature I explored is Nightingale’s Playground by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston that I found through the Electronic Literature Directory. It is a work of digital fiction that follows the story of the main character, Carl Robertson, who is trying to decipher the vanishing of his friend from high school, Alex Nightingale. The story begins as Carl has returned to his hometown for his high school reunion after splitting with his girlfriend. He reconnects with his old classmates who he has seemingly lost touch with, but strangely, none of them remember his old best friend, Alex. In order to quiet his own doubt, Carl becomes determined to prove that Alex did in fact exist and to uncover where he is now. This is where the reader becomes involved in the story.
Nightingale’s Playground allows the reader to uncover the mystery surrounding Alex along with the main character, Carl, by scrolling around different locations in order to discover text extracts. It is told in four parts, “Consensus Trance”, a browser-based experience, then “Consensus Trance II”, which is in the format of a 3-D game, followed by “The Fieldwork Notebook”, in the format of an online notebook, and then the conclusion, a PDF file. The locations in “Consensus Trance” are creepy, opening in a dark, dilapidated bedroom, moving to different dreary locations like an abandoned house and a forest. Text extracts are spread throughout locations that the reader must uncover to be able to unlock the next locations. At the end on this part the reader runs through a forest being chased by “the Sentinel”, which is a computer game that Alex and Carl used to play. This then opens to “Consensus Trance II”, the 3-D game. The reader navigates as Carl through his dark and scary childhood home looking for Alex’s school fieldwork notebook, in hopes that it will prove Alex’s existence and his sanity. Continue reading Longer Blog Essay #2: Nightingale’s Playground