blackberry bloodbath by Melany Socorro
Playtime: 19 minutes
This made me want to talk about:
- We’ve got a take on adolescent girlhood here that’s both highly specific (offerings to satan, the PC’s particular glooms and neuroses of the PC) and also a bit timeless (some of the broader neuroses of teenagers, meeting up in bathrooms, spin-the-bottle). (Most “oof” incident: “throw your phone”.)
- The faux-vintage-computer-desktop styling added a lot. I especially enjoyed the changing alt-text on the icons
- The slang and the usernames struck a believable note. Bellamy talked about the usernames and noted how a username can capture at most an aspect of a person. At one point you meet someone after a period of time has passed, and they’re still referred to by the same username from before, and I felt such a high amount of instinctive “ooh something’s weird about this” that it really made me think about how contingent and specific a username can be, tightly tied to one specific time / context.
Notable line:
My one fervent wish:
Overall, an evocative and poetic glimpse of teen age
Gameplay tips / typos
A few times the bottom of the text (and where you had to click) was off my screen, complicated by the fact that scrolling is not possible . . .