Prior to this class, I was very beholden to what I believed was a supremacy of “traditional” media and literature. I loved (and still love) physical books, works of literature that I can hold and own. In a way, I think the idea of digital literature, such as ebooks or Twine stories, frustrated me because I had no real ownership over them. What I came to realize through this class, however, was that this was a very capitalistic view that I held, where the consumers hold just as much ownership as or even more ownership over a product than the producer. When it comes to art, I believe this to be very problematic, as it implies that the artist should be more bound to the interests of their consumers, rather than their own artistic vision.
Because of this, I approached the creation of my Twine story “Who Killed Robert Johnson?” with a notion of complete artistic freedom. Since I do not intend for this story to reach a wide audience yet, instead intending it only for the eyes of my professor and classmates, I feel as if I have more control over the story, creating it with an idea that I have been playing with for a long time but hadn’t yet found the right medium for. Because I do not intend to profit from this work, the only expectations I have for it are my own, which I find incredibly liberating. Even though the game is unfinished for now, it is also incredibly satisfying to have built something out of my own imagination and see it realized before my eyes.