Fist of all, I am going to talk about the general appearance of the “Meddlesome passenger”, what we can notice at first sight when reading it: the design of the pages, length of the text, the colours used, and the effect it causes on the story. Then, I will explain how the hypertext is structured by his author, the links he makes, the way he presents the information, the relationship between both, reader and narrator, and so on.
The meddlesome passenger” is structured in a very simple way, and it contains a simple design. Every single page has the same layout we find at the very beginning in the initial page. The mentioned design consists on black text written over a white background in the middle of the page. This white background is surrounded by a black background, like drawing or making an “L” form.
In the left margin we can find the face of a corpse, which is supposed to be author’s. Under the face there is like a calendar where the number of the 70 pages the story contains is written in red colour. The numbers are written in Roman letters until reaching the page 30. Each time you press or click on the author’s face, besides of moving and opening his eyes, it drives you randomly to any of the 70 pages, and also you can choose the page you want to go by clicking on that page. But if what you want is to follow the proper order, then, when you finish reading the text, at the bottom of the screen you will see the number linked to the next page.
This is the patter design used by the author in his story. He changes the text when we click on the next page, but the calendar and the corpse’s face are always there jut in order to let you change the page whenever you want.
Why have I talked before about the colour of the words in the text? Well, there is a simple answer. I have talked about it because the use of the colours is not arbitrary, but the author uses the black background to represent “death”, because this is what the story is about. It talks about the murder of an author, and I think this is what Scott wants to represent. Black is often a colour which implies itself negative connotations, it symbolises darkness, or death in this case, and the numbers of the pages in the calendar are written in red, imitating blood’s colour. I think here the author wants to recreate the scene of a murder to put us in situation. Red is also a primary colour, and I think Scoot perhaps chose it because it catches our attention. This colours confers the text a sinister appearance, and just by taking a look to the fist page, you realise what the text is going to be about.
Another feature is the fact hat, certain words in the text are written also in red colour, and if you click on it, suddenly, at the bottom of the page appears a fragment of text. This text is like a kind of conversation between the author and the reader. Sometimes word plays, satirical sentences, jokes, descriptions or sometimes it drives you to another completely different page. At the beginning we do not know who is uttering these sentences, if author, if reader….but in the end, we can make us an idea. It is important to point out that these sentences are not static, they are changing, but if you do not have enough time to read them, you can click again on the highlighted word and the reproduction of the text starts over and over again. On the contrary, the main text does not change unless you press the next page, which I consider is more comfortable because in this way is the reader’s choice how much time he wants to spend reading each passage.
Moreover, in this hypertext the author does not use pictures or images to refer to the text. It does not contain any sound or image effect, which from my point of view could make the hypertext funnier and more dynamic.
The author gives you the chance to choose the path that you want, what means that gives you freedom to choose, unfortunately there are no many choices here, because the text is quite linear. Links are also quite easy to follow, so it is good for readers because in this way they do not get lost.
Analysing the text in depth, on page 33 you find highlighted in red colour the word “Slim Jims” (http://www.spicyside.com/), and if you click on it, instead of giving you general information like the rest in the other words highlighted, it drives you to the website of the company. Here you have a lot of options to explore, and everything without leaving the hypertext, because in the left hand side is still placed the “calendar” and you can come back to the story whenever you want. I logged in this website to ascertain if it had some more meaning, but it did not, so I came to the conclusion that actually this was an author’s strategy to give credibility to his story. I could find in Wikipedia the meaning of “Slim Jims”: “A recent campaign depicted people hunting a fictitious “Snapalope” within convenience stores using urban camouflage. The Snapalope is a deer-like puppet made from Slim Jims. In 2008 Slim Jim launched a new website: “SpicySide.com” encouraging consumers to get in touch with their “Spicy Side” by creating an avatar and fighting their friends in an online landscape called Spicy Town. Slim Jim also partnered with a well known Machinima artist to develop a World of Warcraft parody.”
Then if you click on “Doritos” in the same page, the same happens, it drives you to the company’s website where you can explore. On page 36 you also have “Cocacola”, and if you click on it is more of the same. Moreover, Scott Rettberg is constantly making reference to this company in his hypertext, like for example on page 34, 36 (” Maybe if I had a frosty mug of Coca-Cola“), 45 (“Can you imagine that, forty years without having an ice-cold Coke to quench your thirst? Well, on the seventh day, God created Coca-Cola”, 49 (“Promethean script, you will see the one thing in this miserable existence that is always good and always true. Always Coca-Cola“, 58 (“With a gigantic igloo cooler filled with frosty cans of ice cold Coca-Cola by our side?”), 59 (“Could we at least stop for a Coke, a breath of fresh air? Stretch the legs. Be somewhere, stopped, not a body in motion, just standing there, in one place, a body at rest, sipping an ice cold Coke”, 60 (“Little Timmy the crippled child has a sip of the Coke and he is healed”), (, (I wonder if they pay him for it!).
I think these are just techniques or tools that the author uses just in order to give credibility to his story, to make it more believable.
But, let’s talk about other techniques the author uses. On page 48, if you click on the word “gaming” you realise that this is not just a description, a curiosity or a play of words, but you can see this:
About the short fragments of text which appear on screen when clicking on the red highlighted words, we can say that, at the beginning of the story it is a little bit confusing because you do not who is uttering this words, who is teasing us, but, as the story develops, we come to the conclusion that it is the death author, who is still in this way taking part in the story, he is not completely gone. For example on page 53 “Somewhere there is a blind oracle who knows everything that will happen. Unfortunately, he is no longer with us. He is in a hospital somewhere, or a morgue. He is beyond our help. Come, let’s forget about him. He is just a memory, and memories are but representations, and representations are only things that we never really knew. So it’s better to forget. Could we?” With oracle, the narrator makes reference to the death author, and, if we press “oracle”, the next text appears on screen: “give me back my fucking eyes.” So clearly, here we can identify that the person who creates those links is the death author.
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