I would like to write a type of interactive essay. It will be called “The Ease of Destruction” and try to establish how simple decisions might end the world. The main concept that I would like to portray through various decisions made by the reader would be how easy technology can turn on it’s creator just based on small relationships and other outside forces. The person that the reader is acting as will be a young and upcoming scientist who can choose to work with several different minded people or by himself at each step in his life. Each of the people will influence our scientist to work on different aspects of technology and invent different things. In the end, these different projects will come together as his final invention.
To make the decisions more than just names at each step, I will start with an index of characters and how they think and their past projects. I want to, but don’t know if I will be able to, add in some drawings of the various characters. The reader should read this before beginning his journey. Depending on each of your chosen “friends”, you will either doom the world with creating technology that will take over, or you will save the human race by creating something beneficial or irrelevant. Also, along with the pictures of the people to choose, I want to try to create different inventions that he has the possibility of creating, but don’t know if I have the time or ability to make them.
1 comment:
First, a nitpick - this sounds like a CYOA, or interactive fiction, far more than an interactive essay.
I like the concept, but the relative lack of focus might cause you trouble. A typical CYOA (which runs, remember, to 150 or so pages, even though some of those are illustrations) might follow the consequences of a single invention, and the different choices revolving around all of it. I think that trying to cover numerous inventions in a narrative is likely to cause you trouble.
Of course, maybe you were serious that this is actually an essay. If so, you might step back from thinking of it in terms of a character making decisions, avoid actual narrative content, and focus instead on the consequences of particular inventions.
Either way - what inventions? Is this the near future? Far future? Are we dealing with weapons? With bioengineered organisms? With new means of generating power?
Furthermore, to really address any invention seriously will take some research - you don't just want to say whatever crosses your mind about cold fusion without doing some basic research on the subject. Which is another reason why I think that narrowing it down to a single invention would have substantial advantages.
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