Looking at Photopia

When I first heard "Photopia" in class, I thought back to commercials for the Post cereal company's website for kids with "awesome" shitty flash games on it called "Postopia" (at least, I think that's what it was/is called). Fortunately, this was not what Photopia was about at all.

It was, as you all know, a post-modern text adventure, though not a whole lot like Colossal Cave Adventure, in that it was extremely linear. This does not work to it's detriment, as it seems to be meant as more of an interactive story than an all-out game. It's presented from several different perspectives and is, overall, about the life of a girl named Alley, from when she was very young to her death as a teenager when she was in a car hit by a two drunk driving frat boys. While there is plenty more to the story, I'd like to concentrate on the story Alley tells to the girl she babysit. All of the environments presented here are grand in scale, but are ultimately either dead or destroyed. Listing all of them: Mars, with the destroyed terraforming equipment littering it's desolate surface, the barren underwater castle, the gold beach (I guess there was that one crab), the labyrinth made into the shape of a complicated religious symbol (probably a part of a lost people's lost religion), and the petrified forest. What I think this all represents is the lost potential in Alley when she died; they were all environments she would have fleshed out more in her 20s (probably appearing similar to the Purple Queen, but not as creepy) but they all died along with her. However, the green sprout, dirt, and saving the wolf all represented something here too; they showed that, by passing on at least a bit of her story and imagination to the little girl, maybe some of her life would help make someone else's better.

Aaaaand, there be my two cents.