Myst

As my first experience with Myst, lab this week was frustrating to say the least. However, it was not merely the fact that I didn't know what to do, or how to solve the puzzles (or even how to find or get to the puzzles) and thus, was not making much progress; it was also the limits and controls over how I could navigate the world that frustrated me. I found myself wanting to click on certain things, pick them up, inspect them, or walk to certain places, but these were not any of the choices I could make in the game. While it seemed like I had a lot of freedom to move about and explore in the game, I could really only do so in the ways specified by the program. There were only certain objects that would have any effect if I clicked on them; there were only certain places I could stand, sections of the space that I could go to. I felt like I had all these choices, and thus all this freedom, yet, as we have discussed in section/class, my choices were actually fairly controlled and limited. Even though, as the user, I was controlling my experience and my progress, the game itself controlled the ways in which I could control my experience.