The "perfect" girl site?
I spent most of the afternoon giving a guest lecture for a closed party consisting of four lecturers working at the graphics department at The Technical School of Copenhagen. They teach web, flash, new media design (Director etc) and 3D. We had a lot of interesting discussions along the way - and they challenged some of my more theoretical assumptions with some good arguments from the point-of-view of somebody actually working concretely with the design of interactive narratives, informative websites, small games etc.

We briefly discussed the interactive story Anders & Henriette, a web story in eight parts, which was active last year, as part of a commercial move to make people use a certain Danish financial institution. It tells a pretty straight forward lovestory, with a number of choices on behalf of the protagonist integrated. I think it is a good example of a more traditional use of storytelling, combined with simple choice interaction, which however works well because the choices made have clear implications for events happening later in the story (or so it seems).

However, the web design lecturer told me that his students hated the story, when he referred them to it. "Come on, it is a bank site", they declared. And apparently thought that more important than the story itself. I told him that I at least "as a woman" liked it. He told me that he prefers to refer his students to this site, the Danish section of Libresse.com. It is a perfect girl - teenage site, he said, because you can ask questions to and chat with other people your age. Looking at it, it appears to be a highly personalised site and has a lot going for it in terms of choices of interaction, language etc. I need to include it in my teaching portfolio - but still feel a bit iffy about the fact that the "good" girl sites always appear to be the "talk" and chat sites. Is this how it always is?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:24