Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Patchwork Girl

by Shelley Jackson

1995
Horror
Storyspace

No reviews yet - be the firstIt's on 3 wishlists.

About the Story

What if Mary Shelley's Frankenstein were true?

What if Mary Shelley herself made the monster -- not the fictional Dr. Frankenstein?

And what if the monster was a woman, and fell in love with Mary Shelley, and travelled to America?

This is their story.

2 Off-Site Reviews

The Independent
Technofile
Whatever trail you take, you have to admire [the Patchwork Girl's] heroic dimensions. She's a survivor, 175 years old and now toting a laptop. At one gory stage, [her] parts go their separate ways, and the Girl has to learn how to put herself together again. The answer is a form of narrative, which is also what stops the texts themselves from floating around like a digital stew. Within the patchwork, there are clear, bold stories that the reader follows avidly.
See the full review

50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
Patchwork Girl; or, A Modern Monster riffed on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, remixing text from the original and other sources alongside a new story about the female counterpart made by Dr. Frankenstein for his male monster.
[...]
As she began to develop her project, Jackson became inspired in part by "the Storyspace software itself and the look of it even, the feel of moving around in these nested boxes," and also by her long-time fascination with Frankenstein and its unfinished female monster.
[...]
Unlike in many Storyspace works, Jackson makes the map of linked nodes visible to readers, who can use it to jump between different passages at will, ignoring the text links if they wish. Jackson and her monster both write about how the black link-lines connecting a maze of boxes call to mind sutures, or quilts; and how forging your own path through them is an act of stitching and assembly.
[...]
It's remembered today for many reasons, not least its resonant connections between medium and message. It is "a special kind of text," wrote another scholar, "which, just like Victor's creature, is the end result of certain technological developments."
See the full review

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Edit Tags
Search all tags on IFDB | View all tags on IFDB

Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Delete Tags

Game Details

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page


This is version 4 of this page, edited by JTN on 31 May 2023 at 12:55am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page