Blossom, NY

Blossom, NY is interactive nonfiction—a researched history of a real community, presented like a brief guided tour. This is cool to see! I often wonder why there isn’t more interactive nonfiction storytelling. It would be interesting to see more experiments like this.

Structure-wise, this tour isn’t linear, because the game jumps around via hypertext, as if you’re encouraging your meandering tour guide to expound on whatever topic you’re particularly interested in. (I appreciated the game making sure we were situated by explaining how this would work ahead of time.) At first this nonlinear presentation made it harder for me to understand things, with historical facts revealed out of order, and even some future reflections from a couple years after the tour took place. But as the same highlighted topics kept appearing in different passages, I began to see more clearly the matrix of connections between present, past, and more distant past. I wonder if this repetitive presentation might actually help with learning.

Overall, this mini tour didn’t feel to me like storytelling as much as a history lesson for educational purposes. As a picky reader with a wandering mind, I felt myself grasping for a deeper present-day story layered over the history: Why was the narrator there? Who are they, and how did they discover what they know about this hamlet? When the narrator said something like “Last time I saw [this house] was before they put [the vinyl siding] on,” I wanted to hear the rest of that story. This is probably my IF habit kicking in, but I wonder if a little personal storytelling—whether true or fictional—would’ve made my visit more captivating. Then again, maybe here the point is to educate more than to captivate. And that it certainly did.