haunting

A schoolgirl who has narrowly escaped death hides and reflects beneath a roadway tunnel. Her scattered thoughts manifest against the grotty concrete walls before fading away again into nothing. Soon she realises she's been hiding herself away for days. How the hell did she end up here in the first place? Contains strong language and references to violence.

Inspired by the author’s own dreams and experiences, The Flat presents users/readers with a challenging mouse-controlled environment in which narrative fragments left behind by an abandoned building’s previous inhabitants still linger. Through a combination of atmospheric photography, parallax scrolling techniques, snippets of written fiction, and an evocative soundtrack, the work allows various rooms in the flat to be explored by panning around with the mouse; the transient textual narratives themselves often changing and/or progressing when the rooms are revisited. To add to the feeling of tension and urgency, and to encourage the work to be revisited, a timer ticks down in the top right hand corner of the screen before the user/reader is ejected from the narrative and shown a final, enigmatic scene: a white hooded figure in the back garden.

Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s The Nightingale’s Playground is a digital fiction work that was created with Flash in 2010. The main character is Carl Robertson, who tries to figure out what has happened to his lost high-school friend Alex Nightingale. The piece leads the reader/player through a world experienced from Carl’s perspective. It consists of four individual parts, the first section “Consensus”, an interactive point- and click game that can be played online, downloadable “Consensus II” which transports the reader into a dark 3D flat with text snippets , the “Fieldwork book” is a browser based grungy sketchbook with puzzling notes and the last part is a PDF version of the story.