Depression Quest was an excellent example of digital technology being used to spread awareness about a particular issue while destigmatizing it. Being an interactive game, Depression Quest is able to captivate its players more than a mere article. Moreover, this interactive format allows the players to identify with the depressed person and experience life through the eyes of someone suffering with this disease. In this way, I thought Depression Quest was remarkable in that it builds understanding of depression by obliging the players to make everyday decisions within the constraints of a clinically depressed mind. This experience really helps the players to understand the torment that comes everyday living with this disease.
On a more technical level, the use of Twine to create Depression Quest aided my understanding of just how versatile the format is. The story was very well crafted and included many layers but still operated based upon the choice paradigm that we experimented with in class. I found this inspiring, because Depression Quest shows how empowering and expedient a simple digital tool can become when used effectively.
I am sure most of my peers will echo that they tried to choose the healthiest choices possible throughout the game, hopefully leading to the most auspicious outcome. I thought this was another important aspect of Depression Quest. The game does not truly have an ending, merely outcomes that indicate what the protagonist’s future may be. This is important in order to understand the impossibility of ridding oneself definitively of depression, which the developers stress in the epilogue.

Depression Quest was an engrossing experience that was both challenging mentally as well as a well designed use of the Twine platform. Aside from the dense and immersive narrative elements of the game, the removal of certain options was perhaps the most interesting aspect. In most instances, the options removed would be what I would personally have done if these situations were my life; I instead picked what I felt to be the best, most healthy alternative. These limited options seem to be the purpose of the narrative, though; living with depression doesn’t mean I have the right mentality to make all these decisions, and so I might resort to less healthy behaviors. Some of these decisions were also ones I’ve seen people close to me, including in my own family, have to go through. These moments where full control was limited allowed me to understand how one with depression might feel when facing even basic life decisions.

This narrative displays the scope and power of digital tools; an individual can be briefly submerged in the life of someone else and understand that psyche, developing more empathy in the process. While the ending I achieved in Depression Quest was probably the most positive one, in some cases the outcomes of my selection would be harrowing to experience in real life. The immersive quality of Twine made it so that I was invested in each outcome, making each passage more life-like and experiential; I was the protagonist and each emotion and event was mine. Much of our discussion so far has focused on how computers and their programs are best viewed within the context of their development. Outcomes are solutions to the brainstormed problems, and in this case, the digital choose-you-own adventure format disseminated information that allowed me to have a more-intense of experience conditions that many around me suffer each day.

In class we discussed how the history of modern computing can be traced back to various technological innovations from thinkers like Leibniz, Babbage, Lovelace.  We can also complicate that narrative to include the histories of women in computing as well as the manifold of applications and innovations from various fields and disciplines.

If the history about the origins of computing can be deconstructed, problematized, and challenged, so too can the contemporary discourse about tech and progress. In the modern age, technology is said to connect us to friends and thus create a “global community.” While innovations like the world wide web have made many aspects of our lives better, we also seem to be in an identity crisis of what the future of the internet will be.

Consider for example three tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Although it began as a search engine google’s revenue stream comes from selling direct advertising space. What does it mean for search engines to privilege content based on who can pay the most? Amazon began as a platform for buying and selling books, but is now a trillion dollar company that makes the majority of its money by selling server space and has well documented cases of abusing its workers. Facebook began as a tool to connect college students and, like google, has monetized its platform by selling direct advertisements and sold advertisements designed to influence the outcome of a presidential election.

In other words, our discussions about modern technology should also include the difficult problems that come with “Progress.”

Given that my group’s reading focused heavily on the people responsible for creating some of the first computing machines, such as Leibniz’s step reckoner or Babbage’s difference engine, and the actual logic behind how these machines work, I went into class assuming that that was going to be the main discussion topic. Hearing from the other groups about their readings encouraged me to begin to contemplate how the O’Regan reading was written to influence our more machine-centric views of it.

For example, I read about Lady Ada Lovelace in another book, The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, and I recall reading a lot more about her personal life and the actual details surrounding her involvement with Babbage’s work. Because the book’s purpose was not so much to talk about the actual analytic engine, for example, it focused more on one of the humans involved in it, Ada Lovelace. However, in O’Regan’s work, while the humans behind the actual machines were discussed, they were done so in a secondary way. This fact is made even more evident by the way in which the section headings are divided. When I looked back at the titles of O’Regan’s sub-chapters, I noticed that the headings focused on the actual technology.  Thus, even when discussing the same topics or even people, there is going to be a difference depending on who is telling the story.

I randomly found myself contemplating how history will be told in the future, given the technological advancements that have occurred for us to provide a more globalized telling of history. I am assuming that all of the information that is being put online, for example, may have a longer-lasting shelf-life than, papyrus documents, for example, which we spoke of during the first week of class. Will this mean that history in the future will be focused on more perspectives in general?

In our discussion on Monday, we talked about the humanness of computing. The first computers were humans who were able to perform complex calculations. Once we developed machines called computers, they remained an output of human developments, closely tailored to the needs of individual industries like business and the science. We often view technological developments as something that will drastically alter our way of life, revolutions that will change how we relate to each other and the world in an instant. Instead of remembering that humans developed them, we view technologies as independently imposing themselves upon society. As Mahoney puts it, “there is society strolling along, minding its own business, and, wham!, it gets impacted and is left reeling by a revolutionary technology, which changes everything overnight or in some similarly short time” (121). He proposes that history is actually much slower than instantaneous breakthroughs and dramatic effects. This is true; everything cannot change in an instant. However, the slowly building computing developments do still have drastic impacts on the way we live. The world may not have changed much the day the first iPhone was released, but my life is significantly different than it would have been 10 years ago due to my owning one. How does the speed of adoption of new technologies impact how they change our lives? Does the slow build of increasingly advanced technology mean that it becomes gradually irreversibly built into our lives rather than becoming a fad, briefly impacting our lives before fading away? Regardless of the pace at which we adopt new technologies, they will always be the result of human innovation.