Directions:
Press A to move left.
Press D to move right.
Press W to jump.
"Ethan Has Nowhere To Go" was a short story written by Jeremy Hight. It was about to be published when he pulled it. It will never be published. These solicited works are Ethan. These works are the story.
The text exists only to be used as a nameless trigger, as a bit of back end, like HTML code.
"Nowhere" re-imagines "Ethan has nowhere to go" as a platformer in which the player, as Ethan, is complicit in the slow elimination of the community around him. The text of the story is reduced to a short poem that repeats at the center of the screen, providing an internal monologue as the player guides Ethan towards the inevitability of an empty landscape. The mechanics of a platformer are likewise tied to a history of inevitability and two-dimensional interactions. Throughout play, the rain intensifies as Ethan pushes away layers of memory and confronts the shell of suburbia that is all that remains of his childhood. Nowhere is built in HTML5 using Construct 2. The music, "Windchimes, Rain, Wind, Thunderstorm," is created by Acoustic_Mirror under a Creative Commons license.
Anastasia Salter is an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore, where she directs the graduate programs in interaction design and information architecture and teaches game design and digital media. She has two books forthcoming in 2014: What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books from the University of Iowa Press and, co-authored with John Murray, Flash: Building the Interactive Web from MIT Press. Her infinite canvas collaboration with John Murray, "View from Within," will be on display at the ELO 2014 Media Arts show.
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