Please Answer Carefully, a work built using twine software by game maker and writer, litrouke, is an incredibly unsettling piece that uses the e-literature form with great efficacy. It is an interactive work, formatted as an internet survey, that takes the reader through a series of a dozen questions. The work starts off like any typical online survey, lulling the reader into a sense of comfort and familiarity, before it turns sharply and leaves the reader incredibly uncomfortable. This piece is, through and through, e-literature, and the beauty of it is how deceptively clever it is. It plays off the tropes of banal internet surveys, of which we are all familiar, before introducing a stalking component, drawing comparisons to data tracking.
Stephanie Strickland, in Born Digital, explains, “there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it.” Please Answer Carefully is interactive and contains sound elements, and therefore, could not be experienced the way it is intended to be on anything other than a computing device. Strickland goes on to say, “To read e-works is to operate or play them (more like an instrument than a game, though some e-works have gamelike elements).” Please Answer Carefully falls into the more gamelike structure; for the reader to work through the piece, it must be interacted with constantly; each question must be answered before the next element of the story is introduced. The interactive element of it, as well as its familiar form on the internet, what Strickland would call its “programming aesthetic,” are what lend it its frightening nature. The author plays with this familiar aesthetic, breaking it, to unsettle the reader. Having just been asked how long it takes for them to reply to email, the fifth question of the survey asks readers, “Then why won’t you answer mine?” The piece then abruptly changes to a different question about digital communication, exemplifying another principal of e-lit outlined by Strickland, “Perceptions of these levels [of programming] as well as the transitions and disturbances between them.” Another place in which perceptions of programming are disturbed is in the last question of the work, in which the keys the reader strikes on their keyboard do not correspond to the letters typed out on screen. It leaves the reader feeling as if the computer is no longer in their control, that it’s operating of its own accord, that it’s thinking.
Please Answer Carefully is a wonderfully creepy piece of electronic literature, and one that the author of this site highly recommends experiencing.
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