Hi, I'm Max Levine, and this interactive choose your own adventure was made for Dr. Bradbury's New Media 231 Introductory Interactive Media at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and utilizes HTML and CSS, and it takes place on Ghost Farm. Ghost Farm is where people go when they die. It's not much: just the said person's home when they were alive, a ton of globes that are their memories, and some juice harvesting equipment.
If a person wants their spirit to stick around, they need to work hard at harvesting juice from the globes, which is turned into ectoplasm and helps keep their spirit existing in nonexistence. They have to care for their memories, relive them, and get the most out of them that they can in this bleak, retrospective afterlife.
I wanted to keep the story somewhat generic so as to apply to most readers of the story. So, I described what takes place on the farm in a bit of detail, but for the specific memories, tried to be fairly vague.
The background circles, you guessed it, represent memory globes, and they change color depending on what part of the farm you are on: happy, sad, or nostalgic.
You might have noticed that the story seems a bit “video gamey,” and about collecting “juice.” Well, that’s because it is! I mainly originated the idea of Ghost Farm as an idea for a video game.
I hope that this story makes people feel a bit sad and reflective, and inspire them to live the best lives that they can. Because the memories that you make are really what define your existence.
The main choice that the reader makes is whether to keep juicing their memories or pull the plug. They actually get to make this decision twice - once at the beginning and once at the end. The choice at the beginning has no effect as I only used HTML and CSS and couldn’t store the decision, but it still feels as if they had made the choice throughout.