It Had to Be With You
interactive fiction
Year: 2014
Year: 2019
Role: Concept, Design, Writing, Development
"It Had to Be With You" is an interactive poem about family, culture, language, and secrets. The poem unfolds as a series of words animated in time to music. In order to change the path of the narrative, the user interrupts it by clicking on one of the highlighted words. This will lead the user into a new path, with more clickable words and potential stories.
Concept
ideation and story
The concept for this piece sets a poem about Brazilian familial identity against the musical backdrop of an early Bossa Nova tune. The poem unfolds, in time to the music, allowing the reader to choose to follow a path by interacting with a key word as it lights up on screen. In this way, the piece immerses the reader in an engrossing narrative that they must deliberately engage with in order to uncover.
Conceiving of and drawing out the high level story structure.
Structure
writing and design
In designing the structure, each path of the poem needed to be written, timed and sequenced according to the pacing of the song, then matched up with its connecting paths at key transition moments.
Setting the timing for each word of each written path.
Determining connection points and establishing narrative continuity between paths.
Final piece
design and context
It Had to Be With You ultimately presents as an immersive, yet destabilizing narrative. The reader is made to be unsure of where they are in the story, in their path, in place, and in history. In this way, the rhetoric of the piece evokes the confusion and disconcertion of Diasporic stories, of cultural and familial shakiness, as the reader seeks to understand and unpack stories as they messily unfold.
Allie Teixeira Riggs
Allie Teixeira Riggs
Allie Teixeira Riggs
Design Researcher and Product Designer
Design Researcher and Product Designer
Design Researcher and Product Designer
Design Researcher and Product Designer