Golpe de gracia is a narrative hypermedia that enacts many of the truisms about digital storytelling and its convergence with computer games. Starting in a hospital in front of an old man connected to a machine, the reader understands that she will have to engage the text by decoding its central mystery. The reader is thus at once a journalist, detective, and explorer of a fictional universe populated by characters that will gradually become familiar. With its various rooms, Golpe de gracia offers a unique experience of reading the various texts that make up the story and it also invites critical reflection on cyberculture and its consequences.
Author description: Golpe de gracia is an interactive multimedia piece that combines text, illustration, audio, modeling, and animation and tells the story of a character who undergoes a "near death" experience; this particular situation also functions as a metaphor for the cultural transitions of the present moment. The text is comprised of three "narrative worlds": Cadáver exquisito, Línea mortal and Muerte digital (Exquisite Corpse, Mortal Line, and Digital Death, respectively) and four "deepening rooms" (games, reading texts, study, and construction). The work offers several different degrees of interaction that range from taking decisions in order to follow the routes, all the way up to the collective construction of the text, along the way participating in several interactive games. Golpe de gracia also has an educative and communicative purpose, which is to make us aware of, and to contribute to, the development of collective knowledge. In this respect, each of the narrative worlds offers the development of one or several possible actions, different strategies to facilitate interaction, as well as offering a sort of "encyclopedic" environment that eases the process of contextualizing and in-depth search among the several topics particular to the actual narrative.
Instructions: Flash required.
Previous publication: Golpe de gracia won the I Premio UCM/Microsoft: Literaturas en Español del Texto al Hipermedia on the category of "Literatura digital de creación en lengua española." Additional credits: CEANTIC - ADAC - Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
The Electronic Literature Lab could not preserve this Flash work with Ruffle in February 2021. We do plan to preserve it with Conifer at a later date.