Our project seems to be moving in a distinct direction – examining which themes tend to occur together in horror video games as our primary data focus, and then using Barbara Creed’s framework to dive deeper into a few games – which ones to be decided – for close readings.

The website is also becoming more distinct – I’ve started adding first drafts of the data visualizations to it, and each chart now fades in as you scroll down, which makes things look a little cooler. There is surprisingly more than you’d expect to making things fade in and out of existence. I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole involving scroll driven animations, only to discover they aren’t actually supported on a lot of browsers. Including Firefox, which was especially amusing because I got the documentation on that from… Mozilla, the developers of Firefox.

Web design is confusing! And also full of random standards that not every browser supports. Making a functional, minimal-computing-style website that prioritizes access over bells and whistles means trying to use the most widely accepted standards to reduce any obstacles to someone viewing the site as it’s intended to be viewed. So I found another way to produce the effect I wanted. The code itself for it may be more complicated, but the final product is closer to the standards of more browsers, and thus better supported.

I’m looking forward to beginning to work on the close readings, because like making webpages viewable by various browsers, we want our ideas to be understandable by various people. The text we write to scaffold and expand upon the visualizations will be the heart of that human connection. It’s our chance to speak directly to our audience, to give them a reason to care by making our work relatable to them. It’s our chance to let our own interests and personalities shine through, letting our audience see why we care, and understand the project better themselves through that. Web design has standards, and so too does writing, but the topics we explore, the things we describe? There’s no limit, really, to what direction we can go with it and who we can reach.

It’s scary, but the good kind of scary. Like realizing how small and fragile you are compared to the whole wide universe… and then realizing that just means there’s a ton out there for you to explore.