Everybody Dies

Jim Munroe’s Everybody Dies is a piece of interactive fiction styled similarly to the precursor to a modern first-person video game. Like many of today’s video games, users are able to explore a new world, and through it, the life of a person. As the title of this work suggests, everybody dies at some point in this game. However, after the character dies, when he regenerates, he still carries the memories of all of his previous lives. This work clearly considers the limits and understanding of death, and it comments on the life-regeneration feature common to most games by taking its own clever perspective: the character remembers the in-game deaths, just as the user does, and learns from those mistakes to complete the level successfully, just as the user does. Put simply, this piece of electronic literature allows the main character in the work to have the same knowledge and perspective as the user. The inception of knowing the past, and living in a changed dual present-future is disturbing — it examines mortality and the gravity of death. The story line each player follows is unique and each player has to learn to navigate the world with little help or commands, much like real life.

    This work explores a wide range of electronic literature characteristics such as path independence and user input. The user ultimately creates the piece as he or she chooses where the video game character will proceed next. Thereby, an independent path is chosen for the character each time as the user navigates the video game. Interactive Fiction is one of the most engaging forms of e-literature because of its immersive properties; the user is the main character, and the user makes the decisions and shapes and advances the plot at his or her own pace. A traditional story is comparatively rigid because the reader is a bystander, whereas Everybody Dies utilizes path independence to change a story into a personalized, riveting experience. This path independence coupled with language processing makes this piece of electronic literature a truly collaborative endeavor: collaboration between the author, computer, and user.