So Pottermore....
Aug. 27th, 2011 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lissa_quonI managed to get into the beta of this site recently and I have a very mixed reaction to the site. I also do have misgivings or critiques for the site that I have no real way to communicate. So livejournal, the site that doesn't deserve my ire and nit picking gets my full rant. Sorry LJ.
So...What IS Pottermore?
Even after being on it...I'm not entirely sure.
It on the surface is a series of interactive moments from the books (in this case its just the first book, until this place takes off which it probably will.) Some of the interactive parts are interesting, other parts...are not so much. Other parts are baffling.
You click through scenes from the books, zooming in and out various levels of illustrated static scenes - there is a bit of animation but its not a lot. There is no sound, no music. On one hand this is nice since I rarely like my websites to make noises randomly, on the other hand it sort of wrecks the immersion that they are (probably) trying to make.
The art and presentation of the website is good. I am noticing some odd artifacts on the lage background images, this stops me from calling it "great". The art is nicely done, though the artists determination to not show any of the characters face makes things a bit odd. For example - Hagrid spends a lot of illustration time lurking outside doorframes as just a dark silhouette.
Clicking around the scenes unlocks various things. The notes that you can unlock range from Rowling explaining her thought processes in naming folks, background info on stuff like MacGonagal's past - where the Hogwarts Express came from (this was to me one of the best side articles) etc, to basic things like "Oliver Wood is a fifth year head of Gryffindor quidditch team." These I feel are the most interesting part of the site.
The scenes also allow you to (and in some cases make you) collect various items and add them to your inventory. Some of these are plot bits from the book, like winged keys, others are potion elements (I will discuss potions in a second.) There are other less useful items like Chocolate Frog cards, books, and some more mysterious items like an old tea cup, and some sea weed.
The purpose of these items have yet to make itself known. they might just be there for completionists, in which case I will be greatly disappointed.
As for the remaining element of Pottermore it is a - vaguely personalized Flash game. You the user in the course of clicking through Harry's first year hijinx get to do some of your own thing. You get to get a wand at Olivander's, you have to buy your own supplies (again most of them purposeless, why did you make me buy a telescope I can't use?) and you get to be sorted. By the sorting hat, introduced to you by a video clip of JK Rowling telling you to be honest. Officially. Since a decade of internet quizzes and Warner Bros promotional websites don't count.
This test however seems quite odd - not in its execution but in its results. Since most folks who care enough about Potter to be on here - have had long ago decided their house alignment which in some cases seemingly didn't match Pottermore's sorting. So someone who had mentally accepted in there heart of hearts back when they were 12 that they were Hufflepuff, or in my case Ravenclaw (though Hufflepuff kid also happened) could find themselves suddenly in Slytherin. Not sure if this is an honest quirk of the test or a glitch or if the program is just randomly throwing people in Slytherin to balance things out. Still odd.
The rest of the site after you get sorted and collect your last glop of sea weed, and your last frog card, is essentially the House Cup. Trying to get your house to get more points than the other houses. This is accomplished with collecting items in the scenes, brewing potions and at some point dueling your fellow students. The dueling isn't up yet so I've got nothing to really say about it. The potions, however I have many things to say, few of them civil and printable.
The potions brewing is time based. You do part of the potion - add heat wave wand and then come back in 3 hours (real time hours) and throw more stuff in and wand wave, in theory if you did it right you now have a bottle claiming to be a potion in your inventory and your house has gained 5 points (once again the purpose of inventory is a mystery).
If you come back in more than 3 hours the potion is ruined. And the site doesn't care if you logged out and had to go have a life - your potion is ruined and you will have wasted all those virtual supplies you collected/purchased (with your virtual wizard gold.) There is also no way to really replenish your virtual wizard gold.
I feel that this mini game wasn't really thought out very well. The real time brewing time is a bit insane - 30 minutes I could see - 20 thats perfectly fine - actual hours is a bit much. Especially since there isn't much else to DO on the site. Maybe there will be more to distract you while you wait for those snake fangs to boil down, this IS the beta.
But still Potions is more frustrating than anything else. The timing, the fact you have a time limit after the initial 3 hours brewing process to add the new ingredients which are fiddly and hard to handle (I HATE adding anything liquid based the stuff sloshes around and its too easy to over do it). I've had mroe potions fail just because I was taking seconds too long to keep from spilling too many damn berries in my cauldron - and if you screw up well, *shrug* back to square one.
I suppose that you could argue that this is a "realistic" experience but it isn't really enjoyable.
There are so many little details that keeps this from being a really fun experience. You collect frog cards but can't look at them after the fact, and there are no pictures on frog cards. For some reason little niggling bits like this really bother me. Why waste my time having me look for these things if you aren't going to SHOW ME anything?
Another complaint is the lack of connection or communication between members. I recall there being a big deal about wanting this to be a seriously controlled environment since children would probably get on here. That is understandable, however it makes this experience very hollow.
I can have "friends" which is just a list of names of other people on this site. I can give my "friends" my virtual hammer or my spare cauldron, or cards but WHY. The hammer doesn't do anything, the cards don't do anything its all just nothing. What you can't do - is send your "friends" a message - I have a few friend requests, who these people are, if they are from tumblr, or someone I know in RL I don't know. There is no way for them to tell me and I have no way to ask. The usernames are generated by the site so I don't even have those context clues to figure out who anyone is.
The houses have a comment page - so I can read my fellow Slytherins complain about potions or cursing Ravenclass for beating us in house points but I can't reply. Someone wants to duel, but doesn't know dueling isn't up, the best you can do is post another comment on the board about it not working and hope they read it. Odds are they won't and it will just get buried underneath ten posts of someone fangirling (or fanboying) over Snape. Which begs the question why we even have the comment board.
In short, Pottermore is ambitious but just not really succeeding at anything. For me the best part of this experience is the odd background details that Rowling includes. Those are few and far between sadly. I think I would rather Rowling just release an annotated Harry Potter and leave the online Hogwarts experience for the fandom to handle.
So...What IS Pottermore?
Even after being on it...I'm not entirely sure.
It on the surface is a series of interactive moments from the books (in this case its just the first book, until this place takes off which it probably will.) Some of the interactive parts are interesting, other parts...are not so much. Other parts are baffling.
You click through scenes from the books, zooming in and out various levels of illustrated static scenes - there is a bit of animation but its not a lot. There is no sound, no music. On one hand this is nice since I rarely like my websites to make noises randomly, on the other hand it sort of wrecks the immersion that they are (probably) trying to make.
The art and presentation of the website is good. I am noticing some odd artifacts on the lage background images, this stops me from calling it "great". The art is nicely done, though the artists determination to not show any of the characters face makes things a bit odd. For example - Hagrid spends a lot of illustration time lurking outside doorframes as just a dark silhouette.
Clicking around the scenes unlocks various things. The notes that you can unlock range from Rowling explaining her thought processes in naming folks, background info on stuff like MacGonagal's past - where the Hogwarts Express came from (this was to me one of the best side articles) etc, to basic things like "Oliver Wood is a fifth year head of Gryffindor quidditch team." These I feel are the most interesting part of the site.
The scenes also allow you to (and in some cases make you) collect various items and add them to your inventory. Some of these are plot bits from the book, like winged keys, others are potion elements (I will discuss potions in a second.) There are other less useful items like Chocolate Frog cards, books, and some more mysterious items like an old tea cup, and some sea weed.
The purpose of these items have yet to make itself known. they might just be there for completionists, in which case I will be greatly disappointed.
As for the remaining element of Pottermore it is a - vaguely personalized Flash game. You the user in the course of clicking through Harry's first year hijinx get to do some of your own thing. You get to get a wand at Olivander's, you have to buy your own supplies (again most of them purposeless, why did you make me buy a telescope I can't use?) and you get to be sorted. By the sorting hat, introduced to you by a video clip of JK Rowling telling you to be honest. Officially. Since a decade of internet quizzes and Warner Bros promotional websites don't count.
This test however seems quite odd - not in its execution but in its results. Since most folks who care enough about Potter to be on here - have had long ago decided their house alignment which in some cases seemingly didn't match Pottermore's sorting. So someone who had mentally accepted in there heart of hearts back when they were 12 that they were Hufflepuff, or in my case Ravenclaw (though Hufflepuff kid also happened) could find themselves suddenly in Slytherin. Not sure if this is an honest quirk of the test or a glitch or if the program is just randomly throwing people in Slytherin to balance things out. Still odd.
The rest of the site after you get sorted and collect your last glop of sea weed, and your last frog card, is essentially the House Cup. Trying to get your house to get more points than the other houses. This is accomplished with collecting items in the scenes, brewing potions and at some point dueling your fellow students. The dueling isn't up yet so I've got nothing to really say about it. The potions, however I have many things to say, few of them civil and printable.
The potions brewing is time based. You do part of the potion - add heat wave wand and then come back in 3 hours (real time hours) and throw more stuff in and wand wave, in theory if you did it right you now have a bottle claiming to be a potion in your inventory and your house has gained 5 points (once again the purpose of inventory is a mystery).
If you come back in more than 3 hours the potion is ruined. And the site doesn't care if you logged out and had to go have a life - your potion is ruined and you will have wasted all those virtual supplies you collected/purchased (with your virtual wizard gold.) There is also no way to really replenish your virtual wizard gold.
I feel that this mini game wasn't really thought out very well. The real time brewing time is a bit insane - 30 minutes I could see - 20 thats perfectly fine - actual hours is a bit much. Especially since there isn't much else to DO on the site. Maybe there will be more to distract you while you wait for those snake fangs to boil down, this IS the beta.
But still Potions is more frustrating than anything else. The timing, the fact you have a time limit after the initial 3 hours brewing process to add the new ingredients which are fiddly and hard to handle (I HATE adding anything liquid based the stuff sloshes around and its too easy to over do it). I've had mroe potions fail just because I was taking seconds too long to keep from spilling too many damn berries in my cauldron - and if you screw up well, *shrug* back to square one.
I suppose that you could argue that this is a "realistic" experience but it isn't really enjoyable.
There are so many little details that keeps this from being a really fun experience. You collect frog cards but can't look at them after the fact, and there are no pictures on frog cards. For some reason little niggling bits like this really bother me. Why waste my time having me look for these things if you aren't going to SHOW ME anything?
Another complaint is the lack of connection or communication between members. I recall there being a big deal about wanting this to be a seriously controlled environment since children would probably get on here. That is understandable, however it makes this experience very hollow.
I can have "friends" which is just a list of names of other people on this site. I can give my "friends" my virtual hammer or my spare cauldron, or cards but WHY. The hammer doesn't do anything, the cards don't do anything its all just nothing. What you can't do - is send your "friends" a message - I have a few friend requests, who these people are, if they are from tumblr, or someone I know in RL I don't know. There is no way for them to tell me and I have no way to ask. The usernames are generated by the site so I don't even have those context clues to figure out who anyone is.
The houses have a comment page - so I can read my fellow Slytherins complain about potions or cursing Ravenclass for beating us in house points but I can't reply. Someone wants to duel, but doesn't know dueling isn't up, the best you can do is post another comment on the board about it not working and hope they read it. Odds are they won't and it will just get buried underneath ten posts of someone fangirling (or fanboying) over Snape. Which begs the question why we even have the comment board.
In short, Pottermore is ambitious but just not really succeeding at anything. For me the best part of this experience is the odd background details that Rowling includes. Those are few and far between sadly. I think I would rather Rowling just release an annotated Harry Potter and leave the online Hogwarts experience for the fandom to handle.