Pry is a 2014 interactive digital novella for iPad created by Samantha Gorman and Daniel Cannizzaro, which follows an American ex-soldier named James after he returns home from the first Gulf War.
[1] The novella combines text, haptic gestures, audio, and video to convey James's struggles with issues such as PTSD and his worsening eyesight as he works as a demolition expert.
The gestural modes of narrative interaction Gorman launched in the iPad novella Pry, co-authored with Danny Cannizzaro and released by the studio Tender Claws in 2014, have been analysed by scholars[2][3] and reviewed in both literary and mainstream media including Vice[4] and Wired.
Judd Morrissey, author of The Jew’s Daughter (2000), “used rollovers to replace sentences and words within paragraphs; his text transformed as it was touched.”[10] These interaction forms, which originated within various works, have been repurposed into the story of Pry to create a new experience.
Pry begins by following a man named James who is wandering around his house gathering things as he prepares to leave for the military.
By exploring the digital elements readers will learn about the relationship between Luke and Jessie and how it impacted James, who had feelings for her the whole time.
Readers follow along with James as he struggles through life and, through various methods of interacting, are able the to explore his mind, the world around him, and fragments of his memories.
Pry won the Electronic Literature Organization's award for best creative work in 2015[11] and the New Media Writing Prize in 2014,[12] and was listed as one of Apple's 25 best apps of 2015.
Writing for The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction, Scott Rettberg explains that the "reader's interaction with Pry is primarily about reaching into the protagonist's mind to access his thoughts and emotions.