GTA IV Reading Response

Salon.com utilizes their multimodal affordances in some interesting ways for their article on Grand Theft Auto IV.  For starters, when you first go to the page to read, you are not shown the entire text immediately.  If you pay attention, there are a few paragraphs displayed at first, then once you scroll down to a certain point, the rest of the text becomes available to view.  Perhaps this is to make those first few paragraphs serve as more of an "intro" to the rest of the article, though the effectiveness of this is highly dependent on the reader's method of reading.  It will not really matter much to someone who brings the text they are reading to the top of the page, for example.

The article also uses a picture of the game (repeated, for some reason) with the main character, Niko Bellic, walking away from a car, presumably one he was just driving, as the driver-side door is open, parked with its wheel on top of another person.  This is done to elucidate the dark, bleak nature of the game for the readers.

Additionally, hyperlinks/anchor texts are used extensively throughout the first half of the article, mainly to help explain some of their more "joke"-ish lines and to prove points that they make about setting sales records and other points.  However, I did notice that--at least for me--the hyperlinks that redirected back to another salon.com page did not work properly, while the rest worked fine.  I am unsure what the reasoning for this is, but it is problematic nonetheless.

All of these affordances have potential to be helpful to the text, though they can also harm it--or at least have minimal effect.  For the hyperlinks to be utilized to their full potential, it would be ideal to make sure that the on-site redirects work correctly.  The image would probably be more impactful if used just once, rather than twice in a row for no good reason.  The "appearing text" gimmick is a neat one, but not useful for much aside from added flashiness to the site.