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I was curious to see how Metamorphabet would handle X. In alphabet books, X is always a pain. Or rather, it's always an X-ray, and since alphabet books are generally aimed at kids - by the time a person has grown up, publishers have despaired of trying to teach them the alphabet - X-rays present something of a problem. In the Peppa Pig alphabet book (I looked, so you can leave your copy on the shelf), the X-ray is a baggage machine at an airport. Interesting trade-off, really. Agreed that nobody wants to think of Peppa Pig maybe following up with a biopsy, but it's strange that the idea she might be smuggling drugs through Nicaragua is clearly not a problem.
In Metamorphabet, an interactive alphabet app, X is an X-ray. But here's the thing: it's an X-ray of a giant X, a letter that, upon closer inspection, appears to have two long bones going off on one diagonal, and a bunch of little bones running down the other. A skeleton stuffed inside a letter: it's wonderfully squirm-inducing to think about that. And then, just as you are thinking about that - wow! - it all gets beautiful. Suddenly, the bones turn into a xylophone. A xylophone you can play, fingers running up and down the scale accompanied by some lovely animation. Metamorphabet is creepy and euphoric by turns. It's Videodrome and Goodnight Moon all squished together. In other words, it's Vectorpark.
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