Don't Kick Food!

Fiscally irresponsible purchase made out of necessity.

2007-05-08T22:13:00.000-04:00

Is there a familial resemblence between the person in this photo and the previous one?

2007-05-07T21:28:00.000-04:00

I was going to call this "Through the Looking Glasses", but then I decided that was too glib.

2007-04-28T20:16:00.000-04:00

Bucket.

2007-04-26T22:44:00.000-04:00

Bonus: A stoop in its purest form...

2007-04-25T17:55:00.000-04:00

...untainted by any obligation to lead to a doorway.

(Photo of, not by, me)

I used to live here.

2007-04-25T12:40:00.000-04:00

Buckets.

2007-04-24T17:09:00.000-04:00

Back to work.

2007-04-23T19:52:00.000-04:00

Welcome home.

2007-04-22T22:34:00.000-04:00

Self Portraits #456

2006-09-21T17:43:00.000-04:00

I don't usually wear jackets.

Towards a definition of "nerdsculinity"

2006-08-21T23:01:00.000-04:00

A series of traits, the posession of which enables a person to self-identify as a "nerd". Recent attempts to market to nerds have begun a process of commodification of this quality, leading to feelings of inadequacy and acts of overcompensation through extreme responses to media texts targetted at this particular demographic. An example: the tendency to shout, "Oh my god! That is the perfect ending! That is the best ending ever!" at the end of Snakes on a Plane, treating it as Perfect Film, rather than what it is: a competent, entertaining summer horror movie that simultaneously acknowledges its place in a B-movie tradition and its role as a niche product.

Attempts to Capture a Dining Room's Light

2006-08-20T15:40:00.000-04:00

I promised pictures. I deliver pictures, all taken in my new dining room, with its sundry qualities of light:

These pictures are noirish because they're black and white and have shadows:

(All photos taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT and some crappy lens that I will one day replace).

Where is/are gaming's...

2006-08-18T13:52:00.000-04:00

Lester Bangs and Pauline Kael?

Pauline Kael?

Frank Zappa?

Citizen Kane?

Citizen Kane and Moby Dick?

Merchant Ivory?

This has nothing to do with Guitar Hero or photographs - it's merely a collection of links to articles meant to illustrate a theme in video game writing (as you can see, these articles have a span of a few years from the earliest to the latest), looking for a path video games can follow that is analagous to the growth of other media/criticisms.

This is, in theory, a Good Idea. A logical step to overcoming the popular notion of video games and their players as insular (is this still a notion? I don't know. Maybe I'm too insular) is to become uninsulated. I believe in the importance of context. Post-modern theory may claim it's irrelevant, but I would say that fluidity does not necessarily imply irrelevance.

The problem with this act of contextualization comes from ripping the contextualizers from their own context (I apologize for that phrasing). "Citizen Kane" and "Pauline Kael" (in some circles, Rogert Ebert fit this particular role - at least until he declared games could not be art) become short-hand for "The Film that Defined Film as Art" and "The Critic Who Legitimized Film". Citizen Kane did not spring from the ether, unprecedented. Film criticism was around a long time before Kael (if you have an interest in film criticism, both historical and contemporary, friend Andy at No More Marriages! has essays and links galore).

The article about Merchant Ivory caught me totally off guard - I really don't have anything to say about that. Maybe it's just my Film Studies education talking, but I wouldn't consider a Merchant Ivory film to be "elite" cinema.

A few months back, during a flurry of calls for gaming's Citizen Kane, I considered doing a piece about the film, questioning just what its importance was. Surely, all of these references to the film and its (missing or soon-to-be-discovered or already extant) video game counterpart were well thought out. They would stand up to intellectual scrutiny, to an actual researched understanding of the situation that faced the two media as they evolved.

Then I got lazy, and I got frustrated, and the articles stopped and the compulsion to respond to them passed, and life went on.

Just because history is written in a way to suggest that Kael changed criticism and Kane defined cinema or that Merchant Ivory films are highbrow doesn't mean that it's actually true. Debates about whether or not games are ART! would be more productive if they engaged and challenged any debate on the definition of ART!, instead of saying, "I cried when Aerith died! Games evoke emotion! ART!" (after all, a not-that-old school of thought suggested that Art encouraged distance and contemplation over emotional response, that horribly lowbrow experience - and it was Aerith's death in a cutscene, not during gameplay, to which you responded. Because that made it real. That made it FOREVER.)

Pictures and Guitar Hero soon. But not pictures of anyone playing Guitar Hero, because that just makes you look silly.

Updates coming?

2006-08-17T10:47:00.000-04:00

Quite possibly.

While I don't have anyone as high profile as LeeLoo guaranteeing that things may be written here soon, I assure you they will be. Until then, read the post below about Hitman and my own personal difficulties about writing about games, or this post about Silent Hill, its critical reception, and what value that particular video-game-to-movie adaptation has.

What's on the burner? If I can make it work, a piece about music games (mostly Guitar Hero), music, and performance. Or possibly just more photographs (once I get my laptop back up and running).

What's not? Pictures of kittens.

This isn't Blood Money. It's a fee, nothing more.

2006-07-21T23:56:00.000-04:00

What follows is a draft of an essay that I intended to be about an experience playing a single mission of Hitman: Blood Money. That point is still buried at the end here, but a large portion of what I aimed to write is missing. I began the piece with the intent of creating a context for what I would relay – it soon spiraled out of control and became the (relatively) unedited chunk of text that follows.

I hoped to make the essay a good example of the kind of video game writing I would like to read. Some points I hoped to illustrate (rather than simply list and argue for):

Focusing on a small part of the game (a single mission) as opposed to the game as a whole would show it was possible to say something about the experience of play without having finished the full game.

At the same time as narrowing the in-game focus, expanding the out-of-game focus to include the players (without necessarily taking a New Games Journalism-esque “first person narrative of the game” approach).

Show that a video game, despite its nature as a closed and fully-constructed system, was open to reconfiguration by its players in ways that do not take place within the game itself – in this case, turning a single player game into a multiplayer social experience.

Illustrate that there is a space between the player and the game where meaning is made in ways free from the game’s rules – that the narrative of “us playing the game” is not necessarily the same as the narrative of the game. Total identification with the character in the game is not necessary for engagement with the game world.

As I wrote more, I found that I had more to say about the nature of social gaming than I did about Blood Money. I was unable to write satisfactorily about the game in order to illuminate the above mentioned points. This is my fault – my words are rusty. There is a piece that makes use of those four points above in a readable way, but what follows is not it.

----

Interpersonal interaction, as it relates to video games, is weird. When playing a typical multiplayer console game, you're sitting next to a few other people, each holding a controller. Everyone's attention is focused on the screen - all your primary interactions with one another are mediated through the game. Your actions are inputted through a controller, run through a cable, and then processed by the machine which determines their visual and auditory qualities.

What you do, and therefore how you interact, become the media you are consuming. If it's not something you have much experience with, it's easy to see how it would be characterized as a-(or even anti)-social – focusing on the screen at the expense of eye contact and nonverbal body language (though the movements of characters on screen is a nonverbal language of its own). That's not to say what goes on in the room is ignored.

It is rare that a multiplayer gaming session is totally silent - insults, begrudging praise, orders and suggestions (in team-based or cooperative play), gloating, and cries of frustration abound. What's strange to the outside observer, again, is the focus on the television screen. That the person is sitting next to you is inconsequential. The visual aspect of interaction is supplanted by the video game images. You can't make eye contact and watch the screen at the same time. It's a risky behavior - if the game is still occurring onscreen, you don't know what's going on.

It's different from watching a film or television - if you remove your attention from the screen, it has no effect on the events unfolding. The screen plays no part in your interaction, where it is the dominant factor in multiplayer video games. It's a little different than the typical zombie-staring-at-the-TV-mesmerized-by-the-pretty-lights scenario.

This model of video game mediated interaction works when all of the players have their own controller and their own input into the screenworld of the video game. It's an enmediated interaction, one where the images on the screen are as important as the person sitting next to you (in a way, more so, because they exist within the space
where the interaction occurs, while you and the other person do not).

The images are also far more interesting than the real-world actions that cause them. Watching someone fly across the screen is far more interesting than watching their thumbs fly across the buttons - and despite its digital nature, it's far less abstract. There are games, though, that require a different kind of play that is more performative in the real world and less abstract with its relation to the game world (if the actions there have any real representation at all).

Rhythm games, like the Revolutions (Karaoke and Dance Dance), make the precisely timed button presses that are required for success in most video games into a real-world performance with its own entertainment value. Watching a person hit all the right buttons to execute a difficult series of jumps in a platformer can be impressive to anyone watching the screen, but paying attention to the person's actions is as boring as watching someone twiddle their thumbs. The player's (performer's?) skill becomes apparent to those watching without having to be mediated through the game system.

-----

Here was the big problem – I wanted to write a transition that would link these performative games where one player does the work for the entertainment of others in the room to the experience of playing a typical single player game with other people in the room. Explain the potential frustrations of having a controller in your hand but having other people telling you what to do (“There’s a reason it’s called solitaire!”).

Next up was the Blood Money section, where I'd write about four people working together to finish one of the missions. One person translated the French dialogue in the game, one controlled the character (a hitman named Number 47), one used years of frequent game-playing experience to read the game for hints that would be obvious to a gamer, and I, well, I yelled. A lot. I couldn’t find a way to make it work.

Now, though, the rest of the piece:

-----

We were creating that sense of teamwork and camraderie that characterizes our culture's most optimistic views of group dynamics. The ragtag group of heroes that saves the day at the last minute, the band whose different members each bring something to the table and create lasting musical greatness, the underdog sports team winning an impossible championship - or, in our case, four different people solving the video game puzzle that resulted in the visual simulation of a perfectly executed double hit on child traffickers.

In our lives, we don't have the clearly defined roles (quarterback/receiver, drummer/guitarist, etc) that the individuals in these other groups have, nor do we have the clearly circumscribed boundaries of Our Team, Our Band, or The Good Guys. Blood Money provided the only unifying point we needed - Number 47, the character through which we could affect the gameworld, and through whom we explored it. We weren't necessarily identifying with 47 – we were solving a puzzle, playing a game. He was performing a contract kill.

-----

There it is. It’s not a total failure – there are points in there that (though clumsy) need to be made. They’re ideas I’ve thought a lot about. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into them, and I want them out of my head. Not publishing this would leave them to fester in my brain and in the "Unfinished Business" folder of my laptop. I've noted my motives, I've noted my feelings, and I'm clicking "Publish Post".

Questions about Video Game Criticism.

2006-07-11T21:48:00.000-04:00

1. Who is the audience?

All literate people of the world? Academics? Designers? People who only pick up a game every so often? People who play games at the expense of all other media consumption?

2. Is there a way around the fact that it takes significant amounts of time to complete a game?

Why does writing about a game have to be published as close as possible to its release? When film criticism was developing, a film's chances of becoming influential depended on its remaining in theaters where it could be viewed by the most number of people. Cinephiles didn't have much control other than the choice of a particular showtime when it came to seeing films. With gaming, it's different. It doesn't take a retrospective at the MOMA to allow people to play games that are a month or two old. Buying games on release doesn't really make economic sense, because you know that the price will inevitably drop (unlike, say, a movie ticket, which will only drop in price if a different theater shows it, or especially a particular performance of a play, which is tied to both a specific place and time of performance).

3. Is experience-based writing really the way to go?

If the reason we play video games is to have experiences, and those experiences are guaranteed to be somewhat unique, is an article written about a rise to fame as embodied by Guitar Hero good, useful writing (side note: I believe there is something to be said about Guitar Hero, which I have had a lot of fun with, and its relationship to actual music making: for example, its privileging of rigidly timed button pressing over improvisation for successful music making, and how that is tied to its technology and what that suggests about successful simulation of ROCK GOD SKILLS)?

If all a piece of writing does is mimick what it feels like to play the game, is that successful? Couldn't you just play the game and get the actual feeling?

4. Is it possible that at the current time the storytelling is more important than the story?

This is pointed towards games that do contain a narrative. Maybe we should be looking at the relative simplicity of the stories being told as a boon rather than a hindrance. After all, when you learn to read, you start with simple, straightforward concepts ("See Spot run!") in order to learn how the language works. - investigations of complicated moral dilemmas don't come into play until Doctor Seuss. We're learning to read these games at the same time the designers are learning to write them. The simplicity of the messages should allow us to focus on the way it's being conveyed.

Alternatively, wouldn't it be worthwhile for someone, somewhere, to investigate just why these particular stories are considered juvenile or adolescent male power fantasies and what makes them worth playing anyway (assuming they're not just a waste of time and money)?

In my ideal world, all of the people whose opinions on various media I respect would come together in the comments section of this post and figure it out and all of the "Where is gaming's Citizen Kane/Pauline Kael/Lester Bangs/Cahiers du cinema would be redundant and we could move on.

I can once again take lots of pictures.

2006-06-29T14:40:00.000-04:00

Last week I purchased a Canon Digital Rebel XT. This new toy allows the discovery and development of new photographic habits:

1. The black and white self portrait:

2. Oversaturated colors:

3. Shooting from the hip (literally):

In my ideal cinematic world, everything would be in black and white or Technicolor and tilted at precarious angles.

I used to take lots of pictures.

2006-06-12T10:11:00.000-04:00

Television!

2006-06-09T12:30:00.000-04:00

Christopher Hayes at In These Times writes about Veronica Mars treatment of class difference and doesn't mention the term "zeitgeist" once. A quote:
Her reputation as a crack detective puts her services in high demand, and like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the noir heroes from whom she descends, Veronica sees up close how the pathologies of class operate. Her clients range from Neptune’s aristocracy to its immigrant strivers, all battling to come to grips with their appointed privileges and deprivations.
Now if that doesn't sound like appealing television...

Deadweek continues at The House Next Door. It's a series of articles written about the HBO series Deadwood, now entering its third (and final) season. Two pieces of note: this one, a character study of Calamity Jane, and this, about the female characters on the show. I have only been watching the show for about a week now - I have seen the first seven episodes of the first season. I am not trying to say whether or not Deadwood's representation of women is a feminist one or not, but I wonder what it means that some of the character development of the four major female roles (so far as I have seen, at least) comes from our discovering (sometimes at the same time they do) their innate abilities as nurturing caregivers, whether that be as foster-mothers to the passed-around Norwegian orphan child, Jane's talent at nursing, Trixie caring for Alma as she detoxes, or Joanie's behavior towards the girls at the Bella Union.

Currently Reading:

2006-06-06T15:43:00.000-04:00

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans. I have been reading this for what seems like months. Probably because it has been. Dense - I can't digest more than a few pages of it at a time. When it clicks, though, it clicks.

Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism by Ian Bogost. Just started yesterday - only about thirty pages in. So far, it's a different kind of dense. Bogost's bouncing from philosophy to literary theory to software design to film theory is appealing, although I am finding my undergraduate avoidance of philosophy classes a bit of a hindrance. Later sections promise comparative video game criticism. So far the only time "ludology versus narratology" has been mentioned was to acknowledge the existence of the debate and to state that the book does not touch upon that. I have hope.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. It's been a while since I last read it.

The University of Pittsburgh Course Description Guide. Because I think I have a job and can take some classes in the fall.

An Observation and a Question

2006-05-15T09:40:00.000-04:00

I am not very good at games that require aiming. This puts a burden on my ability to write about certain video games. Or does it?

While I would not consider writing about a film without first watching it in its entirety, I wonder if this is a standard that is necessary for video games. If the participatory nature of video games allows for a wide variety of experiences of which the player's skills are an integral part, is an unfinished playthrough of a game a worthwhile interpretation?

Just how individualized is the gaming experience? Is the experience of a game narrative more individualized than the experience of a cinematic narrative? What do we take for granted if we assume that it is?

Maybe this blog will help you with your homework...

2006-04-30T22:36:00.000-04:00

If you search for "victor frankenstein reliable narrator" on Google (no quotation marks), this blog's January 2006 archive is the first result (because of this post).

Judging from my counter's Recent Search Terms, some class in the New York/New Jersey area has a paper due this week about Walton's reliability.

The power of the Internet!

A Broadening of the Discourse?

2006-04-27T10:34:00.000-04:00

Things read:

This post on Ron Gilbert's blog, where he writes, "[W]e do need to realize that what we do effects people, and that's a good thing. It means we're relevant and artistically influential. . . "

The monthly overview of reviews in the April 2006 issue of Edge Magazine (Number 161) suggests its readers attempt to go a month in their gaming without killing anything. Their words:
"This isn't about censorship. It's perfectly appropriate for games to use this kind of content, and perfectly healthy for people to play them. But is it healthy for it to be so overwhelmingly what games are concerned with? Can games ever expect to escape ill-founded and damaging labels like 'murder simulator' if they can't find more to focus on?"
Finally, the author of this commentary on Joystiq ties an article dealing with a theory that suggests human ancestors were not overly violent creatures can be tied to game design:
"And so we come to a view of games in which all game designers simulate just a few archetypal situations (flight, fight or cooperate) not because they lack creativity, but because we're still rather close to an age when mortal conflict dominated every waking moment."

Questions raised:

What exactly is the nature of "killing" in video games, and the player's relationship to that nature? Does it change from game to game?
How does it differ from killing in real life and in film?
Why IS killing so often an integral component to a game, and what happens when you remove it?
Is evolutionary biology an adequate explanation of the content of games/what we consider "play"?

Things written:

A piece on the construction of killing in video games, and how it relates to the construction of killing in film (to be posted later this week).

Gilbert's right - there needs to be intelligent defense of and discussion about video games. This isn't about censorship, though. Being able to understand and articulate how people make sense of the games they play is a small part of understanding media literacy, a skill which grows more important as media becomes more prevalent.

I guess I'm not done quite yet.

2006-04-25T10:32:00.000-04:00

The post below is a reading of Silent Hill that I, as gamer-film-academic, wanted to get out there. My aim was to suggest a middle ground interpretation: just because the film wasn't entertaining doesn't mean it's useless, and just because it's got Puppet Nurses doesn't mean it's a successful adaptation.

Silent Hill (this is a long one, folks)

2006-04-24T21:47:00.000-04:00

Silent Hill was released in theaters last Friday, and the reviews I've been reading seem to agree on one thing - that it's close to the video game. The critics are citing this as a fault; fans are citing it as a strength. What I find interesting is not how the film reflects the specific game Silent Hill (in its appearance - the design, the monsters, the sounds, the music, etc), but how it reflects a game. There's something about the film that feels game-like.

In the interest of full disclosure, a disclaimer: I have not played any of the Silent Hill games. I have watched someone else play the Dreamcast version for about ten minutes. I have, however, played many other games and watched many other movies, and these are the experiences that color the thoughts that follow. I am not attempting to create a Unified Theory of Video Games and Movies - except where noted, references to a video game are not specific to any particular game, nor are they meant to be broad generalizations covering all video games. They are what they are.

That said, there is something about the way the character Rose navigates through the cinematic world of Silent Hill that feels like a game. She finds an item that leads her to a location, in which she finds another item that leads her directly to the next location. She says that she is sure Sharon is in a hotel, because she found something that says "hotel" in the mouth of a corpse that was tied to a toilet in a bathroom stall with barbed wire and - wait a minute. How does this make any sense?

Video game logic assumes that in a video game, everything serves some kind of purpose - since a game exists in a self-contained, totally created environment, someone is responsible for the location of every item you come across (I'm aware this takes a lot for granted - that's why it's called an "assumption"). This knowledge of the existence of a game's createdness inflects the decisions you make while playing the game. The game machine, the graphics (and their lack of real-world referents), the controller in your hand - these all serve to remind you that while you're having an effect on the game world, it's still a constructed experience that requires technology to exist. No matter how "realistic" it is, it is not "real".

Hollywood cinematic style works in a different way - it hides its technology as best it can, through "intuitive" camera shots and editing. Its aim to create a kind of "realism" does not allow its characters the knowledge that they are, in fact, creations bound by the cinema frame. The style expects its characters to behave as though they were real people in the situations they find themselves in (the existence of this standard is implied in any criticism faulting a film or its characters for their lack of "believability"). Rose doesn't follow these rules - she acts as though she knows that she's playing a game. This assumption explains her logic that the seemingly random object she found in the corpse's mouth is a clue about where to go next.

When Bennett and Rose arrive in the church, Rose says that it is where they are supposed to be. If they are film characters, this is true - where else can they be but where the filmmakers put them? If they are real people, there is a "destiny" aspect to this statement. If they are video game characters, arriving where they are supposed to be means they (through the work of the player) have overcome the challenges set before them to arrive at the place where the game's creators want them to be.

A short time later, Rose memorizes a map of a hospital basement. Rose is told that the map could save her life - when Bennett suggests that it is just a trick to psych Rose out, her concerned is dismissed. In video game language (especially in earlier games, in a darker time when resolutions were not so high as they are now), a bright map hanging on a wall would be a cue for the player to take note; so follows the film.

When Rose eventually makes it to the "demon's lair" and the screen fades to white, "Alessa" congratulates her for following the trail set out for her. At this point, "Alessa" takes on the role of the game's creator (when she claims responsibility for the existence of this nightmare world) and Rose's player role is confirmed. When "Alessa" tells Rose that she has led her there, it begs the question: Why place all the monsters in the way, if her arrival at the place was so important? Perhaps she didn't want the game to be too easy, as to bore Rose?

The ensuing flashback acts as a cutscene, explaining the town's history. In a game, a cutscene is primarily marked by the removal of player control - here, it is marked (to the audience) through heavily filtered "old" and "grainy" footage. There are glimpses of written-on-leader. This flashback serves the same expository functions that a cutscene in a video game would serve.

This has happened once before in the film, when Rose first opens Alessa's desk in the school. While Rose is enveloped in white light in the film's later "cutscene", during this one her actions are clear: from the moment the scene flashes onto the screen until it ends, Rose stands immobile, control wrested from her.

These decisions contribute to the feeling of watching someone playing a video game in cinematic format - this arguably was the goal of the filmmakers, evidenced by their attempts to keep everything so close to the game. The problem with this approach arises when you realize that there's more to watching someone else play a video game than just looking at the action onscreen. There's a potential there, a promise that you could affect what is going on in the game, even though you're not actively controlling the character on screen (James Newman does some excellent work with this idea, where he divides game players into primary and secondary categories, in this article from GameStudies.org).

Removing this potential removes a lot of the threat from the game. In the March 2005 issue of Edge Magazine, there is an article about horror games and how they scare. Games can mimic horror film techniques (through the sound and images), but the "play" aspects are what's most interesting. "They can destroy the progress you've painstakingly made; they can take two hours of your life and tear them up in front of your eyes. Games can hurt you in a way that nothing else can." And a paragraph later, "[G]ames are where you are strong, where you're the hero. Scary games are the place where you're weak, and where you're punished for that weakness by repetition and boredom." (I can't find a copy of this article online, which is a shame - it's the kind of practical-but-thoughtful work video game writing could use more of, and I think more people should read it).

If this was a game and "Rose" died, you would have to start again. This is the wrong "ending" - in fact, it's not an end at all, because you can start over (either from the beginning or from a previously saved point in the game). Let's say that you saved about two hours previous to your in-game death. Those two hours which you spent playing have now been rendered useless - your actions have been negated. The most you can salvage from them is the knowledge on how to best progress through the portion of the game that you will have to replay. If Rose dies in the film, the movie is not going to start over. So while she is behaving as a player in a game would, the stakes are (theoretically) higher because Rose only gets one chance to progress through the story events. She will not be punished by "repetition and boredom", but by death. It should make for intense viewing.

Except as a viewer, I'm not that engaged. Were I watching a game being played, my role as "secondary player" my involvement with assisting the "primary player" in overcoming the challenges set by the game's creator would be a part of the experience. Whether this would be a distraction from the absence of an abstract quality I will refer to as "compelling human drama", I'm not sure.

It's not fair to dismiss the film by saying it's the same as watching a video game - that's misunderstanding the act of watching someone play a video game. It's equating the experience with watching an unengaging film and ignoring the differences between the two media that are not just limited to the experience of the person holding the controller.

My ignorance of the Silent Hill games prevents me from making any judgement on how well the film reflects the specific games it is based on (whether or not it does this, and whether or not that is a worthwhile effort, is not what I'm getting at here). What I am certain the film does is reference its source material's original nature as a video game - a tendency that one notices more often in video game films (Doom and House of the Dead contain two of the more garish examples, with the former's recreation of the original viewpoint of the video game and the latter's use of images from the game as part of the scene transition) than in adaptations of texts from other media. Why is it so important to acknowledge (explicitly or implicitly) the text's original format?

Does it have something to do with the age of the medium? Is it a new media text seeking some kind of respectability through translation into a more established medium? Cinema is older than video games, books are older than cinema. Is the relationship of a video game to the film based on it closer to the novelization of a film than it is to the cinematic adaptation of a novel?

So It Goes.

2006-04-20T13:58:00.000-04:00

A bit about those games that I mentioned in our last class meeting:

This post of mine links to an interview where I took the idea of a game that plays with the way people use the internet, and works with that to tell a story.
Cloudmakers.org is the site that archives all of the playing of The Beast, which was the name of the promotional game for the Spielberg movie A.I. I had forgotten about one of the most interesting parts of the set-up - there were phone numbers that you could call to get messages from characters (Some of this was under the conceit of "accessing their voicemail"). I remember following this game in bits and pieces - it moved very quickly. A lot of the websites aren't accessible anymore, though, so the only way you can really experience it is through this site's archives of the puzzles and their solutions.

Course reflection:

Frankenstein is a good starting point, since it is both a narrative about technology and a narrative that uses the technology of the time (both letters and the book). I think a little more focus on the "book" would be useful, since we tend to take its format for granted, but its the form against which most other kinds of narratives are pushing against.

Keep Patchwork Girl, but put it later in the semester - most of us had little trouble reading Frankenstein or playing Myst (even if some found it boring) because we're familiar with these formats. The learning curve for Patchwork Girl is much steeper, and figuring out just how to read it may be easier after you've been made more aware of how you read a book or play a game, since in it Jackson is actively playing with these activities. Getting frustrated with Patchwork Girl and then figuring out why may be more important than figuring out what's going on in it.

I enjoyed The Diamond Age, and am indebted to Juli for introducing me to the term "infodump", giving a name to that kind of writing which bores me, but I am not sure how well it fits in with the other readings - it seems more suited for a Science Fiction lit class than this partcular class. Although the primer IS an interesting device for conveying narratives, and there are some parallels between the primer passages and the letter sections of Frankenstein.

I came into the course with an interest in video games, and I really wanted to like First Person. I was hoping for insightful, observant academic writing that would situate the medium historically within its relationship to other media, and also situate the games within it. Instead, most of the articles we read suffered from the worst of the academic approach. Academic detachment gave way to almost insufferable vagueness - terms were being defined for the sake of havi them defined, rather than for a pratical purpose to describe some existing phenomenon. Descriptive studies of texts that are aware of the context they were created in and the milieu they reflect are shunned in favor of overarching prescriptive theories that aren't grounded in any existing artifacts. Defending a favored theory (narratology or ludology) takes precedence over looking at a game that contains both narrative and ludic elements and seeing how the influence, enhance, or detract from one another. The research is justified not through its results and their insight, but through mentioning how much money the video game industry makes (one wouldn't begin a work of literary criticism citing figures from the publishing industry).

Granted, it is a medium that academia has ignored,and it is likely that these academics are making extreme cases in order to overcome resistance that is equally as strong, but justifying the study of it by appealing to an idea of mainstream acceptance suggests doubt in the validity of one's work. Especially when that mainstream acceptance may not exist -just because video games make lots of money doesn't mean the majority of people are buying them, just that someone is spending money. A minority with a lot of buying power could result in similar figures.

I know a few of my classmates have expressed the blog format for weekly journal entries allowed them to be more comfortable with their writing and be less constrained than they would be if we were handing in weekly response papers. For me, it had a different effect. The knowledge that everything I wrote for the class would be publicly posted here and accessible to anyone with a computer forced me to be very conscious of what I was writing.
This led to the more questioning tone a lot of my entries had - which was ultimately very useful to me. Rather than setting out to write definitively about subject X (and making myself look silly, pretending to know what I was talking about), I tried to weave together observations, readings, and things I had encountered both in and out of class, using the writing to help figure out the connections that I felt were there, but couldn't quite put my finger on. The public nature of the blog definitely encouraged me to bring in outside sources that I probably would not have touched upon had I been writing response papers, which (given their more private nature) would lead to a text more focused on the class itself.

I have everyone's blog address bookmarked in a Firefox folder for easy "Open in Tabs" access, and will probably still do that a couple times a week out of habit and work downtime.

As for this blog, I am not sure whether or not I will continue its use. I suppose if I do, then it will be obvious as there will be other posts. If not, though, then this would be the end.

What is a Blog?

2006-04-10T18:56:00.000-04:00

According to this post on No More Marriages, some would argue it's a low-cost promotional tool for filmmakers.

The protagonist of the film was a PR man for a Big Tobacco lobby, which explains the e-mail's use of the words "spinsight" and "spintelligence". This particular contest, though, is playing not on the nature of "blog" as "independent journalist whose personalized writing makes them a master of spin", but rather its perceived relation to the historical tradition of the fanzine. The "win a random drawing to meet your idol!" contest has been dressed up in what is arguably a more active experience for both parties.

Expounding a bit on a point mentioned below

2006-03-29T12:30:00.000-05:00

(for example, when Carl explains the communication systems to Miranda - even though it feels a bit awkward when he describes them as different from telephones and cable television)

I reread this passage when editing the post about The Diamond Age (I had mistakenly referred to Snow Crash as Stephenson's first novel, which it was not). It occured to me that I should engage this a bit more, perhaps summing up what the gigantic post below was so verbosely aiming at.

The reference to telephones cable TV in The Diamond Age in the conversation referenced above is a bit forced - the character Carl Hollywood describes the contemporary information systems in the world of the novel in terms of how they are different from these two forms that we, the readers, are familiar with. There's no reason Miranda would need this kind of comparison - she was only familiar with TV and telephones because of the "passives" (movies). It's done for our benefit.

Stephenson partially breaks the fourth wall to explain to us what's going on. Shouldn't I like this, though? The acknowledgement of the artifice of the text? That's not exactly what's going on. If the rest of the novel is acting as a window to the events of the text (which I think it is), this kind of a moment differs from that. Its purpose is to tell the outside reader what is going on. What makes it "awkward" is that it is written in a way that is neither fully integrated into the world of the narrative (thus preserving the "window on the world" metaphor), nor does it go sufficiently far enough in the other direction, openly acknowledging the reader ("Reader, I married him. And then he explained to me exactly how we purify our water.").

It reads clunkily because it is straddling the gap between these two kinds of writing which I below called 'reference' and 'narrative'. It is the former attempting to be the latter. That's a rather simplistic breakdown, I know, and so perhaps one day I will get around to fleshing it out and making it a more complex comparison. Or maybe I'll just find a website that already makes that kind of a distinction and just link to it.

We Need to Have a Talk About Your MySpace Habit....

2006-03-28T15:42:00.000-05:00

Andy (of the Mulkerin variety) (does turning his name into a hyperlink to his blog imply that I think of him and his blog as one and the same?) has written a piece about MySpace.

An excerpt:

I think the foremost question regarding MySpace ought not to be whether it's a bottom-up, malleable internet community controlled by the youth who use it or a method by which “they” can perpetrate their power- and profit-driven schemes (because surely it's a mix of both); the question ought to be, how does MySpace and its architecture affect the way in which its users (and even to an extent its non-users) communicate, and is its effect positive or negative?

The Title of this Post is too Long for the Headline Box, So I Have Included it in the Body

2006-03-27T14:30:00.000-05:00

An apology offered; Marxist Theory; Upsides and downsides to certain interpretative practices; Form follows function in defining "infodump"; Problems of writing a text that has no outside reference texts; a solution in hypertext; an attempt to tie this to the final project.

I am a little late with this entry - my usual blog-writing time has been taken up by extensive resume work and cover letter writing - but it is rather long, to make up for the lateness. I was originally going to write a post about The Diamond Age and the propagandic use of technology as a teaching tool (and how it works to hide the human input in its creation), but Classmate Dan already did something about that, grounding it in literary history far more solidly than I could.

My point was going to be much more vague than his, but touch upon the ideas of socioeconomic class I rambled about last Wednesday (and how Nell's movement through various phyles and claves, with a variety of adult mentors, results in a more well-rounded individual (think Pip, in Great Expectations, after he's come to terms with his past and therefore is all the better for it because he has been both poor and rich - ethnic variety not being an issue in 19th century England, all it takes is a little variety in monetary income and you've seen all the place has to offer. Very different from Atlantis/Shanghai).

Brief aside related to that: I didn't intend to come across as a spouter of Marxist literary theory, reading everything as a conflict between classes. Whether or not Marxist theory is applicable to real world interaction is a different issue than whether or not it is applicable to reading texts. These texts are created by people whose perception of the reality they are writing about is colored by their understanding of it - therefore, understanding the theory can help us understand what is trying to be conveyed through the text. In a way, these theories are more useful for understanding the production of a text than for understanding the consumption of a text (pesky Marxist terms again...). That's a dangerous place for academics to go, though, because of its closeness to dealing with authorial intention, the acknolwedgement of which almost has to undermine the academic's authority in the situation, since the author would know his or her intent better than anyone. Unless, of course, the author is dead. In that case, the intended meaning of every "is" is up for debate.

It can also be used to shield an author's writing from criticism. "Well, that wasn't what he was going for!" is a pretty argument-stopping comment, especially if your angle is based on divining the author's intended output and then measuring how close the work actually comes to this ideal. This is a rubric I find myself applying often - its result is usually less an analysis of the text and more some sort of warped celebrity worship/dismantling that seeks to determine the skill (and sometimes overall worth) of the author. At the same time, it's far more reflective of me and my tastes and my interpretive frameworks - how well does my interpretation of what I read/view/play match up with what I think I am supposed to be reading/viewing/playing?

For example, when reading a book, is the point to convey a narrative, or to build a world? Do these two goals (out of the many potential goals a text could have) automatically exclude one another? Is a thoroughly fleshed-out world necessary for an engaging narrative? Is it possible to integrate the two, or is the infodump necessary?

The "infodump". There is no Wikipedia entry for this word, so a definition of my own understanding (and my own wording) follows:

infodump: noun. The parts of a science fiction or fantasy story where the narrative stops and the cultural and technological differences between the society in the book and the society of the intended readership are explained to the reader. One way to accomplish this is to have two characters partake in an extended discussion about the nature of what is going on around them, whether or not it makes any sense in the context of the story. Frequently boring.

Having read one of Stephenson's earlier novels, Snow Crash, I was prepared for this to occur in The Diamond Age, and it does happen. Granted, it's more integrated in this novel (in Snow Crash, there are extended sequences where the story grinds to a complete halt as the main character, Hiro Protagoniste (Get it?) is lectured on sundry topics, including linguistic theory and ancient Sumerian mythology). Here they don't go on for more than a page or two and are usually part of a conversation between two characters with some amount of plausibility (for example, when Carl explains the communication systems to Miranda - even though it feels a bit awkward when he describes them as different from telephones and cable television).

My gut instinct is to treat an infodump as bad writing - if the information isn't somewhere within the plot of the story, then it's probably not necessary. I don't really accept the argument that these books are trying to do something different than a conventional narrative, and therefore cannot be criticized for the stilted feeling these asides give a text.

I understand that an author creating a fantasy or science fiction story would not necessarily have the luxury of relying on accepted social and technological standards that the readers would already know from other texts, be they fictional or historical, or that they have experienced themselves. Texts set in a "real" historical time and place (past or present) have access to something like this. These other texts can create a rich world that a reader has no connection to other than the book itself (see Jane Austen - how many people have actually experienced aristocratic life as she wrote it? Please excuse my statement that Jane Austen is a significant literary author and all the assumptions that implies, but I need an example here, and it is the first one that comes to mind). The key to understanding the parts of these texts that are strange to us (namely, the customs and the technologies) can be found elsewhere, in an encyclopedia.

If all the author was concerned with doing was creating a world, then they could have written extensive reference-style entries on the world and its inhabitants. Placing their world-building passages awkwardly in the middle of narratives set in these worlds and then justifying poorly written prose as "world building" is misleading, though. There are precedents within the science fiction and fantasy publishing worlds that get around this issue.

Look at J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books - they have appendix after appendix with tons of extra information helping flesh out the world of the fantasy that are not placed in the main text because they're too numerous. Extracting these bits of information and placing them outside of the main narrative (but still within the same physical volume) helps keep those books from getting even more bogged down than they already are (I do not care for those novels, and sometimes choose to be extra-critical of them to provoke people into a debate, hoping to learn something more of why people like them so much. It ties in to the above-mentioned way I tend to read - if I can just figure out what it is that these books are doing well, maybe I can come to appreciate them for what they are). All of the work the author put into the history can be appreciated by the reader who is interested in learning more about the world of the novels. At the same time, it's not in a place where it encourages an uninterested reader to begin skimming or skipping large sections of text in order to get back to the narrative.

The above passage that runs from "The 'infodump'" to "cable television" is, in the context of this blog post, an infodump itself. And it is there because I lacked an outside source that could have explained it, just like most fantasy/scifi writing. These texts have to function as their own reference materials. Tolkien split his into pieces, but most texts do not do this, instead choosing to use "infodumps" to make the main body of the story serve a dual purpose - narrative and reference. This tends to weaken both of them, as the schema for reading a narrative is often based on a cause and event plot, where what happens next is the most important draw of a story. Reference reading is based on taking it all in, processsing the information and using it to make sense of some other information.

Hypertext would allow these texts to resolve their dichotomy in a way not unlike Tolkien's appendices. Pieces of technology, cultural practices, even slang and other parts of language could be linked to another place that explained them, leaving the reader free to infer what these things were, or to pause and go look it up in the built-in encyclopedia that came with the text. This could make for some choppy reading at first, in having to leave and come back to the narrative part of the text. I don't think this is really that different from the process of reading The Diamond Age, though, except that the author controls when I leap from story to infodump. Their inclusion in the same body of text means that I have to shift reading gears (from wanting to find out what happens next to wanting to know exactly how this giant city purifies its water) without much warning. It also assumes that I, as a reader, care about how future water purifiers work (I don't).

Powerpoint seems best suited as a medium to convey information in a reference sense - bullet points abound. My final project will be an attempt to negotiate these different ideas, and see if it is conducive to suggesting a narrative through reference style entry information. Possibly. Unless I can't pull that off, in which case I'll have to think of something else.

Relatively Short Post About First Person and Final Project (Since Today is Not Traditionally a Good Day to Be Overambitious).

2006-03-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

The two articles we read for this week, Jenkin's "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" and Montfort's "Interactive Fiction" were more grounded in specific games, puzzles, etc (I hesitate to say "texts") than the previous readings we've done regarding ludology. This is a nice change of pace. It is very noble to want to be sure that a new discipline is not unfairly colored by the influence of other seemingly (though, the argument goes, not actually) related disciplines. I have a hard time discussing concepts like "narrative" and "play" outside of a specific context, though.

These ideas don't exist in the ether, they are grounded in some kind of physical object or interaction, whether that be a book or a game or a ball or simple conversation between two people. I don't find it particularly useful to talk about the nature of "play" in a theoretical sense. Games, like books or films or any other kind of narrative, are constructed by people who exist in a specifc place at a specific time. What is to be gained by discussing them as if this was not the case?

I must admit, though, that there is something trashy-but-appealing in reading the responses to essays in First Person, watching academics deftly avoid engaging one another in debate and using their skill with words to insult one another instead.

Anyway, on to the final project proposal:

It was suggested to me by a friend in conversation a few weeks ago that Microsoft Powerpoint presentations can function as a medium for conveying narratives in a lecture. I don't know whether or not this is the case, but it something I would like to try out. Since we have about six weeks until the final is due, this is subject to change.

Sorry, Kids. This Blog Ain't Going to Help You with Your Homework

2006-03-15T12:33:00.000-05:00

Keyword searches used to find this site, as tracked by Statcounter.com:

"he was soon borne away"
"victor frankenstein feels guilty"
"subjective focalization myst"
"specific details about frankenstein"

Slate Jumps on the Narrative and Technology Bandwagon

2006-03-15T12:22:00.000-05:00

On Monday, Slate began publishing The Unbinding. From the intial announcement, published a week ago:

While novels have been serialized in mainstream online publications before, this is the first time a prominent novelist has published a genuine Net Novel—one that takes advantage of, and draws inspiration from, the capacities of the Internet. The Unbinding, a dark comedy set in the near future, is a compilation of "found documents"—online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc. It will make use of the Internet's unique capacity to respond to events as they happen, linking to documents and other Web sites. In other words, The Unbinding is conceived for the Web, rather than adapted to it.

Must remember to take a look at this sometime soon.

Myst. Finally.

2006-02-25T18:57:00.000-05:00

When reading The Book of Ti'ana, I found Anna's actions when coming upon the machinery within the D'ni tunnels similar to what I had done while playing the game. Combining what I know of things in the real world (and especially things I have encountered in other video games) with the images I was looking at.

I dealt with the maze in the Selenetic Age of Myst the same way that Anna does with the undergound maze to D'ni. I made a map. This was no different from what I had been doing throughout the game, taking notes on everything that I came across that seemed significant (Partial list of things that video games have taught me carry significance: Stopped clocks, pipes leading from flowing water to machinery, pianos, beams of light, sounds.)

Now, I can take notes while reading a book, or while watching a film, but it strikes me that there is a difference here. Notes on a book or on a film are to aid me in recollection and interpretation - these notes are to assist me in accomplishing the game's tasks. To draw a somewhat tired parallel, the analogue to these notes for a book would be "Read the words. Turn the page." These notes, then, seem to have some kind of connection to the gameworld.

The perspective in Myst is first-person. The image on the screen represents what my eyes are seeing, suggesting that there is a representative of me in the gameworld whose point of view this is. The idea is strengthened with Sirrus, Achenar, and Atrus addressing me directly. By clicking on different parts of the image (such as a switch), I can affect the game world (albeit in ways limited by the game's design). The notes that I made, however, did not work to "draw me into the game world". Looking at the notebook next to my computer, I did not think, "This exists in the world of the game the same way I do, with my ability to affect change within it." The assumed character representing me in the game could be imagined to be taking notes, but nothing in the game's images suggest this.

Like Alternate Reality Games mentioned below, the game is invading non-game space - namely, the notebook on my desk. Games (and films) do this in other ways, through the use of controllers that vibrate when something explodes onscreen or surround sound (Sheila Murphy touches on the former in Live in Your World, Play in Ours: The Spaces of Video Game Identity". The latter is something I came across in a film reader that I cannot find the source for.) Myst does this another way - framing the Book of Ti'ana as an actual historical book within the game world.

It makes sense - in playing Myst, the pleasure is derived from moving about within a different world (solving the puzzles so you can continue moving on in new areas unimpeded). In order to do this, I had to make notes outside of the "world" (if the world is to be understood as computer-bound). The construction of The Book of Ti'ana (its paratext), then, is an attempt to create a similar effect without using the medium of a video game.

Question: If The Book of Ti'ana is, in some ways, The Novelization of Anna Playing a Myst Game (though not Myst), then would her escape with Gehn through the tunnels of D'ni be cheating? She did use the walkthrough Aitrus provided.

Personal Enrichment: Questions I Will Keep in Mind While Playing Myst (Once I Find a Copy of It)

2006-02-14T09:22:00.000-05:00

What is the story of Myst?
What is the narrative?
How would the experience of the Myst story be different if it were read as opposed to played?
Does the game format of Myst convey something about the story that a novel form wouldn't?
Many people in the class have stories of watching their friends play Myst when they were younger. A few other people I talked to played the game with someone else, working together to solve puzzles. Does this change the experience? Does it change from "You are alone on this mysterious island" to "You and a friend are alone on this mysterious island"? Or does the fact that only one person can control the mouse at a time mean that there is only one character in the game world itself, therefore putting both of you into the same character's perspective?
Could the game be considered a second person narrative? That is, does the image of a switch being flipped act the same as a piece of text saying, "You flipped a switch"?

In Class Reading Response Blog

2006-02-13T16:37:00.000-05:00

Mateas attempts to update Aristotle's Poetics to work for interactive drama. This doesn't seem to apply to Myst, as the game has no actors through which the author can convey his theme to the audience. A few of readings argue that the player becomes an author of sorts - whether or not this holds true for most interactive media, for Myst it certainly seems that the player is more of an actor than an author.

The world of the game acts as a combined script and set for the user to move through.

A Return to Patchwork Girl

2006-02-08T12:58:00.000-05:00

The Douglas and Hargadon essay provides a term that is useful for the discussion of Patchwork Girl. Shelley Jackson is consciously working to tweak and outright frustrate the schema we use to make sense of a narrative.

Schema of books: Books are made up of chapters are made up of paragraphs are made up of sentences are made up of written words are made up of letters are representative of phonetic sounds which make up spoken words which make up spoken sentences, etc.

We read from left to right, top to bottom, front to back (in English). "Front to back" is, in these phrases, the most illustrative of how our mode of reading imbues these terms with meaning. The front of a book written in English is the side facing the reader when the spine of the book is on the left and the writing is right side-up. That same physical side of a Hebrew book held that way, though, would be the back of the book.

When we are learning to write, we are taught a certain way to structure paragraphs (topic sentences!), to punctuate. Writing is standardized in a way that works to minimalize ambiguity. It is important that writing say exactly what it is meant to say, because in writing our words become divorced from our person. A reader may not be able to ask us to clarify a point in our writing the way they can if they hear us speak.

As I suggested in a previous post, hypertext stories require the reader to provide an order in which the narrative is read. Books provide this order (as stated above, we read them left to right, top to bottom, front to back). We read the first chapter before the second chapter. When events are read about in a story that occur chronologically before the events that preceded them narratively, we understand them to be flashbacks. They are considered a part of the same story mainly because the paratext of the book itself is a schema that suggests unity.

The physical structure of a book was cemented in place when the printing press was invented - the compartmentalized nature of pages (as opposed to, say the more fluid nature of scrolls) was necessary for mechanical reproduction (this idea is something I came across somewhere else, but I do not remember where). Until other machines like the typewriter and the computer printer came along, sheet size was limited by the size of the printing plate (the story of Kerouac typing On the Road on a scroll so as to avoid breaking his flow by having to change pages suggests an analog alternative way of doing things).

As several others have pointed out (in class and in blogs), there's no sense of "where you are" at any given time in Patchwork Girl. This is intentional. From the "this writing" lexia:

When I open a book, I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future.

Why do this, though? Why break up the form of the book if it works so well in conveying a narrative? Leaving aside amorphous, though not unimportant, concepts like Patriarchy and Feminism (which I have neither the time nor the references to work with here), there are still things Patchwork Girl exposes that other texts (and their readers) must take for granted in order for the texts to make sense.

In reading, we assume that because Sentence B follows Sentence A, they are connected. Why? Because they are written that way? This isn't necessarily the case - that's the notion the Quilt section of Patchwork Girl explodes. Each lexia contains several sentences that seem part of a cohesive whole, but when you click on it and the font changes, the breaks are revealed. Sentences are constructed from phrases taken (or poached, if you prefer) from works written decades apart by different authors. The connection between sentences, then, comes from the order in which they are read. The structure of the text implies relation between two sentence - either because of physical proximity or because of ideas about the nature of written text shared by the writer and the reader.

It's an extreme example that underscores the difference between writing a text and reading a text. This blog post did not spring forth from my mind in the order you are reading it - several previous paragraphs were written between my finishing this sentence and starting the next one. Narratives are everywhere - they are read, watched, experienced. Mass media provides us with hundreds of them every day. Knowing how to read these narratives is an important skill.

Learning to read is more than just learning how to spell words that are spoken. It's about learning how to work with specific schema that both the writer and the reader understand (often unconsciously) to make meaning out of a text. The difficulty with understanding a hypertext is partially based on its different physical nature that frees it from the schema that govern books. Patchwork Girl requires a new way of reading that is related to this schema, but still different.

A problem in the adoption of hyperfiction (and video games) by a mainstream audience is this lack of standardized schema - the Storyspace Reader is different from the straight HTML navigation of Trip, which is different from the navigation around the world of Myst. In reading a book, you might not understand the written word, but the mechanics of navigating change very little from one to another (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, page-by-page, front-to-back). Once you've learned to turn the pages in a Dr. Seuss book, you can physically navigate most any book in the English language. This is a consistency whose absence may be one of the defining features of hyperfiction. Each text requires you to learn to read in a different way, which is not an easy thing to do if you are not used to it.

Patchwork Girl and Hypertext - Long Blog (Which, Ironically, is Shorter than Previous Blog Entries)

2006-02-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

Both Patchwork Girl and Trip require the reader to derive meaning out of their "lexia" by actively making connections across multiple blocks of narrative.

In some sections, such as the journal, the lexia are connected causally. Moving from one to the next (done by clicking on the text) relates a series of events in the order that they happen. As in a book-narrative, these are written assuming that they will be read in order, mimicking the kind of writing that a book implicitly suggests in its bound-and-printed order.

These lexia can be unrelated to one another causally, but that does not mean they are unrelated to the overall narrative. In The Graveyard, for example, each body part has its own self-contained episode explaining its origins and its own temperments. The Patchwork Girl is made up of many different women, a man, and a cow. Bits of information that come back up in other parts of the story, explaining certain actions of the Patchwork Girl.

It's tempting to refer to "other" parts of the story as "later" parts, based on the order I read them (the Graveyard before the Journal, for example). And in a way, they are. The stories of the body parts come chronologically earlier within the story, but not necessarily in the narrative.

Is this so different from how we make meaning out of a conventional narrative? After all, though a hypertext exists as a web of connections without a set path through it, we as readers still experience it as a set path. It is conceivable that one could read a book by jumping around in it - reading the chapters in a random order, for example. Would it still make sense? In the end, you'd have all the same information that you would otherwise. Certain kinds of payoffs (such as surprise endings) probably wouldn't work as well.

In the interview linked to below, Sean Stewart talks about the nature of communication on the internet being based on gossip and sharing information. When a majority of the class was reading Trip on Monday, there was discussion not only among partners, but between groups. We were each reading the story on our own, starting from different points in the narrative. Through talking to each other, we started noticing connections between different parts of the story that, individually, would have taken much longer to come across.

If one ignores aspects of writing such as use of language, and looks at a book soley as a vehicle for telling a story, it's conceivable that a group of people could split a book up into randomly assigned parts, read their parts, and then talk about what they read, reconstructing the story through their memories and interpretations of events. Something like this already occurs when people discuss a book they've read or a film they've seen - different people notice different things, and an open discussion allows one to develop a more complex reading of the text in question.

Hypertext requires a reader to assemble (or, perhaps not assemble, but order) a narrative from a selection of texts that can be read in almost any order. If you think about it, a chaotic series of events that we place into a narrative format is closer to the way we make sense out of real life than a book or film that presents itself in a narrative way. Whether this compulsion to narrative is biological, linguistic, cultural, or the very essence of our consciousness is debatable (locking a neurologist, a linguist, an anthropologist, and a philosophy major in a room for a week and seeing who comes out alive at the end is as good a way as any to figure out the answer to that question).

A Non-Required Posting of a Link to an Interview and Some Thoughts on the Points it Raises

2006-01-27T09:19:00.000-05:00

In this interview with Sean Stewart about alternate reality gaming, points are raised about the nature of the internet and its use suggested a different way of storytelling. This kind of stuff is a combination of hypertext novels and gaming (or maybe it's gaming with hypertext novel-like elements?).

Stewart's idea that blogs are "front porch space" is interesting, too. I agree that blogs are often perceived as such, but does the analogy holds up under scrutiny? The things you do on your front porch aren't preserved and made available to anyone with a computer and internet access. Is this actually an expansion of that space (freeing it from the removal of phsyical restraints), or is the front-porch metaphor an easy way to describe it, glossing over the existence of some fundamental difference between the two?

I debated posting this link later (when we talk about gaming), but I thought the ideas of technology and its use shaping the narrative might be useful to the class now.

Blog 2 - Interpretations of Frankenstein (What has Walton Written?)

2006-01-23T11:20:00.000-05:00

The end of the novel returns to the written-letter format that characterized the beginning of the novel. Walton mentions that Frankenstein went back over the notes and revised them and made sure they were accurate. A few letters later, Walton writes that he must go and investigate a strange, almost-human like noise coming from Frankenstein's room. The next paragraph begins with his return to writing after some events have occurred.

What you have here, then, is an indication that these letters, while they may have been thought about extensively beforehand, are written down exactly as they were, unedited. He did not write drafts and then go back and rewrite them (or, if he did, he disguised the fact). The spontaneous (or, at least, extemporaneous) nature of these letters mirrors that style that many bloggers write in (in my observations across the entire internet, none of which I will link to here because I think that if you've read any small number of blogs, you know what I'm talking about) - the "This is straight from my mind, unedited, and therefore more purely ME" aesthetic. Spell-check is unauthentic!

What follows this most interesting paragraph break is a telling of the events that occurred during that paragraph break - Walton's meeting with the monster at the side of Frankenstein's deathbed.

The monster speaks to Walton, who then immediately returns to his room to finish his letter, the conversation fresh in his mind. This is important. Every other time the monster has spoken in the novel, it has been through Walton's written account of Frankenstein's oral recounting of the monster's words. They are interpreted by Frankenstein as being dishonest - Walton, who through virtue of his loneliness and desire for companionship was predisposed towards believing Frankenstein's account. Walton rejects the monster's point of view because of his relationship with Victor, and what Victor told him about the monster's persuasiveness. Walton does not want to believe that the monster actually feels guilty - he calls him a hypocrite.

Walton never questions Victor, never asks if he can be trusted. At the beginning of his tale, Victor relates that when creating the monster, he was in the grips of a kind of mania. Focused solely on one thing, his perspective on his goal was unchanged for two years, until he reached it. Keeping this in mind, what does one make of his single-minded pursuit of the monster?

The monster's behavior has been that of a petulant child - wanting to make his sole parent pay for mistreating him. Unlike a child, though, he has both the intellect and the physical strength to act destructively on his impulses. Victor believes the monster has justified his behavior by distancing himself from society, by pointing out that if a man would kill him guiltlessly because he his not human, then he is freed from any obligation not to kill humans, simply because they are not the same as him. He goads Victor along, providing him with food or clues on where he is headed next, playing on Victor's guilt for the death of his entire family (excepting his brother Edgar, who simply drops off the face of the narrative).

When the monster talks to Walton, he does not claim innocence of any of the crimes. Instead, he asks why he is the sole villain in the narrative - why all those who have rejected him are absolved from any guilt. He also makes another mention of the state of the devil in Paradise Lost - he may have been cast out from Heaven, but at least he was not alone.

We are presented here with the least refracted representation of the words of the monster (coming to us only through the lens of Walton). Walton intersperses his own interpretation of the monster's meanings with his explanations. The monster claims to feel guilty, Walton does not believe him. We as the readers are here given the room to believe the monster or not, regardless of Walton's interpretations. The conversation is fresh enough in his mind that one can trust the accuracy of the words.

After the conversation, the monster jumps out the window, intent on reaching the north pole, where he can dramatically commit suicide atop a burning pyre. Or does he?

Walton's last letter is one of disappointment - his friend has died, and his crew has threatened mutiny unless he agrees to turn the ship south once it has escaped from the ice. He reaches the aforementioned "most-interesting" paragraph break, goes to meet the monster, and returns to write a paragraph ending with, "the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and wonderful catastrophe."

Walton's expedition has failed - he will return from the northern seas with nothing to show for his efforts except a story that was told to him by a dying man who very well may have been mad. A story that he, himself has no part in.

But what if he, too, faced the monster? Stood his ground, criticized the monster for his destruction of a family, and also showed that he was unable to be swayed by the persuasive lies of a hypocritical beast? Yes, he was a failure as a sea captain, but perhaps his voyage could be known for something else. Something fantastic - and he, the best friend of the man to whom most of the events had happened, and also the last person to encounter the monster before his suicide, the only one there to relate these amazing stories to the world.

And all he'd need is a great ending that would tie him into the main meat of the story, to place him in the same physical space as the monster. So what if it were a little fudged - there's always a chance that Victor's specific details weren't exactly right.

The "spontaneous" interruption of the letter is followed by Walton's showdown with the monster, which neatly ties up any loose ends, suggests to the reader that any attempts to find where the monster is now will be useless (since he's going to burn his body at the northernmost point of the world, a place that the failure of Walton's expedition has shown to be all but unreachable), and echoes things the monster has said before (right down to the exact same Milton reference). It's an ending that, to Walton, seems both "final" and "wonderful".

The end of the novel, then, in addition to serving as a good end to Mary Shelley's story, works as an excellent end to Walton's. It serves Walton's need for adventure, for having had an amazing experience. Maybe he fudged a few details here and there - maybe he made up the entire ending. As we have no other window into the story except through Walton's writing, there's no way to know for sure.

And maybe Mary Shelley's Frankenstein isn't a book about the story of Victor Frankenstein, so much as it is a book about a man named Walton, who on a long sea voyage, for want of a friend (either out of his own desire or to assuage his sister's concerns about him becoming too lonely) or a justification for an expedition that didn't meet its goal, invents a man named Victor Frankenstein, and makes himself responsible for telling this man's fantastical life story.

Blog 1: Sense, Twain, Musical, Film Theory, and Kurosawa (with nary a "wherein" in sight!)

2006-01-18T10:59:00.000-05:00

In order for us to make meaning out of a narrative, we have to engage it. If the only interpreting we do while reading a novel is imagining the physical appearance of the events being described, then yes, a film is going to be less open to interpretation than a novel. The visual stimulus we get from reading is (for the sake of this argument, momentarily ignoring paratext) the typeface. Film gives us an image - representative of something in the real world. A photograph of a tree represents a tree better than a description of a tree (now I'm ignoring ideas of impressionism and its ilk). It can do little else if one defines "represents" as "reproduction of an object's image".

What about the other senses? What about taste, touch, and smell? Are these even important? ODORAMA and Smell-O-Vision nonwithstanding, the only way film can convey these senses is through the reaction of an audience. If you want to be very specific, the apparati through which film conveys images (camera, projector, film stock) can only convey images. Even sound comes from a separate (although synched) source. Before the sound era, intertitles were used to convey dialogue, and sometimes provided a description of the action shown in the image.

What happens when you just have images? In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain writes about a painting of a meeting between Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee:

"[L]ike many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label ... it tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.' ... A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution' [link mine]. It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.'

Granted, this is a still image, not a moving image. Does the addition of motion to an image allow it to tell a story on its own? If so, who can be said to be the narrator in this case?

Abbot argues that a key difference between film narrators and novel narrators is that in a film, we see them acting within the narrative - the voiceover is the narrative, the speaker the narrator. But what happens when there is no voice-over, or when the voice-over and the image conflict?

Near the beginning of Singin' in the Rain, there is a scene where Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) tells the story of his rise to stardom. The voice-over is accompanied by flashbacks that contradict the glamorous story he is telling. The scene can only play as humorous if we read it as a braggart inflating his past, which requires us to trust the images as the actual story and the voice-over as narrative embellishment.

What does one do if there is no voice-over narration? Again, Abbot says that the characters on screen tell smaller narratives, similar to the way we do in real life. But what about the overarching narrative, the film? The story that these characters move within. Is someone telling that? Is watching a character walk across the room the same as reading the sentence, "She walked across the room"? If so, does this make the image analgous to the written word in the novel? We assume this is the case when making comparisons between films and novels that arrive at the conclusion that a film is less open to interpretation than a novel, because the words can be taken more than one way when the images cannot. That would imply that the camera (and the editing?) functions as the narrator.

The camera is thought of as reproducing images of things as they are. The camera is a machine, with no will of its own. If the distortion of reality (either in lying, or in creating fiction) is thought of as a willful act, then the camera, on its own, cannot distort reality. If the images are undistorted, then they are representing reality in a way that is not open to interpretation. The camera appears to be the ultimate reliable narrator, with its images as the ultimate reliable text. Arguing that a film locks you into an interpretation of the work assumes both that interpretation is done only with the visual (and,to an extent, auditory) aspects of the narrative, and it assumes that the image is totally reliable. It's the same assumption that the aforementioned joke in Singin' in the Rain plays with.

Abbot briefly mentions Rashomon, and its multiple representations of the same story in four different narratives as an example of reliability of narrators, but it is an excellent demonstration of the focalization of cinematic narrative. Each story is clearly told from a different point of view. When a film is indicated as being from a certain point of view, we have little problem reading it as a representation of one person's views of the story.

If film can work both as "Objective Truth" (as we've come to read most narrative films, shown in the Singin' in the Rain example), and as "Subjective Reality" (as in Rashomon), how does one as a viewer of these narratives come to make that distinction? Why, when watching the opening sequence of Frankenstein, do we interpret the scene on the graveyard set (quite clearly a set, and not location shooting) as representative of action happening in a graveyard, and not as action happening on a set designed to look like a graveyard?

And how many of these conflicts arise because the concept of "narrative" as it is applied to film was developed over thousands of years of oral and written communication - based on words, not images?

And I really can't tie any of this into the Frankenstein novel.

(I was a film studies major in undergrad, if you can't tell).

Edited at 10:34PM to finish the sentence that originally read "Before the sound era, intertitles were used to convey".

Wherein I Post Introductorily, Ramble About Blogs, Link to a Picture, and then Touch Upon Class-Discussed Topics

2006-01-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

Welcome.

I assume that you are here for one of two reasons:

1. You are a part of my Narrative and Technology class
2. You are a friend of mine to whom I said, "I have to keep a blog for a class". You responded, "HaHA! You-Who-Hate-Blogs must now eat your words!"

I do not hate blogs.

No, really.

It is great that this form of publishing is democratized (at least as far as it is available to anyone with access to a computer), but I have reservations. Blogging is often taken advantage of in a way that is less about communicating with others and more about placing oneself in a spotlight of one's own creation. Also, its ease of use (both in the original creation of content and its subsequent revision/editing) encourages one to "Get the information out there first, update it later if it's inaccurate."

Of course, this isn't a blog-specific problem (see the recent reporting on the events in Tallmansville, WV, for a very good example), or even one limited to the past ten years (such as when Dewey "defeated" Truman - though that's more failed-anticipation of an outcome than outright reporting of hearsay as confirmed fact). But this is not a media studies course, so I will now move on to things more related to the class discussion from Monday - namely, framing narratives.

Framing narratives are an excellent tool to create a sense of either foreboding or underlying relief during the embedded narrative - like Abbot says, each story inflects the way we read the other. Film noir is a great place to see this in action.

The film Double Indemnity begins with Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) stumbling into an office, bleeding from the stomach. He speaks into a dictaphone, and we flash back to the story of what he's done over the past few months. We know where he's going to end up, but we don't know how he'll get there. The events of the film take on a fatalistic tone, even when there's not any reason in the embedded text for us to suspect things will go wrong.

Frankenstein works in the same way. We know that no matter how happy Victor was as a child, he's going to end up starved and half-crazy on a sled with all but one of his dogs dead on the melting ice of the Arctic Sea. It makes the recollections of his idyllic childhood all the more melancholic, because, again, we know just where he ends up.

It adds suspense, too, because though we know where the stories (or would that be narratives?) that Walter and Victor will take them, we don't know the specifics.

A large difference between reading a novel online and reading it in book form is the ease of bookmarking specific pages/marking passages and directing people to specific pages. Sure, you could tell someone, "Search for this line of text and read the paragraph it's in", but it's not significantly easier than telling them, "Look at the top of page thirty eight, where it says this line of text."

Despite my preference for regular old books, I find reading online is superior to listening an audiobook. Those are always read far too slowly for my liking. Coupling that with the difficulty of going back over a passage or saving one's place results in an experience that is more of a hassle than a convenience.

Zounds.

2006-01-10T09:13:00.000-05:00

Blogger has just created a blog for me. I can now add my posts to it, create my personal profile, or customize how my blog looks.