blog post #1 - smooth sand, striated lines (scaffold)
Sources & Significance
Blog post 1 - Narration & Storytelling reading diary: mccloud • jenkins • deleuze & guattari
smooth sand, striated lines: how deserts do narrative with a b/w fractal accent how i approached three texts and folded them into my own practice from black-and-white fractal contrast to world-as-story, to deserts vs grids as a design hinge.
source - Scott McCloud — Understanding Comics
reading mccloud gave me a simple, portable tool: closure — the mind completing what isn’t drawn. the key line i kept returning to:
“this phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. it’s called closure.”
for practice, i mapped this onto my b/w fractal studies: high-contrast edges act like gutters; the eye jumps across gaps and invents continuity. if i push black to total, white to blown, the viewer does more narrative work.
2) henry jenkins — “game design as narrative architecture” (environmental story cues)
jenkins shifted me from “telling” to staging. the sentence i taped above my desk:
“game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” itgs.pbworks.com
i approached the essay as a checklist of how spaces communicate:
evoked (borrowed mythologies / recognizable genres),
enacted (what the player does there),
embedded (props, signage, ruins — the archaeology of clues),
and the emergent echoes that spill out of these.
to internalize it, i storyboarded a corridor twice: first as blank geometry (no story), second with embedded cues (scuffed floor, emergency placard, one light dead, a jacket snagged on a hinge). the beats “read” faster without exposition. jenkins’s lens made me treat level dressing as sentence structure: verbs (interactives), adjectives (materials), punctuation (thresholds, choke points). world-building became editing, not ornament.
3) deleuze & guattari - “smooth and striated” (desert vs fractal as a hinge)
this one i treated like a conceptual rig for layout. the line i kept using as a guardrail:
“‘smooth’ does not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary.” writcult2013
i translated smooth as dune-like flows (open, vectorial, wandering) and striated as grid/logical segmentation (metrics, modules, repeat). my desert vs fractal pairing clicked here: desert = smooth navigation (no fixed path; orientation by gradients); fractal = striated recursion (self-similar cells, measurable rhythm). when composing shots, i now ask: do i want drift (smooth) or count (striated)? the best scenes mix them — a smooth camera move against a striated scene grid — producing tension. the theory became a switching device: pick field (smooth) for mood, frame (striated) for legibility.
closing note
mccloud taught me how gaps tell; jenkins taught me where spaces speak; deleuze & guattari taught me which textures think. together they form a small workflow: contrast → cue → compose. that’s now my baseline for both theory reflections and production sketches.
next post — places of the mind (implemented work)
caption: from theory to practice.
i’ll put mccloud’s closure + b/w contrast, jenkins’s evoked / enacted / embedded cues, and d&g’s smooth (desert) / striated (fractal) into a single environment study. expect a tight, high-contrast workflow: fractal b/w frames, desert flow layouts, and environmental story beats staged in blender → unreal.
implemented shots + breakdowns in the next blog post: places of the mind.
