(Actual screen shot of the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
Tom Bissell then goes on to talk about how the story is played in the newest Gears of War, and how games are becoming the new storytelling medium right now. The example he uses is the eerily affecting game from Telltale Games called The Walking Dead. You would think a game about zombies is going to be a shooter but it is far from it. Instead, it uses the old-school, point-and-click adventure game, one of the more literary game genres.
(This is how the user picks the options to interact with the characters)
This game is different from old interactive games because this actually has actual static environments instead of a blank screen that only has text. The game is still the same in terms of trying to figure out the story by looking at stuff, picking stuff up, and of course talking to people.
The relationship between the two main characters ("a disgraced black academic and a little girl" (Bissell)). The game has some decisions that must be made and in doing so, it creates certain relationships and tensions between other characters in the game.
(You play as the male character taking care of the little girl he found and is protecting).
Sometimes the conversations you have in the game sound like pulpy nonsense, but the way the game humanizes these people and really pays emotional dividends. This game keeps the user immersed in the game by always making the user choose what will happen next and sometimes who will live and who will die. Each choice affects the entire game and is different for every user based on the decisions he makes.
Here's a link to the article and the video trailer/with commentary about the game that will remind you of Lost Pig.
This Poem is very much like fanfic in that the poem follows the canon of the biblical story. The names of the fallen angels in the poem are all based from the Bible and other religious texts. The poem follows the canon in that there is no main difference. The same thing still happens as in the original story but this poem is still very different because it takes the perspective from the main antagonist as well as introduce a lot more fallen angels that were not part of the original story which I thought was really interesting. Milton creates this whole government of the fallen angels with Satan being the leader.
From what we’ve read in class, this proves Derecho’s argument about transformative. I think this could be classified as transformative because it is has the same elements sampled from the biblical story but it is changed into something else. Just by changing the character that Milton focused on, he changed the entire story. If you have the time check it out. Very good poem.
Other critical Question to think about:
How did other works of literature in the past that are said to be fanfic differ from the way the fanfic was written? For example were they transformative, derivatives, or appropriative?
If you have completely finished the DEXTER series read this!!!
The first season of Dexter was amazing and so I continued watching. A couple of seasons were lame but it picked up and so I stuck to it. When the final season came out I powered through but hated it. The whole idea of having a student, then the doctor mentor, and don't even get me started on Deb (so annoying). I can go on and on about how much it sucked but the worst part was the ending. SPOILER Dexter takes Deb's body out to sea, (while Hannah Mckay and Harrison are headed to Argentina), and sails toward the massive storm taking place to fake his own death. Really sucked. The last scene shows Dexter in what looks to be a small mountain town where I guess he is now a lumberjack. It ends with Dexter sitting down and he his a straight face the scene ends. Sucks right??
Anyway I was looking for some fan fiction when I stumbled upon a Dexter season 8 re-write fan-fiction. I found an article about a video summary of what the dexter final season should have been. Best fanfic i've heard so far. The article is VIDEO: 'Dexter' Final fanfic is really very good. I couldn't get the embed code but here's the page url: http://youtu.be/Hl407-PZa3k
The video and story were great. What made it great is that he seemed like a die hard fan. He stayed in the Dexter universe and didn't make any ridiculous ideas; well maybe the serial killer being Ray Romano. I was really impressed when he tied the clip with the trinity killer and dexter to help the characters prove Dexter is a serial killer. This would have completed changed my mind about the whole series and would have had the perfect ending.
But seriously the finale sucked and with that side not!!!
While thinking about Mass Effect and game narratives, I began thinking about some of my favorite "Story Modes" in past video games. Of course these games were also great for the gameplay but I played these games over and over again just to go through the story again. These are my favorite stories from different game consoles from the earliest to the most recent.
1. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (Dreamcast - 1999)
The reason I played this game so much was because this was the first game where I had no clue where to go next. I had to explore and follow clues just to find out where the right direction was. The game used a voice over to narrate and guide the player throughout the entire game.
2. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (DreamCast - 2001)
Terrifying game that took place on a mysterious island. There were monsters, zombies, demons, and you had to find clues to figure out the story. Terrified me when it first came out but I played it so many times because the game made you walk in a dark room with no flashlight with a monster in there to find one clue. The fear and mystery motivated me to play.
3. Darksiders (Xbox 360 - 2010)
Game about the four horseman of the apocalypse. The game takes place when War, (the fourth horseman) arrives on earth alone. He is charged with bring the apocalypse to earth so he must fight powerful demons and some angels.
The story was great because it tied in to a lot of religious text. The names, and the overall concept were derived from actual religious text. The game was so good because it had a side-kick the whole time that guided you but the sidekick was evil more like a prisoner guide.
4. Halo 3 (Xbox 360- 2007)
Of course Halo made the list. The newest Halo (4) was great but the story in Halo 3 was amazing. While playing, I did not want to finish the game. This story made you feel for the character you played in the game. This game also used a voice over to guide the player. Cortana was the voice over that was with you at all times in the story helping Master Chief with any technical problems.
5. GTA V (Xbox 360 (online) - 2013)
This is the most recent game but I actually did not enjoy the main story mode until I played the online version. The online version is still the same game but each player has their own unique character and each person must start out as a low level "thug." As you progress in the game, you become a better thief/criminal but the reason I love the story is because it is completely up to the player to decide what he or she wants to do. The player takes charge of the story.
Before we go to class today I remembered that not everyone played a lot of video games and so Mass Effect could be really confusing without a little summary/backstory. Found this video on youtube. Pretty funny and helpful… sort of!
Before we go to class today I remembered that not everyone played a lot of video games and so Mass Effect could be really confusing without a little summary/backstory. Found this video on youtube. Pretty funny and helpful... sort of!
Schema Theory – describes an organized pattern of thought or behavior. It can be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information.
“Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable.” – Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City [57]
Once a single schema is identified, we begin to think about relevant scripts that shape our perception, navigation and interaction within a scenario
Beyond shoot-outs and hunt-quests
“… innovations seem to adopted most rapidly when their newness is domesticated, …, be design features that invite us to treat the new object as if it were merely an extension of a familiar object or device.” [Yellowlees Douglas & Hargadon, 3]
Before we take a look or begin a hunt-quest, we know we have to listen to the mission and get the right items to complete this small quest, which, in turn, will enable us to solve the interactive’s grand challenge.
Pong, to shooting games, to GTA
Voice-Overs and the Fifth Business
“... Pleasure stems from our ability to discern a single schema and the several scripts it offers us for both interpretation and directed action.” [Yellowlees Douglas & Hargadon, 3]
“… the aesthetic remains largely immersive as long as the story, setting, and interface adhere to a single schema.” [Yellowlees Douglas & Hargadon, 4]
“When aesthetic objects invite us to rely on certain schemas, they are not, however, necessarily guaranteeing us an entirely predictable experience.” [Yellowlees Douglas & Hargadon, 4]
No matter how intense a game is, it must keep to a central idea or set of rules to keep the user immersed.
What would be a good way to sidetrack/trick users without straying too far from the main schema?
Even with highly normative hunt-quest schema, a game can frustrate the player by making them search for clues and causes immersion to evaporate.
Voice-overs are important because they guide the user(s) through the game, helping them understand and keep track of current quests/missions/in-game time, etc.
The example in the article was the film Apocalypse Now and how the addition of a voice-over helped the audience understand the flow of the movie.
In Snow Crash, the third person narration was helpful to explain what was happening and give it a flow.
How could this have helped in Afternoon?
The fifth business is an agent who exists solely to help the characters and plot toward the conclusion.
Watson and Sherlock
Hiro and YT
Master and Chief
Pleasures of Immersion, Pleasures of Engagement
“The pleasure of immersion in interactives stems from our ability to take guided action and see the outcomes from our choice of one or more scripts within a single schema.” [Yellowlees Douglas & Hargadon, 5]
Some readers of hypertext fiction are more likely to seek out secondary sources to supplement their array of schemas for understanding the text.
Before we read Afternoon, we read mechanisms as a secondary source to learn more about its past and how it was created to gain some understanding of it.
Immersion Into Engagement Into Flow
“Hypertext fictions, however, lack such clear signals to readers, making it difficult for readers to determine if their script-acquiring and –developing have been successful in helping them understand the hypertext as a structure of narrative possibilities, or if they need to accommodate, modify, and generate still more scripts.”
Questions to think about:
How much freedom should we be given when it comes to plotting strategy or getting acquainted with characters?
Is a cut scene that concludes the game a reward for working your way through all the quests, boss-battles, and puzzles? Or do cut-scenes nullify the openness of both narrative and plot seemingly promised by the entire concept of interactivity?
Fallout 3 – no cut scenes
Mass Effect – some cut scenes
Final Fantasy – lots of cut scenes than game play in the first few hours of the game.
Side Note: soon no one will even know what the floppy disc icon really is.
What is StorySpace?
A software program for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction.
Afternoon has been through many revisions and there are many copies throughout its publishing history; some that may not even be known because of the translations made in Italian and Germany.
Afternoon, a story – electronic literature written in 1987 and is known as the first hypertext fiction.
The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who witnessed a car crash that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and their son.
Hypertext is known to be compatible with the following browsers:
Netscape Navigator 3.x on Windows 95, Windows NT, and UNIX
Netscape Navigator 4.x on Windows 95, Windows NT, MacOS, and UNIX
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x on Windows 95 and Windows NT
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x on Windows 95 and Windows NT^1
“wings and tentacles” – like most electronic documents.
“colophon” - an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts relative to its production.
So many authors – “Joyce, Jay David Bolter, John B. Smith, and now Eastgate’s Mark Bernstein
“material negotiations”
Pg. 165 “ Bolter suggests that ‘Reading Afternoon several times is like exploring a vast house or castle. The reader proceeds often down the same corridors and familiar rooms. But often too the reader comes upon a new hallway not previously explored or finds a previously locked door giving way to the touch’.”
While I’m reading I’m curious as to how these different editions change the story but keep it the same?
Bolter again suggests – “Every reading of ‘Afternoon’, suggests Bolter, can be a new afternoon, or the reader can choose to pick up the fiction where he or she left it in the last session.” (166)
“as there is no lasting success, there is no failure that needs to last.” (pg. 166)
“…as a hypertext, [it] is not of or on the World Wide Web.” (168)
You need to understand StorySpace to understand Afternoon. Why? To allow us to see the type of sharing tools?
To understand computer culture and software history in the 1980s
After his first novel, ‘The War Outside of Ireland’ (1982), he wanted to explore what he termed as “multiple fictions.” Which then led him to write ‘Afternoon’.
He talks about his cooperation with Becker and how they shared programs and thoughts about early computer models and platforms.
Works on Storyspace software at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Storyspace has changed a lot. First started and conceived as a “structure editor” by Joyce and Bolter. (using a map) At a time, it wasn’t even thought of for the public. More so for businesses.
Storyspace is the combination of “experimentation and postmodern theory, but also interactive computer fiction, artificial intelligence and story generators.” (177)
Some differences between the first edition and the third edition: 3rd edition includes a 20-kilobyte bitmapped graphic on its electronic frontispiece; number of textual nodes increased from 536 to 539 (big jump), number of links increased by nearly a hundred, (854 to 951). The size of the work itself has grown from 235 kilobytes to 375 kilobytes; although, the number of textual variants are minor. (a lot being typos, or misspellings).
They use data structures such as links and nodes to write the story.
Joyce writes that Contour is one expression of the perceptible form of a constantly changing text, and is also about the pleasures of the text.
“The root cause of any version is revision, …”
‘Afternoon’ is usually cited without acknowledgement or awareness of the the differences between its versions, or even the fact that multiple versions exist.
There are problems such as every edit/version is elevated to the status of a legitimate editorial. Who’s version should we care about?
In Coda: Austin’s Afternoons, he talks about the difficulties and procedures to just download and mess with Afternoon at the Harry Ransom Research Center.
Some software or old programs are out-of –date or not even licensed, or sold but is still used by some people, such as Abandonware. “Sometimes the rights holder does not even know the software in question exists.” (210)
I chose this song because it is compromised of 39 songs mixed into one. Each time I hear it, I find a new song that I didn't hear before. (And really cool to see him mix it live on a sound board.
Many novels claim that everything in the book is true but thats only because the author said it. But that is not really true; these works are just fiction, not a philosophical or religious text. Usually theses claims are never actually researched or true to the fact.
The entire story is set in the "future" but thats only because we are made to believe that. This could have been something totally different but its the way the characters portray the story; not the author. This makes me think about ownership of the text and whether or not we or the author really aren't the owners; instead the characters of the novel/story are the owners because what they say and do is what we follow and use as examples.
When talking about ownership of the text, we need to determine what the author does want us know as a fact and what the author allows the characters to make up. This makes me want to re-read Snow Crash and go through to see what the author himself wants us to learn and know as a fact such as the librarian character who gives only facts.
When searching for examples of electronic literature, I found this website as the first link on google. It gave the definition, the role, as well as it's history and projects other people have worked on with some commentary to each one.
Check out their Electronic Literature Collection (vol. 1 or vol. 2)
Snow Crash - Rules of the metaverse parallel to real world norms
“It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street, where it's so crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one another. But The Black Sun is a much classier piece of software. In The Black Sun, avatars are not allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at once, and they can't walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And the clientele has a lot more class -- no talking penises in here. The avatars look like real people. For the most part, so do the daemons.”
(Snow Crash, Chapter 9)
This passage from Chapter 9 of Snow Crash describes avatars in the metaverse and a type of segregation amongst the avatars. I already knew there were some avatars that were created better than others based on their knowledge, or money but I just found it interesting that even in a cyber-world, there still is a sense of vanity. The Black Sun is only for the ‘classier’ avatars and closed off from the “talking penises.”
From Pale Fire, this kind of reminded me of Shade's realization that he does not want to forget the details of life, even after death in the third Canto. After death, he still wants that familiar sense of life even if its just memories. It made me think about how in an alternate reality/after-life, people still want to act and feel like they are back in the real world with the same people, and customs they are used to. When they stray from reality, they want to take some of that reality with them where ever they may go.
(Cobb explains the dream world and even sees places he's been to before and explains why she shouldn't recreate things from the reality.)
After the annotations, I realize that this is a break in action. He is merely describing The Black Sun; giving us a perspective to visualize the place in the metaverse. This passage illuminates the idea of the metaverse as well as the real world they live in. I think it’s important that he gave us these descriptions because we know why he is high on the social ladder. We know Hiro is a great hacker but this proves that the metaverse and the Black Sun see him as an important person of value.
This passage is important because it ties but qualities of both worlds together. Snow Crash is a sci fi novel but there are many points that pertain to realism. For example, when describing who is allowed in The Black Sun, it’s just like the real world and how some institutions have strict rules about who is allowed in and what they can do once in. The metaverse is a cyber-world but in the novel, they try to make it like the real world and I think that is why Neal Stephenson writes how the Street and the Black Sun are different because it compares the social classes here in the real world.
Thesis: The rules Neal Stephenson makes for the world's (metaverse/real world) in Snow Crash are particular and pertain to the culture and norms we live in today.
At the beginning of the novel, I came across the word "avuncular" when describing the uncle. "Uncle Enzo is standing there, not exactly standing there, not exactly smiling, an avuncular glint in his eyes for sure, not posing like a model but standing there like your uncle would, and it says The Mafia you've got a friend in The Family!..." The definition was actually: Of, belonging to, or resembling, an uncle. Just thought it was weird to describe him that way when they have already used "uncle" to describe Enzo. Don't know if its just the way he is involved with the Mafia or if its meant to mean something deeper/symbolic. Just caught my attention.
Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay, In the Beginning... was the Command Line. He said, "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was vaguely like static on a broken television set - a 'snow crash'."
Neal Stephenson - In the Beginning... was the Command Line, 1999
