Katie's blog

Cathy's Book was kind of cute, I mean don't get me wrong, I enjoy angsty narcissistic teenage girl fiction as much as the next person, but as far as it qualifying as an ARG, I believe that it's sort of like a hybrid between standard literary narrative and an ARG. The book as a discourse contains a relatively linear story with characters, plot, etc., all of the components for a narrative. The addition of the extra clues, or "kernels" and "satellites" if we're applying Chatman's terminology, make the story ARG-esque, but it doesn't actually meet the criteria of an ARG.  read more »

I read John W. Gosney's article about the history of alternate reality games. The chapter was called "Unreality: A Brief History of ARG" and the actual history certainly seemed brief. Now I know ARG's are a really new concept and so there isn't much room for history, but the title didn't really seem to fit the subject matter. I guess I'm just being particularly discriminatory because Gosney sites wikipedia as a source for a definition and correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a huge academic faux pas? I've been told in many college classes that wikipedia is a big no no and that automatically made me feel like this author was possibly a little unreliable. It also seemed a bit too personal and contained irrelevancies for a chapter covering some historical aspects, but regardless of Gosney's methods, I wanted to address ARG's...  read more »

I believe Marie-Laure Ryan's book takes an interesting approach to story and discourse. It seems to make some statements similar to Chatman's, but her argument is presented more clearly to me. She discusses the representations of images, much like our earlier discussions of Magritte's pipe, and I found these points most interesting in her argument, particularly the concept of panfictionality.  read more »

After reading Markku Eskelinen's excerpt about the infiltration of narratology in ludology, I found some of his arguments intriguing, but most of them were sounded like pretentious crap. And this was my reaction before reading his rude response to Richard Schechner.. I think his main point that caused me to feel so indignant was how he differentiates between ludology's user time and event time and narratology's story time and discourse time. He expresses these ideas as being totally separate, black and white arguments when really these concepts are so ambiguous.  read more »

In my last blog, I discussed the subjectivity of the text-based game Adventure. Now after experiencing both the Atari version of Adventure and the text-based version, I can make a comparison and expound upon my previous idea.

One of the main concepts that stuck out to me while comparing these two Adventures was the representation of character. In the text-based narrative, the character was essentially you. The discourse of text gives you basic surroundings, boundaries, and objects with brief description and you create the whole abstract world. You would subjectively envision yourself as the main character exploring this metaphysical realm. The “magic circle” in this game would be this creation you have manifested in your mind.  read more »

So I played Adventure and at first I found it to be rather constricting. Initially, the two word command structure used to navigate through the colossal cave was somewhat frustrating, but after some time in the game it was liberating. The simplicity behind it frees our minds from the unimportant, and allows us to focus on the story itself and completing the task at hand. The game, as a text based world versus a visual one that we see and navigate, is an abstraction and becomes a more personal, subjective narrative that we engage.  read more »

After watching Helvetica, I found that there were two main views concerning the text: those who praised the text for its legibility, efficiency, and simplicity, and those who reject it for being bland, unoriginal, and dehumanizing. Although I can clearly see the appeal for Helvetica's functionality...it's clear and useful, but I can't help but feel a kind of rebellion against form, order, and convenience.  read more »

I just started reading the Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method in the course pack and the term metalanguage resonated with me...

I took a class based on the relation between impressionism and novels and I felt that Mitchell's discussion was similar to it. Mitchell argues that metalanguage attempts to "reveal the inextricable weaving together of representation and discourse, the imbrication of visual and verbal experience" (83). It makes an abstraction of the relations between visual and verbal. There were no actual images in the material we read in my literary impressionism class, but the language itself acted as a vehicle to create the images in the reader's mind. Story and Discourse claims that "in verbal narrative it is abstract, requiring a reconstruction in the mind" (97). The main focus of my class was how impressionistic images are relative to narrative, the way the blurred pictures demand a reconstruction in the mind and the way the meaning behind the images is dependent on the perception of the viewer. Narratives that can be described as metalanguages also have to be reconstructed and analyzed in a similar fashion.  read more »

The racial issues in Krazy Kat did seem evident to me mainly by the character's idiosyncratic jargon ("offissa," "mo' sispents," etc.) and now thanks to Jennilee's clarification of it we know for sure. Along with race, I also noticed an obvious social hierarchy mainly through the authority figures.  read more »

So I began reading Story and Discourse and quickly got bored. I've sure had my fill of literary theory at UF. I always find them to be redundant and somewhat pretentious. Anyway, I continue reading and it's all in one ear out the other and full of silly diagrams. Then I get somewhere around page 27 and it starts to make more sense. I read further and I start connecting it to some of the themes in this class. So I think I'll attempt to tackle this theory material....  read more »