Robin's blog

As was discussed in class on Friday, it would be impossible for a work like Twelve Blue to be translated to a theatrical release without removing the hypertextual elements and reducing it to a straightforward narrative. The nature of cinema demands a captive audience, and, as movies are traditionally made for wide release then later transferred to video, most filmmakers are justifiably tied to conventional storytelling methods. Because interactive fiction and hypertext came into their own in the VHS age, film was not a medium that was open to them.  read more »

In Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan writes that, "The drama of most games is only worth experiencing as an active participant; it is meant to be lived and not spectated" (117). So, why are almost all of my gaming memories of times when I was watching someone else play?

As I have said before, I didn't really play video games while I was growing up, so that is no doubt one of the biggest reasons. I never beat Dr. Robotnik, I only know that the princess was (not actually) in another castle because I heard it from a friend, and I have never watched a Sim of my own creation burn to death. Perhaps if I had played more games, I would have had more opportunities to become emotionally involved in actually playing them.  read more »

I completely agree with Dr. Hayles that narrative and data have a symbiotic relationship. Even the driest scientific paper has some narrative structure. The researcher cannot simply publish a table of values, he or she must state how and why the data was collected, what happened over the course of the experiment, and what the significance of the data is. In essence, the scientist writes a (usually very dull) story about the data that has been presented. The word "narrative" is not typically used in this context, but, in most laboratory classes, a student will not receive full credit for a report unless he or she writes at least a sentence or two about what the tables and plots mean in practical terms.  read more »

Since discovering how much I enjoy adventure games, I have tried on several occasions to play text-based adventures. I am inherently curious about classic geek culture, so it was only natural for me to be interested in Adventure and Zork, and my abiding love for all things Douglas Adams led me to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game and the even more obscure Bureaucracy. But to say that I have any experience with these games would be a lie. I have plenty of experience in trying to play them, getting frustrated, and giving up, but not in playing.

I wanted so much to play these games – I like to be in on geeky in-jokes, and I am an incurable completist when it comes to my favorite authors. But somehow, even with walkthroughs, I just cannot figure out these games. I got the cursed ring off of Elaine Marley's finger with minimal assistance, but I got Arthur Dent run over by the bulldozer countless times, despite the fact that I know full well how he survives in every other version of the story.  read more »

I have never been much of a gamer. Perhaps anticipating my addictive personality, my parents never upgraded our video game system beyond the Atari 5200. Although I was occasionally able to play Sonic or Mario while visiting my cousin, my early experiences with video games were almost entirely defined by River Raid, Pitfall, SuperBreakout, and the like.

In high school, a friend introduced me to Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and, when I discovered that Eric Idle had starred in two of the games based on the series, I purchased my very first non-educational computer game. Missing, Presumed...!? proved to be infuriatingly difficult, and a walkthrough became my best friend for a few weeks. Even so, the experience was an entertaining one, and I soon found myself playing Simon the Sorcerer, Monkey Island, and other such adventure games.  read more »

The argument put forth by Magritte in Les trahison des images* seems to me an unnecessarily pedantic one. I may be giving my fellow human beings too much credit, but I am fairly certain that everyone realizes that you cannot actually smoke a picture of a pipe (at least, not in the same way that the pictured pipe would be smoked). To say that the verb "to be" can only be used in the context of strict one-to-one relationships between the noun and the actual, physical object it represents robs language of its rich complexity. Metaphor and hyperbole become impossible – if the drawing of the pipe is not a pipe, then all the world is definitely not a stage, and it was almost certainly neither the best of times nor the worst of times.  read more »

I find it rather odd that there are no pictures to accompany W.J.T. Mitchell's "Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method." For an essay on the interconnectivity of images and text, it seems to be quite limited in its presentation. In the description of Sunset Boulevard, Mitchell demonstrates how a primarily visual work can be supplemented by and (to an extent) converted into an almost entirely textual form, but there is no complementary visual illustration of a text-based work, such as Chatman's diagrams of narrative theory. Mitchell does not even provide stills from the film, so those of us who have not seen it depend on his words to form our mental image of the scenes.

Mitchell's words seem to be arguing that images and text can and should be studied in relation to one another, but the essay doesn't look like it is terribly concerned with visual media. The cost of printing a image is significantly greater than that of printing text, and a low-quality image would likely do more harm than good to the argument, but by restricting the essay to text, Mitchell seems to have devalued pictures, thereby undermining half of his thesis.

(I apologize if a similar entry has already been posted – I have not been able to keep up with the blog lately. That should be remedied in the near future.)

I try to approach unconventional media with no assumptions about how it should be experienced, and I like to think that I do a fairly good job of remaining objective and accepting of all manner of weirdness. In theory, this works well and allows me to better appreciate games like Passage or game, game, game, and again game than I would if I expected them to conform to some commonly accepted standard of what a video game is. Unfortunately, it also makes it rather difficult to judge whether or not I am experiencing it the way it was meant to be experienced.  read more »

From the title of the Chuck Jones short "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics," the audience can already make a number of assumptions about the plot of the narrative. Cultural knowledge of what constitutes a romance in Western civilization tells us that two characters will fall in love and live happily ever after, but only after overcoming some obstacle separating them.

But the genre label does not only inform the story; it also dictates the kinds of characters that will appear. This narrative stars a dot and a line, characters that (Freudian symbolism aside) have no presupposed gender identity. Even without the help of the narration, however, the audience can identify the line as the male character and the dot as the female by virtue of their actions. The line is the pursuer, the dot the pursued; the line is persistent, the dot fickle; the line must improve himself and impress his intended, the dot need only exist and be aesthetically pleasing to attract the attention of her suitor.  read more »