Sylvia's blog

Avatars of Story has been very difficult to read and has occasionally warranted multiple readings, but it has been very rewarding. Even in other English exposition and other writing classes the majority of the time is spent on creating or improving your writing style. Since the focus is predominately on style and structure, their has been a lack of discussion of different forms and architectures possible in writing. This has been my first experience actually considering different architectures and forms of interactivity. I have seen that all these ideas not only can be used to discuss games or hypertext, but can even be applied to literature and expositions. I don't know how many of my fellow classmates have ever encountered any of these things in previous classes, but I doubt it would be many. Why has style been put above the essence and forms of narrative?  read more »

Reading Avatars of Story, my attention was drawn to the section where Ryan discusses the many different interactive architectures affecting both discourse and story. I found it all very interesting, not only because it was such an interesting discussion, but also because it was made very accessible.

Some of the architectures were reminiscent of diagrams used by Chatman in Story and Discourse. The familiarity allowed me to get a firmer grasp on the ideas. The architecture that particularly caught my attention was the track-switching architecture. I don't remember Chatman discussing anything quite like this. I had never even ventured to think of soap operas as narrative until Ryan describes even soap operas as having an interactive architecture as complex as track-switching.  read more »

As I played Photopia, our discussion about ludology kept coming to mind. Photopia seems to wreck the theory of a dichotomy between games and other narratives. It contains both a game and a narrative aspect that can not be seperated from one another without losing the entire meaning. Here the idea of a game and narrative work harmoniously together.

It can not be argued that Photopia is not a game, and at the same time it could not be seen as not being a narrative. There are plots, kernels, satellites and characters. There is always a setting, although navigating it may not always be easy.

Photopia was one of my favorite games to play. I really found the narrative interesting and funny. I really thought it was hilarious that he would explain the definition of words like depression, adorned, etc. yet during the section in space when he is using fancy terminology about radioactive materials and such he doesn't bother to slow down or break from the narrative to explain.

Due to the nature of the game, I easily played it, as it seemed like a book that I had the ability to interact with, much like the R.L. Stine books I have previously mentioned in other blogs.

In response to both Jennilee and Keyla's blogs, I must also agree that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a magnificent representation about the discussions we have in class.

Throughout the story, the relationship between image and text are constantly changing. As both have previously stated, Carroll worked closely with Tenniel to create a symbiotic relationship between the text and the images. I would describe this book as having an image/text relationship at some moments, an image-text relationship at other moments, and every so often an imagetext relationship.

For example, due to the close working relationship between the author and artist, the images and text are co-dependent. We read the episode of the caterpillar and see the episode in cartoon form on the same page.  read more »

I remember reading a lot of R.L. Stine books when I was growing up. In particular, he had a series of his Goosebumps books where after each chapter the reader was faced with a decision about where the story would go. For example, it would give you the option to enter the forest and turn to page 16 or return to the playground and turn to page 10.

I remember these were the most frustrating books of his to read. Although he had written all the possible plot lines, ultimately the reader was in charge of the journey and the ending. These books blurred the line between books and videogames for me. When playing a videogame, if I made a decision that ended up killing me I would start again and avoid doing the same thing. I did the same thing with Stine's books, even though some of my peers considered it cheating and gave me hell for it. But if I had made a decision and in the next chapter something vile ended up happening I would return to the former chapter and choose the other option.  read more »

As we were discussing the picture of the pipe today in class, I began to wonder as to what made it a picture of a pipe as apposed to a pipe. What gives it its "pipeness"? As we discussed, the pipe does convey some of the characteristics that would make one think of a pipe, but that it lacks the actually "pipeness" that would make it a "real" pipe. But this made me consider written narrative. What makes a sentence have meaning in a narrative, or even what gives words meaning? After all, they are just letters inked onto a page. We are the ones who put meaning into the words and sentences to make them more than just ink blots. We stream the words and sentences together and build the stories in our minds as we are reading. We conjure mental images and ideas for written text based on what we know from the real world. If a pipe were to be described verbally or even through written narrative, would it not be a "pipe" because it lacks certain qualities of its "pipeness"?  read more »

I really enjoyed Chatman's look at the antistory in Chapter 2. As I read his idea that these antistories question whether "one thing leads to one and only one other, the second to a third and so on to the finale," the similarities between life and the antistory became clearer to me.
Although it is convenient to believe that the decisions we make in life will lead to exactly one path or one result, I have not always experienced that. In fact, there have been times when I have made decisions to avoid certain results only to be blindsighted by them later on anyway. The narrative, then, seems to be a way for humans to leave behind the randomness and unpredictability of life. In a narrative we can explore life's possibilities without all of it's complications, or set up complications that we can resolve. Maybe this is why we can become caught up and even lost in a narrative world. It allows us to escape the obscurity of life and lets us go down one path to another to another that will finally lead to an end.