I's blog

It's really interesting to me as to how interesting Cathy's Book and Photopia were. Both of them were plainly written with zero flare yet it just kept building momentum. When diagramming the narrative of Cathy's Book from left to right on a linear line in class and then putting all of the little side bits to the top and bottom all I could think about was depth vs breadth. The side information to Cathy's Book and other args could be looked at as depth, but the way I saw it was as the narrative being extremely wide with each part not being terribly deep but the sheer breadth of it all makes it great. The main narrative could be incredibly well written and that would be nice, but it doesn't have to be. Photopia and Cathy's Book are both similar in how they use mystery and interaction to propel themselves forward.  read more »

The power of a photo that I'm interested in is in the way it evokes emotion due to capturing an actual moment in time. In mic's blog about narrative from images, he says, "Can a random collection of images, not held together by a text, become a story? What if the pictures in this camera were taken by several different people, or what if the same person took the pictures at completely different time periods?" The examples he gives are actually examples of some of the best stories photos can tell. Each photo has a story behind it: how it was taken, when was it taken, why was it taken, who took it, and most importantly how did everything that is in the photo come to be there. How did the people in that portrait on your wall get to be there? How did they get those clothes, that tan, those glasses? It's the foundation of comics, with the reader having to fill in the blanks of what happens between frames (Off topic: I'm not big comic reader so I don't know, but are there any good photo comics?).  read more »

Facade really needs a sequel. Looking at the schedule it looks like we'll be playing it next week and for those of you who haven't played it yet here's a little spoiler: it sucks. (I'll be spoiling things about the game in this blog post so if you haven't played it yet then don't read it) I haven't read chapter 7 where she goes into detail about it yet, but she did say in chapter 5 that it comes closest to the holodeck because the user isn't focused on winning a game (...an AI-based project in interactive drama by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern that truly makes narrative action the center of interest because the user's participation is not motivated by winning a game). The idea that it comes closest is why I say it needs a sequel or better yet, a major update. The reason it needs it is because the game actually could be really good, and the setting of a short conflict between a husband and wife seems like the perfect place to start for interactivity.  read more »

Eskelinen confused me because I thought he was writing in the 70s or 80s when games weren't any more advanced than Atari.

He didn't discover a new sense, a new primary color, or a new dimension. This isn't something so different, so unique, so special that it is incomparable to anything else, like we stumbled upon some alien civilization so otherworldly that we must abandon our logic and language and adopt their system of clicks and clacks. No, what he is writing about is the early stages of the technological arts as they start their march from simple play to complex drama. He is like a child trying to punch back the waves as they rise towards his castle. It's ironic that the Ludogolists sound more like Luddites than anything else as they try to cling to something exclusively in a field that is all about change.  read more »

First off let me just say it was really funny when she started talking about SQL database servers literally. With the title of the talk being about database and narrative I thought database would be as nebulously defined as narrative, but instead she just went straight into talking about real databases.  read more »

I think games and simulations are the same. They may strive to be different in the case of an army simulation, but they're always going to have game things about them. Crawford says that simulations aren't stylized, but their gaming interface and other things are always going to be stylized. A game menu is stylized. I've been playing Endless Ocean recently which blends simulated boredom with a very game like interface. There's not very much structure to the game, it's mostly just exploration via simulated diving. I know it isn't a pure simulation, but my argument is that it's impossible to have a pure simulation (Flight Simulators will always have game menus to get you into the game etc.) and that simulations vary in how stylized they are. I suppose it's kind of like arguing about genre, though. Nobody knows exactly what is a horror western film or how to define and RPG or whether Metroid Prime and Portal fall into the FPS category. For the purpose of an argument Crawford might have had to make a distinction between simulation and games, but I feel the difference is unnecessary.  read more »

I made the mistake of saying that this was a pipe:

notapipe: definitely not a pipe

I don't know what I was thinking. This is a pipe:

apipe: definitely a pipe

I shouldn't have made the argument that a reproduction of something that was moving is the equivalent of it. I thought of bird enemies that are constantly in motion in a game and it seemed stupid to call a non moving reproduction of one of those to be the real thing. I do think an object in a 2D game that is non moving can be reproduced in images. The gameworld may give it context, and the player jumping over it may give it interaction, but it still only exists in 2D. At best someone in disagreement could say that it's a pipe that's out of context. I don't see any problem with that argument.

In class the consensus seemed to be that the picture of the Mario pipe was not a pipe. It was a picture of a pipe. I think that's true in the case of a real pipe, since there is a real world counterpart to what is shown in the picture. What is shown in the picture of the Mario pipe is a Mario pipe. It only exists in the world of the mushroom kingdom as represented in 2D and 3D games.

A good argument could be made that the interaction with objects is what makes a game world object different than just an image of a game world object. It doesn't even have to be something that you do anything with (since you can't go down every pipe). Just running around them is enough to make it part of interaction. I don't buy into that, but I see how someone could.

If something only exists as an image, such as the Mario pipe, then an image like the "not a pipe" one is the object. If a person were to take a picture of their tv playing the game then that would be something else entirely, but if it is an accurately cloned image of something that is cloned repeatedly in a videogame already then I don't see how that would not be the object. Does that make sense?

I was glad to see in the Chatman chapter on existents that I'm not alone. I have always heard people talking about how a character wasn't deep enough or wasn't believable, and I could never quite understand what they meant. I don't have a problem with asking hypothetical questions about the characters like others that he cited did, but I still just see characters as created things.

I think for me the problem has always been that the line between well developed and flat characters is blurred. I've never understood what makes a character real or better than another. I don't know much about Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, but I still find the character very real. I don't feel like I need to know everything about a character for them to be good. For comics, such as achewood, just knowing their locution and conversational tendencies is enough. I don't know much about Glottis in Grim Fandango, but he's still a very memorable character. Do I need to know where each character came from, go inside their thoughts like Mrs. Dalloway, or know what they're planning to do next for it to be a good character? The line just seems too blurred and too artificial.