Avatars of Story

After trying out Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue for the first time, I was at first fascinated by the whole process of piecing together this story in any way I chose. With no real beginning or ending it was fun and interesting to go about the text and kind of make my own story up the way that I wanted to. But after a while I quickly got lost and bored. Having heard most of the class' remarks on Twelve Blue I didn't feel alone in my confusion. However, after reading Marie Ryan's explanation of the type of hypertext fiction Twelve Blue really is, it made the text clearer. I went from thinking of it as a bunch of random text to different events that are recollected and interpreted differently. Ryan explains the text as a reproduction of dreams and memory as well as a stream of consciousness. Each link is like bringing those recollections from one's memories into their conscious thought. Since these memories come into mind at anytime, they aren't in any order of time, and they can come back at any time.  read more »

I know a lot of people expressed some rather negative opinions about Facade because of its inability to understand some user input. Some argue that this shortcoming breaks the immersive quality and leaves users frustrated, making it hard to truly experience the story Facade tries to tell. After reading Marie-Laure Ryan's take on Facade, though, I have to agree with her explanation about how this very shortcoming is explained by the characters and the story itself, perhaps then lending to Facade's immersive quality. As Ryan points out, both Grace and Trip are incredibly self-centered, so if they don't listen to your input, it doesn't exactly break character. It's also evident that the two are quite distracted, so if your user input is answered with something that doesn't make much sense, it can be attributed to the fact that they aren't really listening to you anyway because they have other things on the mind. When they start to argue and the situation escalates, it gets even harder to put a word in. At this point, not getting much of a response goes along with how this situation would play out in the real world.  read more »

Chapter 5 of Avatars of Story was a pretty good chapter because it basically shines a lot on the different plot types people could have, and after that fact it doesn't seem too difficult to make a story, does it? I suppose it may not be hard for many people to create stories in our class, as it is likely full of English majors, but regardless, it is something that you may want to show an aspiring writer friend with not much experience. It's also interesting to think about how easy it is to classify things, how the author classified games so simply and categorically speaking. It reminds me of pandora.com where they classify music so plainly (i.e. this song features major key tonality, minor use of harmony, and is guitar-driven) that could be a description for your favorite song which means the whole world to you but to other people it's just a set of characteristics. If that was your favorite song, you would surely add more to it though like, "this song has such meaning in the lyrics" or "this game has such intuitive feel that it really takes the player into the game."

I thought this was relevant to our discussion about shooting and realism of violence in video games on Monday:

Shooting for Realism: How Accurate are Video-Game Weapons?

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 »

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 »

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 »

When I first tried Photopia, I was so confused!  read more »

In Avatars of Story, one of the ideas Ryan presents is that "the fictional speech act creates its world through the very act of describing it, and its statements are automatically true within its refernce world." We talked about this in class and all the cool sci-fi multiverse aspects to this theory. It got me to thinking about a story's canon. For instance, when people write fanfiction, they can be accused of writing the story's characters in a way that's out-of-character, or the entire writing could be said to not fit well with the story's world. This can also apply to published works. For example, when a new writer gets put on a long-standing superhero comic, some fans might not like their treatment/version of the story. This would seem to support the theory that there's a certain standard "truth" to story worlds, and that characters and stories within that world can be written in a way that doesn't allign with this truth.  read more »

One of the subjects that Ryan touches upon is the fact that films is make belief rather than belief because we all know that the drama is being staged and usually captures something be it a tradition or event that exists independently of the movie. I watched the movie I Am Legend yesterday, horribly depressing by the way, and found myself agreeing with this concept. Although the movie took place in a future world that seems to come out of our worst nightmares (we found the cure to cancer but that cure mutated into a horrible disease that killed 90% of the population, 1% were immune to and 9% were turned into monsters by) I don't think anyone left the movie theater thinking that the movie was real. The actors were amazing and in the course of the movie one forgot that they were acting and starting cheering when they survived and tearing up when they died but at the end of the movie everyone knew that no even though they died in the movie the actors hadn't died in real life and they weren't even accurate because it was set in a future that hadn't happened.  read more »

Earlier this week, I beat Photopia. It took me many hours to do this because before this class, my experience with videogames only included Mario Brothers and occasionally watching guys play Halo or MLB baseball.

Every game has rules and also as I found out, limitations. Sometimes I would write, “Pick up shovel,” and the game responded with, “do not know that verb.” Instead, I needed to say, “Take shovel. Dig.” Other times, to amuse myself, I ‘played’ with the game by giving the game instructions such as, “Sit.” The game would humorously retort something to the effect of, “You cannot sit on Alley. You are an adult.” I found that there were a lot of things I was not allowed to do, like eat on any occasion or in outer space.  read more »

When we talked today about Ryan's discussion of belief versus make-believe within Avatars of Story, the concept of the "Megaverse" was brought up, the concept of parallel (perhaps infinite parallel) universes existing alongside our own. I also brought up an anecdotal experience concerning fiction, made by a clairvoyant (a guest speaker in an Honors Magick and Witchcraft course). While her beliefs are a bit difficult to wrap one's head around, I consider them incredibly interesting once deciphered.
This clairvoyant expressed a personal belief in the concept of the Megaverse, and stated a theory that the soul is tied to the consciousness. Basically, when one's consciousness creates something imaginative, whether it be a perception of a scene in a story, the playing-out of a potential outcome of an uncertain situation, or merely a dream, the consciousness has traveled there to experience it. In essence, when "your mind wanders", it LITERALLY wanders.  read more »