narrative

Our discussion in class today and my experiences with Cathy's Book have made me think about my experience with Public Records searching and reporting.

All journalism majors, including myself, are required to take "Fact Finding" a course that essentially teaches you about individual rights to public information as well as how to go about finding this information efficiently and legally for the sake of accurate reporting.

Although the class sounds rather boring to most (oo, the joys of perusing through microfilm, old forms and computer records at your local clerk of the court and county offices) I actually found it rather fascinating. It's amazing, and a little scary, that I know exactly how easy it is to dig up any kind of information on someone, and often times, it is equally possible to find supposedly private info like social security numbers, etc., just because of some clerical worker's blind mistake.  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 »

The blog we looked at about the guy who found a camera in the woods presents what I call an "undefined narrative." We know neither the narrator, or even the implied and actual narratee, which fascinates me. The breadth of possibility within the discourse widens without these two aspects, as does the story. Where the pictures are unclear, the imagination can create both the plot and discourse. This was the most enjoyable aspect of looking through the pictures, both in class and on my own. The figures found in some of the pictures lend themselves to generating interest in the meaning, otherwise they would become a predictable, even boring plot for most folks. Even then, the fog, blurry shots, and camera angles are peculiar.

Several questions have been sticking in my head as to the meaning of actual narrative. 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? How does that form a narrative, and what are the implications for us as viewers/readers/interpreters?  read more »

I some ways your distinction between those who read for the pure enjoyment and those (majority) who read because they are told so is quite accurate. I always love to hear students ask the professor in class whether a certain idea or subject taught in class "is going to be on the test," as if it wasn't on the test the student wouldn't bother trying to absorb that idea any further. That's the kind of mentally students have these days. I see it all the time and it's pretty sad.  read more »

Most of the American society uses the features of a Microsoft program to perform daily duties. Existentially, the sounds signify a meaning relative to the norm, yet as Ryan states, “the Internet is an overflowing well of narratives.” Computer users’ interactivity with Microsoft sounds creates unforeseen narratives that are always part of the norm. The “norms” of how computer sounds are portrayed or the order in which the sounds of Microsoft are organized can constitute a story. Of course the story could change when the sounds and images are reorganized. Some of Microsoft’s sounds, as presented at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfIe5UfGvvw are a medium in which a story is derived from the interactivity between the computer and its user. Thus, a narrative with a musical discourse is created from the daily computer sounds. Personally, I appreciate the way in which the sounds that I interact with on a daily basis are narratized. It shows that narratives help give meaning to what already exists in life.

I believe a leaning towards the expansionist approach to narrative necessarily leads to an acceptance of all sorts of media, even as technology advances and (could it be) more forms of communication and representation are produced. The term 'narrative' seems to be too broad to limit simply to literature, as the traditionalist presume. Narrative should rather be all-inclusive and even open-ended, realizing that stories are being told every day in many differing forms. And since narrative encompasses both the story and the way in which it is communicated, the advent of video games, hypertext, etc. should be considered narrative.

My argument is that there is always a narrator and narratee in these emerging forms of narrative, even though it is not always so obvious. Consider video games. I believe that the narrator is most often you as the player/interactor, whether you control an army from a bird's eye view (as in "Command and Conquer") or through first person ("Doom," "Halo"). The perspective may change throughout the course of the game as you gather new information, but ultimately, you maintain control, and by your actions, you dictate the story.  read more »

To be bluntly honest, I didn't find Photopia to be a particularly noteworthy experience, though certainly unique. I think this may be solely based upon the fact that the game has such minimal interaction. Between puzzle games, side-scrollers, and quasi- RPG adventure games, I've spent a lot of years minimally playing video games where you push a button and things happen right off.

In Photopia- which isn't exactly a video game, but a game all the same - there is a lot of trial and error as you have to figure out commands, which is hardly anything new in the spectrum of gaming. The chance that the action you just took two seconds ago could be rendered completely useless within seconds. Adding to this frustration is the fact that all the dead end running happens in an optically unchanging environment (meaning you're looking at the same basic format of screen outside of the changing colours.) When you run into dead ends at the start of Zelda games, you're probably looking at new, fullscreen, scenery until you start walking in circles or at least seeing your commands in action. In Photopia, some more text and a prompt appears and maybe border colours change - yay.  read more »

Photopia made me interested in Interactive Fiction. I enjoy seeing how writers and artists can experiment with communication and narrative in different media, and I think Adam Cadre is extremely creative in how he works with a medium to interact with a reader/viewer/player/etc.

Although I found Photopia intriguing -- like reading an interesting book -- I don't think it was as impacting for me as it was for other people, judging by their blogs, but I decided that I enjoyed it enough to check out some of Cadre's other work.

The comments about Cadre's "Shrapnel" made the game seem unresistable:

"Unsettling. Brilliant. Damn you." —Ian Finley

"Really good game, but REALLY CREEPY. I honestly woke up with nightmares after playing it." —Sean Gaffney

"This was the most unsettling piece of IF I've ever had the pleasure to play." —Oren Ronen

"I think I'm now warped for life." —Alan Monroe

Could it really be that disturbing? I guess my penchant for trying to scare myself (see my last post about Silent Hill) got the best of me.  read more »

I haven’t played much computer adventure games in my lifetime but would conclude that Photopia was enjoyable to experience. I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first but as I got the hang of it I noticed that there was more than one narrative taking place. It would seem that these different stories did not relate to each other at all but impressively at the end the stories come together marvelously.

I didn’t understand the color changing until I looked up the definition of Photopia-“vision in bright light” (dictionary.com). It was then that I understood how the title was complementing the game or even vice versa. There’s probably more to it than that but that was enough for to understand the oddity of the color changing taking place between plots. I found it interesting that after certain vocabulary words definitions were interjected. Honestly, I felt slighted that I was being told what 2nd grade vocabulary terms stood for.  read more »

“If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen may be right but such a useless comment but he deserves that I pick up the ball and throw it at his retarded self. What was he implying anyways? I suppose he was trying to separate narratology from ludology. After making that comment his credibility points dropped pretty fast.

So his way of defeating the study of narratology is to separate the “colonized” narratology from ludology by “resisting and beating them.” Who are them anyways? It’s quite interesting of the vocabulary he uses because later into his argument he describes duration in gaming as “set time in which the winner is the one who’s in the better position when the set time is up.” It is the exact proposition he used to begin his rant about ludology.  read more »

I discussed in my last post how Doom forces me into a close relationship with it. I feel as if I'm going to Hell, with a chainsaw.

In all my workshop writing classes, we discuss immersion as well, but in a different form. In literature, there are levels of interaction. Think about it: you have first-person narration, sometimes second-person narration (read Lorrie Moore's "Self-Help"), and almost always third-person narration. As first-person, you are the character. Second-person, you are a character interacting with others. (Also, it's important to note the level of immersion with second-person writing. You will not find a novel in second-person. It is too demanding on the reader.)  read more »

Greetings all!

I like how our class has delved into video games and how we have examined how narrative works within the parameters of video games (of course their limits keep expanding daily as our collective imagination continues to stretch like a rubbery patty).

So here I sit on a laptop during this glorious wednesday afternoon, spinning a newly collected vinyl through my soundsystem. (I have quite a record collection...LPs have certainly drained some moolah out of my wallet). Anyway, this is a great album and I would recommend it to all of you...it's called "In Reverie" by Saves The Day. It's a blissful concoction of dreamlike harmonies lush with life and they are complimented nicely by layered instruments. It truly is good and quite a nice surprise from a band known for punk music to come out with such a mature release so distant of any recollection of their past.  read more »

Oh dear. I knew there was trouble brewing when I first started to read Markku Eskelien's 'Towards Computer Game Studies'. "What's this?" asked my brain, "Complete and utter refutation of the narrative theory we've been studying, in relation to video games, which we've also been studying?!" What a mess. Jeez, it's just like an English/literature class to bolster your confidence in one theory or theoretician and then bring it all crashing down around you a few weeks later with the next name on the list. Except after four years of this, you start to realize that they're all right. Or they're all wrong. Really, they got some of it right, and they were just guessing at the rest. Anything to stir up some controversy.  read more »

I whole heartedly agree with Robin as well as N. katherine Hayles on the idea that Narrative and Database are natural symbians: they both need each other; database needs narrative to make its results readable and narrative needs database to "test its insights". In Dr. Hayles' lecture she rethinks Lev Manovich's idea that database and narrative are natural enemies by finding an alternative view to the relationship between the two. Manovich has a limited view on what narrative is, describing it as found in only formal art, like in movies and literature, but according to Hayles, he fails to recognize that narrative figures are found in almost every type of "communication and congregation" humans participate in. Manovich's view on the database is also skewed, he goes from referring to database in the technical sense of a storage and retrieval device to making database and data one in the same. Hayles contrasts this idea with the concept of possibility space, since the idea of the database is limited and "represents only a small slice of actual and potential data".  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 »