Author: altutar

Reflective Post

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altutar

I enjoyed writing blog posts. I think it became such an habit that I even considered creating a blog section to my website, where I can write in two different languages – English and Turkish. Most of the content that we talk about is available in English, but I doubt that is the case for Turkish. I indeed drafted a blog post about how someone could use the Snapchat map to figure out where you live as almost all of us are at home. This is really disturbing.

Looking back at what I learned and wrote about in this class, I explore a variety of concepts. In my first blog post, I built top of my understanding of decaying media. I was critical about all web-based art and literature becoming obsolete, and I explored how we can make these works eternal. Although my direction was to take all these games to some sort of a virtual reality version, it is also possible that every single platform we will create or created will become obsolete some point. I asked the following valid questions that I still don’t have answers to: “Would these kinds of revisions be welcomed by the creator of early hypertext pieces? Would the authors feel the need to revise their work to keep the authenticity of their stories? Is there even a need to revise and revisit these literary pieces?”

In my second blog post, I dived more into Twine, an open-source platform for text-based game creation. Twine has been a good fellow in the COVID-19 quarantine not only in this class, but also in Gender and Technology as well. In this blog post, I appreciate the rebellious nature of Twine as it has challenged the traditional practices of publishing computer games. One question I raised in this blog post was that although Twine games included a wide range of topics such as mental health, they have not taken the approach to guide you how to solve these issues.

As we discussed the importance of Flash Player for web-based electronic literature, my third blog post discussed how my understanding of this platform changed. I report in this blog post that “for me, Flash was just a tool for eye candy and games, but now I also consider it as a medium for kinetic poetry.”

In my final blog post, I discussed the faulty Manovich argument that narratives and databases are enemies. I rather posed an important question: “Isn’t it fair to argue then that databases and narratives are allies rather than enemies when we look at it outside of the modern media and information technologies?”

Looking back on my progress throughout the semester, it is amazing to see how much I learned and grew. My desire to create and be a part of the electronic literature has grown. I am excited to tell different stories as new platforms come into play.

Is There Something Else to Do?

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My Twine story is titled “Is There Something Else to Do?”. This game seeks to make the user walk a mile in a COVID-19 quarantined person’s shoes. It criticizes the lifestyle that the COVID-19 forced us to live. In the game, the user interacts with two different virtual personas that meant to the author’s frustrated experience during the quarantine. Please be reminded that audio might be loud as it intends to immerse the user and the conversations might be hurting.

Play. Don’t forget to press the full screen button

Narratives vs. Databases: Are They Enemies?

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As a computer science major, I have had the opportunity to interact with databases, data structures and algorithms. From my perspective, I see databases as the powerhouse all of the things that we interact in our daily lives. With the COVID-19 crisis, we are interacting with social media more than ever. I have noticed recently that I have got a lot more notification from Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram more than ever. This is due to the databases that power your texts, and making sure that your data stays there safe/unsafe depending on the “terms” that you are giving your data to these corporations, but one thing to realize that is that with school going online, more people go online and play video games.

It must be noted that games are narratives, and that games are made possible by databases. There are many examples of how databases are the backbone of narrative. Think of films, for example. Combining multiple recordings and video cuts, directors create movies, which are undoubtedly narratives.

On the other hand, Manovich in his book The Language of New Media argues that “rather than trying to correlate database and narrative forms with modern media and information technologies, or deduce them from these technologies, I prefer to think them as two competing imaginations, two basic creative impulses, two essential responses to the world.” Based on my observation, I think it is quite faulty not to correlate databases and narrative forms with modern media as databases are almost every where in today’s world.

In addition, if we look at history and how our brains work, it is quite unfair to argue that databases and narratives could be separated. In short, it can be said that narratives are a product of the human brain, part of the human creativity and imagination. It’s reasonable to argue that human brain is a large database that registers every piece of information that it sees. It knows how an animal looks like, and uses its creativity to create “religious” narratives and make gods seem like an amalgamation of two animals. Isn’t it fair to argue then that databases and narratives are allies rather than enemies when we look at it outside of the modern media and information technologies?

I believe that Manovich’s argument needs more support when it argues that databases are competing with narratives. I invite him to consider many more examples where databases go hand in hand with narratives.

 

The Early Bird Chronicle – Coronavirus Updates

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It’s quite common nowadays to see news agencies to provide a separate page for critical events. We have experienced this through Brexit, the American President Elections, and currently the COVID-19 Outbreak. The Early Bird Chronicle – Corona Virus Updates is a news generator that is inspired by popular news agencies and their updates on the outbreak. The Early Bird Chronicle – Corona Virus Updates mimic the news from March 13, 2020 to March 18, 2020 as the trend in the news is likely to change in the following weeks or even months.

A New Look at the Flash Player

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As a little kid, Adobe Flash Player could have been one software that I had to download the most. While surfing in the internet finding new games in website like Miniclip.com, the Flash Player would either break or require an update before running the game. Just like most of the kids at the time, I saw the Flash Player as a tool for playing games, but after my encounter with “Dakota” and reading “Kinetic and Interactive Poetry,” my perception of the Flash Player has completely changed.

The internet has allowed us to discover new ways for us to express our feelings through new forms of media, and not surprisingly, as the internet evolved, authors and poets explored conventional techniques to convey their ideas. For instance, the early hypertext authors utilized features such as web page linking to immerse the reader in an interactive story. With the arrival of the Flash Player, authors have shifted how they look at producing online. In Flash, Salter and Murray explain that Flash producers “took the affordances of the platform and the expectations users brought to Flash works and subverted them, or broke out of the affordances and created new systems for their art.” In that sense, Flash authors followed the same pattern as the hypertext creators. They were fearless to use the affordances of the platform to try new things even though the experimentation might fail miserably.

To explore one of the first examples of Flash literary works, I viewed “Dakota”, created by two artists Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge. Unlike the hypertext works that we explored earlier in the semester, the creators expected the users not to interact with, but to view the content. While words and short phrases are being thrown at me, I felt like I was watching an action movie and trying to catch up with what’s going on in the story line. In Electronic Literature, Rettberg claims that “the use of typographic effects is minimal and controlled, but the pace at which the words are displayed is often very rapid, pushing at the limits of how quickly we can read and absorb the meaning of the words.” Although the idea to direct one’s attention to a couple of words for a couple of second was interesting, I found it quite challenging to understand whether the words being shown make sense. I could see the artist’s intention to challenge in what speeds we could absorb the content being shown at us. It could have been that Chang and Voge were criticizing the pace of information being thrown at us in the information age, but I would have appreciated if the producers included a slide button that would have allowed me to speed the narrative down.

Yet I wasn’t a big fan of “Dakota”, I need to highlight that it made me look at the Flash Player in the ways I haven’t considered before. For me, Flash was just a tool for eye candy and games, but now I also consider it as a medium for kinetic poetry.

 

Twine: Open Source Platform for Text-Based Game Creation

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As a to-be computer scientist, it is hard not to see the similarities between open source game and software creation. In resemblance to game development companies, software companies only allowed its employees to work on the company’s next milestone software project. In a Wired article, Bill Gates says “open source creates a license so that nobody can ever improve the software.” Even though technology tycoons have disliked open-source software, it has an huge impact on how we create software today. With its focus on innovation, customization, and collaboration, the open source community created fundamentally important software technologies such as the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser and Python Programming Language. Its impact in the industry is so predominant that Microsoft not only acquired GitHub, but also promised to improve the platform with a slogan chanted by Satya Nedalla: “We are all in on open source.”

Twine, an open-source platform for creating text-based computer games, has challenged the traditional practices of publishing computer games. Similar to open source software creation, game designers from all over the world could exercise their creativity on developing games on any topic. This allowed users to concentrate on topics that are usually not conveyed in computer games. In “Playing at Empathy”, Salter analyzes Twine games that are relevant to mental health and highlights an important feature of such games: limitations on choice. While playing “Please Answer Carefully“, one could see how limited choice plays into immersing the user into the mindset of a person, who is being stalked. Presented as a survey, where the reader is expected to have freedom over their choices, the game forces you to make decisions that benefits the stalkers. It expects you to strongly agree to the statement that everyone deserves a second chance no matter what they have done. Similarly, you are not given any freedom but to say that I forgive you, come inside in response to your stalker’s I miss you message.

https://www.wired.com/2011/09/phone-story/
Image courtesy Moddeindustria (Phone Story)

While playing such games, I feel nothing but disoriented, stuck, and hopeless. If these games are targeted to solve our mental health issues, shouldn’t it be that they give us hope to fight our issues? In Gender and Technology, we discussed a similar case when Apple decided to remove a game called Phone Story that is aimed to reveal the miserable consequences of phone manufacturing. In one of the scenes, the user’s target is to save workers who are trying to commit suicide by jumping out of the FoxConn factory. Although Phone Story helped me become aware of the exploitation that runs in the hardware industry, it didn’t show me a path how to solve this issue. I believe Twine games are also similar in a sense that they portray that mental health is a critical problem in today’s world, but doesn’t show you how you would approach it to solve it. Creators of such games should think more critically not only to immerse the user into somebody’s mental problem, but also shed light on how to escape it.

 

The End of Hypertext: What’s Next?

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In Winter Break, I had the chance to read Yuval Noah Harari’s 21st Lessons for the 21st Century. Although the book’s focus is on the prospective effects of technological advancements on the structure of our society as a whole, one argument that got me thinking about the importance of stories in our lives was that “humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.” As we continue to develop and advance new technologies, we will continue to share our complex experiences in simpler forms with the help of increased interactivity and connectivity. 

In Electronic Literature, the author discusses how the rise of internet and interactive web browsers led to the hypertext movement, during which multiple authors explored novel techniques to tell their stories. Interactive via the Netscape Navigator, My Boyfriend Came Back From the War allows the reader to progress through a story of a woman and her soldier boyfriend. What stroke me in this piece was the effective use of HTML elements such as hyperlinks and images to engage the user with the conversation that takes place between two characters of the story. In a similar fashion, my body – a wunderkammer presents the author’s physical and mental insecurities through the links on body parts that takes the user to a narrative.

Interacting with these early forms of hypertext in 2020, I predict that works like My Boyfriend Came Back From the War are under the threat of becoming obsolete. In Electronic Literature, Rettberg touches on Moulthrop’s Reagan Library, which is defunct due to QuickTime VR being no longer supported by Apple. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg made the bold claim that there would be a breakthrough in virtual and augmented reality glasses within the upcoming decade. As these technologies will be adapted, there is a chance that we will no longer use web browsers. In that scenario, what happens to the earlier works of hypertext like My Boyfriend Came Back From the War still remains as an unanswered question.

As a virtual reality developer and researcher, I could imagine a revised version of My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, where the user interacts with the story within the woman’s self-avatar. The user then can interact with objects in this dark room and could engage in a conversation with the boyfriend through voice-recognition, but would these kinds of revisions be welcomed by the creator of early hypertext pieces? Would the authors feel the need to revise their work to keep the authenticity of their stories? Is there even a need to revise and revisit these literary pieces? Only time could tell.