A teenage mermaid full of angst, feeling neglected by her family, turns to anything outside the palace to give her life purpose! All she finds is the Sea Witch Ursula and her maniacal schemes. Ariel joins forces with Ursula and together they turn their attention to loftier ambitions: Prince Eric and his fortune. To whom will Ariel be loyal? Her father and king? Ursula? Prince Eric? Or… herself?
Author: ellilly
Reflection
After reading through all of the blog posts that I submitted throughout the semester, I looked at a few trends in my focus. The first thing that stood out to me across a few blog entries was the attention I paid to boundaries. Sometimes I spoke of those between genres, themes, topics, and even authors. It was interesting to uncover, by looking at all of the posts at once, the probing into established criteria that I included. I focused on how a lot of seemingly-distinct lines are blurred often, and that works that blurred those lines effectively were the most meaningful and enjoyable.
Additionally, the way people tell stories was a source of inspiration for my posts. All the different works we looked at were bound together by their storytelling nature. Starting with the Choose Your Own Adventure books going all the way to Pry, we examined the how of storytelling, and that flowed in and out of my blog posts. When reflecting on general ideas for the semester, I think it’s also important to consider the various ideals for which different authors and creators strove. Of course such aspirations are subjective and unique to each creator, yet there’s more overlap that one might expect. I think that’s a big part of my development through these blog posts; recognizing that the categories that I came into this class with aren’t nearly as rigid as I had perceived. That continues in the fascinating comparison between print and electronic works. What’s gained and lost in each medium, and what continues throughout both.
The main thing that I recognized when going back through all my posts is how much of an outside understanding I had for the entire realm of electronic literature. My first post definitely reveals this— there were a lot of basic observations as I basically just took note of what was happening. As the semester progressed, my appreciation and understanding of the techniques enlisted certainly developed and I was able to better articulate and analyze the works we discussed!
Knock Knock Knocking on iMessage’s Door
Bury Me, My Love throws the user into a dialogue that is foreign to the user, but familiar to the character whose story the user assumes. The format of the game does a remarkable job of stimulating an authentic conversation that could be happening on your own phone— except for the fact that I am not in Syria, nor was I during the civil war, and the only dependents for whom I am partially responsible are my dogs. I have very much enjoyed navigating the game because the war in Syria is often a hot debate topic for Americans, many of whom know next to nothing about any real person on the ground. Nour and Majd humanize a well-known conflict, one that my normal method of intel is at least three degrees removed from the matters at hand. To use something as simple as a text notification engages the user and places him on the same level from which he would communicate with his mother, his significant other, or even the dog walker. Something about visualizing the dots as the other user is typing and hitting send as the user sends “his own” messages connects the user to the game in a way that other forms of electronic literature, tethered to a desktop, fail to do.
Bury Me, My Love begs the question— how do modern e-lit authors best reach their audience? Is the smartphone the most efficient? If that’s the case, then creators lend themselves to all sorts of additional trials and tribulations that a familiar computer set-up lacks. Does the advantage of the emotional intimacy that this game allows outweigh the production labors; and if so, is it sustainable?
The Database
The Manovich chapter challenged my pre-existing conception of a narrative. In my other English classes, I work to identify and analyze the narrator or narrative in a given work. The computer world, conversely, introduces an entirely new construction of retelling existence: the database. With so much going on, a database is a complex structure with the capacity to contain immeasurable amounts of content. By adding new components as well as enlisting the resources that already exist in a given space, each database surpasses any narrative’s wildest dreams.
Just because we understand narrative as our main route to access doesn’t mean it’s the only one, or even that it’s the most efficient one. The computer world’s version of cataloguing introduces a new vision. A database presents the world as a list of objects— with no preference for order, it automatically is placed at odds with narrative. Interestingly enough, because it lends itself to randomness, the database became the center of the creative process in the computer age. We have seen this truth in several of the games and programs we’ve encountered thus far in our class. Sea and Spar Between did a fantastic job of drawing attention to the epic scope that randomness allows in a creative setting.
That being said, I wonder how the computer age and its development of the database coexist alongside the established narrative to which we’ve grown so accustomed in traditional schooling. Despite their being “enemies”, according to The Language of New Media, isn’t it possible for one to inspire the other, or are they truly as separate from one another as oil and water? Additionally, what are the various fields that alot merit to each of the two? Meaning, is one preferred in an academic setting? A professional one? And what about recreational activities as well as innovative ones?
Everybody’s A Hero In Their Own Way
https://ajar-warlock-0bwfwtcum.glitch.me/
Amidst the growing skepticism of our leaders and our fellow man, Americans have found a cruel pleasure in viewing the destruction of certain established norms. One such norm is that superheroes save the day. “Everybody’s a hero in their own way” pushes that boundary between hopeful good and familiar evil. Once fofced to face the reality that heroes are as flawed as the rest of us, the program’s users can only operate within the provided scenarios and their various combinations.
Apophenia: a Comfort or a Fear?
Incorporating chance and randomness into poetry creates an entirely separate genre named “combinatory poetics.” This medium, as articulated in Electronic Literature, poses several challenges that are foreign to regular poetry. Cohesion between the various words as they shift is the key feature that authors must learn to navigate. Within the trillions of combination, each one must result in a coherent line.
The lack of a rigid direction in which the reader must go allows a much greater reader involvement than print poetry. The randomness opens the work up to the apophenia humans so greatly covet. By filling in the interpretive space with her own ideas, the reader is able to find her own different meaning every time the work reloads.
The two games assigned for today pressed against the limits of that covetousness. “This Is How You Die” was engaging for the first few spins. After only about four turns, I started to see repetitions. Despite the game’s lack of intriguing aesthetics and much interesting content, the topic of death was enough to keep spinning until the end. The second game, “Taroko Gorge”, in contrast, had no concrete them as interesting as death to incentivize user engagement. Thus I found myself quickly losing focus.
Where the textbook reading and the two games interact, I believe, appears in the capacity of the reader/player to engage in the game. Some topics, such as mortality, strike a nerve so central to the human identity that the reader is unable to resist reloading the game. While the nature aspect in “Taroko Gorge ” initially piques the reader’s curiosity, it fails to maintain it throughout the various editions. Neither of the two games have any plot, per se, but the subject matter of the first separates it from the second. Does user involvement require a certain level of substantive plot? Or, do topics alone separate the games we do engage with from those we do not. Does mankind find comfort in structure or ambiguity? What happens when a game enlists both?
Blurring the line between reality and creativity
In anticipation of Matthew Kirkpatrick’s visit to class, I completed the assigned homework of navigating his two works A Moment Ago and The Silent Numbers. I began with A Moment Ago. Ever-changing, this piece randomly collects text from various online news sources. Once the user tries to click on, or even hover the mouse over, a part of the linked text, another stream of text appears. The constant evolution of A Moment Ago at first overwhelms the user, but eventually she becomes familiar with the onslaught of information and settles into her role as a player, a reader, and an observer. Kirkpatrick’s second work is more guided; The Silent Numbers invites the player along as the game reveals various developments to the player. These reveals, however, are accompanied by audio that existed as legitimate radio transmissions. Thus, as the player goes through the piece she is reading Kirkpatrick’s words as she listens to the spoken numbers. This combination elevates the material because, similar to A Moment Ago, the authenticity of the audio components (the news content for A Moment Ago) grounds Kirkpatrick’s textual and stylistic additions.
Kirkpatrick’s visit as well as his work led me to further consider how creators incorporate real-world activity into art. I have also been thinking about the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, especially in regard to contemporary realistic literature. From there, I think of the line between personal experience and imagined situations— I predict there to be fewer differences in terms of plausibility between the two than one might initially expect. Interesting that even his novel The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art adopts a form that blends the established line between print and electronic literature. Both A Moment Ago and The Silent Numbers reminded me of the proximity that communication allows, and seeing that proximity develop in the two pieces forced me to consider the implications of genre distinctions and other distinctions in general; it’s more similar than we’d think.
Patterns and Structures: Exploring Interactivity and Immersion in Electronic Literature and Media
As someone who used to spend hours hunched over a computer navigating the world of Sims4 and the various intricacies that accompany all choices from the construction of the house to socialization between people, I never took the time to ponder the behind-the-scenes steps required to create the game.
Maurie-Laure Ryan’s book Narrative as Virtual Reality 2 examines the forms of interactivity and the resulting organizational nuances and levels. Her commentary exists in contiguity with Sam Kabo Ashwell’s piece “Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games,” which analyzes the structures specifically of Choose Your Own Adventure games. Reading both pieces led me to wonder the sequential development of CYOA games alongside other forms of electronic media. As we discussed in class, the years during which CYOA were most popular and most widely produced spanned from the early 1980s up until the late 1990s. The depth of some of these games’ options, as Ashwell outlines, limit their mainstream use, but still remain as integral parts to the development of both CYOA games and other forms of electronic literature.
The chapter of Ryan’s book examines ergodism and its bounds as they compress, expand, and relate to interactivity. What stood out to me was, amidst all of the structures, the levels of interactivity. Ryan, as she declares, “propose[s] to peel this onion” that is narrative text (Ryan 176). With this perspective, Ryan allows the reader to unpack the complexity of the games we have taken for granted all this time. Ultimately, Ryan and Ashwell force their audiences to consider the relationship between form and product. What does an author lose and gain with each decision regarding the form of her piece? Do these forms lend themselves to future development and innovation? If so, to whom does that responsibility fall, the author or the player? Moving forward in this class, I look forward to the chance to discuss the relationship between the people on both ends of the production and reception of electronic media and its CYOA counterparts.