Playin' games

     The immersive game I chose to indulge in was Neverwinter Nights 2, an rpg based on the Dungeons and Dragons series of worlds. I define this game as immersive for several reasons. Aside from the standard "cut things up/shoot things/burn things" style of play expected with any game where combat happens, there's a solid core story that unfolds as the player works through. The story could have easily worked just as well as a novel rather than a gaming experience, with a good, high-fantasy-driven plot, memorable and distinct characters/personalities, dramatic (for a given value of fantasy drama) events and surprises, and similar aspects that make the genre enjoyable.
     Aside from but worked into the story there's a degree of immersion to be found in the character itself. As with many of this genre of game, the main character can be created by the player, offering up choices to suit one's preference such as gender, race, physical shape, job (by which I mean a range of options on what it is your adventurer actually does, from the old favorites of wizard, thief, fighter, and cleric to more specialized classes such as duelist, swashbuckler, divine champion, etc), and even down to the specifics of hair, skin, eye, and minor accent colors. You may devise your own history, and choose what skills a character has (though of course some jobs and races are more attuned to certain skillsets), and help the character grow into a unique and powerful force within the context of the game.
     A fun element of the gameplay is where your character falls on the good/neutral/evil spectrum. There are nine distinct alignments, and choices within the game can affect yours to a degree that there are consequences for frequently flouting the moral system you choose to live by. Some jobs can only be followed by certain alignments, for example, so to start with one of these jobs and then lose it through poor roleplaying of your character is possible (and frustrating, after spending hours building them up to a useful degree).
     The graphics, being of relatively recent vintage (2004 or so), are excellent for the time, as is the soundtrack, with the latter supporting the former strongly. traveling through a forest looks and sounds like it should, caves and dungeons offer distant dripping noises, combat gives powerful musical crescendos. The voice acting of the game is of a good quality, lending it at times the feel of an interactive movie. The game functions on multiple levels to create a distinct world and, while keeping you within the bounds of the story, to help you experience that world in a meaningful way, regardless of how you choose to play it.

Do games count?

     Obviously they count. Games are, to a greater or lesser degree, immersive fiction. The level of immersion as regards the fiction, and as regards to mechanics of the games themselves, varies of course. The fundamental premise of putting you into a situation where events happen in a non-real-world way is the core of fiction, even for games as simple, narratively speaking, as Pong. Leave aside the fact of why you're playing, in a narrative sense, as there's no  "you are a ping pong champion defending your title from those evil communist Russians" or similar elaborate backstory. Just accepting the fact that you are playing on a virtual field makes the concept count within the realm of digital humanities.
     Granted, a richer, more immersive story can lend more to the experience, which is why ARGs like Year Zero fit well into the area of study. Taking reality as we know it and pushing it that little bit, adding that layer of fiction to it, gives a chance to redefine how we react to both the new "reality" and the original. There's a very simple cell-phone application, Zombies, Run, that essentially takes advantage of the mapping/GPS capabilities that smart phones possess. There's nothing fancy to it, it just takes a map and adds in a number of zombies that move towards you at a variable speed. A simple, elegant concept, and one which uses what was there and incorporates what isn't in a real-time environment. Now, instead of going for a morning jog, you're trying to outpace the ravenous dead.
     Zork is an excellent example of how a game can count, both from the player side of the screen and the programmer side. From the end-user perspective, you wander around textually, collecting items, avoiding pitfalls, watching out for that damned grue, etc. Items held can have uses, often very specific uses to help you progress further, similar conceptually to (and predating) the more graphics-oriented Shadowgate. Combat isn't a key feature, and rarely happens. Rather, puzzle-solving is the focus. The programming side is where things get interesting, though, as now a game designer, another human, is required to anticipate the interactions the user will have, and code the likely responses into the game. Elements come into play beyond sheer coding, such as grammar and syntax (users must issue commands in an understandable way such as "look at object" or "see object" for the game to process the commands), human expression (typing "yell" or "scream" causes a frustrated cry, which I've given frequently while playing), simple memory and sense of direction (how far north can I go, anyway?) and so on. The programmer in essence has to write around the possible foibles of the player, and work them into the game, either allowing the player to proceed despite them or forcing them to take action to make their desires more clear. So video games, to a degree, become psychological tools as well. This is more apparent in current times, of course, where games, like movies, employ visuals, soundtracks, and other sequences of data to try and set the mood the designer wants, but Zork is a perfect example of how even in the earliest days of video games the games themselves represent significant objects within the digital humanities field.

Reactions to pieces from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Not friendly to epileptics.

That said, all three pieces share a similar structure, i.e. too-fast-to-be-read-comfortably text combined with strobe-y screen flashing and sense-of-urgency-inspiring music. I can get why the poems display at the speed they do, given the music that they try to keep time to and match rhythm with. The problem is that I loathe someone else dictating the speed at which I read. The poems try to convey urgency, force. That's fine. But if I blink, glance away for a split second, pause to light up a cigarette, or whatever, and things have gone three screens away, losing the thread for me...that's just a pain. I don't want to sit through an unpausable video, which is what the poems essentially are, multiple times to feel like I "got" everything that went into it, captured all those little, quickly-vanishing phrases.

"Lotus Blossom" rates special mention for actually playing into the strobe action of the poems, corresponding that annoying quirk of programming with its frequent mentions of flickering lights. The use of subliminal-like phrases scattered throughout what I'd consider the "main" text also adds to the hypnotic quality. All of the pieces almost seem to be aspiring to that hypnosis, especially "Dakota" with its pounding percussion, as if seeking to deliberately induce a trance state. I'd enjoy reading these as traditional text, but I confess doing so would probably lose something that the chosen medium seeks to add. "The Sea," with its stream-of-consciousness wandering, was for me the most enjoyable to read in terms of textual content.

It's possibly a dated view, but I like my text pinned down, like butterflies to a board, so that it can be appreciated. Granted, it may lose the animus when being presented like that, but it does make it more comprehensible. Literature shouldn't be a moving target.

An introduction to my Google Maps essay

    

     I love the word "ephemera." It's pretty, uncommon, and both the title and an accurate description of my essay. Which isn't really an essay, per se, in the sense we think of essays. Which is to say that it isn't a linked, cohesive network of naturally-progressing ideas, built upon a foundation of reason, narrative causality, or the other things we generally associate with essays. It's essentially a lot of blather, a few contemporary-ish literary references, some memories, and bad jokes, set to geography. The geography is for the most part incidental to the essay, but it gives you something to do, with the clicking around and zooming and whatnot.


Orange gets off pretty easily, color-coding-wise. Why yes, pun intended!

     I like this concept of a map-based essay specifically because it lends itself to a certain freedom. We default, I think, to linearity in our prose, because when all you have is simple text to convey something, any sense of imposed order is welcome, just to make sense of things. With the visual cartographic spread of a Google Map, however, we're afforded a degree more freedom, both from linear conceptualization and from relying solely on words to get the point across. The map as presented wasn't written in the order the pins/shapes are labeled. I wrote them as they came to me, and then went back and shuffled bits around to (hopefully) create a flow that is navigable and pleasing.


For the hipsters...

     The experience was actually a bit like coding. While written code does generally require some logical progression, it jumps around a lot too, calling different procedures and functions and subroutines. Some of that may be thought of as mimicked in my piece, given that there are a few parts that directly link to and rely on each other for coherence, though not to the whole. Coding as a practice is mostly rhizomatic, and this piece lives up to that, I feel.


Hail Discordia.

     As I never actually saw any options to use the rich text editing for my map creating, I don't have the links or pictures that I'd like showing. So I'll take the time here to link the things I couldn't there, namely hanky code and Pandemic 2 (and the latter's meme). Also, I've thrown in some pictures, some relevant and some not, since the last few posts have been lacking in visual stimulation. Also, you should read the Illuminatus trilogy. Aside from getting the fnord reference, or the picture on the right, it helps to have read something so sublimely odd. Good for the brain.
    

Reactions to The Silent History, "Reagan Library" and "That Sweet Old Etcetera"

The Silent History - Various

An intriguing blend of storytelling, story-creating, and interactivity. This is possibly one of the best digital objects I've seen, from a production standpoint. The real-world feel of it as a narrative combined with the ability to both access field reports at certain locations written by others and to create reports of one's own for others to access is clever, allowing the underlying story to remain but be supplemented in as many ways as there are extra tidbits to read. Fully crowd-sourced fiction can be sporadic in quality, as in any collaborative project involving dissimilar people and styles thrown together, but the core narrative is amazing as a stand-alone. It's beautifully put together in a technical sense. The blend of traditional text and pseudo-presentation/documentary mixes well, lending it a credence beyond standard fiction. The sheer spectrum of options open to this medium adds something to the art of storytelling that print-only narratives cannot match. Not better, but as good, certainly, and with amazing potential.

"Reagan Library" - Stuart Moulthrop

This would have gone better, I think, if it were meant for a modern platform rather than IE 2 or Netscape. The description makes it sound like there was meant to be audio, forgive the phrase. Also, the point-and-click on objects to move thing didn't work, so hyperlink was the only way to navigate. Still, the ability to drag the screen around to get a 360-degree view was nice. Maybe because it was so silent but interactive, the object was interestingly creepy, and the randomly-generated text at points enhanced that. The feel of an odd systemic human/machine hybrid breakdown actually rather worked given the crippled abilities of the object itself. It feels a bit like this excellent passage from an excellent book. (from 301 to 302) What it didn't feel like was that it became more coherent (or sensible) as things progressed. Just more eloquently creepy/disassociative breakdown-y.

"That Sweet Old Etcetera" - Alison Clifford

This was a little bit beautiful. The medium made for an interesting and innovative illustration of the message. The interactivity, the musical tones, the lovely construction of the poems into a landscape...all brilliant. Hard to read at times, but in line with the spirit of Cummings' style. Can be a bit tricky to navigate without cheating using the tab button, or at least the swaying tree part was, but even that makes it a little playful, in keeping with the tone of the object. This is as much visual art as it is poetry, and it makes me think of the points brought up in Goldsmith's "It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, it's 'Repurposing.'" The core poetry may not be new, but the presentation of it certainly is, and all the better for being presented in a way commensurate with the message.

Reactions to the week's readings, praise and snark dispensed judiciously

"My Body a Wunderkammer" - Shelley Jackson

Clever and playful. Jackson's hyperlink-driven text reads like a series of narrative Wikipedia essays, in that the links come at random intervals within the context of the specific essay being read, but tie into the essay they link to. Her imagery is strong, personal, relatable, and gratifying. The idea of the body broken down to parts, with each not only having its own story, but tales that interweave with the other parts, just makes sense as a medium. After all, our pieces may have specific design purposes, but still rely on other parts. This piece is charming. As separate essays, each link stands alone well, and as a read-through/click-through whole, each integrates nicely. Any negative critiques I have are related to the coding, not the content, and never mind the hair-splitting about the coding being the content, etc. You know what I mean, and I see the two as distinctly separate. I'm old-fashioned that way.

"Index for X and the Origin of Fires" and "Neckdeep" - Ander Monson

I like the presentation of "Index" as its purported namesake. It disrupts the traditional narrative, but still lets you build a narrative from the individual "listings" that allows you to strike near the point. In this case, it also serves to make the experiences relayed more raw, harsher, since without the traditional predictable narrative it becomes harder to...well, predict...the incidents, and thus inure myself to it. Indices are presented at the end of something, which makes everything before, to which they are referenced, a series of memories, in effect. And memory is notorious in its lack of linear reliability. To relive a trauma, one doesn't generally get lead down a safe narrative path, but is presented with it bluntly, across the mental face, full force. This piece succeeds at conveying that. A pity about the pictures, though. Those are just unpleasantly distracting.

As for "Neckdeep,"...eh. It's a card catalog. Clever. But Monson's favorite subject seems to be himself, and while that's forgivable when presented well, it's less enjoyable when the favorite subject is indulged in with the degree of smug self-satisfaction that radiates from the entries in the clever catalog concept. It's this, without the charm of the inherent satire of the personality portrayed.

"88 Constellations" - David Clark

Constellations are the culturally-accepted patterning of stars around culturally-accepted stories that we tell ourselves to make sense out of a universe which too often seems uncaring, incomprehensible, or downright hostile. A different set of cultural experiences would redraw the lines, but the stories would reduce down to the same few we share across the world, with minor changes to suit the tastes of the teller and the audience. "88 Constellations" is a website patterning stories from a man's life around constellations. The stories of that life are generally accepted, and told to make sense of the life surrounding them, to make that life as comprehensible to us as something uncaring, incomprehensible, or downright hostile can be. Different people encountering the subject of said stories might have told them differently, but they'd break down to the same stories in essence. I like to think that that's what Clark had in mind in his design, which is why the whole thing takes on a slightly wry, knowing tone.

"Pieces of Herself" - Juliet Davis

Obnoxious. Riotously obnoxious. Possibly meant to be? Was that the point? I feel I missed the point. If I wanted to parse content while being assaulted by random audio, especially when it layers to the point of being unlistenable, I'd still be browsing Angelfire and Geocities webpages. With the sound off, maybe I could better discern the "exploration of feminine embodiment and identity" the piece purports to offer, but given the crucial role the sound is apparently supposed to play, that doesn't seem likely to aid my understanding. Maybe this is beyond me because it just isn't my area of interest, beyond the fact of it being a digital object. Any socio-gendered discourse above the level of terms like "privilege" is pretty much beyond me, so the message of societal inscription, yadda yadda, is lost and wasted on me. Which just leaves the evaluation of this as a digital object. See the first word of the paragraph. Maybe a great message, but given the obnoxious medium, I don't feel compelled to hear it.

Reactions to Understanding Media and "Mr. Plimpton's Revenge"

His magnum opus

Dinty Moore’s Google Maps essay, “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge,” is a novel and interesting use/subversion of the mapping technology. While maintaining a traditional narrative structure (assuming one clicks through in the order presented), the use of Google Maps adds an element of interactivity I found appealing. Being able to pinpoint the specific locations of the story adds a degree of narrative immediacy and context to what would otherwise be a semi-charming/amusing story told over cocktails.

 

The world's newest supervillain

After reading the selection from McLuhan’s Understanding Media, two concepts stood out as salient. The first, regarding the medium being the message, is harder to wrap my head around as presented. The TV is not what’s on the TV, YouTube is not what’s on YouTube, and so on, surely. I am not what I say, the singer is not what she sings. Then I took a step back, mentally, after hearing about something where the medium literally is the message. The pleasant scent of freshly-cut grass is actually a cry for help, a Bat (Bug) Signal if you will, meant to summon assistance from predatory insects for the beleaguered blades, saving them from the ravages of ruthless fauna. In this case, the medium (smell) is the message itself (help me, Bugman!), the two inextricably bound together. This fact served a useful purpose (aside from reconfirming my sense of moral superiority for never mowing) in that it gave me a platform from which to grasp the concept as applied to us.

Scaling that up and through the lenses of abstraction and self-interest that help define human motivation, I can see the truth in that how we present information can be as important, and say as much, as the actual information presented. How we offer something can inform or define what we’re offering, be it a speech, a sales pitch, a web-based show, etc. Simple marketing theory, right? I’d just clarify and say that the medium isn’t the whole of the message, but is a necessary part of it.

 

Gravitas

Let’s take the Netflix show, House of Cards. The simple message is the show itself, an American political drama. But the medium, the vehicle by which that message is conveyed, tells us more. First, the fact that it is a show original* to Netflix, not simply a re-airing of network television, is Netflix saying “Look, we can create new content! We’re relevant! Eat it, RedBox!” Second, the use of headliner Kevin Spacey reasserts the claim, telling us, “Hey, we got that American Beauty guy! We’re a serious entertainment contender, not some YouTube-haunting kitten video stalker!” And of course Kevin Spacey is himself letting us know that, “Hey, I can still get acting jobs, even after K-Pax! I’m still relevant! Did you know I’m a Serious Actor? I play the POTUS, for crissake!”

 

Suck Dynasty

The second concept, of hot vs. cold media, I can agree with, though McLuhan’s application of those labels shows the age of the work. TV may have been a cold medium in the 50’s, but these days, with the diversity of messages to be found, the TV itself is lukewarm, with the non-medium-messages being hot or cold, depending on intent and content. It can be argued that much of the available programming today leaves very little to the imagination, indeed shoving so much irrelevant crap at us (looking at you, reality television) that we drown in the banality of it. Or maybe that’s just my old age. Now get off my unmown lawn.

*By original, I mean a Netflix reboot of an originally English show which was actually originally a book. But still, not network.