notmyrealname's blog

Okay, if anyone wants to try and play this, here it is. I used Inform's default file type, so I hope that works... If it doesn't please comment and I'll try to fix it.
I hope everybody has a good summer and good luck on exams!

So our readings recently have dealt with various definitions of ARGs and debate on what to call them. The two main options are Alternate Reality Game vs. Chaotic Fiction. In a way, this can go back to the Narratology vs. Ludogy debate. Are ARGs games? Are they stories? Can they be both? I thought the chart in Spacebass' "Undefining ARG" was particularly useful here.

Chart

It shows how some ARGs are more gamelike, with the player really being able to influence how things unfold, while other are more fiction-like, with the author having more control over the story. If ARGs can have so much difference in how gamelike or storylike they are, then, would it really be fair to apply just one label to them?  read more »

So on Wednesday I got caught by the Gotham City police.

After class on Wednesday I just couldn't resist. I went to unforums. I started playing an ARG--the Dark Knight, to be specific, tying into this summer's new Batman movie.

In Unreality: A Brief History of ARG, Gosney touches on the idea of how some people lose grasp of the distinction between reality and fiction when playing these games, and I can definately see that happening. This game's been going on for more than a few months now, so I jumped into it midway, and my first action in it was to try to hack into the website for a (fake) security systems company for the Joker. It asked for a log in of my name, cell phone number, and email address, and as soon as I submitted it my cell phone rang. It wasn't the security company or even the Joker; it was Commisioner Gordon of the Gotham City police saying that he now had all my personal information, and if I didn't turn double agent and gather info about the Joker for him, I was going to jail.  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 »

Okay, so I finished Photopia. I thought it would all make sense when I reached the end, but silly me, I'm still confused.

I suppose I should put a spoiler-alert here. If you haven't played the game yet and don't want to know anything about it in advance, then read no further, my friend.

So, there's a bunch of different story lines. Alley's the main character. She makes up stories--one of which is about the astronaut Wendy and her adventures. We seem to be flashing to different points in Alley's life: from when she was a child, to her babysitting the actual child Wendy, to when she gets hit by the car and possibly dies. Then there's the part at the end where photopia is a pretty light display that Alley's parents are showing her as a baby. That's the part I don't understand. Does it negate the rest of the story? Are all the other scenes just dreams induced by photopia, or is this just a flashback? And what about the queen and the wolf and the rest of the story? I'm so confused. I guess I'm off to google or wikipedia to find someone who can tell what the point was...

So I liked the text-based adventure game a lot more than the Atari version. I got farther in the Atari version than I did the text-based one, but it wasn't as fun of an experience. Perhaps this is because I've never played a text-based game before, and the whole experience was rather novel. Plus, with the Atari's graphics being what they were, I preferred the setting I came up with in my imagination based off the text's descriptions. Then again, I had a much harder time getting around in the text-based game because I couldn't picture the cave's layout. I ended up finding the chamber with the snake maybe once and then never making it back there because I couldn't figure out how I'd gotten there the first time.
I liked the text-based version mostly because it reminded me of reading a fantasy novel. Still I wonder what the experience would have been like if we'd played the text-based game and then an Adventure video game with today's graphics.

So a lot of the Helvetica documentary was talking about what type of message the font got across. Whether that message was corporate, stylish, or bland, the people in the documentary agreed that what font something is written in has an affect (however large or small) on its overall message. And being the East Asian Languages and Literature major that I am, I immdiately thought of Asian calligraphy. Since we learned how to add pictures into blog posts this week, let's see if I can manage.
example: Piece of work by the Chinese poet Mifu, image from Wikipedia.  read more »

So during class this week I found myself thinking of comic books for examples of image-text and typography. More specifically, I found myself thinking about Neil Gaiman's Sandman. For those who have never read it, I offer a link of a scan of one of the pages.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v88/sonokitsunekono/Comic%20Scans/del1...  read more »

Okay, so I found the character chapter in Story and Discourse particularly interesting because I read a lot, and this chapter presented a lot of alternate definitions for the word character. For novels there are terms like "flat characters" and "cardboard cut-outs" which are usually negative terms that mean the author's characters are stereotypical and/or lacking depth. I always considered a "real" character to be a complex thing with traits, personality quirks, goals, fears, relationships, and backstory.
But what about the theory that all a character has to do to be a character is do stuff? After watching Animator vs Animation, I considered the stick figure and the cursor to be characters, even though they didn't fit my definition. And what about video games? You're controlling the character. You could make them run into walls repeatedly if you wanted to. But what about the cut-scenes where characters display certain traits?
I guess there are many different "types" of characters. Someone should make a nice Chatman-esque chart with a hierarchical structure-- and plenty of arrows and lines.

So evidently I'm not as deep as I thought.
I understood that the game was supposed to parallel life, but when we discussed it in class everyone pointed out a lot of symbolism and stuff that went completely over my head when I was playing it. Like how everything was blurry in front of you when you start playing and blurry behind when you reached the end--I just thought that was bad graphics, but it was revealed to represent the uncertainty of the future when young and the loss of memory when old. It makes sense now, but I didn't notice it at the time.
I didn't even notice that the characters were subtly aging until they got really gray and balding. I just kept trucking along the map and trying to get to the end. It was around then that I got the idea that the game paralleled life. Then the wife died, and I was kind of upset. I hung around her grave for a while before continuing on, thinking that there was some end point I was supposed to reach. Then I died, and well...  read more »