textual media

I believe this online database of thoughts is very much like We Feel Fine.  I feel like they could have tried a little harder to make it one of their own. I think even if they had changed the color scheme it would have made it slightly more unique. Ok I’m done with that for now. I like this database slightly less than the We Feel Fine, but I believe that is just because We Feel Fine blew my mind in all sorts of “Sarafriendly” ways.  Twistori expands its thought database to include not just the feeling “feel” but hate, love, think, believe, and wish as well. It also includes the sentance in which the feeling is stated, but instead of just displaying what is stated after the feeling, it will sometimes display the beginning part of a statement if  the feeling is towards the end, something that We Feel Fine limited itself against.

Surprisingly enough, as I observed the website I noticed that the Love and Hate feelings tended to be the most arbitrary. At first I found it slightly ironic since Jonathan Harris’s other website we were to look at (Love Lines) was formulated strictly on a set of statements ranging from love, like, to hate. Most of the feelings in these two catagories in Twistori were statements made nonchalantly such as “I love weekends” or “I love when my teens are snarky”, “I love shopping”, etc.

I found that the Believe and wish were two of my favorite feelings. While all of the sections tend to have a fair amount of both arbitrary thoughts and evocative feelings, I tended to find myself more intrigued and pesonally drawn to these sections. “I believe things ultimately balance themselves out. That simply recognizing something as a problem doesn’t obligate one to solve it”,  “Missing the one
I wish who was there for me. Wait who is that?”, “i wish that i didn’t try to fight things so hard, that i could just accept other people’s stupid senseless rules a lot easier. ” These both tend to be a collection of people’s battles with emotions.

I really like these sort of databases. I was all about We Feel Fine and this is so much like We Feel Fine that I can’t help but love it. I love the stark contrast in colors between the black back drop and bright lettering. It really helps signify the different emotions. I also love the idea of gathering feelings and thoughts. Websites like this I feel really bring a sense of humanity out of the world wide web, which is constantly being attacked for breaking us a part and nullifying emotions and important personal feelings and actions. I have probably spent years looking for websites like this without even knowing that this is what I wanted to find and now I have a plethora of them right in front of me. I think it was a great idea for twitter to come up with this variation of We Feel Fine and give its users and others an opportunity to see the collective impact of their 170 (?) something lettered blogs.

In my opinion, Whale Hunt is a database that is also a narrative.  According to Lev Manovich, a database is a structured collection of data.  Whale Hunt meets that criterion.  Manovich quotes Mieke Bal, defining a narrative as a cultural object ” ‘that should contain both an actor and a narrator; it also should contain three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story, and the fabula; and its ‘contents’  should be ‘a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors.’ ” Further, Manovich asserts that a new media narrative is usually interactive.  In the case of Whale Hunt, the work is interactive.  Since the work is a documentary rather than fiction, I’m not sure how that aspect fits into Bal’s definition of narrative.  More important to me is the fact that Jonathan Harris considers his project to be a narrative.  On the “Interface” link, Harris explains the challenge he faced related to creating the interface.  The database includes 3,214 pictures.  Harris wanted an interface that would preserve the story and minimize picture download time.  He definitely achieved the goal. 

Taking each of Bal’s criteria one-by-one:

• Does Whale Hunt contain both an actor and a narrator?  In my opinion, Jonathan Harris is the primary actor, and Michael Moore, through the lens of his camera, is the narrator.
• Does the work contain the distinct levels of text, story, and fabula?  It is commonly expressed that a picture is worth a thousand words.  Although a text does not accompany the pictures, enough information is given in the “statement” that a story naturally forms through the sequential presentation of the data.  Related to the term fabula, I cannot find a definition for this term. 
• Is the content a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors?  Whale Hunt definitely fits this criterion.  The entire narrative relates to the experience of Jonathan Harris.

Based on my application of Mieke Bal’s definition of narrative, Whale Hunt conforms to the model and is a narrative.

Whale Hunt is truly a spectacular experience.  As a person who loves nature and the outdoors but also respects the unique ways of life represented by indigenous peoples, I was spellbound by this piece.  Harris’s trip is the experience of a lifetime-an experience that everyone can share through the database of Whale Hunt.

Like Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs, Nio empowers the user to cue the sounds and determine how many will play simultaneously.  Each time I clicked and initiated or clicked and froze a chorus, I felt like I was conducting an a cappella group. The music created by playing a combination of the choruses reminds me of Rockapella, but there is a difference.  Nio sounds more like an amalgamation of tribal music and contemporary jazz. I like the clock-like arrangement of the visual cues.  For me, it represents the order of the piece.  As the introduction states, the artist purposed to create layers of expressive, primal sound that he calls music poetry.  That is accomplished.  Just as Maria Mencia associated the visual representation of the birds with the phonemes related to their calls, Jim Andrews applies the same technique.  The letter graphics that accompany the sounds relate to associated phonemes or their syllabic nuclei. 

The “Song Shapes” experience is similar.  The “Round Poem” is created with a counter clockwise motion that begins with syllabic nuclei.  The motion is continuous and, in time, creates a visual image that is basically round but has the dimension associated with layers.  On the left side, there is a slight deviation in the continuum that possibly represents the end of a line in poetry.  As the graphic progresses, the deviation becomes less and less noticeable.  “Ound Poem” presents a continuous, winding ribbon of phonemes that creates a textured blue mass.  For me, the addition of “Mango Approved” bridges the divide between the cold and distant electronic world and the reality of the warm, human blood-coursing-through-our-veins world.  The fact that Jim Andrews would include this link convinces me that he cares about the connection people make with his art, unlike other artists who have an “I don’t give a damn if you get it or not” attitude.  An artist who appreciates the response of a user through the eyes of his kitten is not a cold, distant machine.

“Now and Then” reminds me of x-rays or MRI images.  Generally, in an x-ray, the densest tissue is the darkest in the image.  Modern technology can capture one area of the body from many different angles, like the images in these frames.  For me, this link evokes the idea of the anatomy of a poem. 

The Source Code link tells me a lot about Jim Andrews.  The fact that he makes his code available to the public proves that he is an unselfish artist.  It is inspiring that he is so willing to share his hard work with others. 

By the time I finished exploring this work, I realized something that I greatly appreciate.  I WASN’T A NERVOUS WRECK!  Nio really is an enjoyable experience.  Again, I attribute this effect to the fact that the user maintains control of the pace of the experience and therefore is not forced into sensory overload.  Also, the graphics in the work are orderly and peaceful.  The flowing blue images in the visual poems are calming and remind me of the gentle movement of fish swimming in an aquarium.

The iStory Creator is an application that can be used for creating interactive stories that can be uploaded and read on iPods, but I believe there is a way to run it as a computer program as well. Here’s the link:

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/iStory-Creator-Download-21036.html

It might look a bit intimidating at first, but the program is actually really easy to navigate once you get the hang of it. Basically what you can do is create a number of different pages with text, and link them together in any order. When it is run on an iPod, it works is very similar to a CYOA book. The text appears at the top of the page, and the different links appear at the bottom.

I haven’t really explored what limitations there are in terms of text/page limitations. It does look like there is a limit of 18 links per page, but I can’t imagine that being a problem.

I’ll upload any other information as I find it, but feel free to make corrections/clarifications/suggestions.

*A cool feature that this program has is that when run on an iPod, sound can be added to each page. This could be pretty cool if combined with sound effects or spoken word tracks, and obviously music as well. The only problem is that I don’t think this is an option if only run on the computer.

Here’s a poem I found by poet/storyteller Rives:

O}-< Q<= 10018 MTWThF 02.28.08 7:55pm |* *| Q<= O}-< ½?…1/256? Omg! <3 lol! {u} (_)3 =<”>= H207xNaCl yllambywlaw Q<= “?” O}-< ..-.etc jv *\o/* #*@%! “— —” aabb O}-< :(|) xXx })i({ SW .+ 5^th/42^nd ___ No.2 –> ]?

If you can’t figure it out, here’s the link to him performing it live: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/rives_tells_a_story_of_mixed_emoticons.html

It obviously works a lot better as a live performance (It’s obvious that certain parts don’t fit perfectly, or would be indistinguishable otherwise), but at the same time I found it really interesting how he decided to illustrate this piece using only letters, numbers and punctuation.

            The theme of the story is that there are at times limitations to the spoken language—a guy sees a girl he wants to talk to, but doesn’t know what to say. Instead of saying something generic, he decides to try and convey his feelings in his own unique way, and because of this the girl is left puzzled.

            The illustrations, on the other hand, do the exact opposite. Letters, numbers and punctuation—the building block of written language, are essentially only symbols (similar to what we’ve discussed in class and read in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics). Because they are symbols, they don’t actually “mean” anything. Therefore they have the ability to convey more than the role assigned to them.

For example, when Rives writes this *\o/* it does not mean “asterisk, backslash, lowercase O, solidus, asterisk,” it means cheerleader. When Rives writes (_)3 it doesn’t mean “parenthesis, underscore, parenthesis, number three” it means coffee mug. No one could say “parenthesis, underscore, parenthesis, number three” and think “coffee mug” without first constructing the image (_)3. There is really no actual relationship.

Rives’s performance of this “typographical fairytale” is not just a simple poem or story, but a commentary on language, communication and symbolic capacity.

i found some of the compalints interesting while reading the blogs on Young-Hae Chang’s hypertexts. One that really stuck out was when somone said it “made me feel stressed and anxious.” this comment was said as a negative towards the piece. but i found this interesting becuase i feel it shows how well the piece works. the mixture of the fast paced words and music are suppose to convey these feelings to the viewer. I think Young-Hae Chang wants you to feel stressed and anxious so you can be put in the place of the characters in “bust down the doors.”

the hypertext works on many levels and the combination of text, pace and music all help to accomplish this effect. if you were to just read the peice as a book it would be completely different. your emotional reaction to it would be lacking because you would be reading the text at your own pace and you would set your own tone to it. But by taking this power away from the reader and by adding things like music and flashing text the power is given to the machine and your emotional reaction to it is elavated, making you feel stressed and anxious. i just thought it interesting that what someone didn’t like aobut the piece was what the creator wanted the person to get from it.

“Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs” was a breath of fresh air to me amidst so many hypertexts that stretch your mind and vision to the peripheral. It was a relief to find that I was more in control of this hypertext than any of the others we have recently done. It could hardly be considered overwhelming in the face of Young-Hae Chang’s fast-paced works that leave me feeling as stressed as finding out all my financial aid had been revoked or something. The hypertext games just had so many other distracting features I found it difficult  to get past the first level without getting stuck in my own frustration about the “deeper” meaning of the task at hand.

The foreward of “Birds Singing Other Birds’ Songs” is very informative and you can see right away that there was a lot of thought, consideration, and research involved in the creation of this hypertext. I like that this explanation is given and we are not left to fend for ourselves as is the norm with Nelson. I like that this hypertext is not meant to confuse you, but instead wants you to appreciate the art and techniques themselves. The texts that fly across the page correlate with the bird sounds you chose to play. It is perhaps a much more soothing form of Young-Hae Chang’s use of music and pace of words. But this is instead formatted to move across and around the screen in a more artistic, peaceful, and correlating way. The sounds and texts rely on each other, the bird sounds being altered as the text bumps along with other bird sound text. You can see how some bird calls remain in form, only being altered by the inclination of sound within its fixed form, while others flow from chaos to be merged together, and even others fall a part with the clickclucking of sound. It is interactive in that you get to chose which bird songs are being sung, how many are sung and overlapped at once, and when and if you want certain songs to stop.

I recently came across a clip of a videogame demo called The Unfinished Swan, a first person maze game where the player must navigate through levels of whitewashed walls by shooting black paintballs. (it’s kind of hard to explain, but here’s the link: http://www.kottke.org/08/10/the-unfinished-swan).

            I thought that this was a pretty good analogy of what I’ve felt like we’ve been doing a lot of this semester; paintballing my way through a lot of these textual media pieces, not really sure what to do or where to go. And I think what I’ve struggled with the most is having the patience to take the time to explore the different new media works, and giving them the amount of time necessary for each to be fully appreciated.

I think the main difficulty with most textual media pieces is that I don’t know where to start. The rules to new media aren’t set in stone the same way that they are for more conventional works of literature, such as a novel. When looking at a work of new media, if the question is: “What is it about?” the approach to the answer is much different then if it were asked about a novel.

In a novel, the answer can be found by reading the text printed on the pages of the book. It’s not necessarily a matter of novels’ content being easier to decipher, but a challenging novel is still a novel (and the conventions of the novel will generally guide the reader on the path toward understanding). What is it about? –I’m not sure, but I know where to look, and what to look for.

For a piece of new media, like the Bomar Gene—where there are no set standards or rules—the first challenge if figuring out how to find the answer (the actual finding of the answer does not come until after). The real difficulty lies not in the medium (its navigation, features, limitations, etc.), but not knowing the rules; what to look for, what to focus on. It’s much easier to invest time with an aspect that will yield results (text on the pages of novels), then to take time exploring a completely new frontier. This is because there is a lot more risk involved; readers run the risk of investing time in a potentially fruitless effort. There is the fear that the “wrong” aspects will be focused on, and his or her time has been wasted. This is the same reason that some people feel so strongly opposed to modern art, and why critics exist in society.

At the same time, this new frontier characteristic and the “Unfinished Swan Effect” add some of the appeal to pieces of new media. I think most would argue that part of the initial fun is figuring out the rules before figuring out the meaning, but how do the two balance each other out? If pieces of new media become “conventionalized” would they then lose an important part of their appeal? For instance, if someone wrote Cliff Notes on The Bomar Gene—the meaning, how to find it, etc.—how would it be changed? If the mystery behind it was diffused, would it become more appreciated or less? Above all, is thinking about new media in this way obsolete? Does any of this “old media” analysis still even apply? I really don’t know.

I tend to not like the fast pace of Young-Hae Chang’s hypertexts. The constant flashing of words at such rapid speeds and the black and white block lettering leave me feeling as if I am asking for a seisure to be granted to me. I find these hypertexts leaving me feeling stressed and anxious. Although there is slightly more going on than in “Bust down the Doors!” which only adds more strain to my being, I do tend to prefer All Fall Down over “Bust Down the Doors!”. The music gives it a much more cheery feel and instead of being entirely stressed out about the text the music aids in giving the hypertext a more “game-ish” feel. I want to be able to read as much as possible more as a competition for myself than out of music instilled fear which I found as one of my main motives when studying “Bust Down the Doors!”. Flipping the colors of the text and the background also gave the text a more positive feel and helps in understanding what the text is actually saying better. Upon first viewing it in class I was included in the group that had to watch this top part. It felt almost as if the text was lyrics to the music playing. The text moved with the music and it seemed as if it had the same amount of syllables as notes in the music. The structure of the text and the way it flashes, moves, and disappears at such a rapid rate gives off a sense of chaos, the inability to gain control, at the hands of the elements presented to you, and confusion.

Originally, I thought that the text was lyrics to the music I pictured a little banjo band sitting outside a stoop clapping their hands to the music, with the “Ah, Yah, Yup, Right, uh-huh’s” being sung words of agreement to the main lyrics/singer. Then I got the little banjo band image out of my head and I thought that the black background with white text seemed to be a commentary on what the phrase proceeding it in white background and black text was saying. The text starts out playful but as it became a little less light-hearted and instead kind of crazy and weird, the image of a crazy person saying these things popped into my head. The phrases were all so nonsensical yet still correlated in some strange way. You always hear about how crazy people sometimes have extraordinary mental capacities and can process some things in ways that no other human can and that is kind of the feeling I got from what I imagined the speaker of the text to be. I finally came to the conclusion after sifting through all of my initial guesses that it seems as if it is one speaker blaming himself on mistakes he himself has made, and humanity as a whole has made.

Rather quickly though the text begins to take on a different tone. It gets kind of mean and vulgar. It says something positive or cute, reminiscent of playfulness  or cute eye catching phrases like “beautiful town”, but then follows it with things such as “too damn late”. The text mentions some girl looking drunk and good in red lipstick, her looking good even as she falls down drunk and how “you” never even spoke to her, “you” fool.

It gets faster and faster to the point where really it becomes nearly impossible for me to read the black background white text, and instead only the white background black text. the text continues with negativity and talks about emails falling down, servers falling down.. everything that could possibly fall down is mentioned to do so. Basically, the demise of everything humanity puts its trust in is just falling down. No sunshine, lose your mind, flame out… these are few of the phrases that make me think of nothing but the end of hope and complete loss of faith.

So then I went back and read the bottom part of the page as it scrolled at a soft and steady pace across the bottom of the scene. The text is much more poetic and thoughtful and you can see the speaker is distraught and deeply emotional over the loss or being unable to obtain this women. He writes about her thoughtfully and carefully about the way he longs for her and the things he notices about her.  But he also writes about himself as well, “have you ever felt if you be youself just like they tell you and it isn’t good enough”. This section seems to be the logical stable side of the speaker that gives some explanation to what it was that ticked him and sent him in the crazy uncencored downward spiral we see in the text above.

Note = Make sure you use Internet Explorer on a PC, I used IE 7 and it seemed to work OK—Firefox the PC platform however, did not.

Starting out I had to lookup phenomenology:

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

Phenomenology is a philosophy that analyses phenomena (from Greek, meaning “that which appears”), as they are perceived from the first person perspective in the natural attitude. It could be said that phenomenology studies how one perceives rather than what one perceives. In modern times, Phenomenology usually refers to the philosophy developed by Edmund Husserl and is primarily concerned with consciousness and its structures.

After reading the author’s description, it seems somewhat confusing; nevertheless, I plan to dive right in.

I noticed something VERY weird! If you use Firefox and IE and put the main window side-by-side, the title is different; the author must make a change based on the browser being used.

In IE 7, it says “LEXIA to PER[(p)[L(EX)]]ia”
In Firefox 3, it says “LEXIA to PERPLEXIA”

Going into the first menu “The process of attachment,” it is exactly as the author described, very confusing. Parts of words are taken and mashed together to supposedly create some sort of new meaning, meaning which I cannot see currently. Further examination of the work shows that Firefox does not correctly render the work so I switched to using IE7 only.

After I had gone through and explored all of the aspects of this work, does anyone have any clue what it means? Sometimes there is a correlation between what the user examines—and text that pops up. However, when you try to delve in deeper than that it starts showing those weird convoluted phenomenological sentences, which are difficult to understand and interpret.

All Fall Down by Young Chang Heavy Industries was a bit of a headache as we all saw in class. This work consists of two different story lines being played out in different fashions. This first and most obvious part was the top half of the screen with bigger and bolder text. It also came up on the screen in tandem with the beats of the music. The other part was the ticker-esque text that ran along the bottom of the screen. If we separated all three aspects of the text, the music and the two texts apart from each other it would be a much more pleasurable experience. However, as we concluded during class, reading the texts separately even posed a problem, because it was tedious and the viewer had to be very focused. This is also true with the Star Wars, One Letter at a Time work because the viewer had to be completely involved and actively watching the screen to put the pieces together before the next word or letter popped up.

The aesthetics of the work are intriguing because, again, if you were to separate all of the pieces of the work and make them more simplistic, they would be more enjoyable. For example, I had had this work running behind a couple of Internet browser windows and I found myself enjoying the music. If you were to take the texts out of the pulsating or ticker format and were to put them in a structure resembling a poem, then the viewer would be able to read each word at their leisure.

Aside from the aesthetics and the fast paced nature of the work, the context was a matter of interest for me as well. While we were reading the separate pieces in class, I was wondering if there was ever some part where they intersect. Why were these texts chosen? Maybe when the top part mentions that ‘people fall down’ he’s referring to the person in the bottom ticker and their actions. I feel like the bottom ticker is describing a stalker or someone who is obsessed with a particular woman. It’s almost as if the top part of the screen is pushing the bottom part of the screen to make a move or create some kind of action towards the object. The forced nature of the top part and the way it fluctuates between the black and white makes the viewer anxious and it creates suspense as if something is supposed to happen. Nothing seems to really happen, which is disappointing. It reminds me of a really bad horror movie in which there is plenty or suspense leading up to plenty of nothing.  I found this piece just as stressful as the other pieces, despite the lack of color or intricate links and quirky aspects of pieces such as the Bomar Gene.

The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin told a story through the games that you were playing. The presence of text fluctuated from game to game, but there always seem to be two different ways to understand the story from. Typically, those two ways were through hearing it and the other way was a supplementary picture, text, often times both. To retrieve the story, the viewer needs to advance through the game. Almost, like in game, game, game, and again game, which we saw in a recent class. I found it difficult to pay attention to the story, especially in the game where you had to shoot your rival, because your attention is focused on achieving the goal, rather than comprehending the story.

After going through the game a couple of times, I started to pick up what the storyline was about. Sure, you get the quick blurb in the beginning that says “The intruder- passing the love of women- 2 Samuel 1:26- a story told in ten games…”, but that only tells you so much. The sound of the narrators voice seemed to have a Spanish accent and the original story was in Spanish. The Spanish culture is extremely religious, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see the biblical reference in the title page or game.

I found it interesting when I opened the hypertext at different times because at some points the games were running much more slowly. That tended to influence my tolerance towards the games and the story itself. This is especially true in regards to the game immediately following the title page. Sometimes it was simply too fast and the sound and screen glitch that appeared made me cringe and more so with every miss. I had to eventually mute the sound and manually switch to the next game.

In regards to the theme of the story, the games related to the text or the spoken words of the narrator, I assume. For instance, in the second game, there is an alien game, which relates to the intruder not being familiar to them. In the third game, the narrator speaks of how the intruder or antagonist has relations with women. The game requires you to shoot the opponent without getting yourself hurt. The interesting part is that the woman switches from side to side, which is triggered by whether you shoot. She doesn’t necessarily die, she just changes sides, which may symbolize one side saving her or on the other hand, possibly kidnapping her. This may also symbolize the fact that the narrator of the story possibly feeling like a piece property or a trade item. In this same game there was this intriguing picture of a window with a women standing in it. This represented the possibility of escape through women. Maybe the women in the story were the key to freedom somehow. The story combined with the voice and the games give another layer of insight to the plot it is just a matter or understanding both and comprehending both at the same time.

My Body- a Wunderkammer by Shelley Jackson was a difficult hypertext to wrap my head around, but not in the typical sense of the other hypertexts we’ve studied. Instead of spending majority of our time to simply understand what is going on, we are able to read and understand the context. This work was more relatable and personable than any of the other works, so the difficult part laid within discovering the reason behind the work and possibly the feelings she had while writing the work. While we took time to navigate and explore the work, I felt as though I was prying into someone’s life and private journal or diary. There were some very personal entries about her body. For instance, the entry about her stomach and how her belly button ring chain kept her from slouching was, to an extent, uncomfortable for me. She says, “[the chain] make[s] me aware of my bondage… it stops me from wondering where else I might want to be…” Several parts of the entries are critical of her body and make me wonder if she didn’t feel resentful towards her surrounding society, rather than sentimental and self-confident, like was said in class. This is evident in the same entry when she talks about her belly dancing and her inability to achieve the dance technique. It seems that she has something positive to say, but then the next line is consequently negative. For instance, she says, “Belly dancing has taught me to roll and flutter [my stomach], though awkwardly and unreliably.” Another example is when she had the cast that made her small injury seem bigger than it was. This caused people ‘who wouldn’t ordinarily talk to [her]‘ to inquire about what happened. She felt as though her injury wasn’t good enough for people to seem concerned. While there are several instances of her being expressing self-confidence, I can’t help but feel a sense of shame and resentfulness towards her schoolmates and family or even in her self proclaimed shortcomings.

My Body- a Wunderkammer gave insight to a unique individual’s past and revealed different aspects of her body image. Within each entry there are links interweaving the entries together. I’m not sure why she makes the connections she does, other than the link making a connection to the obvious body part, but there are some that take more anaylsis to figure out. For instance, with her link of ‘princess’ the reader wouldn’t necessarily guess that the link would lead to an entry about her dolls and their hair.

Shelley Jackson’s work is extremely intimate and secluded from the outside world, from sharing about the hairs on her toes to her exclaiming that she discovered a new way to masturbate. This work is very intriguing on several levels than the other works than we’ve studied because it added a sense that the reader could relate to as well as feel empathy towards in some respects.

I contend that “game, game, game and again game” (also known as “terrible game”), upon further consideration, is, in fact, a game. While it is decidedly not among the more “conventional” games, such as Super Mario (as we discussed in class), it has a different set of objectives. There are multiple goals that game developers incorporate into their works, including but not limited to: story-telling, mimicking real life, allowing for an escape from real life, and then there is the category of games that exist for the sake of the player simply enjoying him or herself.

Clearly, “game, game, game and again game” does not fall into this last category; nonetheless, it presents obstacles which the gamer ostensibly wants to overcome due to natural instinct. For example, in the first segment of the game, the gamer must “fall” down a hole into a depiction of the sun in order to reach the door to enter the next level. Now, instinctively, the gamer would assume that, in order to reach safety and get to the door that he or she should use the space bar to jump over the hole. I, personally, performed this action several times before realizing that I merely needed to allow the black hairball avatar essentially “fall” down the hole to reach the door, which acted as a portal into the next level. I came to realize that the “point” or goal of the game, however trivial, appeared to be, primarily, getting from point A to point B.

Essentially, this game falls under the genre of games known as platformers, or platform games, such as Donkey Kong. Additionally, it was clear that the game was intended to act as a catalyst for reflection on religion and, more abstractly, morality and its ties with humanity in general. Throughout the game, we encounter various examples of these themes. There is the representation of a cross surrounded by fish, which is clearly representative of Christian symbols or imagery. Parodies of scriptures appear when the avatar hovers over these fish. What appear to be home videos evoke the concepts of memory and family values. In one of the levels, the images of trembling rockets with the background of various buildings seem to suggest humans, as well as evolution.

Interestingly, one of the text bubbles reads: “where walls hide the frameless, a community served as soft and temporary, they open windows to brick and still.” The idea of a community is deliberately brought to the gamer’s attention, even though the word itself is crossed out—the temporality of humanity becomes an idea at this point in the game. Intriguingly, however, no score is actually kept and it is impossible for the gamer’s avatar to “die”…instead, an ominous voiceover says, on each level, “Come on and meet your maker.” It is as though religion becomes its own entity, despite its ostensible links to humanity. On another level, a bubble of text reads: “Perception is cell death,” while the word, “cell,” is crossed out. Another text bubble in another level reads: “this happens to be life-threatening and pretty and religious, the mechanics of a railroad life within antibiotics.” Finally, we are told, in the last level, “your life is really the end.” Clear and distinctive themes of morality and humanity come into play as central focal points of this game–even as they are not “goals,” per se, but rather, meaningful components of the game.

While provocative and visually stimulating, “game, game, game and again game” is, ultimately, overly visually stimulating and only provocative if read into with an extremely open mind, to say the least. It raises an overwhelming number of questions, which are neither answered nor even articulate. In the interest of finding something to do the other night during a spell of boredom, I showed two friends, who are avid video gamers, “game, game, game and again game.” First, one of them said, “This game wouldn’t exist without the Internet, because no one would pay for this game.” The other responded that the game was “easy…stupid…but then again, I’m not a very artistic guy. I’m sure to someone, that’s a window to the infinite soul of beauty, but really, it’s just annoying.” I thought both of these to be astute observations.

The merging of technology and literature is often described as a progression. We assume that because the scope of literature is expanding, so too must the quality of it expand. That’s simply not true, especially in the short term. As writers broaden their perspective, they lose focus on the forms of literature that have been proven to work for years. By changing the format, hypertext writers have a dual responsibility: to create a quality format and to create a quality text. Novelists, for example need only create a quality text, and simply have more resources to space for this singular task.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been progress within hypertextual literature, but that it hasn’t had an opportunity to narrow its manifestations down to a few workable formats that can convey the message of the author most effectively. Once that has been done, hypertext can bring real progression to the popular conception of literature. But until then, it will remain a fairly unpopular form of art.