Category: Reflections

http://mason.gmu.edu/~lwilliap/index.html

The URL for my analysis on PAX is: (if the pax link doesn’t work)

http//mason.gmu.edu/~jparker6/jenpax.html

-Jen-

 

 

Here is the link for my analysis http://mason.gmu.edu/~tshephar/pax.htm

The time is 5:14 AM on Tuesday, November 8th. My analysis can be found at this link: http://mason.gmu.edu/~pmiller4/coloroftv.htm

The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Yoyager introduces the informationally unique method of communicating to an audience. Unlike other forms of examined textual media, this focuses on providing statistical and analytical information, as opposed to merely telling the story of an estranged love- of a man without his son. This piece of cyber text was purposefully arranged and created to provide its audience, anyone with a name :), to trace the popularity of his or her name during the course of a linearly represented time line of generations.

What interested me most was the graphically artistic approach for this particualr layout and design. The colors, simple and obvious, were used to represent the male and female gender. Through the simplicity and clear nature of the web site, I found my ability to navigate through this media rather easy. Essentially, The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager examines and utilizes a form of communicating perhaps not as accessible through other styles. It’s linearly based information was, like other featured textual mediums, formatted in an interactive and more intriguing way, as opposed to the commonly used book or a more ‘boring’ use of filing information in a computer database.    

I desire to have a proficient understanding of Textual Media and be able to put it all together.  However, the elements that are used to develop a textual game are a little confusing to me.  I can see the storylines and pattern of how the pages are structured, but the concepts of how you play the game are a bit fuzzy.  Maybe the time line and age are factors in how a person interacts with the subject matter.  In games, I see several sections: 1) the stories, 2) the characters, 3) the scenes, 4) the global structure, and 5) the art work, plus some times there is a less to be learned.    As a reader, character, and game player, I believe that there are some elements I am missing in my understanding that would make my experience with this new textual media a lot more exciting.

I choose to write about Stealing My Letters because it seemed alot more tame than the images which showed up on VORN and because the Stealing My Letters website seemed closer to the concept of hypertextual media.  At first I thought of the concept of a public chat room with all the different people using letters, only in this case two or three or more people just drag all the letters to the corner which I would compare to BOTs(automated advertisements for sex sites) that always pop up in chat rooms limiting communication.  The similarity that I found to hypertext is that there are constantly obstacles to the next path you want to take, which in many cases frustrate the reader to a point where you’d really rather not continue.  This was true for me in ZORK and Hitchhiker’s Guide.  As for other hypertexts such as afternoon, the reader has to adapt and be patient to try to get to the end just as in Stealing My Letters, you need a strategy and patience to get your word.

   The understanding VORN site was interesting, definately very visually appealing.  It was odd that the site linked to several personal sites across the net.  I do not read the magazine and so I would not know where to start with comparing.  Though, pehaps it is the variety of people interested in the magazine.  I found the collage of images inpiring as I love collage, the combining of many purposes designed for one particular marketing purpose (in this case).  Upon clicking into the sites I felt rather intrusive but honestly it was at times fun to look at other people’s messages to friends and whatnot and see the intended purposes of the image, if there was one in particular.  The most illusive images of fall leaves were In a language I could not read, I first assumed Japanese but just now I thought I don’t really know what Japanese looks like so it could be any of the languages with different letters from our own.  The resulting image was beautiful at times though more interesting on the pages with several images as opposed to four.  However, the text was obviously very disjointed as it is simply thoughts and musings of normal people.

"Understanding VORN" seems to be a lot different than a lot of the other examples of Textual Media that we’ve studied, since it relies mostly on the input of the internet rather than the input of the reader. The only interactivity that the reader has with this program is to press the "Shuffle" button to mix up the images, and the rest of the input the program does itself by pictures from various blogs on the Internet.

VORN also doesn’t provide the reader with any text to read, unless you click the picture and click to the link to the corresponding blog. The text there, however, was not created by the author of VORN, it was created by the blog user whose picture was pulled by the VORN program. The links also don’t give us any more depth or insight to the purpose of "VORN" – VORN does not have an underlying storyline. The only theme to this is that each picture is pulled from a blog because the picture name either starts with the letter "V", "O", "R", or "N".

This is interesting to play with, but it leaves the reader wondering – what is the purpose of this? The title, "Understanding VORN", also seems to be misleading – what exactly is there to understand? I went to the "About" section to find out, and what it told me was that "the chaotic, unpredictable nature of UNDERSTANDING VORN reflects the chaotic, unpredictable nature of VORN Magazine". As a reader, I would have never figured that out from just playing this game.