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’ve been meaning to comment on this post for some time, because I loved your analogy about paintballing your way through new media texts. It’s a very apt description of what I’ve required of you and the rest of the class. Much of what we studied this semester required a lot of patience, and you had no idea if the patience was going to pay off. What you said about the initial fun is figuring out the rules before the meaning made me think that it might be helpful if we approach electronic literature not as literature per se, but as puzzles, or games. After all, it is only through playing it and experimenting that somebody figures out how to navigate through Grand Theft Auto. We don’t study the instruction manual and then play the game. What if we approached all digital texts that way?