Author: bcowling

Learning to play the guitar is very different depending on which type of guitar you begin with.  Starting with a nylon-stringed classical guitar is preferable, as its strings are softer and its sound somewhat more welcoming to a newcomer.  An electric guitar has a more abrasive voice and a slightly more painful set of strings.  But nothing is worse on the guitar amateur’s virgin fingers than the steel strings of an unbroken-in acoustic guitar.  I remember the first bit of blood to come from my fingertips onto those strings, a piercing pain that felt like the guitar had ripped to the bone but was ultimately a surface wound, something you’d have to deal with again and again.

Understanding Comics presents an interesting take on not only understanding comics themselves but in understanding literature as a whole, be it visual or textual.  In defining what comics are at their absolute basic level we find that a sequence of images can illicit worlds of information and have quite interesting implications in their application, notably: is it a temporal sequence being viewed?  Or is it something entirely different?  McCloud suggests a necessarily chronological basis to comics, which is fair enough.  But viewing them as a whole, a collection of images on a page we find that our natural inclination is to associate images along a certain path, be they related thematically or not.  These visual assumptions again cloud our reading of more conventional literature and have great implications on some of the new media that has been read thus far in this course, notably with Afternoon wherein each successive screen is very ambiguously related to the one before it but as a more broadly thematical, plot-driven piece the reader can find certain inalienable truths within each screen, connecting each whether they deserve to be or not.  McCloud again deconstructs the visual language of comics to such a degree that his musings on hyroglyphics seems to bleed into a discourse on textual media in general, with words associated with other words by what we might deem a sort of correct or correct-sounding commonality.  This again comes back to the Jabberwocky Engine very early in the course, where words are created strictly from these rules that McCloud hints at.  This discussion, packaged in what can be considered a sort of “base” literary form, leads to a very interesting discourse on language and the language of images.  We all ultimately become some form of synaesthete with the appearance of words on the page, and helping to bridge the gap between symbol and text we can better understand the English language.

Afternoon presents a compelling argument in favor of this brand of fiction, in that its interactivity is not a gimmick by which the flimsy meaning of the text is somehow elevated, but the interactivity is bound to the text itself.  The general plot involves a man who believes he has witnessed the death of his ex-wife and son, which mirrors the reader’s attempt to discern meaning from the various tangential areas of the text.  This brings to mind certain debates surrounding video games and whether or not they, or some of them anyway, can be considered art.  The interactivity of nearly every commercial game has not been in any way married to its plot, rendering claims of artistic merit ultimately meaningless because artistic worthiness in video games is generally reserved for its plot alone, not taking into account the various tediums of stomping goombas or gaining attribute advantages.  It is impossible to claim a game is art without considering its interactivity in equal measure with its story.  Afternoon quite ably blends the two creating an artistic experience unlike what has yet been achieved by the interactivity in modern video games.

When interactive fiction was first discussed in the class I was immediately reminded of a game I had played a few years ago called shrapnel.  I was given no context for the game and just simply tried to make my way through it.  It proved an extremely interesting story, sort of a post-modern version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. And now after being more familiar with the genre I notice several things about shrapnel that I did not before.  For one thing, it was written by Adam Cadre, the author of Photopia.  As well, now having read Aisle, I realize the ways in which shrapnel cleverly engaged with the genre, namely the single-move-and-the-story-ends angle of Aisle and other texts.  In shrapnel, you are placed near a house and are given the descriptions of areas to the East, West, North, and South of your position, and usually after two or three moves you are killed in some grizly fashion, by being devoured by dogs or shot in the chest with a shotgun, etc.  However, the interesting thing shrapnel does with this is remember each time you were killed and the locations of your deaths, allowing you to encounter the scenes of your numerous deaths and see how the story has been impacted by them.  It really stretches the premise of Aisle in a very interesting way that makes the text all the more bizarre as the story shifts back and forth in time, as its setting in the Civil War becomes more pronounced, and as you try to grasp whether you are a ghost or to what degree your presense in the narrative is actually felt.  Not wanting to ruin the ending, the text becomes a sort of meditation on interactive fiction itself, and a speculative musing on the potential of technology.

Shrapnel can be found here: http://www.wurb.com/if/game/645

The process of mapping my CYOA book made me realize the inherent differences between the structures of interactive media illustrated by Marie-Laure Ryan.  The tree structure provides a degree of interaction without being overly obtuse, thus allowing the various choices to form a coherent narrative altogether more conrete than those achievable in the other types of interactive media.  Concerning The Great Easter Bunny Adventure itself, mapping out the book revealed the somewhat limited degree of choice achievable in this particular text and the altogether uniform endings in spite of the choices made.  However, the text does touch on something interesting within the medium — that given the format’s tree-like structure, and its different paths telling very different stories but all leading ultimately to the same end, the effect becomes an appreciation more for the journeys themselves as opposed to the outcome, which seems counter-intuitive given the design but is a compelling re-imagining of the format.  Comparing its structure to a tree then becomes difficult as the narrative arcs branch out but ultimately collapse back in on themselves, something akin to a much more limited form of the standard network defined by Marie-Laure Ryan.

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War seems to provide a relatively more concrete narrative than Hegirascope, allowing the reader to pursue different branches of what appears to be a young woman’s thoughts.  The key difference is how MBCBFTW creates a sort of picture at every stage, not simply revelling in the interactivity but clearly making a visual statement as the different paths into the character’s thoughts reveal a progressively more pock-marked, fractured whole.  What comes to mind here are the multiple levels of thought that occur simultaneously and unrealized in, for example, Freudian psychology.  Allowing these tangential but ultimately relatable ideas to create a visual chorus makes the pursuit of the narrative all the more compelling, knowing that each decision will only make the image more fractured still, as each thought or branch leads eventually to blackness.  While Hegirascope offers a similar degree of interactivity, the picture it paints is one more dependent upon the individual choices made.  MBCBFTW leads always to the same destination, and the choices one makes function mainly to put together the story from the bits and pieces of information stored in the different branches.