Author: ekimbell

Responding to Arteroids

When starting Arteroids, I immediately recognized the similarities to an old MS-DOS game called Asteroids. The base concept, controls and namesake were all basic copies, but beyond those points all similarities ended.

After mastering the mechanics of the game, Arteroids is far more challenging than the original. Not only do the word phrases pulverize your little “ship,” but choosing the wrong phrases to destroy can also result in the game ending. Therefore this exercise went beyond the original objective of avoid and destroy and added the challenge of forming coherent poetry.

One extra challenge was to somehow connect the green phrases with the blue phrases. Not only did prepositional phrases and verb tenses make this difficult, but the green and blue phrases seemed so entirely out of sync with one another in terms of poetry storytelling that it made this endeavor near possible. However – this extra challenge was not a random addition but sometimes a total necessity. Blue phrases were far more intent on chasing down your “ship” than the listlessly wandering green, and at times only one type of phrase color remained on the screen to shoot. So no matter how studious one could be on maintaining a coherent strain of poetry, every-once-and-a-while a completely incongruous line in the stanza would appear.

Looking Back at “The Baron”

“The Baron” immediately drops the main character steps away from the fiery maw of a dragon and leaves the user up to decide the next stroke of fate. From there, the strength and player choice drives the rest of the piece.

In short, “The Baron” was fun. It could be played several times over and a new result could be achieved every time. In many ways, it was akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure brand of fiction, but with even more interaction since a user can choose between actions such as “look,” “open” or various other options that although can be done in the CYOA series, the books would have to be much longer than their average of 150 or so pages.

The length of “The Baron” is contestable, pending on which ending the user prefers. If the user decided to fight the dragon in the very onset of the piece, he or she would have found the main character burnt beyond recognition and the story over. Later on, a bad run-in with a wolf in the woods could be your end, or if the user was crafty enough to avoid the wolf in some manner and finally confront the Baron himself, that therefore could be considered the end.

However, this piece overall relies on the user’s imagination to not only mentally picture “The Baron” ‘s fictional world, but imagination is also required to access all the possible courses of action.

Another consideration that it is rather strengthened from is the endless possibilities of discovery. Should the user decide to spend more time with character study, he or she will find out many things about the character that they control, as well as his relations to others in the story. On the other hand, it is completely possible to avoid character study entirely, and simply play the story like a low-grade action-oriented drama with increasingly thinner character motivations.

Thoughts on “Bust Down the Doors”

As mentioned during the Media Inquiry #2 assignment, I experienced “Bust Down the Doors” in two formats. The first viewing occurred when I had Internet access but no speakers, therefore I watched the presentation without its music or sound. Regardless, perhaps due to the rigid rhythm the text appeared on the screen, the text played in my mind’s ear to its own drum beat. Moreover, since the BDtD repeated text over and over with changes only to the pronouns, this internal rhythm was further and further cemented into my brain and by proxy, my bias.

Therefore, when I later returned to BDtD when I had both Internet and speaker access, I felt like I was watching a whole other piece. I found the background music actually distracting to the text since the drum beats did not line up perfectly. Suddenly, the symmetry that I initially imagined in the piece was replaced by asymmetry. Regardless, I sat through BDtD in its entirety both with and without sound, and then recorded my observations with both versions.

Again, during the mute version, the focus was automatically on the text since that was the only stimulus available. It didn’t take long for the intent to become apparent when the second version began to play on screen and all the pronouns were replaced. Suddenly my interest was piqued in how much the context of the work changes when the characters’ identities are switched again. Two perspectives I focused on in the inquiry were the woman versus the man version, and the man versus woman, each scenario being the offender and victim, respectively.

In the second viewing with the sound, as mentioned before I found the music distracting. But what was interesting to note was that although the background drum beats were dissonant and therefore matched the piece in meaning, it too looped and repeated. However, it sound be noted that end and beginning did not match up with the end and beginnings of the text, most likely because the music did not last as long in duration in comparison to the text.

Overall, I enjoyed and appreciated the intent of this piece. On one last note, it’s interesting to compare both my initial bias towards watching the piece mute and the gender or social biases within our perceptions. In other words, I preferred watching BDtD without sound because that was the manner of my first experience. In the same vein, there are also different emotional reactions to watching “them” commit horrible crimes to “you,” or “he” dragging “she” out into the street then shooting her into the head. All these things and how we view them are heavily reliant upon our personal perceptions as well as our past experience forms us.

game, game, game and again game

I immensely enjoyed game, game, game and again game on several fronts. On the level as a simple browser flash game, it held the proper components: stages, challenges and goals, both short term and long term. The objective was to move the main character, the black MS Paint fuzzball, from one end of a level to another to reach a square brown door. Part of this journey relied on solving a few puzzles, but each level provided a level of entertainment by providing things to collect along the way.

This was where game, game, game and again game was at its most interesting. In every level, there were certain objects that by touching them, new images or words would appear on the screen. By giving the player the ability to choose whether or not to come in contact with these objects, the game also allowed the players to choose what level of exposure they desired to game, game, game and again game’s texts.

I played the game several times through and each time chose a different style of gameplay. The first time through, I was completely exploratory and tested every object in every level I came across. This strategy yielded both bad and good results, such as the ability to visually identify every “enemy” or hazard in the game, though this ability came at the price of dying basically every time.

On the second and third time through, I tried different approaches. During the second trial, I skipped every bit of information I could and played the hypertext as nothing more than a simple browser flash game, nothing more. With that particular experiment, I found game, game, game and again game still very entertaining, as if the game was founded on the creator’s subconscious and relied on the surreal to create a fun experience.

Finally, during the third trial, I attempted to be picky and choosy in order to unveil the various hidden texts and messages in this hypertext and then attempt to ascertain their meaning. Unfortunately, this proved more frustrating than fulfilling, because it soon became apparent that the texts were not semantically connected to one another at all; rather, it was their lack of logical meaning that made them relatives. But therein lay the message of game, game, game and again game, as outlined in the creator’s “about” section: that many cultural or religious considerations and texts are convoluted, and overall very meaningless when taken out of their context and replaced with new words. In many ways, this reminded me of Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwockey, as well as the hypertext engine we discussed at the beginning of the semester that operated on that concept.

“Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud – Blog #5

What I quickly began to enjoy about Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” was how it was presented, and the self-encouraging humor it had about itself.

I say self-encouraging, because although the comic made several jokes about itself and the presentation of comics, none of it was necessarily self-deprecating. It all was made with the understanding that comics, their limitations, their styles and what exists beyond their panels is not something to be ashamed about, but rather are things to appreciate and poke affectionate fun.

Before I go on, I should probably admit a few things: I am an avid fan of animation, and have been ever since I was a young child. My first drawing – aside from a cat with nine legs (and I’ll maintain to this day that my 2-year-old self was simply attempting to draw the cat in motion) – was Ariel from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” By growing up in what many now call the animation renaissance of the of 1980s, it became a primary passion in my life that continues today with works from Don Bluth, Hayao Miyazaki or Pixar.

So with that grounding in the world of moving pictures, I have an avid appreciation for comics as well. In many ways, I mirrored McCloud’s early sentiments in his book about the western cultural depreciation of comics as competent story-telling devices or art. But as mentioned before, he did it in such a charming way.

The first hint of his tongue-and-cheek approach (aside from the short and sweet introduction punchline) began on page 24. “This is not a pipe” is a very familiar piece of work from all my art history experience and dedicated visits to art museums, and he did well to connect it to the dilemma of comic books.

“Do you hear what I’m saying? If you do, have your ears checked, because no one said a word.”

Moving on, another presentation of this dilemma I appreciated occurred much later on page 48, when McCloud told the story of the artist and writer coming together to make the greatest piece of storytelling of all time. I found myself emphathizing for each during their long, hard roads in becomming artisans of their craft, then giggle at the bottom punchline when the two stared at each other with a broad, empty expanse between them and large questionmarks over their heads.

This brought me more and more into thinking, and I stayed glued to the text to the very end. Later on, I greatly appreciated the differences and comparisons to eastern and western comic styles, since I too have noticed the differences but did not realize it could be graphically represented in… well, graphs. I resolved to try grading comics myself with this method in the future.  After this, I also noted the publication date of 1993 of McCloud’s book, and quickly recalled many comics and works of animation that have appeared since then. One that specifically came to mind was the recent blockbuster “V For Vendetta,” which many may be surprised to know was derived from what western cultures call a “graphic novel,” or what I like to think of as a way of them to say “so not a comic book.”

Another example I thought of which he actually directly mentioned was “Akira,” which later became a very successful movie adaptation in Japan in 1988, but I was not sure whether it had made its way into the States by 1993. A quick imdb search told me that it did not see wide American release until 2001, so no.

I bring this up because both of these movies, while nestled in their social niches, were still commercial successes in the United States, a place where comic books are only considered for young boys – as McCloud lamented – and only depict grown, muscular men in tights. While this may be true in many ways in western comics, other areas of the world have evolved differently, which proves to me that comics are a limitless media when it comes to depicting art and writing – the difference is how the creators choose to present it, and how the readers open their own minds to receive it.

I look forward to reading more of McCloud’s “Understanding Comics,” because it at times coincides so well with my own feelings on the subject.

Blog #4: on Afternoon

Something that immediately struck me as daunting with “Afternoon” was the size and scope of the piece. My first trial run began with a browsing of the instructions and a headlong dive into a word maze that only grew lengthier and lengthier. Overtime I decided to focus on a few key words in every segment to see if I could find any correlations. The word and its variants I chose was “she.”

What I found were pages of developing love, deep love and lost love. I noticed that with many pages, similar words such as “she,” “her,” “woman,” waitress” or even specifc female names would still lead to the same page thereafter. Oftentimes I would stumble onto poems, two of which I jotted down for memory were “Pieces” by Robert Creeley and “The Ivy Crown” by William Carlos Williams. As one can guess from the titles alone, the first poem appeared after I followed a long train of lost love memories, and the second appeared while the author seemed in the admist of deep, abiding love.

Which, strangely enough, is why “Ivy Crown” struck me as so odd. It mocked romance and likened love to “business.” The poem is stated as follows:

Romance has no part in it

The business of love is

cruelty which,

by our wills

we transform

to live together

(There was additional formatting to this piece in the form of extra spaces, the visual result was cascanding text that skewed to the right. Unfortunately, I can’t mimic the formatting in the same fashion here.)

Overall, this poem still refers to the quinessential “happy ending” that love is often fictionalized to lead, but not without a great deal of bargaining. What I found in the author, or narrator, of this piece was a gravely, jaded outlook on love and life, and perhaps this poem was a foreshadowing of what was to come, or a hint that the author’s deep love was not as deep and abiding as originally thought. Love is blind.

After following a stream of lost love memories, the other poem I came across is as follows, titled “Pieces”:

or happening

is an event only

for the observer?

No one

there. Everyone

here.

Here is all there is

but there seems so

insistently across the way

(Similar formatting was also presented in this poem as was in the previous.)

This poem is far more abstract than its counterpart. The beginning itself seems to be a fragment that originally began with an internal thought. In addition, the line breaks seem to hint at a hesitancy of thought, or perhaps emotional breaks in between. Overall, this strange, disjointed poem can be likened to the loss and disconnection someone can feel after a close relationship is severed and gone – something that the author at many times seems to feel.

It should be noted that, as dedicated as my search was through the paths of “she” and all its counterparts, the information was rarely presented in a chronological fashion. Many times I would stumble on pieces where the author was reminiscing about lost love long before I would later uncover a piece about being in love. Truthfully, I found “Pieces” first, long before I realized another poem existed in the text. I find myself currently wondering if I could have found more, since the possibilities in “Afternoon” seemed endless. All this can be attributed to the medium itself, and its multilinear presentation so dependent on its reader’s choice, and what words strike a reader’s fancy.

Altogether, this was a fun exploration, despite the confusion it sometimes created. But as I have discovered in this class while exploring textual mediums, it is best to continue forgaging through the disjointed pieces, so eventually you can grasp the overall design of its kaleidoscope.

CYOA Reflection

This assignment flip-flopped for me. On some nights when I hunkered down to map out the book, the task seemed forever on-going. Then on other nights, I zipped through the pages and mapped every node without the need to pause. I suppose that in hindsight, every night would have been easier if I could have worked on the assignment for more than fifteen to twenty minutes, but that was all the time allowed.

My particular adventure was “Journey Under the Sea” by R.A. Mongomery. Put succinctly, the plot involved an undersea search of Atlantis, and the majority of the book endings left the hero somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. That is not to say that the hero drowned half the time, rather he drowned, got held prisoner or held a successful life down in Atlantis.

As a child my real experience with the choose-your-own-adventure genre lay with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, wherein somewhere down the line the franchise joined the fad and created its own version with a choose-your-death style. Now that I’ve read one of the original series for comparison, I can say that Stine’s books more-or-less ended more gruesomely, and it was a thankful twist that for the most part Montgomery did not delight in absolutely slaughtering me.

This did not leave the hero immune to shark attacks, painful injections or drowning at the bottom of an inescapable vortex.

Though on the plus side, one ending did leave the hero rich and famous.

Overall, I would do this exercise again. After being acclaimated to the program, I began to enjoy making the bubble maps, and now am thinking of other exercises I could apply it to.

However, as of this moment, I am absolutely sick of Atlantis.

Blog #2: While Reading

In order to capture an array of emotions, I’ll write part of this blog while experiencing the first half of Tuesday’s reading, My Boyfriend Came Back From the War.

On the very outset, which, what, where or when is not explictly offered for this reading, so I cannot say whether the war refers to the current war in Iraq, or war in years past. Regardless, one can still argue that the emotion tearing and impact can be very much the same. Onto the hypertext.

Written as I went along:

I keep checking every page for hidden, black-on-black text. So far, that does not seem to be the case.

I have somewhat cheated in the exploration of this site: maybe the hyperlinked text is meant to be chosen at random, but in order to maintain some sort of order, I have been mousing over each link, and quickly checking the URL as it displays on the Internet browser status bar. I attempt to click 117.html before 130.html, etc etc. Overall I have kept some semblance of numerical order. I will see whether or not that changes how it is experienced.

“Don’t kill.” Click. “Him.” Click. “Them.” Click. “ME”

Several new frames have appeared since starting this part of the homework. Four are now empty and sit at the bottom of the page. It is possible for a link on a separate part of the page to redirect its contents to any chosen frame, I will wait and see whether or not that happens. Maybe the whole of the page will be divided into HTML frames and left blank at the end.

Who are the tigers the page mentioned?

“I keep your photo here” — three clicks later, the photo disappears. I checked the black background for text, there still is none. Onto the next link, its destination is marked as 164.html. The other visible link is 169.html, but I will still maintain some sort of numeric order.

Why a 20th Century Fox logo?

I found an equivalent of a newspaper byline: the author’s e-mail address and an external link that is titled the Last Rest Net Art Museum. The copyright of this particular page by Olia Lialina is 1996. (That means it is not about the current Iraq War…)

Found a clock. The time is 9:16.

Another clock, the time is 6:02. Is it a.m. or p.m., I wonder?

Third clock, 1:57.

No more links left to click, a total of sixteen unevenly distrubted frames cover the webpage, in addition to a seventeenth frame that holds half the space, and has two pictures. One picture looks suspiciously like a window, but it is too heavily pixelated to conclusively tell.

Exercise done. What was the intent of this text?

My opinion is that it was meant to evoke an emotion response, hence why I recorded it as I did–so I could write done my immediate thoughts to each part of the piece. To me, the short, unpunctuated phrases, read to me like halting, hesitate or quiet conversation–conversation that was occasionally interrupted by sudden outbursts, as signified by capital letters.

But beyond interpreting the language and grammar of this piece, overall it seemed to be an unfolding maze. Perhaps my attempt to somewhat organize it was a good one, because each segment seemed to lead into the next as long as it is done in some sort of order. Still, there were several times when I could not track done the page that was to proceed another, and still other times when I would jump ahead to page 169 without reading 140-147. However, this overall did not seem to affect the understanding of the text, which read to me like something from an art museum: war can tear people apart, make them sad, make them angry, and put distance between life before and life after a war.

Blog #1: Evocative and Representational Meaning

As a first blog post, I’m a little leery on whether or not I’ll answer the subject correctly, or even remain on subject. As such, I’ll begin with a lot of uncertainty but at least with quite a few things so say.

Evocative and representational meaning. At first, I couldn’t differentiate exactly what was meant by this, but now with about two hours hindsight, I can relate that to the topic. Words and meaning – or overall, language – are subjective and ever-changing. In semesters past, I’ve been assigned to read Shakespeare, novels or poems that all dated from far before the 1900s; and upon reading all of them (or at least most, when it came to crunch time) it was then suddenly the light went on about how much language changes and adapts overtime. With blogging, or the new media-laden world, we’ve once again hit a dynamic crossroads.

Relating all this to the three examples presented in class, each gives a different perspective on the topic of this blog assignment.

For one, as we discussed in class, the “Orson Whales” video was static in that it was unchanging. It can be repeated innumerable times and never, ever change. The only person capable of changing the video would be the author his or herself. But! Despite the medium itself not being capable of change from outside forces, its meaning can forever be argued.

This is the power of literature, regardless of whether or not it’s old media. People have argued the meanings, symbolism and characterization of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” for over 150 years. Yet the story itself – it’s text, pages and all its characters and letters – has remained the same (for the sake of argument and not delving into library research, we’ll assume that the novel hasn’t changed significantly overtime from one published or revised edition to another). Other classic novels have gained this notoriety: “The Scarlet Letter,” “Frankenstein,” “Great Expectations,” or even more modern Sci-fi classics such as “Brave New World” continue to appear in academic classrooms for discussion and study. Regardless of what a medium is, it would seem that the meanings of its content can forever change as long as there is a subjective human mind to interpret it and lend opinion.

But about evocative and representational‘s place in this blog – the three new media examples can also be argued for years to come (pending on how long the Internet sticks around in this form) about what they exactly mean, or what the author intended. Perhaps the most dynamic of them all, “Firefly,” can be argued most, simply because an outside user can almost limitlessly rearrange the poem’s order, and therefore conjure a new meaning.

So what did the author of “Firefly” mean to do by presenting the poem is such a format? What is the intended, or representational, meaning behind this new media text? I could argue that it is the last two lines, which read, “for what he has to say / is not for me.” No matter what order a user decides to place all the lines of text, the ending’s last two lines remain the same. Surely, then, the represented meaning of this poem is just as stagnant?

No.

Due to the ability to rearrange the poem as one sees fit, the last two lines are just as subjective as anything else in the poem. The evocative meaning, or what the user decides those two lines mean, are reflected in what text the user decides lead up to that point in the poem’s story. Who is “he?” What is “he” saying? Who is the speaker, “me?” All of that is evoked in the poem the user gets to create. The represented meaning is whatever the author has stashed hidden away.

At the beginning of typing this post, I enable the JABBER window and left it in the background to play. Since then, it’s conjured the words “hoppit,” “eynalarch,” “usetons,” “golizong” and many others. I toy around with the idea of resetting it and seeing whether any of those words will ever repeat themselves.