digressive

Montfort argues that interactive fiction is distinctively different from hypertext fiction, stating:
"There is ... nothing in the nature of the lexia or the link, those fundamental elements of hypertext, that allows the reader to type and contribute text or provides the computer with the means to parse or understand natural language. [...] Hypertext fiction also does not maintain an intermediate, programmatic representation of the narrative world, as interactive fiction does."

In terms of understanding how these two forms relate to/differ from narrative, is this distinction significant? Or are they more closely related that Montfort would like to admit? Discuss.


Contrary to Montfort, hypertext and IF are closer than we might think. The "preferred" narrative conclusion in IF, out of a few possible endings, is similar to a specific lexia, out a few, that we might wish to end up at in hypertext. Indeed, hypertext, unlike IF, is not a program that can receive input and generate output. But when related to the underlying or overarching narrative, both hypertext and IF are similar. Both offer lexia that is linked; however hypertext makes those links explicit, so the reader can immediately navigate the narrative at hand. For IF, part of the reader's pleasure is first uncovering the links, and then choosing which links to take. The text that the reader of IF contributes(both extradiegetic and diegetic) are part of the process of the reader uncovering the links.

IF gives the appearance of immediacy, for the narrative is in the present-tense and is generated in response to the user's commands. The use of cardinal points to navigate does convey a certain physicality in IF. But hypertext has similar potential to be equally evocative of the narrative universe. In fact, hypertext might possibly have even greater potential to maintain an intermediate representation, for navigating via hyperlinks, in real time, could be quicker than typing out commands into a parser.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Espen Aarseth defines cybertext as a perspective on textuality, which considers a work as a textual machine, and sees the reader as having to make a non-trivial effort to traverse the text. Discuss whether Scott McCloud’s “Carl” comic strip can be considered a cybertext.


McCloud's "Carl" is less of a cybertext, and more of an interesting demonstration of how comics work by having the reader "close the gap" between frames. Does the closing of the gap, the interpretation between frames of each comic panel, on the part of the reader, constitute it to be a cybertext? I think it hinges on the idea of "non-trivial". Aarseth's central notion is that there has to be some substantial effort of the reader to traverse the narrative trajectory.
"Carl" is then merely an expanding unicursal maze(not a labyrinth, for that would convey a kind of insurmountability), that starts out as a straightforward path with the first and last frame that is initially presented. The narrative path has been forged, and the feedback loop has been completed. We know Carl will die from drunk driving. The only question is what other penultimate narrative satellites could have delayed his inexorable destiny. This does constitute a kind of literal riddle or puzzle to uncover, but it is by no means "non-trivial".

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Does a potential narrative such as Paul Fournel’s “The Tree Theatre: A Combinatory Play” satisfy Crawford’s definition of interactivity? Could it be considered an example of interactive media? Why/why not?


I don't think it's a valid example. The loop, in Crawford's cyclic process of "listen, think, speak" process as the basis for interactivity, is not completed, for after the audience has watched the preceding scene, thought about what they would like to see next and voted for their choice, there is little "thinking" on the part of the performers, for they merely follow the predetermined branching playscript.

But this observation is only possible in retrospect. During the course of watching the play, the audience does not have perfect knowledge of all the possible events in the tree structure. Thus the illusion that their choice at each point is a pivotal one, that it makes all the difference, is effectively created. Furthermore, given the linear nature of the play, the consequences of each choice takes on greater significance, as there is no possibility of reverting any decision made as the dramaturgical trajectory becomes permanent after each choice. The audience thus feels as if the play is highly interactive, when in truth their control is restricted given the fact that there are limited choices and a limited range of possible endings.

Traditionally, theatre is known to be largely uninteractive. The audience listens and watches a play, unable to meaningfully influence the unfolding drama. The question to ask then is whether the audience wishes to actually influence the dramaturgical flow. Theatrical plays work so powerfully for they sustain the illusion of real-life happening on stage, by maintaining that imaginary fourth wall between audience and performer. To allow for audience interaction is to shatter that wall and puncture any sense of verisimiltude. Thus interactivity in theatre has a stronger effect that in new media.

Perhaps a truer form of interactivity(according to Crawford) onstage, instead of the Tree Theatre, would be improv theatre. Think along the lines of "Whose Line is it Anyway?", where the performers have no script, and are given scenarios and characters by audience members to enact out. The audience can stop the action at anytime and throw in a certain prop, or require the performer to say a particular line, or sing a song. The performer must then consider how to integrate that "audience-suggested" aspect into his performance immediately. The disjunctive effect is often comical, and highly entertaining as well. For the audience is afforded a great deal of control over the dramaturgy, and also because it showcases the improvisational abilities of the performers to act on the fly.

Posted by lucasho at 9:03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Sam:

They were with us before Romeo & Juliet. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, carolling gleefully:
We’re allways sixteen.
Sam & Hailey, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Model T to Lincoln Continental, career from the Civil War to the Cold War, barrelling down through the Appalachians, up the Mississippi River, across the Badlands, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
By turns beguiling and gripping, finally worldwrecking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever published before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.

Hailey:

They were with us before Tristan & Isolde. And long after too. Because they’re forever around. Or so both claim, gleefully carolling:
We’re allways sixteen.
Hailey & Sam, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Shelby Mustang to Sumover Linx, careen from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War, tearing down to New Orleans, up the Mississippi River, across Montana, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.
By turns enticing and exhilarating, finally breathtaking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever conceived before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.


mzd is back.

Posted by lucasho at 11:33:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

a failed implementation of what hypertext could ideally look like. Project Xanadu

Posted by lucasho at 10:43:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

In "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art", Landow and Delany suggest that "hypertext can be expected to have important institutional as well as intellectual effects, for it is at the same time a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, a mode of publication, and a resource for collaborative work… Hypertext historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollary to a particular technology and historical era. We can be sure that a new era of computerized textuality has begun; but what it will be like we are just beginning to imagine."

This passage was written in 1991, at a time when hypertext systems were available in somewhat limited forms such as Hypercard and Intermedia, use of the Internet was largely confined to academic institutions, and the term "World Wide Web" had only just been coined. Now, 15 years later, comment and reflect upon the impact hypertext has had on the world.

(Quick trivia: George Landow was the founding dean of USP from 1999 to 2001, during its transition from the Core Curriculum, and he taught some pretty cool modules while here.)

Hypertext is so ubiquitous nowadays, such that in attempting to answer the above question I am hard-pressed to recall what pre-hypertextual(if there is indeed such a period) times looked like. Well, for one, students hardly need to spend long hours in libraries swimming through books looking for a particular piece of information. The internet allows of any studious scholar to save time by quickly and efficiently seeking out the text, the information that he desires. Today, students and readers are empowered without realising it. We know nothing of the "boundedness" of a physical text, for a large of the reading we do nowadays is online. Hypertext, as Landow and Delany presciently point out, allows for unprecedented kind of collaboration, different from traditional notions of working together on a text. Today, given the ubiquity of hypertext and hypermedia, I would suggest that any reader of the text is a collaborator, for he constructs a particular narrative discourse while navigating through the given links between the texts. Collaboration thus becomes integral to the hypertext. Wikipedia embodies this, whereby authorship is fluid and dynamic. Internet chat programs, beginning with IRC and now with MSN, allow for a realtime synchronous construction of narrative - the chat, between multiple authors/readers. Such roles become less-defined in hypertext today.

Also, the advent of hypertext has fostered in an unprecedented paradigm shift in the way people process and handle information today. It has made possible the creation of a metanarrative, or a metatext by linking the entire corpus of knowledge and experience and literature created by and known to mankind, into one intertwined network that grows as long as there is one person writing in relation to another text.

And so perhaps the most immediate and long-lasting effect of hypertext is most generally observed in our day-to-day treatment of information. If your civil engineering lecturer casually mentions an interesting peice of trivia about a suspension bridge built in 1973 in San Francisco, one could possibly Google that bridge to read more about it, and perhaps go on to discover, on a Wikipedia article, that its chief engineer was a Hare Krishna and good friends with Steve Jobs. You could then go on to find out how his religious beliefs manifests itself in his structures, or read up more on how this engineer was one of the select group of people in the Bay area to use Apple Computers. And so on... you get the idea. That piece of trivia at the beginning of this post is a good example as well. Knowledge,(which is what blocks of text eventually represents, yes?) becomes a dynamic intertwining network as hypertext, empowering the reader to fetch linked information, effectively widening and deepening his experience of reading one text. My reading of Landow's text is broadened now that I know he was once in the same classroom as us. (I am all the more in awe.) Hypertext shrinks the physical world by enlarging the virtual text to encompass it, from the inside(of the computer) out(into the world).

In time to come, there might be truly nothing that we cannot know.

Posted by lucasho at 9:22:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

In his paper "Modular Structure and Image/Text Sequences: Comics and Interactive Media", George Legrady states: 'Meaning in the interactive work is a result of the sequential selection of components that the viewer assembles in the viewing process. The viewer can then be considered as someone who actively constructs the narrative through the assembling of fragmented or modular information elements. The sequential sum of viewed selections becomes the narrative.' This approach to interactivity is reflected in his work Slippery Traces.

Discuss how this approach to constructing a narrative changes the roles of the reader and the author in the process of narrative transmission.


By deliberately forcing each of the images to be understood not in isolation by in the context of other images which can be rearranged, Legrady fosters a more collaborative process between the author and the reader. The text is static no longer, but not just on the linear/non-linear dichotomy. The holistic content and meaning of all the images is now created and negotiated by the reader.

And the author, although having predetermined the possible linkages between the images, cannot possibly know exactly how each reader will construct and interpret the text. Yet he can guess at a possible narrative trajectory, given the reader's initial choice of images, for he has perfect knowledge (relative to the reader) of all the images. In this respect he still retains his authority. Thus, the author has called for a partnership in narrativizing, and relinquishes some of his power, but only to enlarge and deepen the meaning and possibilities of his text/image.

The next thing I would like to see, which is what we will probably do in class this Thursday, is for someone to provide images in a certain order, and for another to freely and completely rearrange those images, regardless of the predetermined links between the images. The roles of author and reader will be in greater jeopardy, but only to the benefit of play, and narrative.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Choose a set of 5-10 images that you feel form a narrative. Arrange them in a linear sequence on your blog. You may or may not want to include text captions with each image.

Bring a physical copy of your images to class on Thursday. We'll be using them as part of an in-class exercise.


Sorry! The copyright for the images do not belong to me, and are not avaliable in the public domain. So I can't post them here. But I will bring them to class this Thursday :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Write about the narrative that your group has chosen for project 1. Why have you chosen this work? How might you approach the task of re-configuring it as an interactive piece? Be prepared to discuss your group's choice of work in class on Thursday.


My group has chosen to centre in on the relationship between Morpheus and Nada, found in Neil Gaiman's groundbreaking comic series Sandman Chronicles. It is a love story of epic porportions. Morpheus falls in love with, loses, then rescues and finally liberates his star-crossed lover. On one level, the love affair is bittersweet, for the lovers know they cannot be together for they belong to different worlds. Yet their self-sacrificial acts for each other underscore the depth of their commitment for each other. And the final conclusion results in Nada's rebirth, which we perceive to be a metaphor for the cyclic, neverending narrative that is made possible despite Gaiman's somewhat standard linear comic narrative.

As we have seen in class and in our readings, the comic form is already an interactive medium of sorts, as the reader "fills in the gaps" by interpreting the frames together in a linear fashion. What we could do to make it even more interactive, is to transpose the comic into hypertext(or hypercomic), and allow for greater play and narrative possiblity to enter.

Posted by lucasho at 9:36:00 PM | Permalink | Comments