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I really like the French Electro House duo Justice, a lot. Yeah, I also like Daft Punk a lot too. A year or so ago I went on a hunt for Justice-like music and mostly came up with stuff that was too repetitive and too far towards house for my tastes. I later Stumbled upon DatA (not from stumbleupon). He’s pretty great and the other day my friend Kevin turned me on to Phonat, WOW! AMAZING! So I went on a hunt and found a bunch more, I present them in order of awesome/closeness to Justice.

DatA - Very much like Justice, but a bit less epic, for lack of a better word. Really cool samples.

Phonat - Epic, like Justice, lots of guitar samples and a very cut-up sound.

DANGER - Started as a chiptune guy, so it’s a mix of French house and chiptune with really cool epic classical samples a lot.

Kavinsky - Good buzzy synths and booming kicks, but a real 80’s fascination, more than the others, and that’s saying something.

Teenage Bad Girl - They’re pretty good, not much more to say.

Boys Noize - Like Justice, a bit more repetitive and not as interesting, but pretty great.

The Bloody Beetroots - same deal, like Justice, worth a listen.

I just read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a fantastic book. It paints an unapologetically bleak picture of a post apocalyptic US, but is incredibly personal. Most of the book features only two characters, “the man” and “the boy”. It’s simply the story of their journey south, through the dead and blackened landscape. It’s one of those books that sometimes after reading a passage I just sit and think about it, rather than poring over the next one. It’s not a difficult read, but the prose is dense with meaning. He says a lot in very few words.

It got me thinking about Fallout 3, which is one of my favourite games of the past few years. It too paints a bleak picture of post apocalyptic America, but it’s nothing to the bleakness of The Road. Fallout 3 does a great job of the setting, burned out cars, big open spaces, ruined overpasses, abandoned homesteads. It’s amazing just to roam around the landscape, but many of the characters are not very engaging. The story is decent and the sidequests are interesting, but the voice acting and animations are really not that great. It’s frankly amazing that the game sucks you in the way it does, since bits of it are poorly done.

So, The Road is a great book, and Fallout 3 is a great game, but could post apocalyptic games learn from The Road? Much of Fallout 3 consists of wandering aimlessly, scavenging items and trying to survive. What it lacks is the strong connection to character that The Road features. I think it should be possible to translate that sense into a game. The Road features little actual story, and is really just a journey, the same way many games are.

The problem, as I see it, is the norms of the game industry. Fallout 3 features a lot of violent combat, and super strong mutants and bandits to kill. This is fair, as it’s the third game in a franchise, but it adheres to game norms; violence is a large part of the gameplay by design. But it also has a secondary focus on exploration and the overall tone while doing so. What if a Fallout type game were made where exploration and the sense of foreboding were the focus? Sure there would the occasional confrontation with bandits and the like, but games like Aliens Vs Predator 2 and System Shock 2 elicit an emotional response merely by the threat of confrontation and they draw the tension out to great effect.

I’d like to play a game that combines that tension with the bleakness and exploration of Fallout 3. I don’t want The Road: The Game, but I think it’s a good book to look to for the type of story that would make not just a fun game, but something more.

Presentation by: Dr. Michael Olsson - November 12, 2009

Dr. Olsson’s research focuses on how theatre professionals view Shakespeare. According to Olsson the prevailing academic view of Shakespeare is individualistic. Shakespeare is often viewed as the author and director of the plays. He is viewed as a genius who left everything anyone need know to put on his plays.

Olsson found the reality from actors and other professionals to be much more collaborative and creative.  Actors especially tended to frame their experience in reference to each other. Certain character portrayals were compared across their own experiences as well as well known performances of that character. Actors viewed their own portrayals in terms of the wider theatre context, thinking of their particular roles in comparison to great portrayals by famous actors.

Coming from a Multimedia/Humanities computing background I found it very interesting that Olsson reported many academics thinking of Shakespeare’s works only in terms of the author and as solitary works. My HuCo brain sees everything as potentially collaborative and discussion oriented since so much of the discipline works that way. Watching The Script is a good example of how Humanities Computing looks at the texts. The text is a gateway to an interpretation and many people can be involved in it

It was interesting for me to hear Dr. Olsson talk about a different way of studying Shakespeare that I would have thought would be a natural approach. Sometimes I don’t understand other disciplines.

Presentation by: Dr. Teresa Dobson - Sept 24th, 2009

Dr Dobson’s presentation, for me, really brought up the notion of narrative and what constitutes narrative.

I see parallels between digital literature are digital games in that narrative is often a process of discovery, the reader/player takes an active role in furthering the narrative, rather than simply reading forward to discover what happens next.

Digital literature and games approach narratives in fundamentally the same way, and digital literature can be seen as a bridge to understanding digital game narratives.

Game theory is stuck on the narrative. Games are often seen to be only narrative, and all other features are ignored, “Games are seen as interactive narratives, procedural stories or remediated cinema” (Eskelinen). Games are by nature interactive and thus time is not subject to the same rules as a book, or a film. Jesper Luul notes that traditionally a narrative has two parts, the story and the discourse. The storyline is pieced together from discourse presented to the reader.

This is not strictly, the case for either digital literature, or for games. Digital literature adheres to a narrative structure, though it is often confusing and user influenced. In Girls’ Day Out by Kerry Lawrynovicz there is a a straightforward narrative about girls on a day out on horseback, however the player can initiate a secondary found poem about murders that occurred on the same plot of land. Once started the poem cannot be stopped and its content stands in stark contrast to the first narrative.

Some genres of digital games employ the same tactic of gradually revealing the narrative, often both within and outside player control. Point and click adventure games are often a linear narrative broken up into user selectable parts. Day of the Tentacle, for example features 3 playable characters. The player can switch between any character at any time, but the story itself is linear.

Digital literature and adventure games are a bridge to the more standard video game narrative which, in order to be effective, needs to involve a large degree of player control. Half-Life 2, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time, with 41 “Game of the Year” awards (Valve) features narrative exposition not unlike digital fiction. Throughout most of the game the player character, Gordon Freeman, is on the run, and thus only able to learn story fragments from other characters, radio and TV broadcasts and the setting itself. This fragmented narrative is very effective as the player feels they are discovering the story for themselves.

Bibliography:

Jesper Juul: “A Clash between Game and Narrative”. Paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, Bergen, Norway, November 1998.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/clash_between_game_and_narrative.html

Markku Eskelinen: “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies
http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/

Valve Software Awards: http://www.valvesoftware.com/awards.html

Kerry Lawrynovicz: “Girls’ Day Out”. Electronic Literature Collection
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/lawrynovicz__girls_day_out.html

This is a blog. I have to post things for a class on it. Maybe I’ll post other stuff as well.