Thinking through Digital Narrative: Discussing Terms & Visualizing Concepts

On Tuesday, we met in Second Life to discuss "Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics" by Marc LeBlanc, in a volcano. We'll start off Thursday's class with an assessment of that experience, of what it's like to have class in a virtual environment instead of the face-to-face, brick and mortar (or whatever that metal stuff is we have on the walls and ceiling that is supposed to be soundproofing) classroom. What difference do the avatars make? Is it better to be taught by a centaur? Worse? Makes surprisingly little difference? Is it like being on the phone? In a game? (stuck in a class in a game!!) Why or why not?

Here are some of the slides from our discussion, and we can pick up with the last one:

In today's reading, "Interaction & Narrative," Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern distinguish between STORY: "experiences that have a tightly organized plot arc, progression towards a climax, beginning, middle, and end, etc" and NARRATIVE: " the abstract properties or qualities of stories, and more loosely structured, 'experimental,' story-like experiences" (643 in The Game Design Reader). Are these helpful definitions and distinctions, and if so, why? Where do interaction and narrative intersect? See my previous blog post for how some of the television industry's smartest most innovative minds reacted when someone suggested that interaction would be more compelling some day than story.

Mateas and Stern write: "Where gameplay is all about interactivity, narrative is all about predestination" (643). They go on to explore ideas about interactive drama that seeks to combine the two, rather than accept them as antithetical. In developing their "Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Drama," they draw on Laurel, and Murray. Murray offers three categories for analyzing interactive story experience:

1) Immersion: the feeling of being present (or telepresent) someplace other than where you are physically, and connected to Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief"

2) Agency: I define agency as the ability to effect change in the world, or the game world. Murray explains that agency is connected to intention and not just to interface activity.

3) Transformation: as a) masquerade that allows the player to transform into someone else during the game; b) as variations on the theme that the player can explore and exhaust; and c) personal transformation as a journey on which the game experience takes the player.

They use Murray's terms to conclude: "a player will experience agency when material and formal constraints are balanced" (661).

So, for questions to get us started: how much narrative is there is in the games you like? Do you want to be involved in interactive drama? What about what the authors call the middle ground positions (see pp. 664-65)?

For Project 2, which is the plan/design, I am going to ask you to think of your project as both a story and a game. You'll only make one thing in the end, for Project 3, and you can blend it up any way you want, as long as you have an understanding of how much interactivity, how much story, how much agency, immersion, point of view, self-design, and social interaction is involved in your digital narrative.

I still think gaming is very closely related to story, although I am rethinking why that is. I am curious to hear if and why you think they are connected, and whether Digital Narrative is a good umbrella term for what we are doing in here this semester.

Last and not least, I want to raise the question of how to visualize some of the concepts we have been talking about in a 3-d model I want to build in Second Life that our avatars can be immersed in, maybe even interact with. Here is one kind of model, that takes a taxonomy of teaching objectives and makes it into a 3d pyramid kind of think you can walk (or trot as the case may be) around on, and get definitions of each term in local chat as you do. It is above the EduGolf course on L1's land in Boga: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Boga/179/40/59 That slurl will put you on the "experiment" square.

Any ideas for immersive diagrams? What concepts are the most important ones? I am leaning towards Caillois, but maybe you have other priorities?

LA Story: SCMS Conference Wrap-Up, Digital Narrative Highlights

Here is my highly subjective report from the SCMS (Society for Cinema & Media Studies) conference in LA. Hearing and seeing the producers of the tv show Lost, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, on a panel on Transmedia was incredibly cool, and meeting them afterwards was amazing. Talking to the showrunner of syfy's Caprica, Kevin Murphy, about virtual worlds after he was on a panel about writing, was another highlight.

All three--and the others who were on these panels--highlighted the importance of storytelling, and for us in Digital Narrative, the story is what it boils down to, as well, because the form or technology, in the end, is not what is primary, is not the thing that drives the audience, but the story. In the industry, the tv show or movie of the franchise is called the "mother ship" and they see it as always being more important than the other transmedia components, whether it be a website, game, or Alternate Reality Game. In the example of Lost, Carlton Cuse used the metaphor of the show being the cake and the mythology being the frosting, but that a lot of people were interested in the frosting. But, as Damon Lindelof said, Kate and Sawyer don't care about the Hanso foundation, and they couldn't tell that backstory in the show itself in great detail, but they could in the highly successful ARG. The other platforms become ways to tell other stories, related stories--and note that they are still talking about STORIES.

Kim Moses from the Ghost Whisperer talked a lot about giving the viewers an experience --a "total engagement experience" that would be like a playground that would extend the show and then gently bring viewers back to the show, creating more loyalty and emotional investment.

There was also discussion of "monetizing" the other platforms, but this wasn't the speakers' primary focus in this forum, although I bet it is in others :) Lindelof, Cuse, and Javier Marxuach, who worked on the Lost Experience ARG, all talked about trying to incorporate sponsors and how difficult that was, and that ultimately what the ARG did was to keep the buzz alive during the offseason, which is nothing to shake a stick at, but maybe is not quantifiable. People also filled out contact information when they signed up for the Hanso Foundation, and so ABC has that information--isn't that a valuable asset, they wondered?

In the question and answer part, someone asked a leading question, based it seemed on his theory that in the future the ancillary media would overtake what the producers were calling the "mother ship" of the franchise, the movie or the series that spawns all the other stuff. The producers were incredulous. Someone, I think it was Lindelof but maybe it was Marxuach (it was hard to see and they were both so quick and witty) said something like "No way am I going to do homework to go and see Batman." Later someone connected it back to storytelling, to being told stories rather than playing a game, or doing a puzzle, really, to that kind of entertainment driving the big money and resources of the industry. It is a pretty interesting thing to think about, esp for us in this class. What place does interactive narrative have? How much agency do people want? Is it a story or an experience? Is a game also a story, or is it something different? Does it matter where on the paidia to ludus continuum the game is? How much agon, alea, mimicry, or ilinx? (Remember all of this from Caillois?)

This brings me to the really fascinating conversation I had with Kevin Murphy, who joined Caprica as a producer to work on the second half of the first season (ie: brought in to address some perceived deficit) and then replaced the showrunner a month later in November 2009 (the series premiered in January 2010). I wasn't interviewing him (or Cuse or Lindelof when I talked to them, either), but wanted to say hello as a fan and express how much I love their shows. We got to talking about virtual worlds, and I said I had been doing research in Second Life, making machinima, etc, and that I thought that part of Caprica was particularly interesting albeit an incredibly negative portrayal of a virtual world--all sex and violence and transgression without consequence. He said that there was only so far they could go with the narratives in the virtual world because the characters couldn't change the virtual world, basically didn't have agency within it, unlike the actual world. This is so fascinating--the way that the v-world in the text of Caprica is set up in their story limited their story, because it is not open-ended like Second Life with a high degree of agency, but more of a closed game. Zoe is a character who lives in some weird form in both the actual, physical world, but as a robot, and in the virtual world as an avatar, and nowhere and yet kind of in both as the young woman she once was. Her friend, who is dead in the actual world and exists only as an avatar, with no robot component, is even more intriguing, and a fictional realization of the idea of downloading the consciousness of someone so they can live on after death. The v-world storylines could explore the ideas of identity and avatars--of action and consequence--that are so fascinating. Which is more "real"--the robot, with its BSG red eye, or the avatar? What does it say to choose the robot over the avatar, if that is how the show is going to go, and that is how Murphy made me think the show is going to go. (And that is how BSG makes it seem like it has to, because as much as there is the level of the Six in Baltar's head, as much as the Cylon seem to live in what we can think of as an augmented reality by the end of the series, it is a visceral, physical, embodied reality that BSG excelled at).

Here is the information on the two sessions, both organized brilliantly by the Television Studies Scholarly Interest Group, who really delivered in these and other sessions for this conference:

The More Things Change…

Writing for Television in the 21st Century

Chair Sharon Ross

Columbia College-Chicago

Neal Baer NBCUniversal

Lisa Seidman NBCUniversal

Mark Brown WGA

Kevin Murphy Syfy

Noreen Halpern E1

Transmedia Studies

The Hollywood Geek Elite Debates the Future

of Television

Chair Denise Mann

University of California, Los Angeles

Co-Chair Henry Jenkins

University of Southern California

Carlton Cuse LOST, ABC

Tim Kring Heroes, NBC

Javier Marxuach DAY ONE, NBC

Kim Moses Ghost Whisperer,CBS

Mark Warshaw Alchemists

Damon Lindelof LOST, ABC

OTHER COOL THINGS at the conference:

There were some good sessions I went to, in particular, one on the museum and new media, and another on historicizing video games.

AND although my book I Love Lucy does not come out until April 15, there were copies at the conference at the Wayne State University Press booth, and for the first time, I held it in my hand (see below), cementing the place of the physical, actual, material object in its place in a hierarchy from which it will take an awful lot to dislodge. Read more about my book here.

Defining Play & Games: Caillois

Agon, Alea, Mimicry, Ilinx: these categories of games that Roger Caillois isolate different aspects of play as they are codified into games.

Caillois defines Paidia as the "spontaneous manifestation of the play instinct" that leads to turbulence and disturbance. Ludus is the "taste for gratuitous difficulty" (141).

Let's apply these terms--and check back to Caillois's revision of Huizinga's definition of play (see below, p. 128) as we discuss your excellent analyses of the games you play and of some that we play together.

CRITERIA FOR ANALYZING GAME EXPERIENCES

This is an assignment due later this week. First we have the blog entry about play and building in Second Life, and then this one. I post this to ask if anyone out there has a comment on ways of talking about gaming experiences. I am trying to get at the subjective experience of playing the game, rather than looking for a review of the game (although we will also look at those, too).

Assignment 7: CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF YOUR SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE PLAYING 2 GAMES

This assignment asks you to reflect on and discuss your subjective experience of playing at least 2 games.

As a way of giving you some structure, think through the aspects of virtual subjectivity I suggest in the “Kino-Eye” essay:

1) Point of view

2) Self-design

3) Social relationships/interactions

4) Space and place

5) Agency

Also think about the INTERFACE, and how the game uses elements of text, cinema, and computer forms in it. (Manovich)

Finally, consider the kinds of immersion and interactivity that you experience in the game.

Realism, Not Possible in Real Life, Spectatorship, Participation, & Digital Narrative

Our specific assignment for today as we continue mining Manovich for insights and outposts is to focus on the section on "Synthetic Realism and Its Discontents" that begins on page 184. Manovich makes the important point that the real break with the history of visual representation of realistic depictions of objects and places so they are indistinguishable from a photograph (in itself a modern way of defining it) happens not with the still image but when a person can experience him or herself moving around within the generated simulation of a 3-D space.

Manovich's approach highlights production and technological techniques that are used to create the illusion of realism, and quite rightly explains that because of the way 3-D computer graphics render "reality"--construct from scratch as opposed to record from reality the way a camera does--it is "practially impossible" to simulate photorealistic detail (192). Certain aspects have to be prioritized.

"New realism is partial and uneven, rather than analog and uniform" (196). Think about that for a while.

Today in class, we'll also talk about the icon, a la Scott McCloud:

ALSO, the new Second Life viewer has new media capabilities for putting media on prims. See my blog posting for a video that shows a uStream broadcast (done with my iPhone!!) on one side of a prim and twitter on the another face of the same prim in L1's SL space. The prims also can show Flash content and two or more avatars can interact with the content on the same prim--ie type or play on it. How does this offer more realism? More Not possible in real life possibilities? Hmmmmmm.

Welcome to LHUM P433: Digital Narrative Theory & Practice

This course blends theory and practice in an exploration of digital narrative: how stories can be told with digital and new media technologies. We will work critically and creatively with linear and nonlinear narratives in a range of media: writing, graphics, animation, games, multimedia, virtual worlds, and interactive media.

The overall theme of the course will focus on moving image narratives--both linear and non-linear--that explore ideas about storytelling, time, and memory. In particular, we will consider how interactivity changes narrative, and whether there are new kinds of digital narratives and aesthetics emerging. Students will make movies, websites, DVDs, movies and online installations that illuminate ideas about story, plot, character, time, and narration, comment on their creative work using the critical concepts they learn, and experiment with word processing, graphics, and web design software programs.