Composing Digital Narratives

As we discussed in class, here’s the link to The Choice of Games Blog, the blog where you can get the software for the Choice of the Dragon game.

Have fun playing, and playing with it!

You may have seen this air during the Super Bowl. If not, enjoy it for the first time here:

Here’s another one, not quite as good, but it features Pleo, so that’s cool.

And I kind of liked this one:

A few of you (that I know about) are having problems posting comments to your classmates’ blogs. There’s a line of code missing in many of the templates, which is Blogger just stares at you when you click the Leave a Comment link. It’s missing the instructions about how to actually add a comment.

So, please drop by YOUR OWN BLOG sometime this weekend and try to post a comment on your own blog. If you can, that’s great. You may delete the comment. If not, here’s a quick and easy way to fix it:

• 1) Go to Layout – Edit HTML and click Expand Widget Templates.
• 2) Click inside the text box that’s filled with what may appear to be gobbly-gook. Hit CTRL-F to bring up the FIND box in your browser. Paste this into your FIND box:



• 3) Hit FIND NEXT (or whatever your search box has, and it will take you to that line of code. Add a blank line underneath that line, and paste this in the blank line:



• 4) Your template should now have this:



• 5) Now click the orange SAVE TEMPLATE button underneath the text box.
• 6) Go to Settings – Comments, and look for COMMENT FORM PLACEMENT. Click the button next to Embedded Below Post.
• 7) Click the orange SAVE SETTINGS button at the bottom of the page and you’re done!

Try it and let me know if it doesn’t work for you.

Hope you’re all enjoying this beautiful/cold weekend!

Remember: this week is CRISIS WEEK on the blogs. “By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes!” (That’s from Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which if you don’t know, you should read.) Something bad is going to happen this week on your blog! I can’t wait!

Also, I added a new category of digital narrative to our Readings page, “Screen-Capture Remixes.” These are all narratives that take screen-captures from either a film or video game (you could do the same with a music video or a TV show) and add a new narrative on top of the images. Concerned takes the game Half-Life 2 and switches the super-competent protagonist with his imbecilic look-alike. DM of the Rings and Darths & Droids take Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and reimagine them as role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Check them out. They’re an interesting genre, and one that might be of interest to you as you think about our next project.

• Christopher C. Livingston – Concerned: The Half-Life & Death of Gordon Frohman
• DM of the Rings
• Darths & Droids

In call on Monday we watched Epic 2015, a “future history” of media in the year 2015.

We talked about the way(s) that technology is advancing, bringing us closer together and making us feel more isolated than ever.

I also mentioned that Google has a new feature that makes use of user profiles to tailor search results. The (official) video from Google is here:

For this class, there’s another aspect to consider — the depth and breadth of the media and information trail we all leave online could be fabricated for your fictional characters. Just as we were all blown away by Kat’s business card, imagine if your character had a web page, or a Twitter stream, or a Facebook account. What would your character do with them? Why would they want them? Would they love them or grow frustrated with them? Why?

We also talked in class about Freytag’s Pyramid, the classic, Aristotelian graphic model of narrative.

In the February 2009 issue of Wired magazine, Scott Brown published a brief article in which he “updates” Freytag’s pyramid, taking it from a 2-dimensional line all the way to the 4th dimension. “Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D)™”. Brown gives examples of the ways modern narratives can make use of all of these social media to explode the linear storytelling experience into a 4-D “hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience.” It’s a great read, and offers some interesting possibilities for our projects this semester.

At the end of your first full week of classes, you’ve already set up your blog and have started fleshing out your character. How’s it going? What are your hopes or fears for the blog? How do you see yourself achieving your hopes and avoiding your fears from coming to pass?

Your first Explorer’s Note will discuss your process (and hopes and fears) for your new blog. Head over to the BlackBoard site for the class and click on the Discussion Board button on the left-hand sidebar. You’ll see the first forum, “Explorer’s Notes – January 27.” Click on that forum.

Create a new thread in which you include a link to your blog and discuss the above. Then, read your classmates’ threads in this forum and comment (brief is fine, but be substantive) on each. You’ll probably want to read the blogs before you comment.

Your Explorer’s Note is due by 10am on Friday the 29th, and your comments on your classmates’ Notes are due by 10am on Monday February 1st. Comments should be substantive, but don’t have to be extremely long. Also, “ditto” or “what she said” doesn’t count as “substantive.” This will be the rule for you as well as for me, so whoever gets to the Notes earliest will have the easiest time. Whoever gets there last will have to work hardest to find something new to say.

We’ll be starting our first Choose-Your-Own-Project soon, and one of the options before you is to create an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). But you may be saying to yourself, “Self, what the frack is an ARG?”

Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining the genre and its history. So, start there. Once you’ve absorbed the basic idea (*spoiler alert!* an ARG blends a fictional game world with the real-life world of its players, usually using technology), here are some useful links to follow-up:

• Playstation3 is launching a new possibly-ARG-ish viral marketing game, “Four Days of Rain” to boost visibility for their upcoming game Heavy Rain
• The paradigmatic ARG is the A.I. web game, affectionately known as “The Beast.” Trailers for Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. dropped clues leading to Jeanine Salla, a Sentient Machine Therapist. These hints were the entry points into the game. Cloudmakers was the largest group to coalecse around the game’s many, difficult challenges. You can read descriptions of the entire game and how Cloudmakers (and others) solved it on their web site.
• ARGology is a group from the International Game Developers Association devoted to all things ARG. There is a lot of info on this site, and most of it is aimed at game developers/designers like you!.
• ARGNet is the player-focused analog to ARGology. If you’re looking for new (or old) ARGs, or commentary or community on ARGs, this is the place to go.
• Feeling scholarly? First Monday has you covered with an engaging article looking at ARGs from 2001 up to 2009. Elan Lee’s participation in this paper (he worked on The Beast) gives it insider insight, and could give you valuable pointers as you think about your own ARG.
• Christy Dena’s ARG Stats is an encyclopedic reference for, as far as I can tell, every ARG yet launched. Check it out.

Finally, not all ARGs are online. Some are book-based. Here are a few that explore this new blending of media:

• Cathy’s Book, Cathy’s Key and Cathy’s Ring, by Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman, and Cathy Brigg, are a trilogy that blend books with physical objects, web sites, and call-able phone numbers. (If at all possible, get the hardcover versions of these books. The paperbacks scrimp on the material goodies.)
• Personal Effects: Dark Art, by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman, takes a darker look at the “books with stuff to play with & do” genre, following an investigation into a serial killer.
• Skeleton Creek and its sequel Ghost in the Machine, by Patrick Carman, present a two-level narrative, blending prose narrative from one character with video diaries from another.

After brief but heartfelt discussion, the class decided to read The Daughters of Freya, by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond. Because the e-mails that make up the novel come to you in a “real-time” fashion (that is, according to the real time of the events in the story), we need to be pretty closely synched-up.

So, either today, tonight, or tomorrow morning, head to the Freya and buy it. It’s only $5, and once you sign up the e-mails should start coming in the next few days.

Are you having a hard time coming up with a name for your blog character? If so, here are a few links that might help.

• Random Name Generator uses data from the US Census report to generate random names with whatever degree of obscurity you want
• Behind the Name generates random names based on the geographic/ethnic/transformer (seriously) criteria you give it
• The Fake Name Generator also generates names based on geographic sets of name data
• The Fantasy Name Generator is for those characters who lean a little more toward Uruk-hai than Undergraduate
• Cult of Squid also lets you choose historical or fantasy settings for your names

Hopefully those will help you to find the perfect name for your new creation.

As promised (or threatened, depending on your perspective), here’s the link to those Star Wars Tweets I mentioned in class today. Some are better than others, and you pretty much have to be a Star Wars fan to really get them. These are the starts of two of my favorites.

That’s one of the downsides of choosing an already-established franchise/world for your character — you immediately alienate everyone who doesn’t like that film/book/tv show.

On the other hand, you have a ready-made, and often richly-thought-out, world in which to play. Your call.