Composing Digital Narratives

Here’s the link to Inform7 that works. I’ve updated the Resources page with the new link, too.

Interactive Fiction is defined as a genre by its use of a type of software called a “parser” that takes what you type in and translates that into instructions that it can understand.

Another type of interactive-ish narrative is the branching-path narration. You may be familiar with this from Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. A more sophisticated form of branching-path narrative grew up around the idea of hypertext: being able to connect fragments of narrative via hypertext, thus giving the reader the ability to move through the narrative in the order that she chooses.

Here’s an example of hypertext-like branching narrative: Arcadia, by Jonas Kyratzes. Arcadia uses the Twine wiki software to create a set of narrative pieces, which you, the reader/player move through. Notice the differences between Arcadia and the interactive fiction games you’ve played (and are writing).

In the comments below, please post your first “420 characters” narrative. If you have a snazzy title for your micro-narrative, feel free to include it. If not, let the story stand on its own. After your narrative, please delight and impress us with the number of characters in your narrative (not including the title, if there is one).

As I mentioned Tuesday in class, here are two works of interactive fiction (i.e., IF, or “text adventure games”) that I’l like you to check out:

• You Find Yourself in a Room, by Eli Piilonen
• Roofed, by Jim Munroe

If you find yourself a loss, here’s a great introduction to playing interactive fiction by Jim Aiken.

Click the link below for more examples of IF and solutions for the games.

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By the end of class today (Tuesday), you’ll have your blog up and running, and your first post will be there announcing your awesomeness to the world (and beyond). But is your blog looking and acting the way you really really want it to?

We’ll be working throughout the semester on mastering your blog, and to get that started you need to learn about the bits and pieces of code that make it happen. Blogs work by creating a database that stores all of your blog posts and comments. Then the code for your blog references that database and puts your posts and their comments into a particular style and format. This style and format is contained within a template.

Your template, in turn, is either one long file, or several shorter files, that contain code written in HTML (or XHTML, or HTML5) and that includes a stylesheet written as/in CSS.

To get a clue what these weird terms are and how they work, read through HTML Dog’s HTML Beginner Tutorial and HTML Dog’s CSS Beginner Tutorial. You don’t necessarily need to master this material yet, but by classtime on Thursday, you should be able to explain in plain text what the difference is between HTML and CSS, for instance, and even have an idea about how to recognize whether a part of your template is HTML or CSS. We’ll continue this conversation on Thursday.

As you work on your characters and their blogs, remember that you’re walking a fine line: you want your characters to be original, yet recognizable, unique, yet relatable. T-Rex (from Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics has trouble with this balancing act.

Click the image to read the whole strip.

This project asks you to tackle several very difficult challenges.

First, you will have to invent a person who will need to have not only a rich inner life (i.e., emotional, historical depth), but who will also have to live a life that is sufficiently interesting to maintain interest (ours and yours) for three months.

Next, you will need to construct a story around that person using first-person narration, an always-tricky strategy.

Finally, you will need to fight your natural inclination toward peace, harmony, and “good times.” In our own lives, we often seek these out and value them as laudable achievements. In narrative, however, they often kill a story dead in the water. Instead, your job as a writer is to create people we can like and care about, and then torture that character mercilessly. It is through conflict and strife that characters make decisions and take actions that show us who they are as people. Without that conflict and strife, we lose our most important way of learning about, and learning to care for, your character.

So, hit the link below to see what I’m going to be looking for in your blog narrative.

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Here are a few examples of interesting online narratives to get us started.

• Same Day Test, by Gavin Ingliss
• What If…, by Craig Robinson
• Planet Lois, the continuing, sorta, adventures of Lois Lane on Twitter
• Blue Company, by Rob Wittig
• OPERATION NUKOREA, by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

To get us started with our blogs, we’re going to do a test-run with a character who already exists.

Here are the characters we brainstormed in class. Pick one and write a blog post from that character:

• Frodo Baggins
• James Bond
• Phoebe Buffet
• Eric Cartman
• Stephen Colbert
• Dora the Explorer
• Hermione Granger
• Miss Piggy
• Homer Simpson
• Buffy Summers (the Vampire Slayer)
• Daenerys Targaryen
• Waldo (from Where’s Waldo)

For Thursday you are to imaginatively inhabit your character and will select one moment from that character’s life to blog about. Your post may be serious or comic, crucial to your character’s story or incidental, canonical or completely fictitious (as long as it doesn’t contradict your character’s character, that is).

Post that blog entry as a comment on this post no later than 12noon on Thursday, and we’ll go from there!