As I think about the Spring semester already, reading for fiction writing throuugh to British Lit, I’m wondering why more thought and exposition hasn’t gone into realizing gaming elements into teaching and learning on a more global scale, rather than the pockets of discussion that form the more realistic discourse on this subject.

In other words, consider the idea of objectives in a course and in a degree: what people will do and learn. All games have objectives, demonstrable from the start. They involve a clear set of stated accomplishments. As do college courses and degree programs in general. Outcomes are also requisite, and we hear a lot about these two elements of education all the time, especially from bosses who order that these be clearly articulated for students, which is fine by me.

Objectives, feedback, challenge, and narrative.

In new media we’ve been talking a lot about sequential information and fundamental unifying principles that form or promote continuity in visual narrative. But how does alphabetic language, these marks on the page, display continuity other than being recognized symbols and words? Spoken and written language are at heart sequential in orientation; the structure of language is so transparent to us that it barely gets noticed, unless a reader picks up a poem and is faced with structure first hand.

The sentence forms a unit of language as a system of meaning. Everyone looks or listens for the verb. In English the noun and verb form the sense of a unit of meaning. Nevertheless, a word is a discrete unit in and of itself, but without a syntactical system in which to operate, the word is arbitrary, thus there has to be a unit beyond the single word that can be called discrete, say a phrase, maybe. Dog, in other words, means nothing outside the system. In fact dog doesn’t even exist, really.

Id like to do a little codification and take a sentence and break it up into its units just to see how it fits together as a system.

One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight.

one evening | after thinking it over | for some time | Harold decided | to go | for a walk | in the moon light

Each of these units is critical to the meaning of the sentence from Harold and the Purple Crayon, although other units could be at play here. Neither of the units can stand on their own outside of the sequence, but they can be ordered differently. I have to qualify that last sentence because each unit does maintain a certain level of closure or chunk of meaning that retrieves the next part of the sequence into a whole. Ill provide two examples and label them YES and NO

YES
Harold decided to go for a walk in the moon light one evening after thinking it over for some time

NO
To go for some time Harold decided for a walk one evening after thinking it over in the moon light

The scrambled No is obviously a dud. By distorting (or reordering) the sentence, the YES sentence reveals its syntactical unifying elements: prepositions, tenses, qualifiers, articles, phrases, clauses, modifications, and associations. If left alone, the NO sentence is difficult at best to understand and could be made much worse. Concerning the Yes version One evening indicates time. After thinking and for some time indicate duration. Harold links across the series and indicates who is thinking and who is in time and who will be traveling in the moon light. Also, one before evening qualifies the moment.

What does sense mean in terms of the sentence, though? Obviously, NO can make sense, but it may not be the sense the writer or reader is looking for. Yes and No mean different things. Thats the point. The elements that make the Yes and original sentence mean something to the reader are fundamental to alphabetic language. The reader wants the sentence to make sense; wants to figure things out. Its way beyond me to ask: how does one evening . . . generate recognition. I have to wonder if there are connections between psycholinguistics and semantics. Anybody know about this?

Anyway, we know that One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight makes sense. The reader relates this One evening to that after thinking it over for some time, knowing that thinking doesnt come before the one evening, although Harold may have been considering his adventure throughout the afternoon. Also, the reader knows that neither the evening nor the moonlight decides anything.

The reader works at putting the sentence together just as the reader strains to make sense of panels in Watchmen.

We will probably not be covering hypertext in class at the next meeting on Monday but will continue with space and time in art issues. This past week we had some dynamite spatial analysis of Watchmen from Kluba and Timmons, examinations which are well worth staying on task in terms of our time limits.

In terms of hypertext, space and time, links and sources and destinations and their structures, it’s important to consider how all this plays into the hands of Watchman and its sequential superstructures, which cross the borders of text, graphics, and visual composition. There are associations between how we read Watchman and how we read writing on the screen. To refer back to Ted Nelson: it’s filmic/cinematic.

I’m pretty that our students who are working with Powerpoint have noticed the film editing features. I think this goes to the nature of digital space in general.

Professor Timmons writes, “Editing: the juxtapositioning of signs and symbols as an attempt to create or discover meanings. A significant element of narrative structure.”

I like the “create or discover meanings part.” Because it works with other forms, such as IF and hypertext, with their hidden structures. Consider this poem by Auden entitled The Shield of Achilles. First few lines go

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees . . .

All kinds of questions lead from these lines, not to mention the suspicion that poem may be longer. Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveler takes this issue of narrative structure and makes it a part of the “plot” in the sense that the novels that never find completion compel much of the action. In the novel, a suggested novel won’t find completion, only If on a winter’s night a traveler will end, sort of.

Spinning writes

New media brings the awareness of the thoughts in layers. Teaches us to tie them all together into a symbolic whole. The music for the dancing serves as background just as easily for ponder, and for all the movies constantly running on the monitor, on the mind.

Her post is interesting for the connection she makes between new media and mind. Simply, both mind and network are complex arrays or systems. When we remember, we “make a link” between two things. Thus database is a metaphor (not simile) for a certain function of mind. Of course, memory and database function in vastly different ways. The network and the brain are another connection in this way. Don’t we want to create metaphors that help to concretize or visualize complex systems? Don’t these lead to better questions?

A famility photograph isn’t a memory, though; it’s a “key,” a machine for unlocking. Nor is it “the famility.” Indeed the photograph makes “still” what is in motion always: family. This notion is what caught my ear at the last fantastic Narrative meeting that turned into a nice show and discussion of Fred Nelson’s blackandwhites. John Timmons asked the question: is “this” what Fred was seeing? Interesting, the photograph as mental image.

An interesting day in new media. We’ve moved into considerations of timelines as an underlying theme and model. Discrete elements added to the timeline make for interesting editing. It’s an odd thing to consider. Since the elements, such as a shaded ball, are discrete and permanant yet maleable, where they fall into the timetime brings us back to that other underlying principle, narrative.

Mr. Keating had brought up the example of IF in our discussions and that forms relationship to the concept, but I think here we’re back to narrative paths and the notion of options as conceptual keyframes.

startroom: room
sdesc = “Apple Apex”
ldesc = “It’s windy at the top of apples. You can feel the core beneath your feet.
The apple surface slopes off into empty space. All directions, mainly the cardinal points,
appear as sheers in space. ”
east = apple
north = greenapple
west = whiteapple
south = redapple

Every “verb” or imperative is a possible fork in the unwinding path of the story (sounds like Borges). In that way, various options in the story can be viewed as “triggers.”

The 2004 Interactive Fiction competition has opened works for play and review.

Our own Christopher Coonce-Ewing would have played a role but since we had publically betaed his work prior to submission, T.I.M.E was disqualified. I feel personally responsible for this screw up and hope that Christopher keeps up the brave work.

Susan Gibb writes:

Going out a bit later this morning (oh, all right; my second cigarette!) it was lighter as the morning warned of its arrival, visible through the darkness as a screen 12 inches high by 8 feet long of the garage door window. Though dim with dawn, I see the maple branches, leaves in front of a colorless old colonial that is my neighbors house. I can recall sitting in this same spot with the door wide open, and the house, the trees, the road, my own front yard and driveway become a part of this same scene. If I walk up to the door and peer out of the window, I know Ill see much more. And if I open it, the world is mine.

This post reminds me of borders and circles. Numerous borders and planes. This is a sort of painted image. Then a stepping into the hologram.

For those wondering what we will bedoing on Monday, 13th. We’ll be introducing a few ideas from Barthes, S/Z, but no reading of that long essay is required.

Work on your maps and come to class ready to talk about the newspaper exercise and further discussion of Cortazar, Bierce, and space.

To me it’s interesting how we control movement and meaning by concocting structures with windows, doors, and other forms of openings and paths. Take a book. In a novel we may “enter into” the story and stay there, following the paths that Aureliano Buendia takes through his life. This is a descriptive issue: we “follow” the story along, we’re “into” the story, we’re immersed in the action.

We “enter” the book store, however, in a different way that we “enter” a novel. Calvino writes, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.”

As readers we follow the path that the designer has provided. “Y-o-u-a-r-e-a-b-o-u-t-to- . . .” et cetera.

Page 25 of my copy (no other person has this copy) of Calvino, goes this way:

You have now read about thirty pages and you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark: “This sentence sounds somehow familiar. In fact, this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before.” Of course: there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time. You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions and nothing escapes you. But at, at the same time, you also feel a certain dismay; just when you were beginning to grow truely interested . . .

This passage leads to an interesting twist in the novel, but, regardless, the habit of reading, the “novel” itself, authorial process, and the reader (a fiction) are all being called up as “subjects” we should pay attention to “to read” If on a winter’s night a traveler. Even so, the “reader” still becomes engaged (depending on the reader), who may not “like” this kind of a novel. To continue, Calvino writes

You are thunderstruck. Reading Marana’s letters, you felt you were encountering Ludmilla at every turn. . . . Because you can’t stop thinking of her: this is how you explain it, a proof of your being in love . . . And it isn’t only jealousy: it is suspicion, distrust, the feeling that you cannot be sure of anything or anyone. . . . The pursuit of the uninterrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pusuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises. . . .

Exactly!

Anyway, design creates a surface of story we expect to move in a we are used to. This surface is populated by characters who do things, sumount challenges, then live happily ever after. It is possible, however, to read a story where the surface of the story merges with another surface, say a substory surface, as in A Continuity of Parks, wherein a novel being read by a protagonists takes the plot over and climaxes in the room where a man is reading a novel about a man who is about to be murdered while reading a novel about a character who is about to kill a man who is reading a novel about a man who is about to kill a man et cetera or supposedly. Or, maybe it’s all some major coincidence. But who believes in those?