alison s's blog

For my final project, a short story, I explored the idea of shifting realities and the potential for a variety of realities in what is perceived as one reality. The story is based off of a couple of different people I ran into in the nursing homes in which my great-grandmother and grandfather lived. One woman was convinced she was a cruise boat director. Another man appeared to be the sweetest old man and, before his illness set in, was just that, however, when approached would do nothing but yell obscenities at people. for a while I was struggling with my own grandfather's rapidly progressing dementia due to Parkinson's and realized that many times these men and women, though they appear to be in the room we're in, are in a completely different world that we cannot access. Who are we to say that our world is more real than the one we're experiencing just because it happens to be the one we are experiencing. To me, it's kind of like the "real" level in Avalon, where reality is never something static, defined or even definable. How are we to know that we aren't hallucinating our whole lives?  read more »

I can now only imagine the work that goes into the creation of a real ARG. This has been an overwhelming, but interesting experience. Our ARG stemmed from the idea of somehow using Disney lyrics or references as the basis of a puzzle or some other aspect of the ARG. While this didn’t necessarily happen it definitely did lead us in our final direction. Our group's ARG has a plot that most people have heard of: young girl falls in love with dreamy guy she met on the internet only to find out he's not who she thinks he is. In fact, the man she thinks is her very own knight-in-shining-armor Disney Prince is actually a serial killer who kidnaps (“collects”) young teenagers, dresses them as Disney princesses and kills them. The idea is that our character is the last of his victims and the player must find her before she meets her fate.  read more »

There are some very interesting/obvious connections between ARGs and "Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Here are some of the sections that really made me think about ARGs and the effect they wish to achieve, in terms of puzzles, immersion, and interaction:

1. Borges describes the literature of Uqbar "a literature of fantasy" whose "epics and legends never referred to reality but rather to the two imaginary realms of Mle'khnsas and Tloen" (70). Similarly, ARGs exist in imaginary realms that so closely resemble real ones that they are believable but, nevertheless, fake.

2. "I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architecture and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversie-- all joined, articulated, coherent, and with no visible doctrinal purpose of hint or parody" (71-2).  read more »

Looking into ARGs, I'm beginning to understand why people find htem compelling. Though I'm not particularly good at puzzles, I see why people would enjoy solving them and having a more substantial sense of accomplishment than other kinds of puzzles (this sounds weird, but I always thought being a hacker would be "fun" and playing an ARG would maybe let people like me act out this fantasy without doing any harm). I am more interested in the plot/character aspect of it, however. I definitely have the tendency to get attached to characters and I could totally see myself getting into that aspect of ARGs.  read more »

I enjoyed reading these books, for the most part, even if they might not be ARGs and are kind of juvenile. The one thing that really kills me is the ending though, where she and Victor are going to find way to somehow work out the problem no one else has ever figured out. Come on. I was actually really hoping that Victor might use the serum and become mortal, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since a teenage focus always seems to be achieving less realistic, more glamorous alternatives (Twilight, anyone?). As for all the extra bits, maybe they didn't make the game an ARG, but I think they definitely added a bit of a layer to the story (plus, I just really like stuff). The characters all kind of perplex me, though. They're kind of cliche characters, once unique, but quickly becoming stock characters in teenage fiction. The kind of weird/rebellious/artistic girl who's not afraid to break the rules (but for all her independence, it's always about a guy), the geeky sidekick, the mysterious guy who has more depth than meets the eye, the uninvolved parents.  read more »

When approaching the text based interactive fiction game, I tried as much as possible to draw ideas from the games we played in class. In Shrapnel I found the use of time, repetition, and forced action especially compelling. From playing Shade I really appreciated the idea of things changing and developing and not being what you thought they were. My problem was trying to find a topic that I felt I could manipulate and replicate to a suitable degree. For some reason, the first topic that came to my mind was fame and celebrities. At first I thought it’d be a funny joke to make an IF game about Britney Spears but I later realized that the medium lent itself very well to message I wanted to create.  read more »

A couple of different things struck me while I was reading through the Virtual World blogs. In New World Notes, there was a short entry about whether or not SL would be required to become accessible to disabled, most specifically blind, users. This may sound bad, but I have never really thought about how the blind might access the internet and now that I think about it... it must be very complicated to make websites through which the blind can navigate. The author came to the conclusion that it would eventually happen, that blind users would find SL accessible and that it is of course a good thing. I just couldn't believe I had never thought about that before.  read more »

Snow Crash is much more interesting than I first anticipated. I'm not generally a reader of science fiction, so I often forget that I actually do like reading it, when I get the chance/come across something. Snow Crash, for me, really is a scary representation of what the world could potentially become.
Snow Crash brings globalization and outsourcing to the next level. The U.S. economy is ruined, it's only production really being that of pizza. Obviously, it is generally satirical, but I don't actually think the whole pizza situation is too far-fetched.

(I know we're not necessarily supposed to read sci-fi as being solely a prediction of the future and since it's not really the future yet, I think it is still possible to see this book as a critique on our society today.)  read more »

I've haven't had a chance to read what anyone else has said about our Moo experience last class, so sorry if any of what I say is really repetitive. Though the moo experiment was pretty entertaining, I found it pretty ineffective for class discussion. There were at least 3-5 different strains of discussion going on at once (not all of which had to do with anything related to class) and with that many people talking at once, it's hard to contribute something relevant before a. someone one else says exactly what you were going to say or b. changes topics.
The format was very much like a chat room and while these are okay for informal communication, they take away a lot of conversational necessities like turntaking and relevance. I mean, imagine if we all sat in class and just tried to all talk at the same time. Not gonna work.
I definitely prefer blogs. I know they don't substitute class discussion and they aren't as immediate, but they allow a more organized, coherent medium for expression. You can respond at your own pace and to the relevant topic of discussion (since these can be separated in blogs).  read more »

When asked to make a personal webpage, under the assumption that virtual reality was in widespread use, I was completely at a loss for ideas. The virtual reality story that had stuck most in my mind was The Machine Stops, but I did not want to embrace such a negative view of the future. I did decide, however, to use the elements of the story which struck me most, the disregard with which the earth and its many geographical wonders were made negative and the impropriety of touch, in considering my page.
I decided to go on the assumption that people are always hooked up to VR. This would mean that everything they sense would be through VR, which left me to wonder what it is a person might generally feel while hooked into a VR system. I don’t see, as in Lawnmower Man, people dissolving into pure energy. I do imagine, however, that they would be permanently hooked in a machine and that they never actually move.  read more »

I'm one of the five or so people in the class who, before playing Shade, had had no experience with interactive fiction. At all. As a result, the biggest problem was really figuring what I could and couldn't tell the computer to do in terms of vocabulary and form. I had the vain hope that maybe I could tell my character to karate chop the desk or set his apartment on fire. Alas, he could at least hallucinate (I also have no idea why I'm assuming the character of shade was a guy).  read more »