shadowpuppet's blog

New Media's been one of those classes in which I feel like I'm constantly up until all hours of the night finishing projects. Like something always gets in the way of me doing these things reasonably ahead of time. I might kind of miss that.

Each project we've done so far, I've lost a few points on clarity (hence the snide title of this final post). I'm not sure that I'll win any back with this project. It winds a little bit, here and there. I think I get more direct near the end.

To clear things up a bit:

So far, looking back, I've seen a theme within, at least, my own projects, and my own thoughts on the matter of alternative reality. That is, as Matt also said in his project post, that reality is what we make it - that, I think, comes across in my project without having to dig too much.

To be sure, I've evolved that idea a bit since it cropped up in my head very early in the course in vague form. Now, I think, I'm much more inclined to think that our reality is affected by what we make ourselves, and it is through this that we affect our reality. But does that mean our reality affects us not at all?  read more »

Nearly done, everyone, and a good job we did, too. The ARG thing was difficult, though I guess I expected it to be. In some ways, though, I feel like that was more because of time than anything in this case. I'm also not sure whether I really took away from this much of the feel of what running an ARG is actually like; I think too many aspects of our prototyping simply weren't quite right.

Of course, we couldn't have done much better than this under the circumstances. I agree with GrandConjurer that this would have been a better experience, as an ARG-in-miniature, if we had started much earlier and been able to draw out the experiment over time. Maybe next year.

To be sure, I'm glad we experimented with it - thinking in terms of the kind of openness and multimedia and such that comes with doing an ARG was sort of neat. My group worked well together, even though we were under some considerably less-than-ideal conditions, and the project was rewarding in that regard. Group projects are so hit and miss, so it's pretty nice to have a good experience with one, if only for the novelty! (Thanks Ninja Turtles (+1))  read more »

This occurred to me between class and my apartment just now or I would've brought it up during our discussion, but, accepting the idea that it would be beneficial to give ARG a (different) name, why not "collective fiction"? I admit, I still don't like the acronym as much (it's still CF, which you can't really pronounce like you can 'ARG', and doesn't produce handy puns like ARGument and ARG, matey!).

In any case, I feel like the word "collective" describes this genre very well. ARGs (as I still insist on referring to them for now) are built around the idea of a large group of players working together to complete the game, sometimes with a large group of people "behind the curtain", depending on the game. This "collective" of all the players and PMs craft the story and its progression; authoring duties are, to some degree, shared between the two groups.  read more »

Our discussion of fan fiction and the "canon" of fictional properties on Wednesday made me think of no franchise more than Star Trek. As arguably the oldest and, at times, most nitpicky fandom, the question of Star Trek canon is almost always involved whenever fans come together to discuss the series, and particularly when new additions to the franchise are in the works.

While Trek has not, to my knowledge, been the subject of an ARG (with the exception of the ARG that I hear is currently running in conjunction with the upcoming movie), I think we can approach questions of how we construct fictional worlds like Star Trek's in very much the same fashion as we would the fictional world of an ARG - indeed, the issues are, I believe, almost entirely the same.  read more »

For those of you who haven't been following the comments in Dr. Whalen's puzzle post, we've basically been given permission to do whatever it takes to solve this puzzle. That being the case, I suggest that we make like ARG players and put our heads together. The puzzle is certainly solvable, I presume, by a single person, but I think we can all benefit from working on it cooperatively.

Just to get this rolling, I'm going to go ahead and share what cursory thoughts I have on the puzzle at this moment. First, what are we looking for to solve this puzzle? I assume we've got to fill in the blanks: two for the date, one for the latitude, and one for the name of the Golden Dragons' domain.

On the back of the puzzle we have a series of ten numbers and a bunch of number/letter/wedge combinations (thirty-seven, by my count).  read more »

The discussion of ARGs reminds me of a fairly lightweight one which I followed briefly a little over a year ago, called Ethan Haas Was Right. It was composed of five Flash-based puzzles and a like number of cryptic videos which were unlocked as the puzzles were solved, as well as several lengthy messages written in a mysterious script which had to be decoded (though as I recall this was a simple matter of substitution). The videos were about the prophecies of the "madman" Ethan Haas and a coming apocalypse.  read more »

So we haven't deeply discussed the validity (or lack thereof) of placing Cathy's Book in the category of ARG, though we have touched upon it. For what it's worth to the discussion, then, here's my two cents:

Cathy's Book is not an ARG.

Okay, that seems to be the prevailing opinion already, based upon what people have said in class; we're hesitant to label Cathy's Book as ARG for a variety of reasons, chief among them, I think, being the fact that the evidence is not critical (or even necessary) to understanding the story. I think that is an important part of what fundamentally makes Cathy's Book not an ARG. More concretely, then, the reason why I don't believe it to be an ARG is this: Cathy's Book lacks gameplay.  read more »

Okay, so here's my theory, based on the available evidence, for what becomes of Cathy after the conclusion of Cathy's Book:

I believe that Cathy departs San Francisco to find her father. Based on the evidence (specifically her father's death certificate and Victor's obviously fake birth certificate), I believe that his death was not as simple as it seemed (check out the signatures if you don't believe me).

To do this, she has some help. For one thing, she's found Bianca's number, so she's probably exploring that possibility. She's also on track to a few other past relations of Victor's, many of them deceased. Finally, she received something in the mail - something light - from Chang Kuo Lao, in St. Louis. He's helping her with something, so she may at least have gone to meet him there - or somewhere else he suggested she go.

That's my theory. I'm about to start Cathy's Key, so I'm hoping for some answers.

My interactive fiction project ("Tarot") places the player in the shoes of an ambiguous avatar who has, until recently, shared a space vessel with another character, Lora. Because of something she has done, the player has to move to another reality - something that, in the game world, is not unheard of but not especially common.

Most of the game takes place in the player's native "sphere", Celeste, a sci-fi inspired world of science and high technology. I build this world through the actual environments and through interacting with objects. The second reality of the game, a fantastic sphere called Endmarch, is Lora's home sphere, and though the player does spend a brief time in Endmarch near the end of the game (unless they ignore a particular task given them in Celeste), the sense of the world is translated previously, mostly through Lora's character and how she clashes with the environment in Celeste.  read more »

I've been thinking about it all day and I'm still not sure where to even begin responding to the conversation in Wednesday morning's class. So I'll begin at the beginning, I suppose - my first reaction, while I was sitting there, listening to people talk, listening to the ridicule flying around, was to be offended. Not because anything said applied to me in any particular way - I've been on Second Life a few times in the past, though usually for work-related reasons, and I prefer my face-to-face relationships to any online ones I've ever maintained no matter the medium. However, I suppose I was...and I'm trying to find the right word here...disheartened by how readily several people in the class were not only willing to assume the worst - that virtual worlds are populated by hordes of deviants and weirdos - but also how quickly we all allowed the topic to become an arena for nothing less than discrimination.  read more »

So I couldn't make it to class Wednesday to discuss the IFs we played from the IF Competition, so I thought it might be a blog-worthy thing to talk about. I played a game (completely arbitrarily) called "The Hall of the Fount of Artois", which put you in a mansion tasked with breaking a curse upon the son of this old family. You have twelve hours to accomplish your task, and a grandfather clock in the front hall chimes the quarter-hour as you go, keeping you apprised of how much time you have left.  read more »

I've been meaning to blog on this topic for a while now and just now found the time. When Hiro first visits the Metaverse, we are treated to a description of all the different avatars present on the Street. From normal(ish) people to dragons to anatomical features, the Street seems to have some of everything. Indeed, Stephenson makes clear that the choice of an avatar is not merely arbitrary, but significant.

Today, already, we deal with avatars in one way or the other. All of us have some degree of "avatar" when we are online, though it is not usually a visually represented one; nonetheless, we pick and choose what the rest of the internet sees, some true, some less so. A textual - perhaps informational - avatar.  read more »

For my Aleph, I decided to take an approach opposite to what much of what we have read assumes, and tried to view a world with VR not as one irrevocably changed and alien, but as one very much like our own. So, in my Aleph-world, virtual reality has progressed from the early ‘90s, circa the video we watched, in much the way it was expected to. By the present day, VR equipment is a common technology, and is in the process of supplanting conventional computers and other entertainment devices as we know them. However, the internet still exists, separate from the virtual reality network, or V-NET, which the assignment assumes – how else would this alternate me make a website?

To that end, then, I have basically taken liberally from my own life and extrapolated into a world where the technology is a little different. The question I ask myself here is not what the advent of VR has done to us, but what it is doing. Ultimately, I think a lot of my thoughts strayed into how our perception of place would change when we could essentially make realistic places that didn’t actually take up any space at all.  read more »

As a computer scientist, I've seen my fair share of programming in different languages and so forth, but I've never taken the time to learn HTML. Which, you know, is pretty cool. The only thing that bothers me is the way comments are formatted. (This is the kind of trifling thing that bothers me for days at a time because it interferes with my nice, ordered universe.) The most common comment format I have seen (through the C family of languages as well as Java) is the // syntax, which makes the rest of the line a comment, usually accompanied by the /* syntax, which makes everything a comment - possibly across multiple lines - until you type */ to close the comment. So with these easy-to-type-quickly options, I feel like

/* EDIT: I put the HTML comment syntax in that last sentence, and apparently it works for comments in the blog editor, too. */  read more »

Something we haven't really touched on in our discussions so far - though perhaps it's not quite the point - is why we might create (or allow) reality to be subverted by technology. After such a long line of "technothrillers" - all the way back to "The Machine Stops" and maybe before, but certainly up to and including more recent, well-known pieces like The Matrix - I can't help but wonder whether or not humanity at large would really let something like the Machine to even happen.  read more »