hbaumgar's blog

“Game, game, game and again game” has thirteen levels and discusses society. The author has a negative view of society that is aided by the music and drawings.
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My freshman seminar is about the Mathematics of Chaos, and when I was reading Chapter 5 of Avatars of Story, I noticed a relationship between chaos and interactivity.
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The concepts of agency and structure play an important role in the study of political beliefs. I saw a correlation with these political science ideas and the question of interactivity in new narrative forms.
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During Dr. Murray-John’s discussion, the idea of the author’s intention came up a lot. From medieval manuscripts to the novel to a computer game on the internet, does the author’s intention matter?
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In my political science class we are currently reading a book called Why Societies Need Dissent by Cass R. Sunstein. It discusses why societies, particularly democratic societies, need dissent (this is self-explanatory by the title). Sunstein answers questions about why people conform and what aspects of society make people conform.
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In class on Thursday we discussed analepsis and flashbacks. We also talked about the difference between story-time and discourse-time. I recently watched “The Notebook” which is a great example of these concepts.
To begin, within the movie there are two story-times. In the present story-time, Noah and Aly are old and living in some home/hospital. This present time only takes place over a few days. Most of the movie is only a day, but the final fifteen or so minutes of it take place over a couple days.
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There are aspects of Little Nemo in Slumberland that, in my opinion, were forced onto Winsor McCay by some outside source, probably his employer. In the short introduction to the collection Bill Blackbeard talks about William Randolph Hearst, one of McCay’s employer’s, who eventually took Nemo out of the newspapers and made McCay do political cartoons.
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Last night I was watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. On it, a girl, let’s call her Lori, was staying with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend, and she was raped by her sister’s boyfriend. Also, her sister was kidnapped from her bed. This gets a little crazy…the sister’s boyfriend was asleep when he raped Lori, so the police were unable to press charges.
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I like the idea of narrative having an “invariant core of meaning,” which is what Marie-Laure Ryan writes to describe the traditionalist approach of narrative. This approach of narrative in new forms intrigues me because it has this “core.”
I have always loved reading, but have always hated most video and computer games. If there was a video game that had the “core” though, maybe my thoughts on video games would be different.
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I'm not a big english person, at least I'm not good with symbols and literary devices and all that. In order to analyze a book, or in this case, a computer game, I look at the form of narrative logically and slowly. I often find patterns in the narrative or look very specifically at why the author did one thing or another.
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