AimfortheStars's blog

Over the break I tried out the McDonald's Video game, and found it somewhat difficult. Even after reading the tutorial I still had some trouble getting my bearings. But I did find the game very interesting for several reasons.
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After playing Facade for a little while I tried to find the limits of the characters in the game as well as in the game itself. I think it's interesting the way certain phrases and sentences affect the characters in different ways. Excessively negative or even hostile comments don't seem to necessarily anger Trip and Carol, they just seem to confuse them. It is not until the negative and hostile comments become regular conversation that the characters seem to react.
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The recent discussion of the Choose Your Own Adventure genre has made me consider the relevancy of this particular genre in regard to real life. I was thinking about how throughout your lifetime you make countless decisions and albeit the content of the decision is not always and in many cases is not life altering, it is overwhelming to believe that there is an infinite number of outcomes that could be possible. It is overwhelming to play the "what if" game and wonder if a different outcome would have occurred had you taken a different route.
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When watching reality TV shows, especially those in which competition is involved, I've never actually thought about their relationship to game shows. Although after last class's discussion I've been considering their similarities. I think it's very safe to assume that competition reality TV definitely has the characteristics of a game show, in that the goal of the show is to portray some kind of competition between people taken from society to gain some sort of retribution for their victory. However, I think that to say a game show is reality TV may be stretching the issue.
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Last class the question of whether or not we want narrative to be structured was discussed in midst of the conversation regarding HTML and XML. I think that in actuality we are making really progressive strides by allowing the structure of narrative to fluctuate and not follow one distinct path. I think we are starting to see narrative in completely new ways, ways we haven't really explored before and I feel that this allows us to develop stories and content that is also new and unexplored.
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On Thursday during the lecture on mash ups a video was shown concerning George H.W. Bush's time spent in office and focused on his campaign slogan "Read My Lips". In the lecture, the question of how fair a clip like this was, especially when shown to the teenage audience on MTV.
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In Avatars of Story, there was a discussion which we continued in class about simulation vs. representation and the differences between the two. (pg 13) This was particularly interesting to me, because I feel like these two forms of narrative can occur in all types of narrative. (in video games, stories, etc.)
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When concluding Little Nemo, I found myself slightly disappointed at the structure and content of the comic towards the end. While the intense color returning to the comic helped draw some attention, the homogenous structure of the panels that developed towards the end of Little Nemo's run gave the once exciting comic a bland predictability that affected the storyline in my opinion. It seemed that every discrepancy in the square panel flow that occurred in previous pages brought something exciting to the storyline.
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After reading the Krazy Kat comics, one I found particularly interesting was the strip from July 31, 1942. While not completely similar, Ignatz's drawing of the brick can be compared Magritte's depiction of the pipe. The pictorial symbolism of what the brick meant to the storyline was enough to land Ignatz in trouble with the law yet again, despite the fact that it was clearly not the physical manifestation of the brick, which was what normally got him into trouble.
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The concept of Mitchell's 'pictures about pictures' can be readily applied to different scenarios in Little Nemo (pg 36). The visual example that Mitchell gives of the composition shows a man, an artist to be exact, having just drawn this landscape picture and somehow he himself became lost in the spirals he drew himself (pg 39). Since he finds himself contained by the spirals, it may be that he is at the mercy of a 'higher being' or the implied author here, (despite the fact that he himself drew these spirals that contain him-since after all, someone had to draw him.)
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Last class the question of whether or not Nemo's dreams were real or just figments of his imagination was posed. Personally, as I was reading I got the impression that the dreams truly were created in his mind and not actual events that were occurring. My logic behind stems mostly from the fact that the comic strips often center on a particular time of year. There's a Thanksgiving oriented one, a Christmas oriented one, etc. I feel, taking something from personal experience, that often times when you have dreams they come from events that occurred when you were awake.
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As I was reading "Setting the Record Straight" I realized that comic books are often wrongly perceived as mindless stories aimed for the general audience of teenage boys and children (or atleast that's the stereotype). But many of the people who believe this probably have never actually taken the time to look further than the action packed, brightly colored cover. If they had, they probably would have noticed the intense story line, full of more than just physical conflict. They also would have noted the character interaction and strong character development.
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