JHan423's blog

"Game, game, game, and again game" was as far from being a any type of game I would normally play for entertainment purposes, but we were given fair warning that the purpose of this wasn't for fun. So, as I went through the 13 levels of scribbled lines, flashing objects, and random text, I tried hard to pick up the hidden meaning behind this game.
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I was contemplating with the idea of creating some sort of interactive fiction for my final project, and came across this website while doing research.
http://ifml.sourceforge.net/
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Even after having our class discussion, and then researching on my own, I still can't fully wrap my head around the concept of "hyperreality", or what Jean Baudrillard would sum up as "the simulation of something which never really existed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality). But, I stumbled across a person's blog entry that discussed hyperreality in relation to social networking (which is something I'm much more familiar with). Here's the link:
http://smartrics.blogspot.com/2008/06/hyperreality-of-social-networking....
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In the first chapter of "Avatars of Story", Ryan discusses Walter Ong's approach to the influence of writing on the narrative form. Ong observes that a transition from an oral tradition to a written tradition revolutionized the features of a narrative. Before the age of the printing press, narratives were shaped within the limits set by an oral tradition and were marked by "prosodic features, fixed formulae, and standardized images". But, with the invention of the printing press, story-telling was taken to a new level of complexity.
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An interesting topic came up in our Thursday class. We were discussing the difference between story and discourse, and in particular, the role time plays in both "story world" and discourse. We discussed that often times, the time in the story world is changed and manipulated in order to create an effective discourse. A great example that was mentioned was the movie "Memento". In "Memento", the main character, Leonard, suffers from short-term memory loss.
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Once again, English 251 doesn't fail to break any preset notions I had about college academics. Reading page after page of comics in preparation for class isn't exactly what I was expecting... But, the feat certainly wasn't as easy as it may sound to a stranger of this class. Reading fifty pages of Little Nemo can't be labeled with the same difficulty as reading fifty pages of Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes. Why?
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So, my first reaction to today's assignment was "What? What the heck did I sign up for?". Being a freshman, I walked into the class expecting a syllabus full of research papers and essays, which is the norm for high school English. But, instead, I found that the big red hardcover book I bought at the bookstore (and still haven't opened) for this class really isn't a boring textbook, but is actually a comic book... And the first assignment of the semester is to play a video game.
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