I noticed that much of the discussion during our last class meeting about the closing line of Jill Walker's essay ("You don't play a simulation, it plays you") dealt with the idea of a "simulation" in mostly narrative terms. However, I feel like this idea speaks to other forms in interesting ways.

For instance, we may examine it in reference to games. Much was made in our readings on ludology of the idea of games as a "rules-based" experience, being more about our capability to manipulate the game world than about conventional narratives. I've found that when I play a game of any kind, my way of thinking adapts itself to the rules and limits of a game space, and I may find myself enacting behaviors that I would not necessarily consider desirable or right in a real-world context. For example, when I would play Civilization, which is pretty much my favorite game ever, I act at odds with my real-world beliefs because that is the best way to win the game. The French are expanding too close to my borders? Well, I'll just wipe them out then, and get that sweet, sweet land. The citizens in one of my cities are pissed off? Well then let's see how they like a nice dose of martial law. In real life, such actions would be repugnant to me, but the game, the simulation, has its own logic, which it imposes on you as a necessary step to success.

I've been thinking some about Jesper Juul's ideas about game-time. It's occurred to me that narrative may in fact create an incongruity in game-time, as the narrative suggests one kind of temporal flow, and gameplay suggests another. I'm sure that at least a couple of you have played one of the Final Fantasy games. One thing that I've found incongruous about that sort of game is that the plot creates "urgent" situations where you are told that the villain has been spotted in some town and you have to go stop him. The implication in the story is that you have to go now. However, you can often wander about doing random things to your heart's content, while the urgency created by the plot just sort of festers in the background.

In the Jenkins essay included in "First Person," he argues that games represent "spatial stories" which he likens to the mode of storytelling found in genre fiction, notably fantasy and science fiction. Writing about these examples, Jenkins says, "Often such works exist on the outer borders of literature." This is correct to be sure, but I would say that spatial storytelling has more of a place in"great literature" than Jenkins gives it credit for. What is a picaresque novel if not an example of spatial storytelling?" The focus is not on the inner state of the character, but rather on the various environments and situations that the character wanders into.

A fair amount of the theory we've been reading lately about games has attributed a good-sized share of the "immersiveness" of video games to the notion of agency in that we're not being pulled along by the capriciousness of authorial intent, but are rather able to freely explore within the boundaries of the game system. Having grown up on games with interfaces sophisticated enough, or at least designed well enough to at least project the illusion of transparency, I found the experience of playing Adventure, and to a lesser extent Zork, to be incredibly frustrating.

The interface for these games is so incredibly primitive that I did not feel a sense of immersion at all, except for a fleeting 3 minutes or so with Zork where it was all working, and the computer was not mysteriously denying my eminently reasonable requests. It became easier as I grew somewhat acclimated to the system and what it could and could not do, but every few minutes, I would make what I thought was a common-sense command, and have it rebuffed. Bang. Immersion shattered. For example, during most of my time spent with Adventure, I was being pursued through the damn catacombs by a dwarf who would throw "tiny knives" at me and then retreat whenever he got bored. I had an axe at the time, so I tried to use it on the little freak. No dice.

While this may seem to be something of a regression, I find myself still thinking about certain aspects of last week's reading. In particular I am interested in the idea that Stuart Moulthrop raises that games "appeal because they are configurative, offering the chance to manipulate complex systems within continuous loops of intervention..." Moulthrop's exploration of this topic seems to fall under a more "nuts and bolts" perspective in that he is concerned with the manipulations of the game's rules and the objects in the gameworld (as I understand it).

I remember a game I played years ago, back when I was more into games than I am today. It was a role-playing game called Fallout, where you created a character and wandered about in a post-apocalyptic wasteland hanging out with mutants, killing things and tipping radioactive two-headed cows (actually this was a configuration that I never pulled off, though I wanted to). This was before MMORPGs were really big, so creators of these games had to find ways to make the gameworld reactive, which more or less happens as a matter of course in the case of the online games.

There's been a fair amount of discussion of the idea of "avatars" or created personas, mostly in reference to Hayles' Writing Machines. I think it's interesting in that it makes Hayles' critical process into a narrative, with the critic (and the authors) as characters as opposed to disembodied voices, which I would say is the more typical model. Beyond making the book a lot more readable, I also think that this decision represents literary criticism as a personal process, not a purely rhetorical one.

It is interesting given the personal tone that this decision gives the criticism that Hayles decides to insulate herself from it by working through a persona that she insists is not purely autobiographical. She mentions in her explanation at the beginning that she is repelled somewhat by "self-display," which seems to me to stem somewhat from an idea that the critic should not speak with a personal voice, a convention that I've encountered at Pomona on many occasions. Perhaps Hayles' refusal to engage in overt autobiographical narration is a recognition of the fact that even in such writing there is a degree of mediation owing to the fact that such works are written reflectively, and therefore represent the persona or image of the writer that they have developed in their own memories. An assumption that the image of oneself is not to a degree a created persona, doesn't seem sustainable, so perhaps it is fitting that Hayles doesn't try to maintain that illusion.

A week or so ago, I was searching for an online version of Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" for my Enlightenment Literature class (death to overpriced anthologies!), when I came across a hypertext version
(http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~sconstan) of the poem. While not a very extensively annotated version of the text, it provides in a form sort of like a wiki links to explanations of language in the text and allusions, as well as visual representations of some of the scenes in the poem.

I was reminded of Landow's idea that hypertext has been latent in literature for a long time owing to such things as allusions. Not only does this online edition of Pope's work utilize the capabilities of its medium to make annotation easier, but it also effectively makes Pope's poem a multimedia, visual experience. In a way, it literalizes the associations that the reader draws in the course of reading.

As I read through Joyce's "Othermindedness" or rather the selection thereof, I'm intrigued by the connections that he makes between the filtration systems of the internet (Google, "metasites," etc.) and the filtrations that occur in the "print culture." He writes, "Almost invisibly in the past, for instance, most library patrons read much more of the online or card catalog entries, book spines, or tables of contents than they read from the volumes themselves. People have only so much time. They can't read everything and so they depend on others to link them to what they need or wish to read" (54). It seems then that according to Joyce, mediation has always been a factor in the way that we receive information, but this mediation has never been so overt as in the case of the internet.

As I was reading the Burnett selection, I was struck more by his attempts to make his book interactive than the actual ideas. We discussed this idea in the context of "We've Got Blog" a bit, mainly dealing with the fact that readers have different expectations for bound books than they do for internet content. One of the key differences between these media, of course, was that a blog or another form of internet writing was usually interactive, in that users could comment on the blog and question it, and that a book cannot really be questioned.

Burnett encourages readers to question his book, providing a link (well, a web-address anyway), and invites readers to join in the discussion. I followed the

I've been reading Neil Gaiman's Blog for a few days now, and I'm struck by the unique attitude that he, as an already established writer, seems to take toward his blog (he calls it a "journal" for one thing). It's an odd combination of the mundane and personal, personal promotion, and a method for his readers to contact him. For example, today's entry starts out with his iTunes installation woes, progresses to a whole list of links (including an interview he did recently), and ends with him answering a reader's note.

What I find interesting about the blog is that he seems to "let his hair down" a bit.