So, I've been miserably sick all weekend, and this cold/flu/strep/mono is not going away as quickly as I'd hoped.

Any chance one of you really wants to switch presentation times with me and go tomorrow? I'll make you cookies. (Or buy them for you, so that they won't be infected.)

I have been blogging for a pretty long time--more than six and a half years, or close to a third of my life.

Creepy? A little bit.

It also means that some very weird things have happened on/around my blog, and I am going to share one particularly weird experience here, because I am thinking of mining some of it for my final project. (It’s one of those things that’s so surreal that it seems a shame not to use it toward some more-or-less productive end…) This anecdote is at least among the top five weirdest things that have happened to me on the internet.

So, like Shock and Awe, I was thoroughly seduced by Kind of Blue. Which means that I spent a couple hours glued to the computer screen, and towards the end of that time, I was pretty sure that my eyes were going to fall out.

And let's be clear: I am no computer-screen-staring lightweight. My summer/winter break job=eight hours a day sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen. One of my hobbies involves writing jibberish (code) in a text editor. I blog, I scour four or five news sites every day, and Facebook kind of owns me.

Like most of the class, I haven't been too impressed with my first five days of Online Caroline/Planet Jemma. Jemma bores me completely, and Caroline didn't interest me until I read Walker's article and got spoiled for the end. The problem for me isn't the false sense of friendship, it's the fact that Jemma's story is just really boring, and I just don't care at all about the stuff she's interested in (the little asides on astronomy or whatever). And it wouldn't be any more interesting if she were real--I wouldn't read a blog with the same content.

What I do appreciate about Online Caroline is the depth of Caroline's fictional world--the fact that there is an XPT website, for example, and pages like this one on that site.

I don't know how many of you have seen the Honda Element commercials with the crab and stuff, but there is also a game (which my seminar class played with for, um, twenty minutes tonight).

It's a little online game where you drive a Honda Element around and find different animals and talk to them/help them. In a few instances, it gives you choices as to what you can say to/do with the animals.

Obviously, this game is pretty basic. But the idea of advertising as a part of an immersive experience is a common one (like all the blatant product placement in major motion pictures)--we're immersed, and therefore already in a state where we're accepting things we might not normally accept. It becomes even more powerful with something like a video game, IMO, because people aren't just being bombarded with ads while they watch a movie. They're actually choosing to play a game that IS an advertisement.

Something has been bothering me a while, and I have finally figured out what it is. It might make me sound whiny, but I am okay with that possibility.

Basically, it's this: Why do we care what (if any) "difference" there is between narrative and games?

I don't know. Maybe I'm being narrow-minded (or an English major), here, but it seems really obvious to me that there is a narrative element to video games--duh, of course there is. That's what happens when people do things in fictional universes: in some form or another, stories develop--whether they're plot-based, character-based, or world-based, there is some kind of narrative. Even in that James Bond game. Even in snowboarding games. It may not be a traditional narrative, but to try to divorce games from narrative seems pointless.

So a lot of people/readings have been talking about text-based games, and how they are kind of lame. (I'm looking at you, Adventure!)

What I would like to talk about is a different kind of (entirely textual) game, and in order to talk about it, I have to make a confession:

I am addicted to reading other people's role-playing games. Particularly this one. Because homework requires a large majority of my free time, I've never played, but I've been following some of the characters for a couple of years.

This particular RPG is called Milliways Bar (anybody else a Douglas Adams fan?), and it's a LiveJournal-based role-playing game, in which people play characters from literally hundreds of different fictional universes, all of whom have mysteriously ended up in this bar/restaurant/motel at the end of the universe. Some characters come and go between the bar and their home universes, while others are permanently stuck in Milliways. You get characters from different points in the timeline (i.e. a Han Solo from the movies, and a Luke Skywalker from fifty years earlier) interacting. And for me, as a media nerd, the most fun part is watching characters from different universes interact--everybody from Buffy to Judas Iscariot (nope, not kidding) to Salad Fingers. Plus there's plot within the bar, so characters are reacting to all kinds of stuff all over the place and it is a whole lot of really dorky fun.

So, I was excited to see that First Person talks about gaming, as that topic has spawned a few of the more interesting conversations on this blog. What I wasn't expecting was how closely the articles would tie in with the conversations we've been having about electronic literature--and particularly the complains a lot of us have made about the artificiality/awkwardness of the e-lit we've looked at.

In Bryan Loyall's response to the first article (Janet Murray's) he writes: "One property of Murray's three main examples is that the participant is consciously aware of the story and actively manipulating it. These forms give powerful ways to tell new types of stories, but for me, one of the joys of a story is when I forget about it being a story. I am simply there."

1. I was really pleased by this statement (from page 99 of Writing Machines): "Contrary to much hype about electronic hypertext, books like A Humument allow the reader considerably more freedom of movement and access than do many electronic fictions."

...yep. I don't really have anything to say about that, except that I agree completely and so I wanted to point it out. Even if in hypertexty novels (like House of Leaves, which I love) we aren't making "choices" the way we do in electronic literature, we are able to make actual informed choices--like choosing to read the last page--instead of just clicking things at random. Hayles points out that "logical ordering and linear sequencing" are just as important as association (75), and while not all books are chronological, there is at least some sense of order, of beginning and end. And of course we can bookmark, highlight, etc. to our heart's content, which we can't do in hypertexts.

The design of "Writing Machines" is clearly important--the designer is credited a lot more thoroughly than usual, and in the preface Hayles refers to the work as collaboration. Yet 50 pages in, the design hasn't enhanced my experience of reading the book. Its main purpose, as far as I can tell, is to lead me toward the meanings that Hayles wants me to make.

What I mean is--almost all the other texts I have read have left it up to me to underline, dog-ear, highlight--they've left a lot of that user-end meaning creation up to me.

Am I misinterpreting what she's doing with the enlarged text/underlined words? I feel like she's trying to direct my reading in a really unsubtle way--it's like buying a used book at Huntley and finding that the person before you highlighted a bunch of things that you don't necessarily think should be highlighted.