I finally got a chance to have a look at Winchester's Nightmare just now, and I have to say that I found it to be far more bearable than either Zork or afternoon.

As far as Winchester's status as a hypertext goes, what I appreciated about it was that there is at least an attempt to provide a spatial context for the exploratory kind of reading that the text demands. Winchester takes as its central conceit that we are exploring the mental space of Sarah Winchester (at least that's how I see it). As such, the confused, associative way of moving from one scene, one lexia to the next at least makes a certain amount of sense. For example, you start out on a beach with a seashell in front of you and the way that you actually start the story (probably after some time spent wandering Zork-like to no particular purpose) is to listen to the shell, which the text compares to a rifle shell, and then boom, there you are in an armory. I'll admit, I didn't just randomly decide to listen to the shell. The text will give you a hint or a prod every now and then if you get stuck for awhile, which I appreciated. The beauty of Winchester's premise is that it actually works with the structure of hypertext, rather than being almost incidental to it. Arguably, afternoon's premise of reconstructing an accident was in harmony with this as well, but Winchester casts you as Sarah Winchester, whereas there is no clear point of entry for the reader in afternoon.

In Monday's class, my discussion group spent some time talking about Henry Jenkins's treatment of American McGee's Alice, a computer game in which the user plays as an adolescent Alice, returning to Wonderland. Only, as Jenkins points out, the world of Wonderland that American McGee crafts is openly creepy and dangerous. As the player fights his or her way through the game, Jenkins supposes that the attributes of this new Wonderland are read against the player's previous impressions (from the cultural dominance of the Disney version of the story).

Interestingly, I played the game back when it first came out, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen more than a few seconds of Disney's Alice in Wonderland. Nor have I read Lewis Carroll's book, even though it's been on my shelf for years. I'm trying to think back to when I played American McGee's Alice, and whether I "read it against" anything. But I don't think I did. It would be pretty easy to make the argument that, even having never seen the Disney movie, I probably couldn't have escaped its place in American children's culture -- I know it without knowing it. Still, I've always found Disney stuff to be pretty creepy (all cartoons are a little bit creepy, aren't they?), and I know that Lewis Carroll had certain pharmacological proclivities. So I'm not sure how contradictory American McGee's Wonderland really is. I guess the point could be made that McGee's vision of Wonderland finally cops to its true nature, but by this point I'm not longer seeing what's so crucial about the reading/reading against aspects of the game. Comparison isn't really the game's voltage.

A lot of this is riffing off our discussion in class on Monday, particularly my spin on things. If this doesn't appeal to you, stop reading here.

In class, I was trying to put forward the idea that transparency is at the heart of how we determine the quality of a narrative or a game. Taking the angle of Janet Murray's essay, a narrative has more emphasis on plot and while a game prioritizes the actions of the user. This defines a number of continuums with the most paradigmatic games on one side and the most traditional stories on the other. What we started to work with on Monday was what makes for a good story and what makes for a good game, and is there a connection between the two?

I mistakenly thought that everyone knew about Peasant's Quest, but since it turns out many people unfortunately missed out....

Peasant's Quest, is a game on homestarrunner.com that is parodying the early text-based games, with additional graphics to supplement the story. You play Rather Dashing, a peasant whose thatched-roof cottage has been burninated by Trogdor, the Burninator. To go seek revenge, you have to get to his lair in the mountains, but you cannot cross until you a) look like a peasant, b) smell like a peasant, and c) are on fire like a peasant. It's directed by text commands like Zork and Adventure, but the commands mock the ridiculousness of what you're supposed to get your character to do in those. So where in Zork you must enter "pray" or "ulysses", in Peasant's Quest, you enter a series of commands that enable you to put the baby in the well bucket, and lower it to get the meatball sub on the bottom. You also deal with Old Man Rub and a hiding naked guy.

This article from the New York Times again raises the question of the purpose of games. It describes a new Fantasy Congress game (created by four CMC students!) that allows users to pick congressional teams (4 senators and 12 House members). The creators wanted an alternative to the Fantasy Sports online teams/games that are incredibly popular. I think this "game" ties into the discussions we've had in class and on the blog about the purpose of games and their use for educational purposes. The final quote of the creator implies that Fantasy Congress can be a tool for popularizing politics: “Everyone knows about football, but more people need to know about Congress,” Mr. Lee said. “If as many people knew about Congress as knew about football, baseball and basketball, we’d all be more educated.” I also feel Lee implies somewhat of a hierarchy of what being truly educated means, putting politics above sports. I’ve never played Fantasy Sports and don’t know how game-like these online fantasy teams are, but perhaps this game will make staying up-to-date on current events fun and get more people interested in politics. In the end, though, I think people who are already interested in either sports or congress will be the ones playing.

I recently stumbled across this rather interesting simulation game that really lets you run with your narrative to wherever you want it to. You are born somewhere in the world (based on statistical likelihood, like 1 in 5 times you play you'll be born in China), and from there, you age and make life decisions based on what is available to you in your country and social situation. I've been executed in Iraq, orphaned in Russia, had to go broke to get my middle aged kids to move out in India, risen to the rank of a judge in Malta, and died as a baby several times in Africa. You can also design your own character, which led to times like when I was a doctor in Denmark who forayed into modeling.

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.

Playing with Zork was interesting, to say the least. I could see the conflict Henry Jenkins describes in "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." He writes, "Game designers struggle with this balancing act--trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger narrative trajectory. As inexperienced storytellers, they often fall back on rather mechanical exposition..." (126). With Zork, I felt the larger narrative framework was derailed...or I couldn't find it. Like Lulu, I googled (actually, I Wikipediaed) Zork, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. There is no way I could have figured out what I was doing and even get out the trees in the dimly lit forest until Wikipedia gave me simple commands to use. Even after I found some help sites, I still couldn't figure out what to do. The most frustrating part was that I felt like I was following strict guidelines that weren't even told to me on how to play the game. I repeatedly typed in responses (which I thought made sense) that caused the message "I don't understand what you mean" to pop up. After seeing those over and over, I wanted to scream at the computer. Yet, oddly enough, the pleasure of typing something that caused a positive reaction or an actual response was rewarding enough to keep me going. However, eventually the displeasure of seeing that my responses were invalid made me play the trick that KF said user did with Eliza: come up with ridiculous responses in order to mess up the system. This turned out to be my favorite part, because I felt like I was getting a human answer. For instance, I was stuck in the forest behind a grating, and I typed "pick up grating," to which Zork replied "You can't be serious." When I found more grating and typed "jump grating" (again), I got "You're enjoying yourself, aren't you?" Later, when I found the bird chirping in the tree, I (for kicks, I hope I'm not this violent in real life) typed "kill bird." Zork responded: "I've known strange people, but attacking a bird?" Funny stuff. The amusing part is that enough users must have tried to input these same, weird commands or the creators of Zork suspected that there would be oddballs like me who wanted to push the game's buttons (so to speak) or they wouldn't have created those replies. It made me want to continue just so I could see where I would get a funny reply and not simply "I don't understand what you mean."

That was such dorky fun! I hate to admit it, but I totally had played half the games they talked about in the reading for today. I knew exactly what they were talking about when they were maligning poor April Ryan using a dragon scale and a twig to direct a river in The Longest Journey. And I had no idea that anyone besides my best friend and myself had heard of Titanic - which came out before the movie, thank you, I wasn't that dweeby. That, if anyone's looking for something to occupy their winter break, is a good, good game. It mostly makes sense, too, unlike some games. AND it has mul

The first time I played through Facade, I was thorougly unimpressed. The characters didn't seem to respond to the things I said, and when they did respond to me, they often completely misinterpreted what I was saying. At first, I attributed these things to poor programming. However, as I played through the game again, I realized that the moods of the characters varied significantly between runthroughs. The underlying tensions were always there, but in some runthroughs they were much more reactive than others, even when little in my behavior changed. There were some events that, as far as I can tell, were entirely determined by random chance. This dynamic is, in my mind, what separates Facade from other games or interactive stories. In Facade, you have some degree of influence over the events, but there are still major plot points that change from version to version for reasons entirely outside of your control.