How appropriate! Just when we were all lamenting over the lack of videogame reviews in the media, I open up my browser and lo and behold! a videogame review appears on the frontpage of my city's online newspaper site! The San Francisco Chronicle occasionally reviews videogames using the same rating system that they use for films. The clapping man jumping out of his theater seat is a sign that the video game is super awesome. Anyway, this videogame review rates this new videogame called Bully. This is an "immersive boarding school experience" where you have to play "Tough kid Jimmy" whose "weapons of choice were itching powder and wedgies." Cool!

Transmedia. The future of media and gaming? Or rather, is the future now? Henry Jenkins writes that "transmedia storytelling...depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy." (124) He includes books, film, television, comics, and other media, "each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world comes to those who follow the narrative across the various channels." (124)

I've asked some friends who like gaming whether they feel this is true, and they seem to think that the best games are those that don't belong to some "narrative economy." Stand-alone games that don't seem to have a narrative arch like CS and Diablo are, as we all know, really popular and it doesn't matter that there's no background story. Video games that involve Harry Potter and other non-computer-media based characters don't do as well, in terms of sales. Why is this? Is the fun of the game lost in the attempt to make a videogame an accurate representation of the particular book or film? Do the constraints of the characters' book world or film world limit what the videogame player can do? Maybe I was asking an audience that just happens to not like such "transmedia" works, and I'm making too rash of a generalization? Still though, it seems that the most successful--and I'm defining success by sales and sheer number of players worldwide--games have not been the "transmedia stories" but instead stand-alone videogames.

*Spoiler Alert: If you haven't played Zork yet, proceed with caution because some of what I say in this entry will potentially "spoil" the story for you.

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Yesterday, when I started to play Zork, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I started out in front of a white house, on the edge of a forest. I thought this would be similar to the experience of interacting with Eliza, a simple exchange of user prompts and computer-generated responses. Boy, was I wrong. As I found out after several hours of stumbling around in Zork-world, the white house and forest actually sit on top of an elaborate underground empire called The Great Underground Empire, complete with secret rooms and monsters to kill!