In my search for online images and backgrounds for my final project, I came across a site that reminded me a lot of Shelley Jackson's Skin. The site is called Novel Twists, and it basically is a piece of collaborative fiction comprised of a total of 150 pages, and people bid for the right to contribute a page. I tried to find the ebay aunction site where this was going on, but I failed. It's probably privatized or something.

Anyway, this project is very similar to Jackson's Skin. It also relies on the premise that this is a collaborative project with a limited number of participants who don't know each other. Here, though, the participants aren't as thoroughly screened as those in Jackson's project. Rather, the winner/writer of each page goes to the highest bidder, and then all the proceeds go to charity. Quite an interesting way to raise money, don't you think?

This might seem like I am stating the obvious, but is it just me, or does Shelley Jackson seem--in addition to being super interested in bodies, as Frabby pointed out--to also be obsessed with puzzles? It seems like if we were to simplify the concepts behind Skin and Patchwork Girl, then it would seem like Jackson is creating a giant jigsaw puzzle.

When I first looked at the frontpage of Skin, I was misled into thinking that her final project was supposed to be presented as a giant collage/puzzle of the people's tattoos. Pimm also linked us to Jackson's tatooed people's community blog, in which someone mentions that "I am we," which seems like the individual does acknowledge that he or she is like a puzzle piece in a larger collective identity. Not to strip people of their humanity and say that they're/we're all puzzle pieces, but it does seem like Jackson's hinting at this concept with her work.

So after I came up with my final project idea, I ran across David Bellos' translation of a book by Georges Perec, a Frenchman, called Life, A User's Manual. The idea behind the book somewhat resembles the idea behind my hypertextual neighborhood-- although Perec's idea was considerably more original, considering that his book was published in 1978. Perec examines every room in an apartment block in Paris on the evening of June 23, 1975

There are several interesting aspects to this book. For instance, despite its avant-garde structure, Life, A User's Manual was both a popular and a critical success-- almost a French version of House of Leaves.

I first logged onto Online Caroline for about 30 seconds, looked around, thought she was a real person, and then logged out. I thought she was just another blogger. I was tired that night and decided to put off "playing" with her until the next day.

The next day, I read Jill Walker's essay on Online Caroline. It was during the reading that I realized Caroline was fake. I "spoiled" the story for myself before I could even start my "friendship" with Caroline. I walked into this "relationship" already skeptical because of Walker's analysis, and after about 10 minutes of being Caroline's "friend," I was convinced this was not for me. I echo a lot of skepticism that others, including crashingintowalls and tophat1,talk about in their posts. I mentioned in some comments in other people's posts that the over-friendly tone, though aimed at making the situation believable, actually has the opposite effect. Caroline's attempts at moving this friendship forward had a negative effect on me. The web designer's "tools" of friendship, including personalized emails and a conversational, direct tone makes the "player" realize that this situation is forged, fake. Like other people have mentioned, the personalized email does not feel personalized--rather, it seems contrived to me. It seems to me like the web-designers are forcing the friendship onto the participant, wanting desperately for us to buy into their scheme. But, as many of these posts seem to suggest, it hasn't been working for the most part.

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.

I've been thinking about the idea of a contract between reader/player and text/story/game, which several people have made brief reference to in class and on the blog. It's a pretty generally accepted notion that readers enter into contracts with books, and it seems equally plausible that a player enters into a contract with the game she chooses to play. I'm wondering if the contract that a reader makes with a text is substantially different from the contract a player makes with a game.

A reader expects that a story will make some sort of coherent sense (unless we're talking about highly experimental stuff)-- that she'll be able to follow along to a certain extent, that even if she doesn't understand every single paragraph, she'll be able to draw some meaning out of the whole.

*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!