Well I just got back from Tokyo, Japan where I was working on a future documentary on 50 years of videogames. The Playstation 3 launched there earlier there this week and me and my crew of two others were literally the first on the scene as hundreds of people had lined up for hours to get their hands on the new console. Well, we showed up at 4am and to say the least, it was intense. We were able to get a bunch of interviews with people standing on line (and the first guy to actually purchase one) and met some very interesting people. Some guys actually flew from the UK just to get one of the 90K that were sold on the 11th.

Ken Perlin's essay discusses the differences between characters in media such a film and in video games. He claims that in film and books, the emotions of the character are real enough that we can buy into the avatar living in the real world and thus buy his/her story better. He goes on to state that in video games, this is not the case. The computer generated avatars are too static and don't have the capabilities to act on their own in a realistic manner. Unfortunately I would have to agree with him.

This summer, I worked as a game designer on a future title scheduled to release next year.

Janet Murray returns to us to present yet another wonderful piece on the nature of the game vs. puzzle vs. story. She does a very good job of separating these three terms, but as she is using them in reference to everything from scrabble to myst, I wasn't exactly sure if she was addressing all forms of games, or computer games in general. Anyway, I have always seen the narrative computer game as a combination of those three terms. One of the responses to her on pg. 10, declaires that books and films have already established themselves as a perfect medium for story telling, "so if it ain't broke, why fix it?". This got my attention, as in my opinion, the video game can not only tell just as good a story as any other medium using story, but it can incoprorate puzzle and game to enhance the experience.

Reading Hamlet on the Holodeck has made me begin to think how close we really are to having some of the technology described within the science fiction quoted in the book. As I am doing my Thesis on the topic of Videogames, this book has also been quickly added to my bibliography. But back on topic, Nintendo. What are they doing now? Nintendo is releasing their newest video game platform in only a few weeks which is seeking to revolutionize the industry. Titled the Wii (pronounced "we"), some of you might have heard about this strange system and how it pulls you into the game in a way Sony or Microsoft cannot with their systems.

After finishing Understanding Comics for like the millionth time, and thinking of House of Leaves at the same time, it was interesting to link McClouds comments on words and pictures merging to the visual setup of House of Leaves. House of Leaves purposesfully sets up its texts to be pictorial (ie the window) and almost forms itself into a comic of its own. The psychosis of the mother glares at the reader in the terrifying way the text is contorted to be visually insane as well as verbally. In McClouds scale it would look like this:

P
/w
0
W /
p

I just put the topic title there for fun. Although this post is about House of leaves. Anyway, I was talking last week in my group about House of Leaves, and wondering how different it would have read if it was placed on the Internet instead of in a book. I know it was leaked onto the internet early, which gave it it's original cult following, and I wonder how different it was to read it then. Having hyperlinks to the different footnotes instead of the footnotes taking over the page, being able to directly link to words in the the index. Linking directly to the mother's letters. Would this greatly change the experience of reading the story? In my opinion, most definately.

After finishing "Making films Asian American", I found the quote by Lin, stating he would gladly do Mighty Ducks 4 to be interesting. In the world of film, and especially Hollywood, the presence of Asian authors (directors) is very slim. Saying that Asian directors are only accepted into Hollywood after they "have either submerged their Asian identities to make films about white Americans or have added Asian 'flavor' to Hollywood film." is somewhat true today because of what has become of the Asian American filmmaker. But this can also be said about any number of ethnic minorities in Hollywood, which are pretty much all under-represented because of the people who run the major Hollywood studios.

Forgive me if I'm getting ahead of the text here, but i just got finished reading a line of Janet Staiger's essay and I wanted to comment on it before I trudged on. The part I'm referring to is on page 32, where she talks about Kael's statement that "Mankiewicz's authorship has been obscured in favor of Welle's contributions..."
The idea of community authorship is one that I bet pops up in this book many many times, but speaking in the present, film and video productions are interesting in terms of authorship, as so many authors are involved. The fact that a film is derived from a screenplay, which is in some sense the "true" work.

So bell hooks is here talking about post-modernism and the "black folks" place within it. It would seem that in this post-modern era, where we can have dead authors and readers that write the texts they just read, having specific racial identities that are also authors may have little place amoung the dead. There are two sides to this. Going back to Barthes, we can see that eliminating the identity of the "black" author, makes the work stand on its own without the context of black history and ideals. However, this doesn't work at all when a black author decides to write a work dealing with black issues.

I just finished reading Marchessault's: Is the Dead Author a Woman?, and after sifting through, what most of the time was next to impossible to comprehend, I have come up with a question so powerful, that it shall end all other questions about Deaths of Authors...Why? Why is it important that the dead author be male or female, as either will only serve to confuse the reader, who, according to Barthes, shouldn't care about the author in the first place. Sure, there are people (readers) who come to the table with pre-reservations on gender, ethnicity and class when experiencing a work, but at least personally, the background of the person is more fun to find out after the work is finished and thought through, almost as a self perscribed afterword.