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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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What do you like better, narratology or ludology?
Excerpt from Espen Aarseth's "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation" in the 2004 MIT publication First Person edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan...
Underlying the drive to reform games as "interactive narratives," as they are sometimes called, lies a complex web of motives, from economic ("games need narratives to become better products"), elitist and eschatological ("games are a base, low-cultural form; let's try to escape the humble origins and achieve `literary' qualities"), to academic colonialism ("computer games are narratives, we only need to redefine narratives in such a way that these new narrative forms are included"). At a recent game conference, it was stated that the difference between films and games was simply the "interactivity" of the games.
This latter motive, the only one of the three mentioned before to concern us here, seems to me to spring out of a certain ideology, much practiced by humanists, and also well beyond our ivory towers; an ideology that we might call "narrativism." This is the notion that everything is a story, and that story-telling is our primary, perhaps only, mode of understanding, our cognitive perspective on the world. Life is a story, this discussion is a story, and the building that I work in is also a story, or better, an architectural narrative. Ironically, most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.
Yet among anthropologists, business people, technologists, visual artists, media theorists, and other laypersons, this ideology -- or what Alan Rauch once fittingly called story fetishism -- is strong and uncontested. And to us humanists, the (let's face it) lowest caste of the academic world, it is nice to feel important again, for once. Finally, our expertise matters! We don't know much about technology, or biology, but we do know stories and storytelling. So why be critical when we can be important instead?
A book vending machine in a Sao Paulo Subway .
(image courtesy of Fastwürms)
Heartwarming current events:
"The Newfoundland comedian [Mary Walsh] shocked the crowd last night when she called the federal Conservatives "the arse-lickers of Satan'' before introducing a performer.
TV cameras then cut to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, who bowed his head and smiled sheepishly from the front row. Earlier, while making a presentation, the Nova Scotia MP was booed when he mistakenly referred to Halifax as Toronto."
If you liked "Chariots of Fire" you'll love the horse rescue (thanks M. Jean).
Parasitic Venture Press has a launch tomorrow at Art Metropole (588 King St. West, 2-5 pm). I'm keen because artists' books are great, but publishing them is a hard gig. Michael Maranda loves the medium, and knows it well, and is moving this forward with lots of amibtion and enthusiasm. Also, I've sneak previewed some of the books launching and they're great, notably Sandra Rechico's whereabouts.
