FINALLY!
and in this last go-round, I was choked twice, cut three times, but figured I’d try shooting at him and also for the first time tried using up some of my first aid kits–they saved me, I think.
James is fine. I’m just a lot older, my heartrate is way up, and I don’t have to bleach my hair anymore.
And most importantly, after the monster left, I remembered to SAVE!
Honestly, my pulse is racing at 120 bpm. I’ve just gotten killed a half dozen more times. I ‘m lasting longer and longer, but for some reason, James won’t listen to me when I tell him to run (typical male).
Well at least I’m all set for my first homework due for Creative Writing: Fiction, although it’s all true. "How I Spent My Semester Break", by Susan Gibb.
Here’s an interesting take on New Media: Has anyone ever done a study on the effects of video gaming on the heart?
I mean, like, has anyone ever been found dead at the keyboard with an action adventure paused on the monitor?
To share the joy, help you understand what’s keeping me on the focused path of New Media, and frankly, to keep you busy elsewhere whilst I kill or escape this monster of Silent Hill 2, I am fingerpointing towards some of my favorite examples of new media. Most of what I’ve found has come via Anne at Fishbucket, John at J-Walk, and Steve at The Great Lettuce Head or John at Five Fingers. Enjoy. I’ve got some intense hours of play, er, work to do that includes some fancy footwork. Wish me luck.
Katamari Damacy http://katamaridamacy.jp/contents_e.html
Hiccup 101 http://seneca.rsad.edu/animations/Hiccup101.html
Zoomquilt http://zoomquilt.nikkki.net/
The Pretty Unlucky Head http://seneca.rsad.edu/animations/ThePrettyUnluckyHead.html
I’m such a baby. But honestly, I was getting upset, and my heart beats so fast and loud with each encounter in SH2 that I was getting nervous about that as well as being sulky. Anyway, some needed assistance came through, and I am reinspired to keep trying to move beyond that point in the game.
In the meantime, I played with the SIMS a little, and of course, didn’t read all the instructions nor go through more than a short bit of the demo, and managed within minutes to destroy a perfectly beautiful home before I moved the family in.
Well, I’m just about done in, heart pounding, fingers shaking, frustrated, and losing the joy of the story real fast. Can’t seem to get past this part of the game.
Very rarely will I put a book away unfinished–unless it’s really that bad, and I don’t intend to shelve Silent Hill forever, but I need to get away from it for a while. This is one thing that books hold over interactive text; there’s nothing holding you back, and while you may need to reread text to more fully comprehend what you’ve read, you can easily go on again to the end. Interactive story, it seems, forces you to progress in an ordered (varied paths, but ordered) fashion or stop. No skipping ahead. While I suppose I can turn around and go back out the front of the building, I know already that that just leads me backwards space-wise, and there are no outlets leading from town other than the path I’m on. I’m tired and like a cranky kid, am losing interest fast.
So, I’ve loaded in the SIMS 2, and just the happy music and young pretty people dancing around has picked up my spirits. It’s also made me feel like a giant wuss.
In going into that hallway to prepare for battle again and again, I find myself fascinated by the video that the first couple of times around well serves to shock and strike such fear.
It is unreal, a monstrous halfway-human form that’s struggling with a double legged mannequin in a somewhat perverted-looking dance. But that’s the key–it is unreal; these creatures are not human thus we can accept whatever it is they’re doing, and also true, no one expects, I’m sure, for the reader/user to be spending so much time in there watching it again and again until it’s clearer.
But how much worse, McCarthy’s Harrogate, and his affinity for a field of virgin melons? This thought occurred to me as I left Silent Hill 2 and faded into a calming break with Suttree. Then I flipped back a bit to the beginning, and reread this episode, here which I’ll excerpt just a bit:
He knelt in the rich and steaming earth, his nostrils filled with the winey smell of ruptured melons. To steal upon them where they lay, his hand on their warm ripe shapes, his pocketknife open. He lifted one, a pale jade underbelly turning up. He pulled it between his knees and sank the blade into its nether end. He shucked off the strap of his overalls. His pale shanks kneeling in a pool of denim.
Harrogate is a fictional character, but is so much more closely related to us, so much more the reaction to his act. Is this what draws the line in visual graphics? Will this be something that is allowable in a virtual world someday? Movies had to slowly run the course from their conception to where they stand today; from fadeout hints to showing all, and the inception of a rating system as a guide.
And can video as well infuse Harrogate with the sympathy and humor as McCarthy gleans from us? His words produce a sharp image, and our response is one of wha….? to shock perhaps as the dawn hits, to one of outright laughter if we find it funny, and God help me, I sure did. Can this be duplicated or replaced satisfactorily in remediation? Or do words sometimes, when skillfully used, have a power that is intrinsic to their nature alone.
I cannot do the dawn, nor watch the skypeel back in colors of confusionand yet not think of all the knowledge within its boundries of infinityhidden in the scarlet streaks
that slash the black horizonsyawning into time.
The King Goes to Battle
He woke in the morning and showered and shaved,
and dressed for the day in the great robes of purple
and strode through black streets,
his robes rimmed in ermine untouched by the dirt
held aloft by the boys gleaming and golden
ignoring the jester, silver bells tinkling
who danced back and forth to cheers of the crowd
and the jeers of the babies at breast.
Leading the men, all suited in red;
the ladies in blue carried bags of pink petals
they strew in the path of their men bearing rosewood
and they bowed as he passed, avoiding his eye
that was bluer and cold as the sea.
Okay, another day, another coupla defeats. But, I think I know what I need to do in this fight with the monster. He’s big and swinging a sword at me (James) but he’s slow. It doesn’t look like the handgun has any effect on him, but I finally realized that I can’t escape down the stairwell at all, and if I can just remain calm (that includes waiting to start pushing buttons until after the non-interactive video segment finishes), I can dodge his blade by running past him back and forth. It’s all in the control, of my instincts as well as of the story. This is where my own experience (not helping so far) and the experience of the game begin to blend.
But the timing is critical, and I must keep my wits about me, just as does Harold, when he slips and falls but uses his Purple Crayon to save himself. And even as I control the story (as Harold drew his own), I must know how to quickly react over things that I do not control (Harold drawing water and a sailboat). I must learn to watch carefully, remain alert, not panic, but know when to shag my ass to escape annihilation.
Even as I learn the ins and outs of new media, the question is always there, popping up in various forms: Can new media carry the impact of the words of some of our greatest writers? And if so, in what form of enhancement? Movies obviously have bridged the gaps, but still fall short in some areas while overwhelming static text in many ways simply by the capabilities of audio and visual effects.
But can someone like McCarthy’s Suttree be more fully realized than McCarthy has written him? Can the others?
"The old man looked up at him. From under the whites of his eyeballs peeked a rim of the red flame that raged in his head. You come back and find me dead, he began. Find me layin here dead, you just throw some coaloil on me and set me alight. You hear?"
I don’t think that even as McCarthy conjures up all sorts of images in his readers, can one come up with too much more imaginative embellishment of one’s own. He provides all the words to give you the image. There’s rarely a need to look any further than that.
McCarthy as interactive fiction? I don’t know. From where he leads you in, and once you’re there, I think you’d be a damn fool to venture any further on your own.
or, "Learn to Love Your Arrow Keys"
Well, James and me is doin’ the Texas two-step in the hallway just inside the Blue Door to Hell. One of the necessary learnings of gameplay for the novice gamer is the arrow keyboard which is rarely used by the text writer and casual computer user. But in interactive narrative, these and other hot keys are vital to the process and must be practiced and fine tuned until it becomes as normal as typing letters in order to maneuver the character and navigate the story as it is presented. Speed counts. He who is pokey is destroyed.
Part of the culture, part of the story world that if the reader user is going to interact, he must learn the language, and that language is based upon the keyboard (or perhaps a joystick, but I’ve never really needed to learn about those so far, albeit it sounds interestingly kinky).
So as I learn through practice how to move within the story, my plan is to progress to the Polka by mid-afternoon.
With words alone, a winter day:
Silent, cold, grey overtoned white, smelling and tasting of water.
Elaborated:
A chill dampness that penetrates a soul to color it grey, leaving the mind wanting of flavor and sniffing like hounds after rabbit for the red blood scent of life.
In this morning’s BBC:
"Pocket-sized devices that let people carry around video and images are set to have a big year in 2005, according to industry experts."
Now I’m smart enough to know that once it hits the news, the stock price in the device manufacturer’s and software has already resulted. But…
Look ahead, to the optical industries, and I would consider sinking my stock money into eyeglass and contact lense makers.
Unbelievable; that a heavily biased piece of propaganda can win the People’s Choice Award for best film, Moore’s Farenheit 9/11. Kinda makes me lose a little bit of faith in the American public. Of course they/we also voted Will and Grace the best TV comedy, and to me, that’s one of the dumbest shows going.
What bothers me most about Farenheit 9/11 is its labeling itself as a documentary, although I suppose the definition is one that is debatable. The slant is irrelevant, although I see it as the highest funded-form of Bush bashing prior to an election. I’ll say it here, I voted for the other guy, the loser, but for very different reasons than most others.
And as for Will and Grace, before you label me homophobic, that’s not the case. Every character in that program is equally ridiculous and unfunny. But what these results can reveal is saddening; that people are coerced into believing things just in order to be hip and cool.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology