Don’t Kick Food!

When reading The Book of Ti’ana, I found Anna’s actions when coming upon the machinery within the D’ni tunnels similar to what I had done while playing the game. Combining what I know of things in the real world (and especially things I have encountered in other video games) with the images I was looking at.

I dealt with the maze in the Selenetic Age of Myst the same way that Anna does with the undergound maze to D’ni. I made a map. This was no different from what I had been doing throughout the game, taking notes on everything that I came across that seemed significant (Partial list of things that video games have taught me carry significance: Stopped clocks, pipes leading from flowing water to machinery, pianos, beams of light, sounds.)

Now, I can take notes while reading a book, or while watching a film, but it strikes me that there is a difference here. Notes on a book or on a film are to aid me in recollection and interpretation - these notes are to assist me in accomplishing the game’s tasks. To draw a somewhat tired parallel, the analogue to these notes for a book would be “Read the words. Turn the page.” These notes, then, seem to have some kind of connection to the gameworld.

The perspective in Myst is first-person. The image on the screen represents what my eyes are seeing, suggesting that there is a representative of me in the gameworld whose point of view this is. The idea is strengthened with Sirrus, Achenar, and Atrus addressing me directly. By clicking on different parts of the image (such as a switch), I can affect the game world (albeit in ways limited by the game’s design). The notes that I made, however, did not work to “draw me into the game world”. Looking at the notebook next to my computer, I did not think, “This exists in the world of the game the same way I do, with my ability to affect change within it.” The assumed character representing me in the game could be imagined to be taking notes, but nothing in the game’s images suggest this.

Like Alternate Reality Games mentioned below, the game is invading non-game space - namely, the notebook on my desk. Games (and films) do this in other ways, through the use of controllers that vibrate when something explodes onscreen or surround sound (Sheila Murphy touches on the former in Live in Your World, Play in Ours: The Spaces of Video Game Identity”. The latter is something I came across in a film reader that I cannot find the source for.) Myst does this another way - framing the Book of Ti’ana as an actual historical book within the game world.

It makes sense - in playing Myst, the pleasure is derived from moving about within a different world (solving the puzzles so you can continue moving on in new areas unimpeded). In order to do this, I had to make notes outside of the “world” (if the world is to be understood as computer-bound). The construction of The Book of Ti’ana (its paratext), then, is an attempt to create a similar effect without using the medium of a video game.

Question: If The Book of Ti’ana is, in some ways, The Novelization of Anna Playing a Myst Game (though not Myst), then would her escape with Gehn through the tunnels of D’ni be cheating? She did use the walkthrough Aitrus provided.

• What is the story of Myst?
• What is the narrative?
• How would the experience of the Myst story be different if it were read as opposed to played?
• Does the game format of Myst convey something about the story that a novel form wouldn’t?
• Many people in the class have stories of watching their friends play Myst when they were younger. A few other people I talked to played the game with someone else, working together to solve puzzles. Does this change the experience? Does it change from “You are alone on this mysterious island” to “You and a friend are alone on this mysterious island”? Or does the fact that only one person can control the mouse at a time mean that there is only one character in the game world itself, therefore putting both of you into the same character’s perspective?
• Could the game be considered a second person narrative? That is, does the image of a switch being flipped act the same as a piece of text saying, “You flipped a switch”?

Mateas attempts to update Aristotle’s Poetics to work for interactive drama. This doesn’t seem to apply to Myst, as the game has no actors through which the author can convey his theme to the audience. A few of readings argue that the player becomes an author of sorts - whether or not this holds true for most interactive media, for Myst it certainly seems that the player is more of an actor than an author.

The world of the game acts as a combined script and set for the user to move through.

The Douglas and Hargadon essay provides a term that is useful for the discussion of Patchwork Girl. Shelley Jackson is consciously working to tweak and outright frustrate the schema we use to make sense of a narrative.

Schema of books: Books are made up of chapters are made up of paragraphs are made up of sentences are made up of written words are made up of letters are representative of phonetic sounds which make up spoken words which make up spoken sentences, etc.

We read from left to right, top to bottom, front to back (in English). “Front to back” is, in these phrases, the most illustrative of how our mode of reading imbues these terms with meaning. The front of a book written in English is the side facing the reader when the spine of the book is on the left and the writing is right side-up. That same physical side of a Hebrew book held that way, though, would be the back of the book.

When we are learning to write, we are taught a certain way to structure paragraphs (topic sentences!), to punctuate. Writing is standardized in a way that works to minimalize ambiguity. It is important that writing say exactly what it is meant to say, because in writing our words become divorced from our person. A reader may not be able to ask us to clarify a point in our writing the way they can if they hear us speak.

As I suggested in a previous post, hypertext stories require the reader to provide an order in which the narrative is read. Books provide this order (as stated above, we read them left to right, top to bottom, front to back). We read the first chapter before the second chapter. When events are read about in a story that occur chronologically before the events that preceded them narratively, we understand them to be flashbacks. They are considered a part of the same story mainly because the paratext of the book itself is a schema that suggests unity.

The physical structure of a book was cemented in place when the printing press was invented - the compartmentalized nature of pages (as opposed to, say the more fluid nature of scrolls) was necessary for mechanical reproduction (this idea is something I came across somewhere else, but I do not remember where). Until other machines like the typewriter and the computer printer came along, sheet size was limited by the size of the printing plate (the story of Kerouac typing On the Road on a scroll so as to avoid breaking his flow by having to change pages suggests an analog alternative way of doing things).

As several others have pointed out (in class and in blogs), there’s no sense of “where you are” at any given time in Patchwork Girl. This is intentional. From the “this writing” lexia:

When I open a book, I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future.

Why do this, though? Why break up the form of the book if it works so well in conveying a narrative? Leaving aside amorphous, though not unimportant, concepts like Patriarchy and Feminism (which I have neither the time nor the references to work with here), there are still things Patchwork Girl exposes that other texts (and their readers) must take for granted in order for the texts to make sense.

In reading, we assume that because Sentence B follows Sentence A, they are connected. Why? Because they are written that way? This isn’t necessarily the case - that’s the notion the Quilt section of Patchwork Girl explodes. Each lexia contains several sentences that seem part of a cohesive whole, but when you click on it and the font changes, the breaks are revealed. Sentences are constructed from phrases taken (or poached, if you prefer) from works written decades apart by different authors. The connection between sentences, then, comes from the order in which they are read. The structure of the text implies relation between two sentence - either because of physical proximity or because of ideas about the nature of written text shared by the writer and the reader.

It’s an extreme example that underscores the difference between writing a text and reading a text. This blog post did not spring forth from my mind in the order you are reading it - several previous paragraphs were written between my finishing this sentence and starting the next one. Narratives are everywhere - they are read, watched, experienced. Mass media provides us with hundreds of them every day. Knowing how to read these narratives is an important skill.

Learning to read is more than just learning how to spell words that are spoken. It’s about learning how to work with specific schema that both the writer and the reader understand (often unconsciously) to make meaning out of a text. The difficulty with understanding a hypertext is partially based on its different physical nature that frees it from the schema that govern books. Patchwork Girl requires a new way of reading that is related to this schema, but still different.

A problem in the adoption of hyperfiction (and video games) by a mainstream audience is this lack of standardized schema - the Storyspace Reader is different from the straight HTML navigation of Trip, which is different from the navigation around the world of Myst. In reading a book, you might not understand the written word, but the mechanics of navigating change very little from one to another (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, page-by-page, front-to-back). Once you’ve learned to turn the pages in a Dr. Seuss book, you can physically navigate most any book in the English language. This is a consistency whose absence may be one of the defining features of hyperfiction. Each text requires you to learn to read in a different way, which is not an easy thing to do if you are not used to it.

Both Patchwork Girl and Trip require the reader to derive meaning out of their “lexia” by actively making connections across multiple blocks of narrative.

In some sections, such as the journal, the lexia are connected causally. Moving from one to the next (done by clicking on the text) relates a series of events in the order that they happen. As in a book-narrative, these are written assuming that they will be read in order, mimicking the kind of writing that a book implicitly suggests in its bound-and-printed order.

These lexia can be unrelated to one another causally, but that does not mean they are unrelated to the overall narrative. In The Graveyard, for example, each body part has its own self-contained episode explaining its origins and its own temperments. The Patchwork Girl is made up of many different women, a man, and a cow. Bits of information that come back up in other parts of the story, explaining certain actions of the Patchwork Girl.

It’s tempting to refer to “other” parts of the story as “later” parts, based on the order I read them (the Graveyard before the Journal, for example). And in a way, they are. The stories of the body parts come chronologically earlier within the story, but not necessarily in the narrative.

Is this so different from how we make meaning out of a conventional narrative? After all, though a hypertext exists as a web of connections without a set path through it, we as readers still experience it as a set path. It is conceivable that one could read a book by jumping around in it - reading the chapters in a random order, for example. Would it still make sense? In the end, you’d have all the same information that you would otherwise. Certain kinds of payoffs (such as surprise endings) probably wouldn’t work as well.

In the interview linked to below, Sean Stewart talks about the nature of communication on the internet being based on gossip and sharing information. When a majority of the class was reading Trip on Monday, there was discussion not only among partners, but between groups. We were each reading the story on our own, starting from different points in the narrative. Through talking to each other, we started noticing connections between different parts of the story that, individually, would have taken much longer to come across.

If one ignores aspects of writing such as use of language, and looks at a book soley as a vehicle for telling a story, it’s conceivable that a group of people could split a book up into randomly assigned parts, read their parts, and then talk about what they read, reconstructing the story through their memories and interpretations of events. Something like this already occurs when people discuss a book they’ve read or a film they’ve seen - different people notice different things, and an open discussion allows one to develop a more complex reading of the text in question.

Hypertext requires a reader to assemble (or, perhaps not assemble, but order) a narrative from a selection of texts that can be read in almost any order. If you think about it, a chaotic series of events that we place into a narrative format is closer to the way we make sense out of real life than a book or film that presents itself in a narrative way. Whether this compulsion to narrative is biological, linguistic, cultural, or the very essence of our consciousness is debatable (locking a neurologist, a linguist, an anthropologist, and a philosophy major in a room for a week and seeing who comes out alive at the end is as good a way as any to figure out the answer to that question).