The most precious thing in the World

Hi! my name is Soh Ning Ge, Christopher.

I was born on the 20th October, 2006 at 0849hrs to my happy and proud parents.

Everyone thinks I'm adorable and have lots of hair. My eyes, lips and legs are probably from my Mum while I got my nose, fingers and hair from Daddy.

I'm so lucky about 40 - 50 people came to visit me in hospital and showered me with gifts and love.

I can open my eyes and look around, gurgle, say "eh", scream "EEehhhh", hiccup, sneeze, cough, and am quite obedient in daytime. Once, I even pulled Daddy's spectacles off his face! Mummy and Daddy nearly paniked the first night 'cos I kept waking them up and they didn't get any sleep. Anyway, they're getting more pro at looking after me as each day goes by.

Most importantly, I feel loved and at home.

Question 6

1. In his article "I Have No Words and I Must Design: Towards a Critical Vocabulary for Games", Greg Costikyan suggests that "the search for non-game interactive entertainment is wrong-headed, inspired by a failure to apprehend games and a foolish, reflexive response to what they represent, in our culture, at this point in time. Any form of 'interactive entertainment' that isn't a game must be non-interactive; or not entertainment; or pointless." Do you agree? Support your position with reference to specific works.
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Here, I reproduce Zimmerman and Costikyan's definitions of a game, which will prove useful in this discussion:

"A game is a voluntary interactive activity, in which one or more players follow rules that constrain their behavior, enacting an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome."

"...An interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards a goal."

Games are naturally interactive, involving the user's actions to provoke a reaction from them and in turn the games output would affect the user's next chain of actions. Under Crawford's definition games definitely figure in interactivity: there is "a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak.” He points out that participation does not mean interaction unless that participation is active and has influence over the other's outcome. In sum, the two actors need to be purposefully involved in all three stages. In games between people like chess, the players have to pay close attention to their opponent's movements (listening), actively reason how the last move affects them before making their own move (thinking and speaking). Manovich, Crawford and Costikyan all seem to put forward the idea that if something is computerized, or electronically powered, it automatically becomes interactive by nature. As in Crawford's example of opening and closing the fridge to induce a light to turn on or off, lower forms of interactivity exist even with household automated appliances. Computer games would represent achieving higher levels of interactivity.

So is there such a thing as non-game interactivity? We have contrasting views here: Scott McCloud and George Legrady certainly think that comics are interactive works where complex forces of time, motion, space and sound become subjective according to the reader's interpretation and the narrative trajectory is changed as a result of how he/she constructs meaning from viewing and assembling the panels. The proposition that interactivity is impossible outside the realm of games is also an insult to people crediting film montages to induce watchers to fill in meaningful gaps between the story. For sure, movies and comics are entertaining and purposeful to us, and introducing non-linearity into the narrative requires some effort from the reader/viewer to respond mentally rather than passively receiving the images (and sound in the case of movies).

The interactivity debate seems to centre around the module title: narrative and play(or gaming) are opposite ends of the pole, not independent of each other, neither are they mutually exclusive. When they meet there is a struggle between offering choice in interactivity and having a basic structured form remaining fixed. Games do better on the interactive side: there are goals and the players involved have to beat obstacles in the game to overcome it and win by achieving the goals despite being constrained by the rules and context of the game. When we consider movies and comics, the narrative structured form is the main form of entertainment, though the reader/watcher cannot direct the movie or move the sentences around the page a level of interactivity does exist for those who choose to immerse wholly into the narrative. The story becomes "alive" and the characters interact with them (in some films they actually know they are being watched, The Truman Show?). Although I do not disagree that games are interactive, it would be too severe a statement to dismiss all non-gaming media as non-interactive or "pointless" in my point of view. It really all depends on your frame of mind, as McCloud would say.

Questions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3

1. Both hyptertext and IF work by means of links between lexia chunks and only when pieced as a whole can one gain the entirety of the narrative. In terms of differences, the hypertext still maintains a distance from the reader/user in that he or she take a more passive role than IF, where first-person interaction is a requirement for input of instructions to produce output reactions from the system. Uncovering the story requires more effort on the reader/user because there is neither preconceived knowledge of the fantasy world the story is built in nor a history of the character you are “born” into. As in “For a Change”, nontrivial effort is really needed to uncover the metaphoric coding the language goes through. In fact, all IF demand some form of detective work to be done and thus it provides a high level of satisfaction when one can solve the riddles and puzzles but can in turn render one frustrated and irritated if the game is of a high difficulty. Also, it seems that IF has a higher level of interactivity than hyptertext fiction because you have to physically key in correct commands to advance the plot compared to clicking the mouse on the text, and also the risks involved are higher (you can die) so the ‘play’ component factors in stronger.

In considering the similarities, one could point out that there still is a narrative determined by the author, albeit split into fragments between kernels and satellites. The user undergoes engagement with the text via the computer medium to reorder the narrative and something is changed in this experience – perhaps the story is made much more subjective and personal, forcing the user to more physically re-enter and exit between the real world and the world within the narrative structure so transcoding occurs.

2. The Carl comics are essentially unfolded panel-by-panel in a linear manner dependent on the viewer’s choice of directing the narrative. In a sense there is a physical construction of pictures to form a whole picture of what happens to Carl and control is granted to the reader so he becomes an active participant in the narrative – a kind of authorship. However my problem is that it is rather non-ergodic because the type of effort required to traverse the text is trivial and the kernels are laid out already (Carl will die from drinking and driving). Whatever additional information is subsidiary to the final event and has to be linearly formed, so I do not consider it cybertext.

3. For the play to be defined as interactive in Crawford’s terms, it has to entail the 3-fold processes of listening, thinking and speaking between two actors. I would say it is a creative way of enlisting choice of the audience into the play structure, but it lacks in variety between choices. The 2 choices granted to the audience is limited in scope (at one point the princess always faints no matter what the choice is) and really if the audience returns for consequent shows to see other outcomes they would feel cheated as the outcomes are too similar to give the feeling of true choice. It is interactive because there is a cause-effect going on, but it is interactive on a low scale, reflecting that interactivity might not always be a good or viable thing across different genres.