Narrating in the New Media
My my... what difficult readings we have. Chatman is true to his name and while he was chatting away to himself, I was trying my best to understand his verbosity. But the module is starting to make a tiny bit of sense after an initial rusty start-up from the engines that power this brain of mine. It is a feeble start after a month of wedding ups and downs, another a trip all over 4 US states, and lastly one of inertia.
Question 2.1
1) Choosing a narrative piece, discuss how the transposition to/from interactive media has changed it. Has the structure of the narrative remained intact?
Summarizing Chatman's theory that "transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium”… he supports Bremond that a narrative can be transformed (transposed) from one medium to another, without being affected in its core elements, and goes further to say that this trait makes it a single, whole structure. Therefore, by right, a story can be told in as many media but essentially remain unchanged in its events and existents.
However, he does not consider the realm of interactive media, which of course is partly decided by the story-teller, and partly the reader/audience/player or what have you as we have learnt. And in games, the player is in some way the story-teller too.
An example would be the Spiderman 2 game on Xbox that derived from the movie, which in turn was sparked off by the comic genre. As the story moved from one media to the next, and even back (the Spiderman 2 MOVIE comic) to its original one, it changed subtly in story (existents and events) and discourse (structure of narrative transmission and manifestation). It is the same hero in the game as in the movie, and the same heroine and villains, but definitely there are parallel plots that distinguish the game separate from its predecessor. One instance is the introduction of Blackcat, an additional character, the playing down of the love theme through less scenes (and certainly Peter doesn’t reveal his identity to MJ and get married) and emphasing the action scenes. Furthermore, there is the possibility that the hero dies! Thus if Prof Alex decides to play the game exactly contrary to what the designers have in mind, he would kill himself in the main story, or carry on with sub missions. And of course we know that from print to screen, comic to box office, the movies are drastically different in characters, events, ordering of events etc. In other terms, the story can and does change in practice, because there is really no stopping the storyteller from telling the story differently.
Another example, this time from interactive to non-interactive media would be the Baulder’s Gate game which was written into a book. It had a linear and fixed discourse and only selected plot strands, characters and settings were employed to fit the unchanging, non-interactive narrative. Thus the structure was changed, though I can make an argument that the Themes are otherwise similar.
In conclusion: no, the structure does not remain intact UNLESS the story-teller wants it to.
My my... what difficult readings we have. Chatman is true to his name and while he was chatting away to himself, I was trying my best to understand his verbosity. But the module is starting to make a tiny bit of sense after an initial rusty start-up from the engines that power this brain of mine. It is a feeble start after a month of wedding ups and downs, another a trip all over 4 US states, and lastly one of inertia.
Question 2.1
1) Choosing a narrative piece, discuss how the transposition to/from interactive media has changed it. Has the structure of the narrative remained intact?
Summarizing Chatman's theory that "transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium”… he supports Bremond that a narrative can be transformed (transposed) from one medium to another, without being affected in its core elements, and goes further to say that this trait makes it a single, whole structure. Therefore, by right, a story can be told in as many media but essentially remain unchanged in its events and existents.
However, he does not consider the realm of interactive media, which of course is partly decided by the story-teller, and partly the reader/audience/player or what have you as we have learnt. And in games, the player is in some way the story-teller too.
An example would be the Spiderman 2 game on Xbox that derived from the movie, which in turn was sparked off by the comic genre. As the story moved from one media to the next, and even back (the Spiderman 2 MOVIE comic) to its original one, it changed subtly in story (existents and events) and discourse (structure of narrative transmission and manifestation). It is the same hero in the game as in the movie, and the same heroine and villains, but definitely there are parallel plots that distinguish the game separate from its predecessor. One instance is the introduction of Blackcat, an additional character, the playing down of the love theme through less scenes (and certainly Peter doesn’t reveal his identity to MJ and get married) and emphasing the action scenes. Furthermore, there is the possibility that the hero dies! Thus if Prof Alex decides to play the game exactly contrary to what the designers have in mind, he would kill himself in the main story, or carry on with sub missions. And of course we know that from print to screen, comic to box office, the movies are drastically different in characters, events, ordering of events etc. In other terms, the story can and does change in practice, because there is really no stopping the storyteller from telling the story differently.
Another example, this time from interactive to non-interactive media would be the Baulder’s Gate game which was written into a book. It had a linear and fixed discourse and only selected plot strands, characters and settings were employed to fit the unchanging, non-interactive narrative. Thus the structure was changed, though I can make an argument that the Themes are otherwise similar.
In conclusion: no, the structure does not remain intact UNLESS the story-teller wants it to.
posted by aileen @ 10:47 PM
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