Text Within a Text

I began playing Myst this weekend. I would have begun sooner except Best Buy and the bookstore don't make it easy to get a copy of the game. I must admit that although this isn't my first experience with the Myst series of games (I have played about 15 minutes of Myst IV, Revelation), it is the most enjoyable gaming experience I've had in a while. At first I couldn't get over what seemed to be almost overly non-linear gameplay ("should I be throwing these switches, should I go left or right, if I go right will I ever get the chance to go left?") but as the game progressed I realized that it didn't really matter what I did at this point, my goal was to get that rocket ship off the ground. Anyways, I'm not a fan of linear style games at all. I started my PC gaming with Far Cry, which was touted as the most non-linear FPS of all time. I must say that Far Cry lived up to this descrition in my opinion, while remaining a great FPS (I know many who have played Deus Ex may disagree, but I'm not that far into Deus Ex to make a good comparison). It was a fantastic game.

When it came to Myst, I knew from the readings for class that we wouldn't be a linear style game, but I was surprised with how non-linear it seemed to be at first. If you don't read the books in the library then you won't really know what you are doing on the island at all, so you might run around for an hour looking for stuff to do. I must admit that I had no idea that there was a help box at the bottom of the screen until I clicked on it by accident. I figured I'd take the hint it gave me and read more than one of those books in the library. So I meandered, or rather, I clicked my way back to the library and began reading. That's when this idea hit me. Myst, at least at this point in the game, is a series of texts within one main story. Each text seems to be represented by a different world that needs to be discovered and saved. This is a common motif throughout literature, and I found it particularly interesting to be noticing it in a game. All the different worlds that are alluded to and described in the 4 or 5 books that are legible in the library represent a new story, a new place for me to go out and discover at some point in the game. This adds to the excitement: I can't wait to meet the characters that were alluded to in the blue book, or even to discover the world that always had a gray sky...

Anyways, these were just my thoughts as I began the game. I can't wait to see what happens as the game progresses. Upon launching the shuttle I realized I hadn't read all the books in the library, so I went back and did that, which is when the realization hit me that there were many different stories, all contained within one greater story going on in this game.

Happy gaming!

The "system" of textual analysis

Something that really hit me while reading today, especially the Kirschenbaum material was the idea that machine level instructions are even a form of media. Think about the way that a blank word document, in and of itself is constructed of many thousands of lines of code. Just because that code is not inherently visible to us in its raw form does not mean that it doesn’t exist and have meaning. The meaning of the code is, in and of itself, reflected to us as the lines and the white, blank space right before us. Everything on page, even the blinking cursor waiting for us to give it meaning, to formulate some grand new scheme has in and of itself a pre-determined meaning: a code which makes it blink and exist. A code that defines it. We are simply manipulating (or re-defining/interpreting) that code so that it will have the meaning that we assign to it. I suppose in that vein we could even argue that the very words themselves that we type are also comprised of some sort of coded language, and therefore the representation of the letter “p” on this screen is the result of a system of actions that must take place on a hardware level and therefore comprise their own language and code within themselves. Fascinating! Thinking about this in terms of the book, I began to understand the “technology” of the book in much clearer terms. The book itself is a measurable product of some reaction (on a chemical level for the paper/binding) or even of a physical labor. Each one of these sets of technological definition of the book also has it’s own inherent subset of technology which enable it to occur. For example, the books pages were created as a result of the technology which drives the lumber industry. From the saw that cuts it down to the chemical stripper which makes it easier to write on, a piece of paper can be viewed as a system and a language in and of itself. I suppose that is where the readings have taken me since last night when I posted: system-level thinking about the inputs and outputs which comprise the physicality of the book, whether it be on a computer or in a book form, each has a system which can be defined in non-definite, interpretive ways.

Gaming group formation and dates are pretty much set. It's really going to be an exciting adventure to think about the games that we've chosen within the context of what we have discussed in class thus far. Something that really has piqued my interest is the idea that games are a form of text, a form of representation of information that can be traced back into the roots of our culture. I suppose that I've never really thought of games as anything more than an avenue by which I could find some time to myself and engage in something that excites and involves me. Just within the first few classes I have begun to realize that games are nothing more than a new form of media, that everything, from the platform they are played on to the content and coding which makes them "live" can be viewed from a textual point of view. When I think about it, the ideas of games as a form of text and media that we are forming really isn't all that divorced from the stir that books themselves caused as they gained popularity (specifically around the Victorian era, where reading books that were not part of the canon was looked down upon).
To this end, I suppose it makes sense to mention that I am also taking Talmadge Wright's Sociology 123 course: Pop Culture and Mass Media. Much of what we are discussing seems to be matching up well with his class, and the ideas that I have been developing from each class have been feeding off of each other. One thing that I'm looking forward to investigating in the video game that our group plays is the different forms of violence that we see in games, and how the age group that a game is developed for seems to be the thermometer which decides how much "gore" a game is allowed to have. It doesn't only depend on what genre the game is, or what age group it is marketed towards that determines the amount of violence a game has. The platform it is played on is also marketed to certain groups. For example, the Wii is generally marketed towards a much more diverse group than the Xbox 360. The result is that the Xbox has more "adult oriented" games than the Wii. Also, the violence in some Wii games (not all) is less copious than in Xbox or PS3 games. This idea matches up well with the ideas of McGann in that we cannot simply look at one aspect of our "text", we must investigate all facets of what it has to offer in order to truly understand it, and also in order to ackowledge the fact that it has multiple meanings for multiple people.