This symposium was pretty entertaining and informative seeing as it was my class’s questions (my question was the only that didn’t get answered.. *sadface*) so we’d already discussed the concepts in some depth.

But before we got to that there were more hypertext questions. The one about video games was fascinating, in that it’s so easy to pass it off as nerdy le3t gaming mumbo jumbo, but it’s the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Is a video game a hypertext? Short answer – no. Hypertext is mainly based around storytelling whereas a game isn’t.
Adrian’s point about the difference between a narrative in a game was that games are not about storytelling; they’re defined by a notion of winning. You don’t win stories, you read them. For example, is there any narrative element in Tetris?!

There’s no beginning, middle and end, no conflict, no main characters or love interest, no hero or villain; no narrative principles. It’s about winning.
Is there any narrative to Ball-in-a-cup?

Nope. It’s about catching a ball-in-a-cup. Nothing more, nothing less. BALL IN A CUP! (that’s stuck in my head now…)

What this has proved is that video games don’t rely on narrative; but they can include them. Games like GTA, Saints Row, LA Noire and most other console video games are strongly based around their narrative storyline.

The QWERTY keyboard fact was pretty cool; it was created 120 or so years ago to stop typists (mainly females) from typing too fast as they could quite easily jam the keys on the typewriter. I can’t imagine typing on an ABC keyboard, that’s so foreign.

Recommendation hierarchies; a notion directly relevant to our reading this week. Amazon’s seemingly simple ‘recommendations’ algorithms based on your previous activity or purchases was pretty revolutionary. Most social networking somewhat uses this to make your experience as personal and individual as possible, instead of feeling like you’re part of a mass market with identical interests as everyone around you. Instagram; your dashboard is entirely personalised by you and users you like. Facebook will show posts on your newsfeed that it feels you’ll be interested in, Spotify will flat out recommend songs for you and almost every online shopping outlet will have some sort of “Similar items” or “recommended for you” thing going on.

Finally, building the network (related to ‘The Long Tail’) will require us linking around to each other and tagging students instead of just the media blog. Which I will be doing, because everyone deserves a page one ranking when they google themselves.

And bitches love pingbacks.