I tried my hand at making a twine game of my own. You can play it by clicking here. It’s a little autobiographical and I hope it isn’t too depressing because I’m really blithe and fatalistic about the whole thing.

But seriously, you can play it on loop so all you do is wake up, play Candy Crush and fall asleep again. I engineered that very deliberately.

I liked the world of twine games a whole lot. Some were better than others — I have a lot of respect for Ke$ha but I don’t really care about her music enough to make that particular game work for me — and some were boring but very clever. Depression Quest really interested me in particular because it was actually the best representation of depression that I’ve ever come across. I don’t consider it a particularly big secret that I have depression (seriously, play my game) and the way DQ offered you the option of what you know you ought to do (things like Have an honest conversation or Relax and have a good time) but didn’t let you click it was so clever in mimicking the frustration and helplessness of this illness.

I also loved the absolute immersion of With Those We Love Alive. I think the bizarre prose it what drew me in, but I loved wandering around the world that the author had created. Sometimes the dead ends of twine games annoy me because I feel like they can be a bit superficial in their description; I don’t really have a strong enough grasp on the world to want to meander around in it. In WTWLA, I just enjoyed wandering through the strange, empty laneways of that kingdom. A lesson, then: don’t skimp on the description if you’re going to rely on the patience of your audience.

For very very important reference: a link to a very important album (the deluxe version, natch) / the case study for my essay.

Jenkins, Green, Ford — Designing for spreadability

• First off, nobody can guarantee something will go viral. C’mon, man
  • To be fair, Mekanism has a good handle on their audience (the youth)
• Spreadability is determined by “process of social appraisal”, “active participation of engaged audiences”. This doesn’t mean that media artefacts can’t be designed to optimise their chances of virality
• The uncertainty principle
  • Difficulty of predicting and measuring success – even demand is foggy
  • Response in entertainment media industries has been to overproduce i.e. throw as much at the wall as they can and hope enough sticks to turn a profit. Sequels are a big part of this, hoping to see some of the cash from the popular original. See also: the seventeen new Alvin and the Chipmunks features
  • This favours spreadable media in particular because audiences hold it to a different standard of production quality, meaning it can manufacture even more media. This is why nobody minds that Friendlyjordies sets most of his videos on his porch
  • In this day and age, content is more likely to succeed and spread if…
    • It’s on-demand (YouTube)
    • It’s easy to share (quotable and grabbable)
    • It’s reusable (gif potential)
    • It’s widely relevant (maximise potential audience)
    • It’s regular (hit subscribe!)
  • Good, potentially viral media pays attention to the “patterns and motivation of media circulation”
• Perceived value is deeply important, which is why juice brands work with weird, rich, beautiful teenagers on Instagram
• Spreadability feeds into lifestyle – I define myself as the kind of person who drinks fancy juice, I want to align myself with these beautiful juice people
• Rushkoff: “Content is just a medium for interaction between people”
• Producerly texts and cultural resources
  • Fiske: mass culture v popular culture which is “meaningfully integrated into peoples’ lives”
  • Messages are encoded into content and then decoded from a text. Audiences will interpret meaning whether producers like it or not and often deviate from the intended meaning. This is why fanfiction is so terrifying
  • Although a friend of mine wrote an 80,000 Harry Potter fanfiction this one time and she’s pretty switched on so I guess they’re not all awful. I haven’t read it but I’d really like to
  • How to nudge media artefacts into cultural resource status: openness that affords the audience an opportunity to see their own experiences in it, add something of themselves to it
  • Sidebar: this text references somebody called Grant McCracken and that, without doubt, is the best name I have ever heard
  • Traditional branding theory: “controlling meaning rather than inspiring circulation”. Anti-meme culture
• Highly spreadable content
  • Shared fantasies: nostalgia, aspirational lifestyles, OTP nonsense
  • Humour: dangerous territory – requires intimate understanding of the publics’ ethical codes. If it works, audience will build upon the joke, often through parodies
  • Parody and references: respect and understanding of the community
  • Unfinished content: interaction, puzzle-solving
  • Mystery: is it genuine? Is this a real person or an actor?
  • Timely controversy: a rallying cry
  • Rumours: if people think your chicken brand is owned by the KKK, watch out

Gambarato – Signs, Systems and the Complexity of Transmedia Storytelling

• Signs have an “open nature”, can really be anything
• Interact with the sign first, which stands for an object and is then interpreted
  • Substitute > object > context
• Signs as intersection and means of exploring the internal and external (mind and physical world)
• System: the idea of the total of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts
• There’s a lot of Latin in this reading
• Uh oh, here’s Aristotle
• A system is made up of its composition (what’s in it), environment (context) and structure (how the composition and environment relate)
• Open and closed systems (with or without an external structure)
  • What’s an external structure, you ask? Well, Gambarato never really clarifies so you get to guess! Isn’t this fun.
  • I’m assuming he means the possibility for public collaboration
• Seriously, am I stupid or is Gambarato assuming a whole lot of prior knowledge? Maybe / probably both
• Supersystem, system and subsystem entwined in transmedia storytelling
  • Supersystem: the entire transmedia experience – the universe
  • System: means of experiencing this world, platforms
  • Subsystem: character, plot etc
• Cultural attractors “draw together a community” and cultural activators give them “something to do”
• Lance Weiler, who clearly wasn’t paid enough attention as a child, declares: “Audience is dead”.
  • His point about a shift from passivity to collaboration is better

A few stray thoughts after the first two weeks of the Story Lab…

• So much of this is being facilitated by the internet and the way it facilitates community and knowledge. It’s the flip-side of my grandmother’s conviction that our brains are turning to goo because we don’t need to remember things a, ny more. Maybe not, but we need to be able to make connections and links, think laterally, more than ever before. We have all the information at our fingertips, in the huge database of the general internet, and need to use deduction and problem-solving skills to wade through it, follow relevant paths, and retain the essential information that makes it possible to figure out what’s happening and where to go next.

• I have a new appreciation for the nerds of the 20th century. It’s easy to be a nerd these days. If you’re interested in something, you can really leap into it. You don’t have to write in to Making a Murderer Fan Club PO Box 11, Milwaukee WI; you just find the subreddit, buy a creepy shirt from Etsy, and you’re good to go. If you’re interested, you can easily branch out further into the genre, listen to the Last Podcast on the Left like the loser you are, buy another creepy t-shirt, watch the documentary they recommend and then leave a scathing Rotten Tomatoes review about it. But the director had potential, so you Google what else they’ve done, read their blog, write about it on your own blog, and so the whole cycle continues. The leaps that we make so quickly must have been agonising before the internet. My brain can’t comprehend it. Where did people leave their scathing film reviews?

• I’m also amazed that cult films — or even confusing films– flourished before the internet. “Did you get it?” is a question I don’t even bother to ask anymore, because I know that someone else has Yahoo Answer’d my question before I even touch the computer. I guess that’s why my dad saw Star Wars so many times at the cinema. He probably had to take notes. And he didn’t have the collective weight of the internet behind any madcap theories he might have formed; just the Friends of Middle Earth society at uni. I’m so glad I don’t have to rely on people at uni to listen to my fervent belief that the Zodiac Killer was the Unabomber all along.
• Going along, then, I’d like to think more about the relationship fan communities have with transmedia

Jenkins – Searching for the Origami Unicorn

• “To truly appreciate what we are watching, we have to do our homework” – a really fascinating point, not just relevant to the Matrix Tied in w technology of era
• Media convergence – narrative no longer needs to be contained – and can’t be, once it gets so sprawling – to one medium
• Era of collective intelligence – each participant (author, reader, spectator, producer etc) informing and building upon each other, creating a circuit
• Each element must be self-contained, enjoyable without having seen any of the rest, and all must serve as potential entry-points into the narrative world
• Sheer amount of work that goes into successful transmedia stories means that they need contribution and collaboration from the “audience” – an outdated term for a passive group that transmedia audiences certainly aren’t
• A transmedia “base” (eg a film) needs to have enough resources to sustain the other platforms
  • I don’t know if transmedia will always need a base but at the moment, I think it absolutely does. It’s shifting, but to current, mainstream audiences the Matrix is a film first
• Don’t underestimate the power of the pause button
• The fine line between “smart storytelling” and “smart marketing”—transmedia is not licencing Darth Vader to Covergirl to sell branded lipsticks. Similarly, a video game can be a clumsy reinterpretation of the original media rather than adding to the world of the narrative
  • Cross-promotion (static) heading towards co-creation (fluid) instead
• Transmedia can’t be an afterthought – must be created from the ground up together, or carefully and relevantly included afterwards
• Fan communities as an extension of transmedia? What about fanfiction, headcanon, various theories people come up with?
• Co-creation – acknowledging and embracing different styles rather than going for a uniform look or plot structure
• “Storytelling has become the art of world building”
• Reliance on understanding from audience – assumes you have some background or common knowledge so you can piece together an inherent understanding. Leads to confusion when an audience member’s scope of knowledge is outside of the “pre-requisite”
• You can’t force the audience to participate in transmedia – how do you make them curious enough to explore the larger world of the narrative without feeling unfulfilled if they choose not to?
• Why the internet and fan communities are so important – you don’t have to understand it all, you just have to understand enough and know where to go and who to ask if you don’t understand

Giovagnoli – Plan Transmedia

• The audience member should get enough from transmedia to entertain themselves, and then a different experience from sharing with their community
• Essential guidelines for creating transmedia
  • Frequent clarification of small plot points in different media
  • Clear explanation of the relationships among different media
  • Presence of repeated bridges between media
  • Adoption of editorial strategies suitable for audience engagement
• Alternate reality games – an interactive game that uses the real world as its platform
• What is the ‘shape’ of the communicative system across media? Need a map to create a cohesive and well-linked world
• Flat and curved systems (the shape of the world’s universe). Flat is more straightforward, moving on a single infinite plane, whereas the curved universe sees the artefacts warp in organic or even unexpected ways
  • A spherical system moves its media together, shuffling them and growing them together
  • A saddle system disperses them, fragmenting the artefacts but allowing them to spread further
• Crucial narrative dimension of a transmedia project is the way the audience interacts with it and its call to action – and this must be controlled to an extent, or the transmedia journey won’t make sense and the audience will lose interest
  • Creation of a cross-media intervention principle: motivation to act (primer) > sense of action (referral) > reward for action done by audience (reward)
  • Primer: activated by suspense, curiosity (eg cliffhanger)
  • Referral: how to satisfy that curiosity (eg website link)
  • Reward: curiosity satisfied or encouraged, starting the cycle again (eg learning the ending)
• I don’t mind admitting that I struggle with physics and that the rest of this reading, no matter how hard I tried, skated over my head. Specifically, the relevance of it

Eco – Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertexual Collage 

• Recipe for a cult object
  • Love for object from the audience
  • A “completely furnished world”, where additions can be recognised as part of this same universe
• A successful cult object can be broken apart and still be recognisable (eg quotable lines, iconic sets)
• Again, the idea appears of a coded structure for representing archetypes – a huge reliance on a contemporary body of knowledge that’ll be redundant in a century
  • Important to find a point where these archetypes are still fascinating
• Element of déjà vu – not an unpleasant reminder of films that have come before and after
  • “Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion”
• Postmodern films seek to emulate the organic, ethereal banality of Casablanca. Is it possible to succeed?
• Cult films have so many layers of this prescribed knowledge (or in-jokes, essentially) that the cultish element forms around people who are clued in enough to catch on. But this is more easily facilitated in the world of the internet, where you don’t have to get it by yourself – you just have to be part of a community where everybody gets it a little bit

Manovitch – the Database

• Database as a pair to the narrative, holding media artefacts which exist without a story. Narrative items organised in cause-and-effect pattern whereas database items exist in vacuum
• Expression of a database in a multitude of ways, eg a virtual museum seen through a CD-ROM (ha)
• Gives us the option to explore information in our own way, creating a different “narrative” for each person based on their interaction – sometimes. The act of exploration doesn’t necessarily create a narrative; narrative must have qualifying factors of…
  • An actor and a narrator
  • Three levels: the text, story, and fabula
  • Contents a “series of connected events caused or experienced by actors”
• A database is not immediately an “interactive narrative” – author must exercise enough control to satisfy above criteria
• Web pages are also a new way of storytelling via database
  • And those databases can be linked, creating a sort of mega-database
  • The internet is never finished – databases can grow organically as they’re updated
• Storytelling through algorithm: execute and win (hidden logic of a “world”)
• Virtual world comprised of databases (information) and algorithms (ways of understanding)
• Data collection obsession of the 90s produces cultural algorithm: reality > media > data > database
• The syntagmatic and the paradigmatic
  • Syntagmatic: “combination of signs, which has space as a support” – real
  • Paradigmatic: “units which have something in common are associated in theory and thus form groups within which various relationships can be found” – imagined
  • What
  • Eg: the words of a sentence that materially exist are syntagmatic, whereas the sets that they exist in in the reader’s imagination are paradigmatic (I think?)
  • This is reversed when virtual (but I really don’t understand it enough to know what that means) – is it because the database presents us with nothing but choices from which we form a sort of syntagmatic trail from? Rather than reading a sentence and imagining the other words that could have been used, we’re looking at every word possible and making choices through interactive interface
• Quote Manovitch, two joints deep: “Like, what even is language, dude? Why do we, like, constrain ourselves? It’s outdated, man, we need to set our minds free.”
• Overspill of database-esque systems of organisation into traditional media eg a film being organised by colour rather than narrative
• Vertov: his “kino-eye” is decoding the world, assembling it into a database – here is the merging of database and narrative

Murray – Agency

• The satisfaction of meaningful action and results from the choices we make – essential in the experience of databases – but rarely in the narrative (except for those choose your own adventure Goosebumps books)
  • Even when it does exist, our agency is limited because we are aware of expectations
• Is it possible to strike a balance between coherence and true agency?
  • Yes – on a computer, where you are the god of your own virtual reality
• Moving narrative to computers offers opportunity to translate it into the ‘language’ games operate in
• Pleasure of exploration, like when you fall into a conspiracy theory Wikipedia binge
• Adventure maze – builds on the exploration by incorporating puzzles, computers can take this further by making the maze infinitely exploreable. Finite mazes have heavy consequences
• Rhizome – a maze with no logic that never ends, therefore there are no consequences
• Potential of the labyrinth to include the best parts of the two – anxiety (consequence-linked) essential (suspense, fear of getting lost, fear of attackers etc)
• Violence hub – database of experiences linked to one event, such as a plane crash – clear sense of narrative even though it’s not a linear one
• Journey stories – combine exploration and puzzle-solving
• Games as symbolic dramas, even when entirely luck-based. What’s the difference between rolling dice and buying a lottery ticket?
• The most common form of gaming is the earliest form of narrative: the contest
• Agency is so direct in fighting games, for example; a click equals an immediate explosion on the screen
• So how much authorship do players extend over the worlds that they mould? Remember the distinction between “a creative role in an authored environment” and actually being an author
  • Look for the author in the rule-writer
  • The ultimate difference between authorship and agency

I’ve been thinking about something very specific Matthews said, and it’s been bothering me. It’s not really fair to hold 115 year-old thoughts to modern standards, but I’m going to do it anyway at the risk of looking like a nit-picking bully. It’s his contention that a short story must exist over one day, in one place, just so. I agree absolutely that a short story must have a central theme, a thread to follow. But I think it’s incredibly short-sighted to essentially lump in the short story with the play, confined by a stage, a budget and general human limitations that the written word oughtn’t be subjected to. (Read too much from 1901 and you’ll start using words like “oughtn’t”, apparently.)

The example I want to use is a lovely short story: Married Love by Tessa Hadley. It follows a young woman through the eyes of her brother, from a premature wedding to her professor to the drudgery of middle age. Now I think about it, there is something of a play about it – the sets are clearly defined and laid out for us in loving detail. Excruciating, some might say, but that’s really just down to preference. With the scenery so well-described, I found myself not really minding too much that the characters were sketches. The world that they operated in felt so real that they felt real too, by extension.

The most striking thing is, of course, the several decades the story spans. It focusses on key points, obviously; mostly the reveal of the engagement and a visit to the couple’s house years later. The contrast is stark. Home, the first time around, is warm and soft and cozy as only rainy Sunday mornings can be. The second time, it’s a dingy flat strewn with the debris of messy children and their dissatisfied parents. Everybody can see her future about to fall apart but her, and then we see her in the mess of a broken life. She’s given up her passions and lives in tracksuits. It’s depressingly human.

It serves as inspiration for my first project brief, too. At this stage (who knows, it may change) I want to write over a period of time – a little over a hundred years – and Married Love has given me a good sense of how to achieve this without alienating and confusing the readers. I like the idea of boiling down a lifetime into a few morning conversations. I wonder if I can achieve it in my own writing.

Matthews, B 1901, The Philosophy of the Short-Story, 1st edn, University Press, Cambridge, U.S.A.

• Favouring of the novel over the short story as if it were a higher form of art
• Short story vs short novel (“novelet”) – inherently different (novelet is just a small novel, after all)
• “A true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short” (p 15)
• “Unity of impression” (p 15) – short story is more “precise” in the choices it makes
• Short story contained: one action, one place, one day (this is first degree nonsense)
  • Makes a more interesting further point: the short story has one thing to say – one key emotion or theme to convey, that might span decades or not. The narrative centres around it anyway
• “The Short-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, while the Novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes” (p 17), “unity of impression” (p 17)
• Novels are tedious because they conventionally must contain lovers and a hero / heroine; short stories are not bound by this constraint
• “Love seems to be almost the only thing which will give interest to a long story” (p 20)
• The short story writer doesn’t have time to be ploddingly descriptive, must find concise and vivid ways to present the environment
• Fantasy + ethics = big tick from Matthews (fantasy as a reflection of the inner self also highly commendable)
• A beginning writer would do better to write short stories than launch into a novel – teach themselves how to tell a story
• Matthews takes time to honour the great American tradition of bashing the English. He thinks the French are pretty good, though

Dahl – Lamb to the Slaughter

• First off, I love this (and all) of Roald Dahl’s adult fiction
• Action contained, much like a play – the living room, kitchen, and Sam’s grocery. Characters, slightly two-dimensional (fleshed out by our preconceptions and the plot) move through it
• Very little backstory – all action contained in the moment (Mary’s reaction to the news of her husband’s affair rather than a flashback)
• Matthews’ principle of one day, one location, one action etc
• Scene set so you fill in the blanks with what the typical reader would be familiar with (slightly outdated with the wife waiting for her husband, but otherwise contemporary) – does this mean that the readability of certain short stories have an expiration date? Like how Shakespeare is sold with those guides and almost impossible to really understand otherwise
• Story does rely to an extent on clichés – the inefficient policeman, the sweet pregnant wife (of course subverting the cliché so brilliantly – elegant that Dahl keeps her mind on realistic preservation of the child but elevates Mary past role of wife and mother to very clever person and murderer)