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 It’s outdated, man, we need to set our minds free.”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