All i can think about. Bacon. If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life.. it’d be Bacon. 360 degrees… of Bacon. Or maybe just 6 Degrees of Bacon. Apparently, there’s a “Regina Lee” out there with only 3 degrees of Bacon. Look for yourself.

While i struggled to really be inspired by anything drawn from the lecture, something that did grab my attention was the suggestioni that Broadcast television only allows for 24 hours of broadcast a day, as opposed to the 24 hours uploaded every 5 minutes on Youtube. I mean, it’s true, but we don’t really think about it like that.

The internet has an absolutely unlimited capacity without any hierarchy. There is no location of control or centre. It is never-ending, almost like a black hole.

It is this that allows the internet to be porous, allowing networks and connections and hyperlinks to be weaved in and out, connecting people from all over the world.

6 degrees of separation, hey?

Uni and work has really gotten in the way of my valuable GTA time. Thank GOD my basketball team had a bye this week, so I was allotted some solid game time (see what i did there? ;)) Unfortunately for me, my mother has taken the liberty of watching me like a hawk and dictating my life- “why does he keep swearing?”, “this language is absolutely foul”, “what the hell kind of game are you playing?”, “why did you let your sister play?!”, “why are you so bad at driving?”, “aren’t these games for boys?”… etc. MUM, PLEASE. LEAVE ME IN PEACE. All my guy mates are warranted the peace and quiet required to play this heavily addictive game, and we spend hours on end in a party chat room yelling at our TVs in unison. It’s quite sad, really. My favourite thing about these kinds of games though, is the narrative. The fact that all the missions are linked together- it may not strictly be hypertext, but in a way, i’d say it is. We complete missions, which act as a link to the next part of the story.

So reiterating my point from earlier today, yes, in a way video games are hypertext narratives. Similar to the Sims (which I find almost equally as addictive), as you are the “controller” (to a certain extent) you are able to create your own story, more so in the Sims as you create your own life and narrative. In terms of author interpretation, video games? ehhhh, not so much. There is no way that you can see the personality of the author or game designer through a video game. I agree with Adrian in the sense that the narrative is the thing with the personality- you can see within the game, or the characters in the game, that they change and develop and they are a certain way- but this doesn’t mean the author is. So, what? Just because the game has car chases, bank robberies, strip clubs, dysfunctional families and crazy killers, does that mean the author does? No! (I hope not), honestly, the only facts we can really draw from this is that the game was marketed to a certain demographic- mostly males, aged…. what, like 15-30? All we can deduce about the author is that he knows what his target audience wants. And what the audience wants, the audience gets.

No complaints here!

In all honesty, I am going to get nothing done this week, i just know it.

For all of you who don’t know… GTA V came out last night- Now,it just so happens that as I went to post about it, I saw this post about video games being hyperlink narratives… And I think to an extent, yes, video games can be hypertext narratives- Of course in GTA there is a set storyline, but much like “The Sims”, you are the controller. You control where they go, what weapons they use, what car they drive, how fast they drive them, etc. Of course these actions are limited, so in a way, perhaps not. But aren’t our actions limited too?

What’s different about this GTA is the fact that there are 3 protagonists, unlike the usual single protagonist, GTA V allows character switches between characters- you jump through the map to “catch up” with the other protagonists and take over from wherever their built-in, systemised mind takes them, for example, more often than not I find Michael sitting in his parked car, doing absolutely nothing; understandable, since he has the most dysfunctional family, like, ever. 

But there is a major, major difference this time in the control you have as a character- much the same as usual, you can change your appearance, go to the gym, even the gentlemen’s club, get drunk, or high, highjack planes and everything under the sun! But this time, you have three different characters with three different personalities in which to do so, allowing so many more variations in “choosing your own adventure”.

Something that really caught my attention in the lecture was the idea that a story must contain truth claims, whether it be truth claims made in “a world” or “the world”. Where a documentary makes truth claims about “THE world”, fictional narratives make truth claims about “A world”-

While authors can control the truth claims they decide to make, they cannot control the interpretation of their work- similar to my post on “the gap”, the reader interprets material for themselves based on past experience and cultural knowledge, they treat the material as the object it represents, and as suggested in the lecture, “the piece has the personality, not the author”.

In my interpretation, this means that we don’t learn anything about the author through their works; we just learn about the piece. we learn about the characters, the qualities and tone of the piece, and its mood, but we cannot push these assumptions on to the author.

Personally, I hate e-books. No matter the hours a day I spend on a computer without my eyes hurting, the minute I try to get down to some serious reading, my eyes start to scream. Books were made to be held, to have the pages rustle as you flip them, to have that sweet heady, old, back-in-time, scent, and to be treasured, swapped, given, but never lost. You can give a book for a present, but would you give someone a USB with a bunch of PDFs on it for their birthday? I don’t think so!

Doesn’t that just prove to you the value of books?

But of course, I like the idea of e-books. The idea that we’re able to carry an entire library in the palm of our hands, and never having to deal with the discomfort of having dog-eared pages. It’s smart, compact, convenient… I get it. And it’ll probably take over as the main source of reading distribution. But much like the vinyl record, the book is never going away.

similarly to the spaces in a comic book, all work relies on “the gap”- the space between action in which an audience needs to assume what happens. These assumptions are based on past experience and cultural context, so it would make sense that we read “not with the intent of the author”. We apply our own learnings to these situations- say in one frame, we see someone holding a gun, then the screen goes to black, and we hear a gunshot- we can only assume who was shot, and we make these assumptions based on our knowledge of our surroundings.

This is used frequently in drama television; Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, and all the other typical girl shows I watch. Then again, it also happens at the end of GTA III. Luckily, in TV shows, we are given closure when the next episode comes out and we finally see what happened.

And that’s how hypertext works too, hypertext leaves way for recurrence, and takes away the linearity of text- because we are the active audience, we make the narrative choices, we [somewhat] control the story, just reducing “the gap”.