Class 10: Selected Hyperfictions

Held Thursday, September 23, 1999

Summary

• Due:
  • Hyperfiction reading.
• Assigned:
  • The Internet Paradox.
  • MUDs and MOOs.
  • Williams: Cohesion
• Writing Exercise: Muddying Writing
• Experiment/demonstration: Immersive games
• Discussion: Different reading experiences

Handouts

• Assignments:
  • The Internet Paradox.
  • MUDs and MOOs.
  • Williams, Style, Chapter 3: Cohesion.
• Carlstrom, Eva-Lise (12 May 1992). ``Better Living Through Language.'' Senior Thesis, Grinnell College.
• Curtis, Pavel (1992). ``Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities.'' From Proceedings of the 1992 Conference on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC).
• Dibbell, Julian (December 21, 1993). ``A Rape in Cyberspace.'' The Village Voice, 36-42.

Notes

• Your teaching webs can be found at
  • http://www.math.grin.edu/~portilaj/teaching-hub.html
  • http://www.math.grin.edu/~wilsonm/frontpage.htm
  • http://www.math.grin.edu/~palermo/home.html
• After some reflection, I've decided not to assign letter grades to your teaching webs. Why not?
  • It was quite difficult to do an outstanding job on this assignment and none of you did, so I would have to assign all of you a B or lower.
  • Some of you ignored key issues in the assignment (such as having a set of typed links between pages or short narratives).
  • However, it's clear that most of you had a lot of fun with the task, so I'm hoping that's the appropriate reward.
• I've evaluated the citation exercises. Many of you will have to redo one or more of the parts of the exercise.
  • A number of you misstated Ong's claims. We'll discuss interpretations in our small-group meetings.
  • Some of you have to work on your use of definite articles. (This wasn't enough for a redo, but it's something I want to make sure you consider in future works.)
  • For my class, always italicize book and journal titles. (This wasn't enough for a redo, but it's something I want to make sure you consider in future works.)
• On Monday, Bolter is speaking at Drake. A few of you have expressed interest. We'll take a college van (as long as they're not all reserved).
  • We might also consider going out to dinner beforehand or visiting shops (bookstores?) afterwards.
  • So far, Adam (pre:dead flesh,post:any), Ellen (pre:no dead meat,post:any), Isabel (pre:any,post:any), John (pre:dead anything;post:red town), Kevin (pre:pizza/burger,post:any), Marti (pre:any,post:music), Matt (pre:any,post:ambivalent), Sam (pre:Thai,Indian;post:bookstores), and Yasir (pre:any,post:any) have expressed interest (this seems to be the best place for me to keep track :-).
  • We may have a few of my research students as guests in the van.
• In your afternoon appoinments, we'll discuss your academic honesty exercises and/or your teaching webs.
• Next week, we'll move from today's graphical games to more text-based game-like virtual environments as we begin to consider communities on the 'Net.
• Adam recommends that we read the game review at http://www.gamecenter.com/Reviews/Item/0,6,0-3174,00.html.
• Today's convocation is ``Nappy Hair Revisited'' or some such. Sounds like my hair. Should be fun.

Style: Clarity, Revisited

• In the previous class session, we considered how one might improve writing using Williams's first two principles:
  • Put actions in verbs.
  • Make the characters of your story the subjects of those verbs.
• Today we'll work backwards, moving from relatively clear sentences to less clear sentences. In each of the following, identify the actions and convert them to nouns. (About ten minutes.)
  • ``I recommend that students peruse this page so that they may learn how to improve their writing.'' (A silly sentence from SamR.)
  • ``Smith proved that Jones had failed to improve the property, but the Court held that Jones had not breached their agreement.''
  • ``A writer who wants to write more coherently should trace the transitions in an editorial, a book, or a well-written article.''
  • ``Although I patiently explained how to write less elegantly, my students continued to write well and clearly.'' (A silly sentence from SamR.)
• Once we've identified the nouns, we'll try to rewrite the sentences (About ten minutes.)
• We'll then share our ``improved'' sentences. (About ten minutes.)

Game-like Hypertexts

• I managed to find two game-like hypertexts (or is that hypertext-like games):
  • Sam and Max Hit the Road by Steve Purcell from LucasArts
  • Freak Show by The Residents from Voyager
• We'll spend about twenty minutes immersing ourselves in those environments.

Open Discussion

Before we begin, I'd like each of you to spend a minute or two summarizing the hyperfiction you read and what ``story'' you discovered. If you read as a team (which I know some of you did), then you can summarize as a team.

We'll leave the rest of today's discussion topic a little bit more open. Our primary goal is to continue to reflect on the use of hypertext in fiction, grounding our considerations in our experiences with the hyperfictions and the ``immersive'' games.

We may want to consider some of the following:

• What, if anything, distinguishes a hypertext from a virtual environment?
• Does the order in which you encounter portions of a story really make a difference?
• Are there particular genres that are particularly amenable to hypertextual writing?
• Are there other works that have illustrated some of the tendencies that Bolter and other suggest?
  • One film-based example is Kurosawa's Rashomon