“In short, he so buried himself in his books that he spent nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits. He filled his mind with all that he read in them, with enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments, and other impossible nonsense; and so deeply did he steep his imagination in the belief that all the fanciful stuff he read was true, that… he decided… to turn knight errant and travel through the world with horse and amour in search of adventures.”
Don Quixote de la Mancha
Vision Fine Arts Gallery
The life of Don Quixote, living 150 years after the invention of the printing press, is a clear example of the dangerous power of books that creates world, sometimes even ‘more real than reality’. Then, almost 350 years later Regent Roddenberry reveals to the world his new vision of the literature. The creator of “Start Trek” sends the crew of starship “Voyager”, for recreation and entertainment, into the holodeck, the digital cave where they can be any fictional character from any book, or story. The holodeck can be programmed any time you wish to travel to new places, or be a new character. Any time you wish to change the ‘book’. A ‘few’ years later we were the witnesses to the birth of World Wide Web. The magical tool that with a few clicks is able to take us instantly into a medieval village or to the center of flying city in XXXVI century. Digital media can take us to a place where we can act out our fantasies. We have our ‘holodecks’ now on our desktops. We are now the modern Don Quixote, with digital windmills.
Ok, that is more or less what I have been doing last week. I have been looking for some proof that I am following a good path, the true idea. The Idea that good literacy narrative is able to work as a Virtual Reality, is able to transport us, of course depending on our fantasy, into a magical and pleasurable place, is able to give us the experience of Immersion. I have done a little research about the history and theory of the definitions of Immersion. I found a few interesting concepts.
1997 – Coomans and Timmermanns ‘Towards a Taxonomy of Virtual Reality User Interfaces’
“The feeling of being deeply engaged where participants enter a make-believe world as if it is real.”
1997 – Janet Murray ‘Hamlet on the Holodeck’
“Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool – the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.”
2002 – Marie-Laure Ryan ‘Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity and Electronic Media’
“…immersion is the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated with live human beings.”
2002 – Steve Poynter ‘Immersed in the News’
“What’s immersive? It can be roughly defined as story presentation that allows the Internet user to interact with story elements or data. Instead of ‘reading’ a story online, the user gets to ‘do’ something –and in the process learn, and better understand the topic”
2003 – Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman “Rules of Play”
“The Immersion fallacy is the idea that the pleasure of media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality. According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is party of an imaginary world.”
However, ARG creators are using a different tactic of immersion named after the first ARG game “Beast” (2001) TING (This Is Not Game). Then I have been studying elements of gaming, especially what makes a game a game. Very helpful in this point was an article by Jesper Juul: "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness"(2003) from Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings.
The next step was to start looking in wider context. Because if it is not a game than what? The first clue comes with the article written on unification.com, by award-winning science-fiction/fantasy writer Sean C. Staccy, who wrote the story for first ARG game “the Beast”. In his blog post “The Puppet master-Player Communication Dynamic in Alternate Reality Gaming and Chaotic Fiction”,
“Alternate Reality Game is about telling and producing a story while the audience interacts with it. In some cases, this means that audience member may converse with fictional characters. In other cases, it means that ideas produced by player brainstorming session might be incorporated into the plot.”
This citation gives me two main lines of studying. Firstly, that the ARG is a story, a new form of narration, transmedia storytelling. A book told through all possible media and even beyond them. The second thought was that this story is interactive, like a cyber drama, or interactive fiction, but what make it different from all existing new forms of interactive storytelling is that ARG engages players to act in real life, or in other words, real life is the interface of the game. And the second difference is that ARG forces player to act collectively, and this element of ARG makes this game as interactive as a hypertext. Players become authors of a game.
To understand these few aspects in depth I have started to read a couple of books:
Janet H. Murray (1997) “Hamlet on Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace”
Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) “Narrative across Media. The Language of Storytelling”
I also have a list of authors and websites from one of scholar from our New Media department, places where I should start looking for some examples of Interactive Fiction and some important authors and theorist in this field. There are a few places to look:
Nick Montfort; Denis Jerz; Carolyn Handler Millere (in her new edition of book (2008) “Digital Storytelling, Second Edition: A creator's guide to interactive entertainment” she argues that ARG is a form of evolution of IF), or sites like ifarchive.com, directory.eliterature.org
There is another aspect of ARG which was predicted a few years before the first ARG – “The Beast” in Janet H. Murray’s 1997 book “Hamlet on Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace”. In this book she predicts that VR – based interactive drama can match both the entertainment and the educational value of literary narrative. And along with the first ARG the Internet collaboration of players presented a huge potential and a phenomenon of collective intelligence. It was a group of players of more than 7000 who gather under umbrella of website cloudmakers.org. The phenomenon of massive collaboration is still studied (Jean McGonigal has done this for the last nine years) and even creates a new genre of ARG that tries, through the global collaboration of players, to solve the real global problems. So, for this study I moved back to the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. His outstanding achievement in the field of development psychology, child development, and education, I think are very accurate to this phenomenon. I am talking about his two innovations on the fields of development psychology, which could be applied to massive collaboration in ARG. That is a concept of Zone of Proximal Development and related to this idea of Scaffolding, in this case inside of the group of players.
If think that is all for this week.
