Session 4: New Narrativism
5th Global Conference
Sunday 11th July 2010 – Tuesday 13th July 2010
Mansfield College, Oxford
Reading with the Body: Interpreting Three Dimensional Media as Narrative
James Barrett
Umeå University/HUMlab, Sweden
This paper argues that virtual online worlds are complex sites for the realization of narrative, in a form of embodied reading that is posthuman and performative.
The in-world avatar is the embodiment of an interpreting agent in the virtual world. Such devices accomplish a number of functions in terms of the narrative realisation. The avatar contributes to the posthuman realisation of narrative through the navigation of the spatial attributes, the setting up of perspective in terms of Point of View (POV) in the reading, and the introduction of a character agent into the narrative architecture of the virtual world. Such a series of characteristics results in a cybernetic relationship between the virtual world, as a text, and its reception, interpretation and responses that can be offered to it. Such a relationship is based in the performative possibilities represented in the virtual world. Architecture becomes the grammar of reading in the virtual world, with design and code, copyright and the address of its objects and inhabitants, that which makes the narratives.
The meeting of an embodied agent in a virtual world results in tensions between phenomenological and hermeneutical conceptions of meaning. Building on the work of Harroway (1991), Aarseth (1997), Hayles (1999), and Jenkins (2003), this paper argues for the posthuman credentials of virtual worlds, as media that is read performatively. In doing so, it is proposed that the reading of virtual worlds has more in common with the role of narrative in pilgrimage, megalithic sculpture and the performance of place bound religious rituals.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
The Flickerman: Creating Narrative as Augmented Reality
Lance Dann
Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
This paper will discuss the use of both social media tools and diverse media platforms in the construction of a narrative that inhabits the hybridised space that has grown out of cyberspace and into the ‘real’ world. It will concern an ongoing creative research project, The Flickerman, that began as an attempt to explore the possibilities offered to writers by working outside conventional broadcasting networks, and has grown into a piece of open-source story telling. The project is discussed in terms of its methodology, being one that breaks through the ‘fourth wall’ of the computer screen and works with cyberspace as a form of augmented reality.
The Flickerman is a multi-platform sci-fi thriller that was written and produced as part of a PhD in Creative Writing based at University Bath Spa and funded by the Society of Authors. By combining real world events, audience interaction, live writing, found online objects and uploaded ephemera The Flickerman’s narrative recreates traditional story telling as a digital audio bricollage, one in which the distinction between real space and virtual space is discarded and the real and imagined are seamlessly blurred. The series was launched in 2009 across Facebook, vimeo, SoundCloud, twitter, Facebook and iTunes, with the audio elements being broadcast on radio international (it is currently being serialised on ABC Radio National in Australia). The project is a fully functioning experiment in new forms of story-telling, one which aims to go beyond possibilities offered by Alternative Reality Games by creating a narrative based experience that is both engaging and inviting to even the most casual of audiences. The Guardian said of the series’ radio broadcasts that “it all makes you feel involved. This is what people hope to create when they say “interactive” but I’ve never seen it work before. It is a strange and exhilarating project”.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Making Science-Fiction Personal: Videogames and Inter-Affective Storytellin
Kevin Veale
Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Videogames bring science fiction into the affective present. By and large, videogame texts are structured so that there is none of the mediation presented by the protagonists of books or films; instead, the relationships the player forms matter to them because they are personal. The agency provided to game players means that they have a direct relationship to the consequences of their actions, which give science fiction videogames impact at a personal level. In “System Shock 2,” the player is confronted with body-horror. Enemies yell for the player to hide or run away, even as those enemies cannot prevent their bodies from attacking, after being taken over by alien worms. “System Shock 2” then makes the body-horror personal by creating situations where the player questions her/his own humanity, due to cybernetic modification. The game asks the player, “What do you do? How does that feel?” The affective experience of videogame texts is distinct from that of other forms of media because the questions are directed to the players themselves, rather than to a character they identify with.
Since videogames are distinguished by the player’s experience of the text, tools from phenomenology can be applied to consider how the player forms affective relationships with fictional characters and science fiction concepts. Affect, the dynamic and transportable zone of potential emotions, functions through cathexis, whereby an individual becomes invested in something regardless of what that may be. The investment occurs within a contextual world-of-concern which envelops the player and grounds his/her investment in the experience of the game’s story.
The impact of having the player directly involved and affectively invested in the experience presents opportunities for inter-affective storytelling which would not be possible outside of an interactive context, since agency is a fundamental part of what makes the affective connection personal.
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