whitneyo – Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

On Gaming…

While I understand that it is the process and principals of video games that Jim Gee is interested in, I would like to speak for a moment about their content, and the possible applications of it. I spoke briefly in class about video game narratives, as a genre, and I would like to expand on that idea here.

When I was young and had the urge to write a story, I only ever wrote in one form: video game narrative. I would spend weeks or even months on one idea: drawing maps and pictures of the world, writing notes about the environment, discovering characters and creating histories. My notes were extremely detailed, because the assumption was that the player would be able to interact with all aspects of the world, and I had to devise exactly how the world would respond to this interaction. In addition to this type of writing, I would also create a somewhat linear narrative that would serve as the central narrative for the game. This narrative kind of resembled a tree, as it would have changing parts, depending on player action.

While the process of writing this narrative may or may not have resembled that of someone in the beginning stages of devising a novel, I HAD to consider it as the start of a game, specifically. I had to imagine the story as one that would be experienced specifically by playing through it. The way one experiences a narrative in the form of a video game seems to be specific to the genre; you have to work for the story. You cannot learn what happens next until you earn that information; you are very actively engaged in discovering the narrative.

Additionally, because video games are primarily a visual genre, there are aspects of the writing that would be similar to that of writing for the stage or the screen. The aesthetic of the game, visually, contributes significantly to how the game is read. I spent a lot of time imagining and trying to put down in words the intended atmosphere of the game: the way it looks, the way it sounds, how players move through space, how items react to being touched. All of the these components contribute to how the player reads the game and experiences the narrative, just as how angels, lighting and music affect the viewing of a film. I would have notebooks full of notes and pieces of prose dedicated to games I was writing, focused on these details.

I bring this up to suggest that my experience of pleasure writing video games cannot be more sophisticated or intensive than the process of writing a video game that is actually made. What I am trying to say is that this thoughtful engineering lies behind all games with rich narratives. As such, they are just as valid as film, literature, or theatre for study and critique.

On Adaptations…

During our presentation yesterday on adaptations, Teresa brought up the idea that the “original” text may not always depend on chronology; rather, it may simply refer to the text that an individual experiences first, and forms an attachment to. There is an example of this in the reading, when Bortolotti and Hutcheon discuss the adaptations of the narrative of Romeo and Juliet. When people compare film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet to the “original text”, they almost always compare it to Shakespeare’s play, which as we know is not the “original” text but an adaptation in itself. Shakespeare’s version, because of its popularity and its status, is what most people consider to be the source text of this narrative; it is therefore what people (even those who perhaps have not read the play but are still aware of it through collective cultural knowledge) have an attachment to. People measure their subsequent experiences of this narrative against their experience of the play, engaging in a fidelity discourse that is not in fact directed towards the “original” text.

I would like to once again explore this phenomenon in the experience of music. As I mentioned in class, music lends itself to this type of reverse fidelity discourse because of the expansive nature of genre and sub-genre within the medium. Covers are a common form of adaptation in music, and because covers often cross-genres in radical and profound ways, new audiences are often exposed to songs from genres that they may never have been interested in before. This sometimes leads listeners to hear cover songs before their “original” counterparts, and also increases their chances of attachment towards the adapted piece, as it falls into a genre that they most likely (having sought it out) prefer and relate to. Hearing the “original” piece, after forming this attachment, may not satisfy the listener; they may find themselves sensitive to the perceived shortcomings of the “original” as compared against the covered version. The listener therefore engages in the same type of critique as those engaged in fidelity discourse over texts such as Romeo and Juliet, but in a reversed order.

The two above examples illustrate some of the limits to the usefulness of fidelity discourse; because it revolves around the concept of “proximity to the original” it leaves itself vulnerable to individual or even collective interpretation of what the “original” text is; if someone hears “Hurt” as covered by Johnny Cash before they hear “Hurt” as originally performed by Nine Inch Nails, they will carry a personal attachment to Cash’s version of the song, whether technically “original” or not. In a similar way, it seems to be the pervasive belief that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the “original”, rendering the other source texts negligible to the larger cultural perception. When I consider this limitation, I feel more inclined to follow the suggested critical strategies of Bortolotti and Hutcheon concerning adaptation.