Aesthetics: June 2006 Archive Page

Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim." A decade later, a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to assault his TV and shout, "Be more funny!" -Sam Andeson --A Prairie Home Conundrum: The mysterious appeal of Garrison Keillor. (Slate)

A great quote from later in the piece: "Without saying it outright, Keillor projects himself as a sage -- a kind of Wobegon Obi-Wan spreading the revolutionary creed of premodern simplicity."

The whole idea of episodic stories was born in the 19th century when the printing press made cheap magazines possible. Writers like Charles Dickens hit upon the idea of delivering a big story in weekly chunks, each with a cliffhanger to keep the audience in anticipation. (The cliffhanger is essentially a technological invention -- a direct result of the movable-type press.)

Dickens soon discovered that he could now do innovative things with his story. His characters' personalities could be developed not through single, central scenes, but through a dozen glimpses over a long stretch of time. Serial narrative also changed the way audiences relate to characters. When we focus on movie characters for two solid hours, they become epic heroes; when we encounter TV characters every week for years on end, they become old friends. There's an intimacy to episodic stories, and it's all the more intensified in a game because you literally go through hell with these folks. --Clive Thompson --Tune in Next Week for Gaming Fun (Wired)

I'm watching this closely. Last summer I had time to play a whole bunch of video games (well, four or five commercial titles, which is a lot for me). But I got stuck in HL2, and though I've read few walkthroughs that tell me what I should do, I just simply haven't felt motivated to get back into the game. HL2 taxes my computer system pretty heavily, and although I want to use the HL2 mod creator as part of my "New Media Projects" course this fall, I'm worried that the hardware requirements will make the project more stressful than it should be. (While I definitely want to use the HL2 engine to create my own educational mods down the road, I'm still not sure whether this is the 3D platform I want to introduce to my students.)

Because Valve is experimenting with selling games online, bypassign the retailers altogether, I'm not surprised that the company is putting out more frequent episodes.

New media have always met with suspicion: As The Economist editorialized a while back, a "neophobic" tendency dates from antiquity, with Plato's argument in the "Phaedrus" that the relatively newfangled medium of writing corrupted the memory-building powers of oral culture. Of course sometimes the new is bad. Yet the critics of video games are not only conjuring up a threat where none exists; they're ignoring the positive moral lessons and cognitive benefits that many of today's sophisticated games offer. --Brian C. Anderson --The Brain Workout: In Praise of Video Games (Opinion Journal)

Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a "book cover" of sorts for her work, which is automatically displayed when the player begins the game. Thumbnail versions of this art could also be displayed in another application that has aroused considerable discussion in the community, even if it is a project still far from fruition: the creation of a sort of IF "I-Tunes" application that would allow the player to browse the Archive's immense database of games, and to open any one of them on her computer with just a couple of clicks. A meta-data standard for IF is under discussion which could make this dream a reality by providing a standard format for storing basic information -- copyright date, author name, brief description, etc. -- about every game to facilitate easy searching and browsing. These projects have a long way to go, but the community seems increasingly committed to shedding the retro-gaming label once and for all and embracing the future. I believe a larger audience for IF is out there, and I believe an improved presentation for the genre as a whole is the best way to reach it.

Some see IF as suffering something of a directional crisis in the last few years. The wild experimentation with form that marked the late nineties has now largely subsided. One could argue that we have a pretty good sense of what the genre is capable of now, at least unless and until we see some quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology, or until something else occurs that shifts the paradigm of IF development. This is does not mean that the exciting phase of IF's history is over, however. It may in fact be just beginning. Authors are now free to use the techniques that the experimentalists pioneered not as formal exercises but in the service of the stories they are attempting to tell. Some recent games, such as Jason Devlin's Vespers and Chris Klimas' Blue Chairs, have displayed just this ascendancy of substance over form that is the mark of a mature artform. There are many, many stories still to tell, and I believe that a substantial upswing in IF's popularity could be just around the corner if the community stays the course with current efforts, even as increasing academic interest brings the genre a respectability it could never have dreamed of in the days of Infocom. Interactive narrative will be the literary form of the twenty-first century, and IF has every chance of continuing to be an important part of that movement for years to come. --Jimmy Maher --Chapter 11: The State of IF Today (Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction))

In the US, "Chapter 11" is the section of legal code dealing with bankruptcy, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Especially notworthy is the "Suggested Works of Modern IF" page, which includes a brief essay on canon.