Story structure: it's not just for movies anymore

Posted by Dennis G. Jerz on May 3, 2008 11:46 PM | | Comments (0) ~
The idea isn't new, but the phrasing is clear and effective.  Todd Alcott:
Just as movies began as novelties shown before "real" entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve years and from the 15-minute Great Train Robbery to the maximum-opus Birth of a Nation in seven. Gaming started with Pong and Pac-Man in the 70s and got to Doom in the 90s, then Half-Life a mere four years later. If Half-Life is the Birth of a Nation, that means that the Gone With the Wind of gaming is still in our future, and the Godfather of gaming as well.


Categories: Aesthetics , Art , Culture , Cyberculture , Design , Games , History , Media , Rhetoric , Technology

Leave a comment


Type the characters you see in the picture above.

Search

Recent Related Entries

Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole & Chocolate Cake « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis:I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color....

Hypertext '08 Poster Presentation: Charlie Hargood, A Thematic Model for Narrative Generation
Because I'm unfamiliar with the poster paper genre, my own textual bias made me want to read all the text on the poster before I was ready to listen to the presenter's explanation.   A couple times I had to tell...

Hypertext '08: Literatronica. Adaptive Digital Narrative :: Juan B. Gutierrez, and Mark C. Marino
Literatronica: Juan: Empower the computer to be part of the literary transaction... mathematical literature.Mathematical literature -- not the syntatic approach, using mathematical language to describe a story. Not a semantic approach, using theorems to define stories.Lexicographic Hypertext -- basic HTML...

Hypertext '08: Chris Crawford -- Deikto: An Application of the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Chris Crawford has been working on Storytron for 16 years. The computer gaming industry was not intersted in or able to solve the problem of interactive storytelling. Left the gaming industry to solve that problem on his own. Has been...

Hypertext '08: Dene Crigar, Hyperlinking in 3D Multimedia Performances
Dene joined us remotely from her lab in Vancouver, demonstrating multimedia works that are performed through hyperlinks triggered by a performer's actions in a 3D space.  The demonstration is intended to challenge the notions of a hyperlink as a silent...