Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

The absolute highlight of my time at MLA09 was the night panel on transmedia narratives. I finally got to meet my friend Christy Dena and also catch up with some other friends. Here are my notes:

Marc Ruppel

• The biggest shift in storytelling has been multiplatform narratives
• What are they? digital/analog, oral/audio, etc
• Examples of transmedia narratives: Lost, Buffy The Vampire Slayer series eight comic, etc
• Connectivity: Edges as transactional spaces
• Reading paths, instead of just left to right now…(It’s refreshing to hear this; I’ve been saying this for a long time!!!)

Migratory cues:

• Direct-URLs, books, phone numbers, business cards (the series Heroes was the example for some of these)
• Intermedial-Direct prescence of one site’s content in anothers
• Intersectional-One site reflects and approximates momentary events of another
• Often used in combination
• Visualize network as a whole

Christy Dena

• Presence of narrative and nonnarrative
• Jenkins transmedia storytelling definition
• Transmedia fiction definition: stories and games
• Distributed narratives, Jill Walker-Rettberg definition
• Jane McGonigal/Ubiquitous Gaming
• Jesper Juul/Definition of “game” (I wrote about that once)
• Fictional world is transmodel

After this, I just sat and listened to everything Christy was saying. Her work is fascinating and close to what I originally wanted to write about in my Master’s Thesis before sliding to something more “Englishy” (see about Distributed Narrative)

I also asked a question to Marc and Christy about the role of canon in fan culture. Specifically, I was curious how they regarded fan fiction and spinoff noncanonical media in regards to their examples of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. The BTVS series eight comic is pretty established as canonical, but what about Doctor Who where there are numerous comics, Big Finish audios, and other things where their place in the canon is murky at best. Both Marc and Christy said that trying to decipher between all of that just wasn’t worth doing, so they regards everything in the same manner. I can certainly understand that.

Afterwards, while catching up with Christy, we also talked about the defining of new terms which she does in her work. While writing my Master’s Thesis, I had trouble enough with resistance to terms like ergodic, distributed narrative, hypertext, etc. Christy is creating new terms as she goes.

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• According to her monthly Web Site column, Jeanette Winterson is creating a children’s show for the BBC.
• Scott Esposito on the role of research in Infinite Jest.  Also see the comment section for some discussion from myself and others on the difference between the sort of notes Wallace and Borges created for their imaginary works.
• Jacket Copy on John Barth’s The Floating Opera
• Henry Jenkins on the role of fan fiction as critical commentary on texts.
• The new issue of Open Letters is, as always, worth your time.
  

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• The Institute For The Future Of The Book sums up my ill feelings about John Updike:

His death is, in a sense, another nail in the coffin of a kind of literary vanguard. I can understand why this blog’s readership might relish, openly or in private, the extinction of these writers, particularly given the old school’s knee-jerk aversion to new methodologies and shifting boundaries. By 2006, as the sensationally-titled “The End of Authorship” attests, it seemed that Updike opposed progress in the humanities more than he furthered it. The voguish sentiment, for better or worse, was disdain for his belletristic ways.

• This surreal story from Rolling Stone about the fallout of a sexual relationship between a student and teacher is equal parts surreal, disturbing in ways that get worse with each page, but also not surprising.
• on creating fan fiction with Twitter.  I am a lot more enthusiastic about it than he is, having been created for the excellent Mad Men series he mentions for awhile now.  This reminds me a lot of the, based in Livejournal, AIM accounts a number of fans created for Buffy The Vampire Slayer characters.  They were fun to interact with and stayed in character really well.  Twitter is a much more interesting medium for this sort of thing.
• The new issue of Game Studies is now out.
• Jane McGonigal on why she is not a game evangelist.

This week’s video is Black Flag from the same show the Saccharine Trust footage was taken from.  You’ll want to especially pay attention to Greg Ginn’s ridiculous guitar playing.

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• Very curious to read more of Kathy Acker’s work.
• I’m saddened to hear about Electronic Gaming Monthly’s demise.  Like many others my age, a lot of grocery store trips ended with a copy of EGM going in the cart.  Once I got on the Internet I really lost track/interest in gaming magazines, but still there was a time when they were essential reading material.
• From Transformative Works & Culture, Madeline Ashby on cyborgs, Donna Harraway, fan fiction, and intellectual property in regards to anime.  I will have more to say about this article soon.
• From Eludamos, Esther MacCallum-Stewart on the role of gender bending in gaming looking specifically at why so many men play as female characters:

This paper was initially intended to be about the roles women like to take when playing games. How do they socialise? What roles do they prefer and how do they imagine them in terms of role-play? It quickly became apparent however, that a more pressing issue was at stake, prompted largely by the responses to questions asked amongst players of both genders. Why do men like playing women so much, and how do they understand this role?

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Recently I came across a Doctor Who web comic called The Ten Doctors. The title says it all: this comic brings together all ten regenerations of The Doctor plus companions, The Master, Daleks, and more. The attention to detail in both characterization and story are exceptional. Updates have slowed recently but hopefully the story will continue soon.

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Emily Short has a review up of a new interactive Harry Potter fan fiction, Ron Weasley & The Quest For Hermione. Like her, I am not too interested in the adult part but I am interested in the idea of fan fiction being adapted for interactive fiction. Much like my post about Prom Queen from a few days ago, the concept is a lot better than the actual final output.

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If you can’t wait for your preorders to be shipped to you, you can check out the of the new Buffy The Vampire Slayer season eight comic over at Dark Horse’s website.

I very briefly looked at it this morning. I like the dig at the whole business with The Immortal. The art looks nice and I am very curious about the concept of there being three version of Buffy (huh?). I also liked that one of the Slayers was named Rowena. A shoutout to Watchers Virtual Series? How cool would that be!

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