illustrative method

performer

I will borrow the process and structure of the objects of study for this discussion. Myst, Sandman, Ultima OnLine, and MitterNachtSpiel, are hypermedia that incorporate different mediums and stories beautifully. I also want to incorporate these mediums so that the dissertation shows what it is extolling. Through this representation, I will not only be analyzing, but using the various mediums, theories and stories together I believe the best way to do this is to create a hypertextual dissertation.

For this illustrative performance, I have leaned heavily on those who have written and performed within multiple mediums. Like Kathleen Stewart in, A Space on the Side of the Road, I will incorporate multiple styles of textual discourse in order to better illustrate this study. Stewart uses multiple voices and points of view as well as academic writing, conversational transcripts, and almost theatrical scripting of scenes in order to better represent her ideas and descriptions. I plan to play with different styles of writing to tell a story about narrative.

While Stewart was playing within one medium, playing with the mixing of two mediums is an interesting way to see how each medium conveys meaning in a slightly different manner than another medium. In his article, "Realism of Low Resolution," Richard Shiff notes how a medium best gains a sense of its communicative possibilities in relation to, and interaction with, other mediums. So when I show multiple mediums in this study, we will be able to get a better sense of the communicative strengths and weaknesses of those mediums.

In the case of comics, or sequential art, we will see the dance between words and images. This dance is gleefully explored and utilized by Scott McCloud, Will Eisner and George Herriman. All three of these authors/artists are great guides and inspirations for my interests into sequential art. McCloud uses a medium to talk about itself. In Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, he uses comics to explain comics. And Eisner’s two seminal books, Comics & Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling, literally and figuratively illustrate how images and words combined in the format of a comic to tell a story like no other.

The comic and comical experiments of George Herriman are well documented in an edition edited by Patrick McDonnell. As McDonnell notes, "Herriman’s history is the history of the comic strip" (25). He helped define the medium from its infancy (25). The comic medium was "perfect for Herriman because he was equally adept at manipulating verbal and pictorial elements" (26). We get to see how Herriman used words, images, space and time to represent the wild world of Krazy Kat.

Displaying several mediums to tell my story brings up issues of graphic design and page layout. Envisioning Information, Visual Display Of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte serve as a guide for page design. Tufte has been analyzing and performing how visual representations of information can help an audience to better understand the information being shared. With words and images playfully and thoughtfully placed together on the page, I hope to relate and illustrate this study.

The use of the word play is not casual. As Johan Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, playing is one of our most significant functions (1). We communicate a range of our wants and needs, thoughts and feelings through playing with each other. And in terms of hypermedia storytelling, the play is the thing and the game is afoot. Hypermedia stories like Myst, Ultima OnLine and MitternachtSpiel have an obvious game element. They are stories that use play to entice the reader to engage. As Andrew Colman notes in, Game Theory and Experimental Games, games deal with the logic of making decisions in situations in which the outcomes rely on the decisions made (3). In hypermedia, the story needs a context in which the reader then has impetus to act, otherwise the story does not progress. By incorporating a game component into the experience, creators of hypermedia encourage people to play and get involved with the story as they try to solve the puzzle or win the game. In Myst, the context is one of a mystery story that will not be revealed unless you puzzle through it. In Ultima OnLine, you are a participant in a world where you can kill the bad guys, be a bad guy, win some treasure, and/or become a leader, etc. The story develops as you build up experiences and gain more abilities in its world. In MitterNachtSpiel, the play is not engaged until you join the moon and company. It's through your interactions that the midnight play begins, continues and ends. The game is a part of the story.

Games on computer have always had some form of narrative involved. Pong, one of the first electronic games was a simple version of ping pong; the rules were similar, and you kept the "ball" in the "court" (Bennahum, 15). Space Invaders had the aliens coming to destroy the planet, Pac-Man had a round icon with a mouth that constantly ran around in mazes eating up dots while being chased by ghosts, and Mario Bros. had Mario saving the Princess from the dragon. Then came Zork, if any game can be seen to have an influence on the story of Myst it is Zork. Like Myst, Zork puts players into a fantasy world where they must explore and play in order to puzzle through the story (Murray, 74). Unlike Myst, Zork is purely hypertextual, there are no images or sounds, only text. You typed in your actions, such as "pick up box," "go west," etc, and more text would describe the results of your actions. Both games have a strong story within which the reader plays.

Along with an integrated story and game, Myst, Ultima OnLine and MitternachtSpiel incorporate several mediums (text, graphics, music and aural ambiance, video and hypertext). Each has a context that gives the reader a reason to want to play with the story, and because of the computer, each author had to design an interface that enables the reader to engage the story with a minimum of mental effort. In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman, discusses some fundamental principles of good design that is pertinent to the issues involved with interface design.

David Miles points out that a current aspect of hypermedia is that it leans on other mediums. In his article, "The CD-ROM Novel Myst and McLuhan's Fourth Law of Media: Myst and Its 'Retrievals,'" Miles looks at how Myst borrows heavily from older mediums, illustrating how these retrievals show the strengths and weaknesses of the mediums involved (4). By illustrating all of these mediums, I will be able to analyze them differently.

[repeat] This is an academic study and a narrative about stories and their mediums [1]. [4] If you choose, you can decipher the puzzle and connect the links; if not, you can read straight through [5]. [3] Links in and between the digital and analog are keyed through repeated symbols (colors, words, numbers, images, etc.) creating a rhizomatic web [4]. [2] Images, colors, words, numbers and links are used to code and layer this chapter [3]. [5] Either way, stories are related and experienced [end]. [1] You can experience the story and play with the ideas as you puzzle through the words and images [2].

Within this representation will be a threefold blending, a critical choreography and cartography of stories, theories and media. The multiple mediums will be complementarily combined, blending together text, sequential art and hypermedia. Also, various narratives will be incorporated within larger narratives allowing a juxtapositioning that opens up new perspectives on the stories. And a myriad of theories revolving around narrative will be put into play together to shed as much light as possible on the process and structure of narratives across media. This tripartite collage of media, stories and theories will allow us to better comprehend and represent the ways and means in which we try to understand the worlds in which we live through the stories we share with each other.