Today’s Plan:
- Meakin Reading
- Tragedy Introductory Lecture
- Homework
Meakin Reading
I asked you to respond to 3 of the following 5 questions:
What do Meakin et al see as the purpose and/or value of tragedy?
How do Meakin et al define catharsis?
How do Meakin et al define aporia? How does it relate to catharsis?
How do Meakin et al define epiphany? How does it relate to catharsis?
How do Meakin et al describe our relationship to a tragic character (hint: they describe it as movement)?
Tragedy
Homework
For homework I would like you to read the Mateas article in the files section of Canvas. The article draws on Janet Murray’s 1998 book Hamlet on the Holodeck, which is a classic in video game studies. As Mateas notes, Murray provides us with three key terms for thinking about “interactive narrative” (or video games, there was this debate in the 1990’s about whether we need to call serious-artsy-games something other than video games, in the same way that we call serious books novels). Those three terms:
- Immersion
- Transformation
- Agency
Read sections 3, 4, and 5 and come up with descriptive and useful definitions for those terms. What is agency? How do we know when we have it? Etc.
Then, watch this play-through video of Mateas’ conceptual interactive narrative “Facade” (he describes it in the remainder of the article). If you have a PC, you can still download and play the game. Use the terms you have just defined, Immersion, Transformation, and Agency to reflect on your own experience of playing (or watching a playthrough video) of that game.
I’m thinking about two things here: first, are those terms useful? On Friday we are going to start building a Handbook for Digital Tragedy. Should we include them? Second, Facade is a 20 year old game. At the time it was launched, it was heralded as the future of video games. That hasn’t happened. Why not?
Here is another playthrough video I want to talk about a bit in Friday’s class.
