In the final part of my blog series about video games, I want to bring up a point that we haven't really talked about iand it applies not only to video games, but every medium of narrative that we've discussed throughout the semester. That point is, drum roll please...:

Video Games sell like hotcakes.

Whenever people see a sequel to their favorite game series, they all go out and buy it. Take for example, Halo 3. It had $170 million in profits the first day alone, and more than $300 million in the first week. At the time, it held the record for the most selling IP on the day of release EVER. Now for a recent example, take Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It now holds the record that Halo 3 once had, with $550 million in sales in only five days, $310 of which was from the first day alone.

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I have chosen to do the creative section for the final project, my idea being that I will create a choose your own adventure story that the class will act out on the day that we present our final projects. In order for it to be unique, I plan on giving the readers (in this case, the class) the option of creating their own choices at some parts in the story. In order for the CYOA to be as organized as possible though, I'm going to ask the class to be one whole coherent unit, as opposed to everyone in the class acting on their own.

I haven't decided a specific plot yet, but I'm working on it. Two ideas that I've come up in my head are that the story takes place on campus and that the protagonist is a student here, and the story would be through his/her eyes. The other idea is once again on campus, but the campus has been overtaken by zombies and the student is the only one left, as far as he knows.

The Choose Your Own Adventure book that I am analyzing is The Magician's Ring by Carol Gaskin.  In it, you are a minstrel who knows the art of song and dance, and you travel as a living.  Eventually, you find yourself in Wandelmere, a kingdom that is very odd.  In the day time, all the inhabitants are animals, but once night rolls around, the animals turn into the citizens of the kingdom.  Even the royalty are plagued by this curse set upon them by the wizard known as Mevar, so the King asks you to aid them in their time of need by seeking out Mevar and destroying his magical ring.

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I've been thinking about animation since our last class trying to think of something to write about, which was a bit daunting at first. My thought process was that animation seems to be very similar to TV and film, so it might just be a re-hash of something that's already been said. I began thinking, "What makes animation unique?" I then remembered someone very iconic in our culture. Mickey Mouse.

Mickey Mouse first appeared in the cartoon where he's on a steamboat, which happened to be one of the earlier animations of our time. His whimsical adventures led him to do many a humorous trick for the viewers, and this placed him in the heart of children everywhere. I began thinking to myself that this seems to show a difference in the media types: animation seems to be very silly for the most part.

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In this sequel to my first blog, "Video Games, the new white meat?" I would like to talk about why I personally think that video games are one of the better methods of telling a story. Without further ado, that reason is immersion.

What immersion is in terms of narratology and story-telling is how into the story the recipient becomes, such that they really get sucked into the story. At least, that's the way I see it. To show how video games are more immersive than other mediums, I'll talk about how they do it first. A book shows the reader words on a page, leaving the reader to imagine what happens themselves on their own levels of personal detail. Movies show exactly what happens in the story (or happened/will happen given the usage of ana-/prolepsis) as it happens and leaves nothing to the imagination. Comics have a similar take on it as movies, albiet there is no sound and the method is somewhat different given the seriality of most comics. In video games, the player literally controls what happens, and most things aren't set in stone.

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When we were talking last class about how to classify video games, I was thinking to myself "Why are video games being treated so differently?" The central question offered to the class was whether video games were a genre or a medium, but here's my question to everyone else on here, couldn't you say the same about every other form of media used in telling a story?

The way I see it, video games are very similar to other forms of narration. For comparison's sake, I'll use movies. There's action movies, comedic movies, romance movies, horror movies, etc. Now, for video games, there are first/third person shooter video games, role playing video games, simulation video games (think the Sim series or Lemonade Tycoon), survival horror video games, etc. Both movies and video games have "prefixes" added onto them to classify them.

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Two classes ago while we were talking about Little Nemo, we touched on how the topic of narration/description by way of narration. In the first few comics of Little Nemo, nearly every panel had text written under it describing what would be going on in that certain panel (or the story as a whole if text got cut off.) I brought up one of the differences in narration for Manga and Traditional American comics, that being that Manga typically doesn't have too much of it.

From what I've read, Manga is often very explosive, filled with action, and incredibly detailed (as detailed as a black and white picture can get, anyway.) This isn't to say that traditional American comics are all drawn carelessly, all we need to look at to reassure us of that is, in fact, Little Nemo. The comic in which the zoom-in of the gigantic elephant is drawn is rendered with amazing detail: http://www.comicstriplibrary.org/images/comics/Little%20Nemo/hs_Little%20Nemo%20-%201906-09-23.jpg.

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Near the end of class on Tuesday most everyone started to talk about TV shows and breaking the fourth wall, the fourth wall being the invisible barrier that separates the show/text from the audience. Breakage of the fourth wall has been used fairly extensively, albeit it only recently became a more popular technique in the 20th century.

The first notable usage of breaking the fourth wall would probably be the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series (and all books related to it, like the goosebumps books.) These books used the choices of the reader to impact the how the story played out- at the end of teach page there would be instructions to turn to different pages based on the reader's choices (that or the story would end.) In this example, the purpose of breaking the fourth wall seems to be to add a further layer of immersion to the story, allowing the reader to LITERALLY control the outcome of the story.

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The notes of music are fairly limited. This being said, they can compose beautiful works of art. The various keys that exist, usage of scales, techniques relative to different instruments- all of these are combined together when composing a piece of music. When used skillfully, these make most pieces of music tolerable, if not quite enjoyable... unless you're listening to The Jonas Brothers, but I digress.

Music can clearly invoke certain emotions/reactions in people. Take, for example, Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfBVYhyXU8o

Assuming that I'm doing this right and the video comes up, what you should hear is a very scary piece of music. However, without the title of the music, all there would be are shrilling violins. By themselves, they can certainly invoke shock or fear from their dramatic playing, but there is no story. The language of music, the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G (including all the relative sharps and minors) can't spell out a story. Musical notes cannot be a medium or a narrative text, however, they can be an aid or am amplifier.

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