ODB's blog

An Interactive Soap Opera/Video Game?

Dec 2 2009

Façade is a game that details a dramatic culmination of a failed married couple's frustrations with each other. Instead of sitting back and watching the scene, you are a third person party to the drama, having only introduced the two in college 10 years earlier but are at the couple's house for a get together just before the climax of their drama. The people in the couple, Trip and Grace, make random (literally randomly picked from a short group of topics) small-talk with you, attempting to pretend that they aren't mad at each other. Grace and Trip play out their roles like characters in a series of cinematic scenes, reacting to each other in ways that you can't effect such as getting mad at everything the other person in the couple says, or leaving the room claiming that their spouse is intolerable, all the while dragging you into their arguments. When the couple stops to allow for the player to input a word into the conversation, the player may say anything he/she wishes; should the player say something that corresponds to the question posed to him/her, the couple will react accordingly, usually with one offended and the other on your side.

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Final Project Proposal

Nov 24 2009

For my final project, I was immediately drawn to the creative option. I would like to create a short choose your own adventure story that was not just designed to be read by children. I was thinking that instead of having just two options, the reader is given three or even four different choices on page options to go to from the current page they are reading. I also though it would be cool if instead of blindly making decisions, there would be riddles incorporated into the story that the reader would have to make decisions based off of, to give a sense that the reader is actually making decisions in the story. For my analysis of this story, I will map out all of the possible ending out comes as we did for the choose your own adventure assignment and also go into detail about the specifics of the endings and details in my story.

Mystery at Loch Ness

Nov 17 2009

 

For our choose your own adventure story project I read Mystery at Loch Ness, by Roy Wandelmaier.  The story starts off with you on a vacation in Scotland with your cousin Derek.  You and your cousin are quietly watching television at home when all of a sudden a breaking news report comes on about a missing person, Dr. Gregory, a scientist tracking the Loch Ness Monster has vanished without a trace from her campsite and must be found.  "'Loch Ness is only four miles from here,' says Derek, sipping his hot chocolate.  'I bet we could find Dr. Gregory.'"  With those fateful words you and Derek set out in the night on a trecherous rescue mission to find the good doctor, little do you know of the magical and potentially fatal journey you are about to embark on.

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Auditory Stimulation and the Flow of Animation

Oct 28 2009

In many old Warner Brothers cartoons, such as Bugs Bunny, the music and sounds in the background help to tell the story by adding a drum roll before a character gets hit in the head or simply by having the characters move their feet in time with the notes being played, the characters moving faster when the tempo increases. This music is usually not being created by anything in the animation so we must assume that the music is not really heard by the characters, despite the fact that they move in time with the music and act according to how dramatic the music is. Music adds to the cartoons by adding funny sounds to slap-stick jokes and by setting the appropriate mood music for what is going on in the cartoon.

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The Unique Medium of Video Games

Oct 21 2009

Previous blogs have pointed out that when playing a video game, the narrative of the game (if it is even there in the first place) is often times unrelated to your enjoyment of it. I would like to elaborate on that by suggesting that video games are the only form of narrative where the medium of the story can still be entertaining even though the person playing the game has completely disregarded the narrative that the medium presents.

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