For my final project, I have opted for the analytical route. I would like to write a narratological explication of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Although we briefly discussed some narrative fiction early in the semester, for the most part the focus of this course was on forms of narrative that have not been explored in as much depth as standard prose fiction. And while writing a paper on your average novel would probably not be a very fruitful exercise (in the sense of fitting with the parameters of this project,) looking at House of Leaves offers an array of potential sources for narratological analysis.

For instance, the layered narration of the novel subverts the standard narrator/narratee relationship - when we have one narrator of one thread of the story, and a second for another one, what narratological implications does that have? The fact that Johnny Truant is relating a story from a text he found that was originally written by Zampano also leads to questions of historical narrativity. What is the impact on stories when they are passed down to different narrators? How does this affect narrative as we understand it?

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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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