Post a semi-brief (2-3 paragraphs) response to one of the following prompts for the reading, and put it under category Reading Response 4.
Is there a city that stood out, or that you found especially memorable? Why? Does any city remind you of a city you have lived in or visited, and if so, in what ways?
Many cities are described in explicit detail—magnolia gardens, radiator pipes, facades, inhabitants—but some aspects are more abstract. How might these more conceptual details translate into a virtual environment and what we might do while there?
In any given city, what role does time play? In what ways does the storyteller use time to convey an impression of the city?
I need to figure out my interactions better, because they seem a bit ambitious. To make my interactions intuitive, I’m making the room itself pretty dark, with the fireplace as the main light source. It will make the viewer move closer to it. Then you see a book on a shelf and once you press it the lights come on.
That’s the first main interaction. Once the lights are on you can spin the globe or move around the room- closer to the window or the fireplace. I’ve given the sound a range and roll off so as you move around some sounds get louder and others get softer, like the fireplace and the wind.
As I was reading this chapter, I kept drawing parallels with the discussions and questions I have had when taking an NYU Gallatin class called The Garden of Forking Paths last year. The class takes its name from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story that is referenced a few times in “Hamlet on the Holodeck” as well. Throughout the course, we have analyzed hypertext literature, non-linear narratives and gameplay which are central reference points in this reading as well. As I am not a gamer myself, I keep referencing the examples we have looked into in that class to apply the theory from Janet Murray’s work while also evaluating the discussion I’ve had in the past in other contexts about user agency and what interactivity really is.
Source: Pinterest
For the sake of applying this reading to an example, I have chosen to revisit I a game called “Life Is Strange 2” I have played for the class I have mentioned before. Long story short, the game follows a story of two brothers (you play as the older teenage boy) who, after witnessing their father being killed by a police officer, set off to flee their hometown and escape the police investigation of the sudden explosion of their house in which they are the prime suspects. You become a juvenile fugitive who is now responsible of taking care of the younger brother with (spoiler alert!) supernatural abilities.
The story unfolds through exploring different environments, collecting objects (which enrich the background story and give a more detailed portrait of the characters) and it progresses through branching dialogues. The decisions you make in the latter determine the conclusion of the game and the relationship that you develop with the younger brother and how his personality is affected by the events that happen. Overall, it sounds like a game that provides so many opportunities for exercising user agency in order to unravel and impact the story on your own. However, from my experience, I was not satisfied because often the game provided only the illusion of choice. Some decisions that you make along the way do not make a significant impact and the gameplay is interrupted at certain points with linear cinematic breaks in which you only spectate the events. Although I understand that it is a method of making sure that the narrative progresses and does not get stuck, it felt like my user agency is being taking away or is not significant. Yet I was pleased with the ability to explore the environment and objects in it that had a clear connection to the story and thus could enrich it with more detail. At the same time, choosing not to interact with certain items did not make the experience less comprehensive or fulfilled.
My key takeaways from the chapter on agency, which I have also used to write my brief analysis of “Life Is Strange 2” above:
Agency is often confused with the misused term of interactivity which relates to “the mere ability to move a joystick or click on mouse”
Agency is about meaningful interactions that are pleasurable and help shape the overall narrative
Navigating the digital space should be allowed to be flexible and pleasurable while user choices should be meaningful, engaging but not limited to the win/lose consequences
Every object in the environment should have a direct connection to the narrative and enable a clear sense of user agency
“The interaction is not the author of the digital narrative”, exercising power within the interactive experience “is not authorship but agency”.
I enjoyed Murray’s take on the importance and use of agency in games and how that makes them more interactive. A game that popped into my mind when reading is Final Fantasy XIV. FFXIV is an MMORPG that offers players various forms of Agency. One of which is after the game’s first DLC. There is a land called Ishgard that goes through restoration by the end of the DLC. Instead of the game being linear and fixing it up within patches the game developers created an area where players go to with their crafting and gathering classes in order to donate items and objects to fix up the city. There are multiple servers in the game and each one’s pacing of the development of Ishgard depends on the player base’s contributions to the area making the players feel like they had a lot of agency in restoring the area.
Another game that I think offers a player a lot of agency is Valheim. Valheim is an open-world sandbox adventure game where the player is free to do anything they want to do. The players choose what kind of game they want to play. Players can choose to turn the game into a building simulator (https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/lz4upv/cheats_wip_valheim_is_not_a_citybuilder_so/) focus on creating a house and base, gardening and cooking, beast taming and breeding, exploring and adventuring into tombs and dungeons, role-playing and turning the game into a PVP battle arena, etc. the possibilities are endless, the player’s imagination is the limit
These examples are of things that allow players to feel like they truly constructed their own world by strongly feeling their own presence and how that impacts their environment. You can view the difference in immersion when being compared to older more linear games like an extreme example, Super Mario Brothers where the player has no choice at all they just go forth on a linear one-way path.
