Poetry and Media

In my first post, I mentioned a poetry reading I had attended, and that it gave me some ideas concerning the combination of my studies in poetry and video games. As it turns out, I have just recently returned from another reading, this by Robyn Schiff, who is also a candidate for a teaching position here at Loyola. At the first reading, Joshua Marie Wilkinson spoke about the influence that various forms of media has had on his poetry. His poems are full of references to photography, painting, and especially cinema. Furthermore, his writing in some ways trys to actually replicate this visual forms in language. There is a strong reflection in his work of the kind of visual media culture that surrounds photography and film. After his reading I wondered what it might be like for the video game culture to find its way into poetry. I am quite pleased that I waited to post on this topic, because Schiff's reading gave me quite a bit of insight into one way that poetry and video game culture (or, at least, new media culture) might blend. She actually had a little bit of help from Dr. Jones on this one, as he asked a question that prompted a rather interesting answer out of her (I knew exactly what you were up to there, Dr. Jones). Robyn spoke of how her poetry often times winds in strange directions, dealing with one idea or image that leads to another, and then to another, and so forth. She specifically mentioned this as influenced by a "Google thought" or "internet thought," wherein ideas are literally linked together and lead to one another. In this way, her verse is kind of hypertextual, each idea linked to another in a chain that leads us forward. A kind of Myst-like poem, perhaps. Her comments really bring out how pervasive technology is in our society and world, influencing even the most traditionally "non-technological" forms of art, such as poetry. I'm excited to see what I can work out on my own in terms of immersing my own writing into the video game culture.

Question for my Colleagues

I have a question for all you fine folks about the Myst series. As I've been playing through Myst again, I've been considering skipping over both the original and Riven (both of which I've completed before) and skipping ahead to Myst III, which I've never played. Does anyone know if the gameplay in the third installment relies at all on remembering things from Riven? I'm not too concerned about remembering the storyline unless it actually influences the game itself; I just don't want to be completely lost if I launch into III without replaying Riven. Thoughts?

Ancient Technology: 1 Jeff: 1

SUCCESS! I'm sure everyone will be relieved to know that I have solved my Diablo dilemma. I gave up on installing the program on my laptop after several failed attempts, and decided to fire up my old desktop PC. Now, it's about five years old, so it's not completely ancient, but it's certainly seen better days. The installation went off without a hitch, and I'm now free to roam the countryside and strike down evil to my heart's content. On a tertiary note, all audio functions on this PC seem to have failed, so I haven't completely bested my technological adversaries.

It has been many, many years since I've played Diablo, and I was interested to see how I reacted to it. I enjoyed the game when I first started playing, but was never a die hard fan. This remains the case today. What is fascinating now, though, is how obviously pervasive Diablo's influence (and other early action RPG's) has been on RPG's that have followed it. Whenever I think about Diablo, I inevitably end up comparing it to the Baldur's Gate RPG series from BioWare. Now, I happen to prefer the Baldur's Gate universe, probably because I enjoy the turn-based gameplay of the Dungeons and Dragons format to the real time action of Diablo. Furthermore, Baldur's Gate and its sequels/expansions are generally more complex in both gameplay and plot. The point, though, is that the dialogue between these two games in particular is overwhelming. Each contains archetypal elements of the action RPG, and it is easy to see how game developers learned from Diablo. Diablo was named one the Greatest Games of All Time by gamespot.com; their entry for the game specifically references its influences in the RPG world.I'm interested in investigating some console RPG's further, and see if we can't piece together a kind of family lineage all the way up to console games like X-Men Legends I and II, and Ultimate Alliance. These games are different, to be sure, but they owe much to the games that came before.

These types of games are also noteworthy for the massive textual universes in which they reside. That is to say, a game like Baldur's Gate is surrounded by an overwhelming amount of supplementary text, or paratext (as discussed in class). For games as lengthy and complex as these action RPG's, texts like playing guides and walkthroughs may amount to several hundred pages. Furthermore, BG itself is part of the larger Forgotten Realms universe which contains several Dungeons and Dragons inspired games; accompanying each game, of course, are guides, walkthroughs, literary fiction, fan fiction, discussion groups, fan websites, and so on. As part of our final presentation, I hope that we can find time to explore the world of the RPG's paratexts.