Kisses hide under unfettered words
Hugs aside, a yearn.
A wish fulfillment that will come
Come as it may and come and come
And as each smile rises to your face
A trinkle of a laughter breaks
To make another person smile is an amazing gift
To raise and give emotion for a small thing of bliss
So on Monday, I gave a short 5 minute sprint talk at the Digital Humanities conference held by AUB. It was an amazing experience, with Ray Siemens and Lynn Siemens (Victoria), Sebastian Gunther (Goettingen), Caren Kaplan (UC Davis), the Provost Ahmad Dallal, President Peter Dorman of AUB, Chairman David Wrisley of the English Department, as well as many other AUB teachers, staff and students present. I began the talk with a “Hi! My name is Sagger Khraishi, and I am a game designer.” As I looked at the people present, I smiled and then said, “Well, when I tell people that, the usual reply is, ‘Cool! So are you a computer science major? CMPS?’ ” and then I would reply back with, “No, I am an English Major.”
With some laughs happening there, really did ease the tension, I brought up the context of my discussion, talking about how with the expansion of video games in the setting of the mobile game environment, the interactive narrative presents itself as a new form of literature to a larger audience. From things between the lore, scripts, background, and over arching story – the small stories presented have moved back to the dime-back selection of novels.
Opening up a large image of Space Invaders, 1977, I talked about how that was the first narrative. You were given the mission, and put through with limited text to complete wave after wave of never ending monsters. Narratives have evolved though, over time to a larger audience. I quoted some stats from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)’s 2012’s Essential facts about the computer and videogame industry. The average gamer is 30 years old, with 12 years of experience. 47% of the gamers are females, middle age women group being 68% larger than the 18 to 20 year old male group. 33% of players play with smart phones, 25% hand held devices. And that half a billion play world wide at least an hour a day (Taken from “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal).
So I came back to the explanation of the narrative with Space Wars, despite it being deviant, and mentioned about the different places you would find text, such as Skyrim’s 820 in game books to help support the lore. Of how World Of Warcraft, has the lore and as the player, the avatar places themselves within the lore and creates a new journey through the interactive narrative. I stressed on how many games, except for the rare ones that achieve the never-ending story, use the narrative to give completion. The completion is found using audio, visual, or textual cues.
There, I mentioned about Angry Birds reaching 1.7 billion downloads so far. This was tied in to the technology. The technology allows us to interface with a larger audience as people shift from board games to virtual ones. This leads to a greater interactivity with the player creating the avatar to interact with the story and to expand. I gave the focus of role-playing games as an example, tying back to World of Warcraft and Skyrim.
With the avatar creating a personalized story within the story, this may seem as a smaller scale to the imagination present when reading actual texts. But the difference is that these games give an alternate form of interactivity, with such things as the use of network cafes to personal computers.
With this, I moved to the Content & Form, Theory & Practice. I spoke about how with games, we need to step away from the view that we are the narratologist, as literary theory is more than just narratology with games. I mentioned about the never ending story there, and talked again about the dime-back pharmacy novels and how we should use these games as an alternate form of story telling. I told the audience to imagine telling a story to 1.7 billion people, which would be affected to some extent. And I asked, as a writer, wouldn’t that be an amazing thing to achieve? The topic then moved on with another example of Bioshock Infinte, having 20k more words than the average novel (source: Irrational Games).
As to why the university should focus on this, more and more companies have been hiring writers over the years, as games shifted (at least what I believe) from who looks pretty to a stronger base of content. Given the audience, as seen with Angry Birds for a buck ninety-nine, this should not be ignored. From here, the conversation split into two points. One is about a certain Avant-garde fallacy that is drawn out from this. Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou is a movie where it is hard to make a coherent story due to the temporal skips. With this, as a reply to that, it is important to remember that text becomes discourse as an alternate form. This ties back to the audio cues and visual cues to present the story without the story itself disappearing.
The second point came after the talk in the discussion. I mentioned about how this still requires interdisciplinary cooperation to create the games, even for things such as text based games. This is why it would be important for AUB to create a game design major, which would be one of the first in the Middle East, especially at a respected university. The second point was that the courses are already available. What is important though, is to change the perspectives on the courses and group them up to be placed under the major. For game writings for instance, the creative writing as well as play writing courses to learn how to write in scripts is important. Use of excel, at least a basic understanding of coding is important. The courses are there. The third point was about how Western games are already to an extent racist. You have games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counterstrike, which portray Arabs as terrorists.
By giving the Middle East the tools to counter the anti-arab orient, it will gain better support from the country, as well as politically in Lebanon. (There was silence at this point, which felt pretty good as the words sunk in).
And with that, I closed the talk and sat down with the applause. Damn that felt good.
So I was thinking about the different topics I want to write about.
Well, this is what I’m going to be working on the next few days.
Just heard, hope everyone is safe.
To be honest, I’m pretty scared about the conference later. I’m not sure if I’m going mess it up or not. 7 and a half min to talk about literature in the mobile game environment.
Alright, so an explanation from spacewars till now, touch on Everquest, WoW and other MMO’s, and move down to angry birds and other hand-held mobile games.
Explain the importance of literature with games, the different ways that it is used, (insert a joke here?), which direction it is moving now and why we should support it as a medium worthy of other styles of text.
aaand after that I have no fucking idea.
A post-apocalyptic gentleman sketch.
Foreword: This is perhaps one of my favorite things to create poetry. The exercise itself is simple enough, you take a paragraph, and break it up. I will be using an interview of Jean Francois Lepage by Anita Zechender called, “Shaking the Soul” page 83, Image in Progress N. 3.
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“The photography of Jean-Francois Lepage, a genial artist and a Parisian, reproduced finite and decadent traits. Female souls are models in a world whose contours are drawn by the human pen. Paradoxical stage sets eho an elegant and sophisticated fashion, which shows its infinitesimal plasticity, capable of invading the eyes with matter and fabrics but of preparing the mind to the surreal. Lepage’s art is complex, as it transcends the world of fashion, touches upon graphics and painting, calls to mind cinema to finally reach the philosophy of existence.”
&
“The concept of woman as an inspirational muse, custodian of the mystery of seduction is abandoned in favor of transformist bodies, without sexuality, headless. “Avatars” that allow access to a mysterious Surreality, sinister and magic at time which is suggested as a possible safe haven. This are post-modern, unobvious images; they are subversive, nearly troublesome, never natural yet so fitting in all historical periods.”
—————
In order to create a collage out of it, I am also going to be introducing another paragraph as well to mix and match. One will be in bold, the underlying lines italicized, and the other plain.
————
1: reproduced finite and decadent traits. Female souls are models in a world contours are drawn by the human pen. Paradoxical echo sophisticated and elegant fashion infinitesimal plasticity invading the eyes with matter and fabrics preparing the mind to the surreal. Transcends upon graphics and painting reach philosophy of existence.
2: An inspiration muse, custodian of seduction in favor of the concept of woman without sexuality, headless. Access to a mysterious Surreality, which is suggested as sinister and magic, a possible safe haven. Post-modern, images, subversive never natural yet fitting in all historical periods.
————
Now that the key words that I want were selected, I will continue with mixing them together. As if it were a 10 by 10 poem, it should read together, yet become an understandable separate poem if split apart. It becomes a decadent assembly of words set together as a collage to form a new art – yet at the same time retains the original sensibilities.
————-
Finite and decadent concept reproduced
[by]female souls ina world[of]contours
are sinister models yet in a world drawn
by inspiration muse ofseduction thehuman
pen SophisticatedSubversive and elegant
fashion invadingtheeyes with a possible
post-modern safe/haven and parado-
xical infinitesimal plasticity preparing the
fitting mind all tothegraphic
philosophy of existence.
—————–
And there we go.
So for the conference, I received an interesting email regarding a dinner. While yes, I do understand that my friends are getting married, or having children, and so on – no, I do not have a spouse. So my options regarding attending this dinner are:
Now, I’m leaning towards option 2 and 3. Option 1 is out of the question, as I am pretty sure that I have not married anyone up to now. Option 4, would be interesting. Choices, choices.
The Arts and Humanities Initiative
takes the pleasure to invite you together with your spouse
to a dinner honoring its participants in the Digital Humanities Workshop
Tuesday: April 16
Time: 8:30 pm
Place: Blue Note- Makhoul Street
R.S.V.P. by Monday, April 15th.
That said and done, I probably go with option 4 and find someone who would like to go and pretend to be my wife for the evening. Or go with option 3. This is going to be interesting.
A couple of pictures, something to create worlds out of.
So what kind of art would you guys like to see? Should I go into the more fantastical art, with dragons or knights? Should I focus on something a bit more realistic, such as daily slices of life? Maybe something a bit more sci-fi, with alternate worlds and flying ships.
With how we use technology, we can easily access so many different genre’s of art. But what is it that you like to see in specific?
Daydreams that build Worlds 