Maybe the future of digital storytelling lies in dynamically generated narrative through reader/player interaction?

By the way, I brought up this post on the course website I set up as instructional technologist for an upper division seminar on apocalyptic thought.

What I don’t quite understand is the ending. On that wiki page, it seems to indicate that regardless of which of the two outcomes you achieve, Slicers still overrun a nuclear submarine, presumably threatening the end of the rest of the world. Does the game thereby explore the question of whether free will and morality can exist in a deterministic world? Or does it perhaps negate the notion that what we do matters, since the particulars of the end are inevitable? And if the narrator’s voice (the voice of moral conscience?) relates the same story, just with an angrier tone if you eradicated the Little Sisters, what does that say about the locus of moral agency?

If I had a PC or an XBOX 360 (and didn’t have a dissertation to write), I’d love to get my Structuralist hooks into that game.

That is awesome, I love the idea behind tiltfactor. Creating a video game focused around illegal immigration and being on the run is compelling for all sorts of reason. Particularly as Virginia is in the process of “cracking down” mightily on this workforce as the economy contracts. Speaking of Counter-Strike, that game is certainly embedded within the violent logic of the war on terrorism, but I always found it fascinating how that model allows you to pick a side, and in many ways “become” a terrorist. That seem to suggest a whole different layer of complexity when it comes to the idea of national loyalties, etc.

The idea of a peaceful form of protest within those games is really interesting. Hacking these servers to disrupt the war on terror (which in many regards has been virtually acted out by the civilian with such a game engine) does, indeed, introduce a whole new layer of thinking about the violence inherent in games. I think your point about doing within these environments is an excellent one, and the becoming an agent of aggression and violence is a good point. I often approach the polemic visually, yet the actual ability to agree to cut up people with your chainsaw is definitely an act of virtual violence, regardless of resolution.

All of this has me thinking about Bioshock. This game is pretty amazing in terms of graphics and game play, but it introducing an interesting element of choice into the narrative. Quickly, there are characters called little sisters that are genetically mutated children, you have the choice to either harvest them for ADAm (the manna for survival) or save them. Each choice has its benefits and drawbacks, and in many ways determines the ending, yet yo are ultimately faced with a kind of ethical choice. I harvested the little sisters (which says something about me!) and the first time I did it was kind of strange because, unlike in toher games, I knew there was an alternative.

Trippy stuff, and we are still only at the beginning of the virtual narratives that will really bring the psychological, philosophical, and moral questions at the root of our culture into some serious question.

At the CUNY IT conference last November I attended a gaming panel that was interesting. The speakers were from a company called Tiltfactor  tiltfactor.org), which is dedicated to creating politically progressive games. They observed that almost all video games embody value and belief structures, in which gameplay reinforces either genocide (kill all the “bad guys”) or capitalism (eat or otherwise capture all the resources). Tiltfactor developes games that try to break that mould. In one game, based on a popular first-person shooter, the player is a member of an immigrant group being chased my immigration officials. During gameplay, the player “learns” about unfair U.S. immigration policies by interacting with people from other immigrant groups. Another game, Velvet Strike, allows players to hack violent online multiplayer games like Counter Strike, a popular anti-terrorist game, and introduce anti-war graffiti into the environment.

I’m not sure how much “learning” is achieved through such a polemical approach, but it struck me that the Atari games you mention fit the kind of genre that the Tiltfactor folks described. Maybe some of the negative reaction derived from a latent recognition of deeper ills that the games embody and re-enact. Maybe that’s where a lot of the horror movies come from, too, but I must confess I’m ill-read in that genre.

Yeah, the TCM game held my interest for about three minutes, and I tend to be very, very forgiving. But cutting up a pixelated character with an ill-defined chainsaw has its rewards. But don;t take my word for it, you can get the game yourself, get the Atari 2600 emulator called z26 (and the x26 GUI interface makes in more windows friendly). Then just do a search for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ROM.

In fact, I’ll be posting more about this emulation soon. I was thinking about your post on TCM and the way in which the violence on the screen spilled over into the production of that film (or is it the other way around?), and it is interesting to me how the mediated representations of this violence take on their own reality, even if only virtual. The idea of this game as violent really opens up some interesting questions about what we understand as violence in media –is it verisimilitude? Or is it only the idea? Nonetheless, it can be kind of fun as you suggest.

Now, if I can only get to Cannibal Holocaust -did they make a video game of that?