The important notion which Adrian brought up was the idea that narratives do not have any real connection to games unless the narrative is the focal point of the game. This similar notion of competition driving the focal point of games is one which i disagree with at first. As i kept on thinking i kind of developed my own sense of narrative within this storyless or plotless games. Even though games is a broad term, the most competitive of games at the moment do not actually yield any form of narrative in the traditional sense of a storyline. However, i can see the direction of a more abstract version of a narrative. In a way the actions which occur in a replayable game with no ends such as Street Fighter, Starcraft and Dota etc… have no story. But the competitiveness kind of becomes a narrative in itself.

In games i would call it snowballing out of control or sometimes even mind games, in real life sports as an analogy it would be called strategy or a gameplan. By doing this sort of action, this consequence will occur. If a player tends to continue to block over and over or seems to tend to be aggressive and forget aspects of the fundamentals such as over committing etc… This becomes the starting point, the narrative will continue in that I will hopefully punish them for doing a mistake or adapt to their playstyle. These reactive style games have a narrative in the strategy of these games rather then a story based narrative.

These competitive games which i would like to differ from narrative based games do indeed have a narrative, but not in a plot or protagonist form. These mindgames or human reaction become a style of narrative. I just thought that this is quite interesting as these terms such as narrative, story and plot are all so broad. In a sense these reactions are also links and each action or event that elicit an aciton is a node. im starting to see the broader grand scheme of things when related to networks and it is fairly interesting.

The word itself sounds quite crazy, some form of Street Fighter final move, The Hypertext dun dun dun. The tutorial today explored some key points relating to story telling/narrative and hypertext. I have never read a hypertext narrative, but it seems like it could work. The main flaws presented by the class was the detachment and the sudden change of scene from the actual text, whether it be through the break in story or the break in sequeital cause and effect. Elliot raised a point that games cannot really be classified into hypertext, maybe aspects of it can, but games utilises different aspects of hypertexting. The notion of cause and effect in games is large now days where this simple action will lead to this ultimate consequence. I feel like my understanidn go hypertext relies solely on this notion since why would you hypertext or hyperlink something if the following or connected information is not the effect of what you just said.

Hypertext as i said in previous post seems to work really well in non fiction rather than narrative, i read a piece Kevin Li’s blog about the likeness of hypertext to youtube annotations. The narrative structure which hypertext bring can be seen when two videos are related in that they are a split story, an unfinished story. The annotations really do help when they mention a previous reference or skit that is related to the topic at hand. This example really allowed me to see how hypertext has positivel affected my life even though not academic at all.

edit:this was posted a long time ago, but it was in drafts>_>

I recently picked up a card game after going to pax a few months back and seeing it plsyed on twitch.tv. I loved card games as long a si remmber, pokemon cards, then yugioh, i was a pretty big yugioh fan and played the game religiously for a while. At first i thoguht Magic would be simple or approachable at first, boy was i wrong. This game has so many in built mechanics which is quite daunting for a beginner. The combat system is intricate as well, it is fairly similar yo duel masters or hearthstone , they are both simplified versions of magic. The amount of intricacies make the game both appealing yet unwanted as well.

This reading was pretty interesting from a business commerce view. I understand the graph now after reading wiki pages, the left side of the tail or the beginning of the tail (it looks like the back of a dinosaur) will normally encompass 50% where as the right side will make the the remaining 50 It is interesting to note the idea that instea dof selling all mainstream items, you focus on the niche markets in order to sell a wide variety of minor products, but these combined niches will equal out to the main product. I find this works because, even though stuff is mainstream, there is a large majority of people who will not conform or like the content provided from the mainstream. In turn the wide variety of niche products will have less inventory spaces, but those 1 or 2 inventory will sell if available. I dont use netflix, but i know how it works and i think the digital age has really helped move it along. Why vcare about inventory space, when you can store anything and everything digitally for such a minor amount of space.
On a side note,  i cannot believe that article mentions kazaa. I have not heard that name in 10 years or so, back before limewire became the top dog in piracy peer to peer sharing :D. What ever happend to limewire and kazaa i still don’t know.

This reading was quite strange. Itstalks about the  distribution of data in real life situations which fit into this 80/20 structure. In a way it is true due to the bell curvedistribution which we have grown all too familiar with in high school. The majority of people will fit into the middle where the bell curve peaks, where as the rest or the 20 will fit into the outliers whether it is too low or too high. I normlaly don’t see this statistic in many other situations, but thats probabnly cause i don’t pay attention, but in games which have a ranking system or mmr you can see that 80% of the population fit into the average skill bracket or even low, where as the remaining 20% are in the high skilled bracket. Another important point of 80 20 which i thought was ironic was the thought of equally distributed links among nodes or anythting. Every webpage or node will have a similar amount of links going in or out of page and will uniformly have the same trait. This also reflects the 80 20 rule, i dont know the exact stats but the sites which deviate will prbably be around 10-15 as well if this theory is correct. In a way this theory is just a reflection of the population as whole. 80% of the world or population will be in average jobs , lead average or noaml lives. The 20 or mayube not 20 maybe 10? will do something extraordinary or live in a world of comfort and wealth more so than the 80. It seems very similar to the 1%, we are the 99% campaign. Well that number is completely off target from the 80 20, but you get the picture.

Swearing was such a big giant boo boo as a kid, everything even minor was regarded as a profanity; damn, oh my god and even crap. Being in this transition generation between lack of technology and the rise of the internet, i was able to see myself as an individual as well as younger generation develop a higher tendency to swear. I saw a funny image recently of how Australian’s call their mates c__ts and their enemies mates. Growing up as a teenager, this is ironically so true. Maybe not the older generation, but this generation and evenyounger is quite crass. I do believe there are some situations where swearing is not a neccessity, but it does feel good to say it. When you jam your finger or do something unwanted that sudden burst of “f__k’ or ‘s__t” is more than necessary, what other word or words would be appropriate for that situation. Nothing. I’m no angel myself when i speak or type casually, you might even say or label me as crude or uncultured at times, but i do believe swearing is a necessary part of social communications. The type of swearing i can’t stand is using f or s (lets just abbreviate them to 1 letter for a more sensible discussion) as adjectives for no reason in their speak e.g let me check my fing phone. Just a minor rant.

Week 7’s lecture focussed on the difficulty and the inability of the authors intent. Everything you ever make and create is up for interpretation and scrutinity from the entire world. You have no control over what they interpret, but you can ehlp them by making things clear. I do believe that even though eveyrthing is subjective, that’s why we have opinions, but what we interpret is not always random. Even though we can all present differing views, there is always a central undertone which everyone understands. This central idea is what we all should interpret and understand if the creator has presented his/her work well. It is much like Year 12 English, did the author or cartoonist actually put in that much thought right down to most minute detail, oh that flower is blue because it is a sad day etc… If it was me i would say probably not. But, the main idea or general contention is always the same no matter which student you ask, they might word it differently, but the contention or creative idea is always streamlined.

Genre was also a key idea discussed which i thought is interesting. To me genre is the general outline in which we can categorise styles or themes or anything. A genre is much like a tag on twitter etc… This film is _____, in turn that _____ will attract a certain type of audience. When i think of genres i think of pokemon, each genre is a type. Pikachu is part of the electric genre, charmander is fire genre etc… I don’t know how this is relevant to our lecture, but pokemon 😀