The Narrative: Transposition
Choose a narrative that has been expressed in both an interactive and a non-interactive medium, for example the game Tomb Raider and the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Discuss how the transposition to/from interactive media has changed the narrative. Has the structure of the narrative remained intact?
Ah Yes, The Da Vinci Code, transposed two times over from book to film and then to video game. Given the limitations of the cinema (length of movie, budget, religious resistances among othe things), the movie failed to deliver - receiving 156 rotten tomatoes out of 200. Perhaps it's the incompelete nature of the narrative ("infinite number of plausible intermediate actions or properties" and the Unbestimmtheiten. Although the movie did adhere closely to the original storyline, the whole experience was different, and unfortunately disappointing.
And then game developers cash in on the whole Da Vinci hype and incorporate the narrative into a video game. You play as Rober Langdon, exploring the different environments and investigating the whole conspiracy. There are two main game mechanics: the puzzles, and the combat. Since code breaking constitutes the plot for The Da Vinci Code, the game stays true to the narrative by recreating these kernels that move the story forward. However, combat mode comes in when your character is confronted with his pursuers, and a tedious simon-says "fight" ensues: you basically mimic a sequence that appears onscreen with your arrow keys. This becomes really long-drawn and tedious after a while which takes your mind away from the story to just mindlessly tapping on your arrow keys. Besides the crappy combat mechanics, the game has endless cut scenes which would be confusing unless you already knew the story (which would be pointless playing the game as you already knew the answers to the puzzles).
On a macro level, the story is transposed rather accurately as the existents and events stay true to the original narrative. On a micro level however, details are omitted and changed due to assumptions in the original text (For example, what Robert Langdon looks like is left to your imagination, and are potrayed differently in the movie and in the game).
In essence, different mediums bring out different aspects of a story. And in the case of interactive media, too much emphasis on interactivity compromises on the discourse, doing great injustice to the narrative.
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Is it that too much emphasis is placed on interactivity at the expense of discourse, or that its unreasonable to expect an interactive medium to be able to convey a story? Perhaps they would have done better not to try to tell the story, but to focus on the gameplay? We'll come back to this later in the semester...