Final Project for "Narrative and Digital Technology"

Find or create a work of electronic literature or a digital game to discuss.  Write an essay about it (either with links or screen-captures) addressing the following issues and answering the following questions, quoting and citing the theories we read throughout the semester:

  1. First, introduce us to the field of digital media.
  2. Second, talk about the particular medium you are analyzing: what are the major goals for this type of digital media (the type you are analyzing), and what methods are typically used to achieve those goals?
  3. Third, evaluate your digital artifact in terms of the goals listed and explained for question 2.  Did the designers and programmers fail to employ certain methods? Employ them to a particularly good end?
  4. How does the digital artifact you have decided to analyze position the reader or user?  What kind of power does it offer him/her?  What power does it deny him/her?
  5. What historical events surrounded its production?  How is it connected to and/or disconnected from those events?
  6. How does this digital artifact impact society, and why?
  7. What do the critics say about this particular artifact?  Do you agree?  Why or why not?
  8. What should designers of games learn from this digital artifact, both practically (how to make a good game or literary work) and philosophically (how to best affect the world)?
  9. What can you do to affect the future of these kinds of productions?

Alternate Project:

  1. Introduce the field of digital media in which your argument is embedded.
  2. Analyze the narrative structure of the digital biographies and/or personal discourses that you chose to work with, identifying in them some of the narrative structures we have observed in works of high literature (see the class-authored text book on the Wiki).  Reiterate and/or quote the definitions on the Wiki as a way of introducing each term you use.
  3. Analyze how pictures work on this site, again using the terms we have gathered together this semester and relying on our class-authored text book (Wiki).
  4. How do the features of the discourses that you have identified in 1 and 2 above affect the meaning conveyed by people about their feelings or lives?  Do specific elements of the narrative and / or visual arrangement of the site construct a persona, a vivid character with whom you can identify or whom you can imagine having as a friend, or do they create alternate kinds of subjectivity?
  5. Are the personae and lives as constructed by digital-self-presentation – are they works of art?  (Define how you are using the word “art,” quoting or citing some the theoretical texts that we read this semester.)
  6. Is the site cool, and if so, why exactly? what specific features make it cool? (Define how you are using the term 'cool,' again, relying on theory.) Is there a better term than 'cool' to describe why this new-media form of autobiography is compelling?
  7. Conclude your essay: what's the relationship between art and 'the cool,' or whatever other term you have mobilized to describe your digital object?

You can turn in the digital artifact on a CD-Rom, or give me permanent, functioning links to the object.  Turn into me directly the essay written about it, answering the questions above.

Some Sites for Artifacts:

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