Looking at the concept of Archives this week for class, I realized that I've actually been making use of a particular online literature archive for several years -- that is, http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, Project Gutenberg, which has more that 20,000 out-of-copyright works of literature online. I came across this site at first while looking for Baum's old Wizard of Oz works--as you may or may not know, there are actually quite a few of these--because I've found myself rather drawn to older works of fantasy and science fiction. There is a very different feeling to many of these works compared to more modern fare, as though those authors were more willing to range further in their imaginations. In the case of much speculative and science fiction from the early 20th century, I find myself ticking off scientific impossibilities as I read, but I don't think that detracts from the stories.
As far as using archives for teaching, I was hard-pressed to add to Dr. Webb's list of ideas! Creating a new set of original mythologies presented in the same fashion as http://www.pantheon.org/ would make an interesting group project...
On another note, all that talk of hypertexting the other day made me recall a text-based game I wrote up a long time ago in C++...the engine itself was very flexible, allowing for story nodes with decision groupings that could vary based on certain conditions (for example, the choice to unlock a door might appear if the user had previously picked up a key). I wrote some of a game using the engine that involved exploring an abandoned WWII-era mansion, but I didn't get too far before realizing the fractal nature of the story options was going to require a very large amount of content development and subsequent debugging. I wonder if it would be worth continuing to develop now. It'd be interesting to consider something similar (probably in a more updated format, such as hyperlinked .html pages, for instance) as a group project; having a fractal branching format for a story is just begging for multiple contributors. Where one student/group might develop a thread from the initial conditions that became a murder mystery, another group's work might cause a different choice at the beginning to lead to a romantic plot. And if such a thing were developed in a internet format, the possibilities of embedded hypertext and other additions only make the potential complexity and richness of the resulting work that much more immense.
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2 comments:
The game sounds interesting, and if you do continue to work on it, you should bring it to class.
James--I think the game sounds intriguing, but I also know how long such work takes--about as long as writing a novel--which is kinda what you'd be doing.
I really want to learn to do the kind of programming you apparently do. I'm interesting in exploiting the choices that you mention so that I can show students (a) that writers have choices and (b)ways to play with choices. My hope would be they'd transfer the comfort they gain with playing with choices to their own writing development.
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