I had vaguely planned to keep adding to this blog while working on my thesis, which of course means that I’m only now, at the end of June, actually writing an entry. I’m trying to ignore the voice in my head that questions everything, insistently asking: What’s the point? Why bother? Is it even still worth it if the summer is halfway over?
Author: Alexa Pukall Page 1 of 2
Economic Narratives was an amazing course. Seemingly aimless and meandering at first, it took me a couple of sessions to realise how much I was learning despite the relaxed atmosphere.
In addition to a veritable boatload of assignments, week 11 also included a Twine workshop which I honestly didn’t expect to find as useful as I did.
In week 6, my first self-chosen intensive rolled around: Story Roots for Sustainable Futures. It had been an easy choice for me in September, when I first read through the course descriptions, and I’d been looking forward to it since then. And it certainly lived up to the hype.
Weeks 4 and 5 were umbrella’d by being assigned and coordinating a meeting with my supervisor, who I formally met with at the start of Flexible Learning Week. While it’s certainly strange to be thrown together with a (near) stranger who will be such an influential force on a project that will take up a significant chunk of my time and become a defining period of, at the least, my stay in the UK, I was hopeful going into the meeting and continue to be so now. My supervisor had a number of helpful references for me that explore avenues that I hadn’t considered yet (and also triggered a minor imposter syndrome crisis, because can I really consider myself an academic if I can’t list literary theories and their major contributing researchers off the top of my head?) and I came out of the meeting feeling like she understood what I find exciting about my idea. She was accommodating of my learning style and open about what she couldn’t help me with, but with recommendations of who maybe could. I now have another half dozen books to stack onto my ever-growing research pile, but I’m pleased with how the meeting went and motivated to give this project my all – for myself, of course, but also, now, for other people.
My initial response to the writing prompt for week 4 was that Ethical Data Futures is irrelevant to my final project. Much as I enjoy the class, I won’t work with data in the traditional sense and I’m not going to be utilizing algorithms or AI technology which are built by, with, and for using data. A lot of my learning in the course is extremely relevant for life, but not necessarily for my dissertation.
However, after thinking about it for a little while longer, I’ve decided that EDF is providing me with prime dystopia fodder. Institutionalized prejudice justified by being “fair” and “unbiased” because it came from a machine sounds like it could easily join the ranks of disturbing science fiction a la Stepford Wives. I don’t have a concrete idea yet what to do with this thought, but I’m going to stick a pin in it for later anyway.
In case anyone is wondering how it’s going, I wrote this entire blog post about week 2, six weeks ago, and apparently never hit ‘publish.’ So that’s great.
I very much enjoyed the week 2 World as Story intensive. The readings were excellent and the different sections delivered on the built-up expectations. The politics segment was probably my favourite, but there were points of interests in every part of it, and I’m really happy I get to be here and study this. And the next time someone asks me what the point of my programme is, I can just tell them everything is narrative.
In terms of influencing my thesis, there haven’t been any dramatic discoveries. At this point, as I’ve already been forced/forced myself to commit to so much of my thesis topic, I doubt the individual intensives are going to truly shake the foundations of what I have planned. What I did find an interesting takeaway was the idea that narratives are controlled; perhaps not by an individual, but a system, culture, or society. Obviously, if I write a story, I control what happens in it, but the story I write is also either in concordance with or counter to the stories we tell ourselves in our everyday lives and that we live with or fight against. Alette Willis’ diagrams on stories and storytellers below struck a cord with me: I not only want to tell a story, I have said multiple times that I want my audience to be a part of the experience
For instance, I want to explore the idea of reader choice. That means that as the person holding the strings of the narrative, I have to decide whether to let those choices be “right” or “wrong” – I can deceive readers into choosing a path that may look good on the surface but ends in disaster, or I can give them exactly what I hinted at. I can punish them for trusting me, or reward them for it.
It’s something to think about, and something that makes me curious about the Story Roots intensive, and how my perspective on storytelling will change with it.
So far, 2024 has been an amalgamation of events catering to a wide variety of my interests. I’ve rediscovered my love for films (aided by a ‘free movies for members’ offer by my local cinema) and seen The Boy and the Heron, 20 Days in Mariupol, Godzilla Minus One, American Fiction, and Wicked Little Letters so far. I’ve been to the ballet (Cinders), musical (Shrek) and experimental theatre (Plinth), and independently organized talks (The Art History of Studio Ghibli). And, of course, I’ve attended EFI and related university events: Understanding Planetary Health; Controversies in the Data Society: AI Safety and AI Ethics; and Developing TILT: a Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching.
A common theme among these events is how to communicate information in non-dialogical ways. Body language, color schemes, music, and terminology all inform how we transfer meaning from one person to another. Each medium has its own language and shorthand that it uses to communicate, that has evolved over time, and can cause some subtleties to become lost in translation to the uninitiated.
Obviously, this isn’t a new idea. There are entire disciplines devoted to studying the history, methodologies, and trajectories of mediums like film, art, etc. But it has gotten me thinking about the issue of translation and adaptation. In fan circles, there’s this persistent idea that a good film adaptation of a book needs to include every single detail of the book, and that every change is unnecessary and borderline offensive. However, translation of any kind doesn’t work that way. There are always ideas, phrases, and peculiarities of one ‘language’ that simply don’t translate into another in the same way. And while I’ve recently developed a particular fondness for translated works that embrace their peculiarities and leave ‘foreign’ audiences to sink or swim, I’m going to have to pay attention to medium-specific language when creating my final project. So far, I’ve been approaching this as a written story borrowing ideas from games, but it’s worth considering that characteristics of either form might be lost in translation. If I do want to explore this liminal space of not-quite-a-book, not-quite-a-game, then I need to make sure that the subtleties of my writing can still be read and understood in this digital, interactive form.
While I didn’t have the chance to do much reading over the break, I did get asked quite a few questions about how my studies were going, and thus had the chance to reiterate my ideas for a thesis to an outside audience. I’ve found that even away from the go-go-go frenzy of last semester, I like my idea and can see myself devoting four months of my life to doing little else. Which is good, considering the circumstances.
I’m also coming to the conclusion that I’ve now reached a point in the development process where I should start thinking about what stories I actually want to tell. In an interactive narrative, the world(s), characters/personalities, and genre uniqueness should ideally influence the types of decision-making a reader is able to do, and therefore developing plotlines and narrative arcs will allow me to figure out precisely what skills I need to have on the technical side to translate my ideas into playable choices.
If I really want to delve deep into how player choice can influence narrative, it would be beneficial to also look into the psychological reasons for how and why choices are made. I want to do some research on how point of view influences reader empathy as a basis for my narrative choices, as well as what kind of choices readers expect, so I can both meet and subvert said expectations. I’m very excited to stake out my own little sandbox to play around in, and even if my folder of downloaded research is already a little intimidating, I might have to dive back in and hunt around for more.
I can’t believe I arrived in Edinburgh three months and three days ago. It feels like ages ago, and also like I just got here, like, yesterday. This semester has been stressful, forcing me to confront bad habits that I’ve had since my undergrad days, but has also expanded my understanding of storytelling; its ubiquity, its possibilities, and its importance. While I do have my gripes about the last three months, I can’t deny that I’ve enjoyed myself immensely. Every course I’ve taken has offered new perspectives and taught me something unexpected, and while I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on any of them, I could still cry over all the amazing courses that I didn’t get to take.
