Slow morning
Jul. 11th, 2009 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_dreamsSadly, the thunderstorm we were warned to watch for did not properly materialize. What can you do?
Piper's gotten the serious crazies, and I've managed to lose my sewing scissors. The week at work had a heavy side-order of brain-dead, and I'm polishing the resumé (not because I need to get out of there, just on the general update/possible side-work theory).
Been thinking about--gah, I'm not even entirely sure of the term. Fiction that is conveyed with set pieces, rather than just through the written word. John says epistolary, and a lot of them are, but that's not all of it. I mean, the first section of The Dionaea House is epistolary, but the later stuff--Eric and Loreen's private blogs, Danielle's LJ--aren't letters collected to tell a story or a diary republished in a book. They are the things you'd transcribe.
On the scale of "creating an item that your character would create", online journals are easy; hell, they're probably easier than handwritten letters. (You get a lot of this in video, too; I'm sure there's something to be said here about Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and Blair Witch Project.)
I mean, I can think of several examples. I've got a computer game that comes in its own evidence bag and arranges for you to get e-mails from other characters in the game; BBC had something similar (which is how I first tripped over the idea of TINAG; I've calligraphied letters and bought sealing wax and made seals for LARP props; I recently ran across Personal Effects: Dark Art (and I want that book so badly it's not even funny). Moving a bit further afield from straight narrative, I've seen the field kit of a werewolf hunter and pages from Cthulhu Mythos texts.
And I mean... there has to be a name for this, right? I'm looking at the alternate reality gaming idea, and thinking "alternate reality storytelling?" but that just sounds like another name for the alternate universe genre. And then there's the whole question of, if you have to work to get the next part of a story, how you define the difference between a story and a game...
Rambles that have been kicking around in my head a while, I guess, that I wanted to get down somewhere.
Piper's gotten the serious crazies, and I've managed to lose my sewing scissors. The week at work had a heavy side-order of brain-dead, and I'm polishing the resumé (not because I need to get out of there, just on the general update/possible side-work theory).
Been thinking about--gah, I'm not even entirely sure of the term. Fiction that is conveyed with set pieces, rather than just through the written word. John says epistolary, and a lot of them are, but that's not all of it. I mean, the first section of The Dionaea House is epistolary, but the later stuff--Eric and Loreen's private blogs, Danielle's LJ--aren't letters collected to tell a story or a diary republished in a book. They are the things you'd transcribe.
On the scale of "creating an item that your character would create", online journals are easy; hell, they're probably easier than handwritten letters. (You get a lot of this in video, too; I'm sure there's something to be said here about Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and Blair Witch Project.)
I mean, I can think of several examples. I've got a computer game that comes in its own evidence bag and arranges for you to get e-mails from other characters in the game; BBC had something similar (which is how I first tripped over the idea of TINAG; I've calligraphied letters and bought sealing wax and made seals for LARP props; I recently ran across Personal Effects: Dark Art (and I want that book so badly it's not even funny). Moving a bit further afield from straight narrative, I've seen the field kit of a werewolf hunter and pages from Cthulhu Mythos texts.
And I mean... there has to be a name for this, right? I'm looking at the alternate reality gaming idea, and thinking "alternate reality storytelling?" but that just sounds like another name for the alternate universe genre. And then there's the whole question of, if you have to work to get the next part of a story, how you define the difference between a story and a game...
Rambles that have been kicking around in my head a while, I guess, that I wanted to get down somewhere.
