Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Walker Walks Us Through Narration

Who can forget the classic computer game, Doom? I personally never had the game, but eagerly anticipated playing it at my friends house after school on a near daily basis. What fun! Oh sweet Nostalgia!
Part of the game's success should be attributed to the feeling one had while playing that he or she was in the game. It was completely interactive: you could look up at the ceilings, crouch down and check out the floor, and of course blast your way out of dungeon with hell fire.

The game was certainly designed to be interactive, and as our blogging class learned by reading an article by Jill Walker, many successful writings are designed in the same vein. Her article called Do You Think You're Part of This? Digital Texts and the Second Person Address, compares a successful narration to the success of the video game Doom. Walker tries to break down the essence of narration by teaching the importance of allowing the reader to feel like he is in the text.

What could be a better analogy than the classic video game, Doom? Perhaps her attempts to compare a successful narration with voyeurism. "When you read a narrative, you enjoy being a voyeur." I looked up the word voyeur in several dictionaries to see if it had a connotation that didn't relate to sexual gratification. I didn't find any, and this made me cringe when I read her repeated allusions to voyeurism. Perhaps she should have found a more suitable word.

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