Narrative and Technology

Justin Bortnick, Ph.D., Department of English, University of Pittsburgh 

Course Type: Seminar 

Keywords: Twine, Narrative, Technology

University Department Level Credits Length Medium
University of Pittsburgh English Undergrad 3 15 Weeks In-person

Course Description

This course asks students to consider the ways in which technology influences narrative and  storytelling practice. Many day-to-day experiences are mediated through an increasingly  complicated network of technological structures, algorithms, and a plethora of connected  devices. It is paramount that students understand the relationship with and influence that these  systems have on traditional narrative modes, and how the works that manifest from them – video  games, fan production, hypertext and more – are produced and consumed. This course asks  students to write at length critically about these relationships as well as engage in creative  production to design interactive digital narrative works of their own.

Weekly Outline

Week 1: What is Narrative? 

Week 2: Machines, Robots, Cyborgs (Part 1) 

Week 3: Machines, Robots, Cyborgs (Part 2) 

Week 4: Surveillance Society 

Week 5: Problematic Creators 

Week 6: Protocol 

Week 7: Interactive Fiction and Twine 

Week 8: What Can Games Do? 

Week 9: World of Warcraft Introduction 

Week 10: A Connected World 

Week 11: The “World” of Warcraft 

Week 12: Messaging in Warcraft 

Week 13: Play and Games – Warcraft and Beyond 

Week 14: Game Narrative and Politics 

Week 15: (one week each semester is consumed by fall/spring break, the week is variable)

Course Objectives ​

  •  Introduce students to major works of theory in the fields of both narrative and technology • Encourage students to consider the role of narrative in their own lives and how  technology mediates that experience 
  • Allow students to engage in creative production of interactive digital narrative in a hands on experimental way 
  • Expose students to notable and influential works of cinema and television that have  shaped public discourse around narrative and technology 
  • Ask students to consider the value of “problematic” or troublesome authors and texts, and  how a modern social media environment has shaped the narrative around these people  and works
  • Provide students historical context for understanding the media environment they exist  within today and illustrate how stories that shape their lives are in term shaped by earlier  stories and technologies

Reading

  • 2600 (various issues) 
  • Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question,” Science Fiction Quarterly (Nov. 1956).
  • The Bible: Genesis 1.1-9.29 and Revelations 1.1-22.21  
  • Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota  Press), 2011.  
  • Bogost, Ian. “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” The Atlantic (25 Apr. 2017),  www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/. • Capek, Karel. Rossum’s Universal Robots. 1920. (any edition) 
  • Corneliussen, Hilde G. and Jill Walker Rettberg, eds. Digital Culture, Play, and  Identity: A “World of Warcraft” Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.  • Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), 2nd ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195-228. • Golumbia, David. “Games Without Play,” in “Play,” special issue, New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 179-204. 
  • Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism  in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of  Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. 
  • Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), trans. William  Lovitt, in Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to “Being and Time”,  rev. and exp. ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 307-41. 
  • Ellis, Warren. Global Frequency, (New York: DC Comics), 2013. First published 2002- 2004 in serial form by DC Comics. 
  • Galloway, Alexander R. “Gamic Action, Four Moments,” in Gaming: Essays on  Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 1-38. • Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 
  • Galloway, Alexander R. “Warcraft and Utopia,” Ctheory.net (16 Feb. 2006),  www.ctheory.net/articles. aspx?id=507. 
  • Galloway, Alexander R. “We Are the Gold Farmers,” in The Interface Effect (Malden,  MA: Polity, 2012), 120-43. 
  • Jagoda, Patrick. “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” boundary 2 40, no. 2  (Summer 2013): 113-44.  
  • Kermode, Frank. “The End,” in The Sense of and Ending: Studies in the Theory of  Fiction with a New Epilogue, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3-31 • McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The  Extensions of Man, critical ed., ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko,  2003), 17-36. 
  • Nakamura, Lisa. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in  World of Warcraft,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2 (Summer  2009): 128-44. 
  • Ryan, Marie-Laure. “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of  Interactive Narrative,” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 1, 2009, pp.  43–59.

Viewings

  • “Be Right Back,” Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 1 (Netflix) 
  • Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982, 2007) (DVD) 
  • Dynamics: The State of the Art (Clint Hocking) (YouTube)
  • Hannah Arendt (2012) (Kanopy) 
  • Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (Werner Herzog) (Internet Archive)
  • “Make Love, Not Warcraft” (South Park Season 10 Episode 8) (South Park Studios)
  • The Social Dilemma (2020) (Netflix) 
  • Tron (1982) (Disney+)

IDN Artifacts

  • Bee (Emily Short) (PC IDN) 
  • Colossal Cave Adventure (Will Crowther and Don Woods) (PC IDN) • Depression Quest (Zoe Quinn) (PC IDN) 
  • Final Project (Alexis Giobbi) [Exemplary student project from this course] (PC IDN) • Howling Dogs (Porpentine Charity Heartscape) (PC IDN) 
  • Mystery House (Sierra) (PC IDN) 
  • The Oregon Trail (MECC) (PC IDN) 
  • The Play (Deitrich Squinkifer) (PC IDN)  
  • The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo (Michael Lutz) (PC IDN) 
  • World of Warcraft (Activision Blizzard) (PC IDN) 
  • Zork (Infocom) (PC IDN)

IDE and IDN Authoring Tools

  • Twine (IDN Authoring Tool)

Major Assignments (being assignments whose value is of 25% or more)

 Course Blog 

  • Platform: WordPress 
  • Purpose: Facilitate short-form critical writing and analysis on subjects of  relevance to the course 
  • Requirements: 
    • Minimum three mandatory postings with prescribed subject matter, with  additional required comments on other students’ writing. 
    • If students wish to achieve higher than a grade of “B” on this assignment,  they must take the initiative to produce additional blog posts beyond the required three at their own initiative, on subjects related to the themes and  content of the course. 
  • Evaluation:  
    • Mandatory postings are evaluated based upon how well they addressed the  provided prompt, factoring in depth of analysis, strength of rhetoric and additive stylistic elements. 
    • Voluntary postings are evaluated based upon how well the student ties  their post to the course material, depth of insight, and quality of overall writing. 

Twine Project 

  • Platform: Twine  
  • Purpose: To introduce the students to the production methodologies of branching  narrative, giving them an opportunity to apply the theory discussed during  seminar. 
  • Requirements: 
    • Minimum 75 nodes/lexia 
    • Story must meaningfully branch. 
    • No coding proficiency is required, but students are encouraged to produce  as a work that thoroughly demonstrates their grasp of the concepts and themes of the course to this point. 
    • Narrative must specifically engage with the ideas and content from any  two of the texts or works discussed in the course. 
  • Evaluation: 
    • Twine projects are evaluated based upon whether they met the lexia requirement, how effectively they integrated the course material, and how creative their narrative implementation was.
    • Critically, students are not given higher grades or marked down because of  a lack of technical complexity. Many students have little experience with  game design or markup language, but Twine still allows these students to  succeed at effective creative practice. Students are encouraged to use the  full extent of their capabilities – if they are code experts then by all means  use that talent – but doing so will not in and of itself result in a higher mark.

Final Project – “A Project”

  • Platform: Student’s Choice 
  • Purpose: To allow students to produce a work that they believe demonstrates the  full culmination of what they have learned over the course of the entire semester.
  • Requirements: 
    • The final project is open-ended and the form it takes is up to the individual  students. Some may opt to write a traditional thesis-driven academic  essay, others may make a video game building on what they learned from the Twine project, still others have produced podcasts, video essays, interactive web maps and more. The sky is the limit for potential here.

Course Best Practices

  • Expect a minimum of ~three hours of class time each week with at least an hour of office  hours availability. 
  • As the course is a seminar, there should be relatively equal division of time between  lecture, discussion, viewings and activities. Lectures include narrative and games in  politics and historical overview of Heidegger’s legacy. Discussions include “how do you  think about surveillance and technology in your own life?” and “what makes us play  games and why?” Activities include the Twine peer playtest day and the Warcraft tutorial  and player versus player tournaments. 
  • Grade breakdown is as follows: 
    • Class Participation – 20% 
    • Blog Posts (combined) – 20% 
    • Twine Project – 20% 
    • Final Project – 40% 
  • All students will be familiar with some of the technologies discussed in the class, but  many will struggle with various assignments that are outside of their experience.  Allowing the more experienced students to take the lead to guide those who are less  allows you to effectively balance this concern. For example, some students may have  strong computer science skills but be relatively unfamiliar with interactive digital  narratives and vice-versa. The Twine project’s in-class mandatory peer playtesting  session allows for the skill and knowledge sharing to shore up both of these concerns. 
  • Many of the more theoretical texts, especially Kermode, Heidegger, Galloway and  Haraway, are challenging for undergraduate students who may become frustrated with  the dense prose. Set aside ample time to model exactly how these texts should be read  and what they are actually saying. I find that by leading with what many students  consider to be the hardest reading of the semester – Kermode – and spending a full class  session working through the first two or three pages line by line with them, many  students report Kermode being their favorite reading of the semester, refer back to it in  subsequent writings and projects constantly, and report that the careful guidance set them  up for success with future challenging readings.

Acknowledgments

The format and the content of the course when I first began teaching it is heavily indebted to a  syllabus for this same class designed by Bradley Fest, Spring 2015. Although it has significantly  changed since that time, Dr. Fest’s structure and choices of texts were extremely helpful and  many works are still used by me today.