Brian Greenspan

Live Hypernarrative and Cybercartography: You Are Here, Now

AbstractThis article explores some of the potentialities of narration in the context of cybercartography. We have developed a new kind of dynamic or “live” form of hypernarrative, in which the content and structure of stories is determined by live information. This system would ultimately allow the creation of hypermedia narratives capable of mining public databases on the fly in order to customize and integrate narrative material appropriate to the users particular temporal and geospatial context. Unlike other forms of hypermedia, a live hypertext narrative can actually be different every time it is read. More akin to an improvised performance than to a recorded one, a live hypertext changes depending on where and when it is accessed, and on what is happening in the world and on the Web. Live hypertext thus presents a new development in the history of writing that challenges our inherited notions of the stability, fixity, and even authority of printed text. The role of live data and the spatial and temp...

A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys: BioShock and the Dystopian Logic of Convergence

For all the critical attention paid to dystopian landscapes in recent literature and film, a similar dystopian turn within gamespace has been largely overlooked. The authors contend that post-apocalyptic digital games merit the same critical examination as their literary and cinematic counterparts, arguing that such games can provide a meaningful site in which questions about the future of technology play out against the dialectic of utopian and dystopian alternatives. Specifically, this article argues that the popular console game BioShock simultaneously celebrates and interrogates utopian notions of technological progress and free will embedded within prevailing industrial and academic conceptions of convergence. The authors explore the differing, yet complementary, conceptions of utopia put forth by critical theorists and the games industry in order to examine how BioShock’s ambivalence toward technology—and technologies and practices of media consumption in particular—complicates more idealistic and totalizing forecasts for the future of media convergence. Building upon Alexander Galloway’s treatment of gamic action as an ‘‘allegorithm’’ that permits procedural exploration and mastery of dominant control protocols in the information age, the authors analyze the way in which BioShock operationalizes the ‘‘control’’ logic of convergence. By performing a close reading of the game’s ideological content as well as its procedural strategies of transmediation, they link BioShock’s ambivalence to the multifaceted, often conflicting nature of convergence discourse and practice within the digital games industry.

Chapter 13 Mapping play: What cybercartographers can learn from popular culture

Abstract Although cybercartography is a new field of study, its arrival has long been rehearsed in popular culture and entertainment, including novels, films, Web sites and digital games. The widespread representation of cartographic, navigational and location technologies in popular texts have created cultural expectations that far exceed the current technical limits of mapping tools. At the same time, these popular narratives enable a growing familiarity with the concept of cybercartography that cannot but shape the way users approach the cybermaps of the future. This chapter will explore cybermaps as a popular concept, examining some of the cybercartographic interfaces (both real and fictional) that have been imagined and implemented in printed fiction, hyperfiction, Web sites, films and digital games. Through various forms of cultural analysis, I will show how the stories we tell about cybermaps today can inform future cybercartographic theory and practice. Note: View the SIM City Screen Capture Images on the Accompanying CD-Rom.