I the narrator

Week 7- Visual Narrative and the Media

To narrate means to tell a story. A visual image speaks everything and it does not have a hundred and one meaning. This contributes to the reason that there is no universal image as different people from different culture have different understandings for a similar image or sign. Therefore, it is very important that narrative is used in order to shape the visual image into the audience. For this week’s post, I am going to write from my perspective towards this and this makes me as the speaking subject. Everyone can tell a story. Just like everyone can write. However, not everyone can write an interesting story. What makes an interesting story? Writing is never easy. I’ve always think that good idea makes good story. In order to search for idea for this post, this time, I’ve decided to follow my friend to go for fishing. I’ve ever do fishing before, but the truth is that, I only fish in video games. I remembered that I was addicted to the fishing game and I couldn’t stop playing it. But when I was fishing in real life, it was so boring that I got so impatient and became angry. Then this keeps me pondering, why do people like to play video game so much?

The simple reason is that, video games have always been the narrative genre. Most video games are based on a novel, comic, movie or even a story. Therefore, we can say that video game is the genre of discourse of non-fiction, fantasy and also mostly action. According to Seymour Chatman (1978), each theory has two parts, a story and the content or chain of events, plus the characters and setting, and a discourse, that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated. Aristotle also suggested that, "stories have a beginning, middle and an end." (Smith, Moriarty, Barbatsis and Kenny, 2005: 327).

Notice that in a game, you never are asked to fight the big final boss in the last stage when you first played the game.

Tekken 6 Final Boss

It always starts with a short story or an introduction of what your mission is. Take a look at resident evil video game. It always start with the introduction where a series of bizarre murders have occurred and you are being sent to investigate the murder. There is also another sport game where I came across, where you start of as a rookie and are able to join trainings and can even join different kind of tournament virtually. The story of the video game is always in chronological sequence of events.

The main game player is always the speaking subject and also the subject of speech. When one is playing the game, the player is actually positioning himself in the shoes of the game player and so, he became the one who narrates the story and play the game. The story of the game is always mediated from some perspective and in this case, the player is the focalization. When one solves one stage, one can then proceed to the next stage.

One of the reason that I love to play video game is that you got to play it from the beginning to the end. While in real life fishing, everything just seems harder. 

References:
Aristotle . Aristotle on the art of poetry .Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AriPoet.html
Chatman, Seymour. (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=ewrOp9uPjYUC&pg=PA30&dq=Visual+Narrative&hl=en&ei=W0-jTLizF4rOvQP-49D9Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q&f=false


Images taken from:
http://www.psu.com/media/azul_01.jpg
http://www.tritonboats.com/newsImages/screen%20shot.jpg