Showing posts with label Paper Topic Woes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paper Topic Woes. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Pick Your Poison: Potential Topics

So this Shakespeare and video games idea has blown up way bigger than my original musings. I know it can be awesome and I want it to be awesome, but I know for that to happen I need to pick a focused topic within all the huge ideas that have been floating around. So, in a nutshell, here are my possible approaches:

1. If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be a video game designer

2. Video Games can be art, and Shakespeare is the key to opening this new medium

3. The Tempest is a video game, and either should be produced in the style of video games or made into a video game

4. Video games probably share more in common with theatre than any other art form, and Shakespeare is the key to bridging this gap and improving both mediums


Of the four (and there's more, possibly), the first catches attention the fastest and I probably have the most evidence for it/would do the best job arguing it. I care a lot about the other topics, though, and could potentially put them into the work, but probably couldn't give them the attention I wanted.

And there's another problem when I find stuff like this:
embedded from http://media.salon.com/2011/08/ive_gotten_to_the_secret_level_in_macbeth-460x307.jpg

What you see here is a performance of Macbeth called Sleep No More that's been running in NYC since 2011. No one speaks. The guys in masks are the audience, not the actors. Old warehouses have been turned into a fake five-story hotel and audience members are let loose to explore while the story of Macbeth plays out throughout the hotel as the night goes on--all stylized in the tradition of film noir and the early 20th century. If you want it to make sense, you have to follow a single character around the hotel all night--unless, of course, they run so fast you can't find them, or they just lock a door behind them, as they just might do.

To find the whole story, though, you have to play the game. Meaning, you have to find clues, collaborate on the internet, decode a website, and even find clues hidden in real-world NYC locations, which can lead to real-world encounters with actors outside of the hotel, but still in their roles. It's a performance. It's a game. It's mind-blowing.

You see what I mean?

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Make Me a Believer! . . . in Blogging

After perusing the blog I really liked Marsha's 'paper story' particularly because she had a hard time deciding on her topic.  At this point I feel like I am in the same boat as she was so it was really encouraging to read and see how her use of social media helped her refine her topic and view it in a different light.

For me it's super daunting to write a paper that would be worthy for publication and, at this point, one of my biggest hurdles is finding a paper topic that would support the amount of research that such a paper would entail.  Marsha's story made me a believer in Professor Burtons methods.