Narrative Without Story

I was recently caught by a youtube comment that sent me on an angry rant to myself regarding the commentor's ignorance and inability to see reason. After calming down I decided some of the conclusions I came to reinformed my understanding of Story and Narrative in Video Games. I shall dispense my insights now.

"No, video games without stories do not deserve to exist anymore in this modern age of video games. A video game without a story being made now is like making a silent film from 1920 in the year 2010. It is just fucking outdated and shows insane laziness and overall not caring about the quality of their own products.
Nowadays, either make a story based game, or fucking leave the medium. Gameplay only games are doing nothng else but being damaging to the medium. Such as COD!"

It's funny he should mention silent films and a 1920s aesthetic  Because the most powerful exemplification of how wrong he is comes from a game that brings that style to a modern audience, and laziness is not the game maker's reason for that style -- quite the opposite.

Globalization and Global Media, Final Paper

Grant Tabler
Natalie Evans
MDST 4080*01
29 November 2012

Games Without Frontiers

War Without Tears

First person shooters are a genre of video game, which revolve around the player seeing through the eyes of a character with a weapon, and killing enemies you come across while accomplishing objectives. Many of these games are based around war, be they imaginary and science fiction, or modern and realistic. The critique of war video games is that they trivialize the experiences, and desensitize those who play the games to the violence and horrors of war. What if there was an altogether different kind of first person shooter game? A game where you stayed in first person, but you shot people with something other than a gun. 

The game I propose is one in which the player moves through a warzone as a war reporter armed with nothing more than a camera and editing software as she attempts to capture as much ‘truth’ and experience as she have time to cover. The player would then take this footage, and attempt to edit it together to make a legitimate narrative from the random violence. All the while the war would continue and the player would see that their camera isn’t affecting the broader arc of the war, just the opinions of the viewers back home. This game is currently in development and it is called Warco.

Massively Multiplayer Friendships: An Exploration of Online Raiding and the Implications on Real World Friendships

Massively Multiplayer Friendships:
An Exploration of Online Raiding and the Implications on Real World Friendships

Grant Tabler

MDST*4500 (Applied Research Project)
Section 03, Thursday 11:45

Professor Greg Kelley

November 22, 2012

We lost six of our soldiers in that last battle; we barely made it through alive. We heard this place was hell, but we didn’t expect this. The squads that came back last week were broken and battered, not a hint of optimism among them. I sit here, weapon at the ready, listening to the strategizing going on for the fight to come. We know our enemy and we’re doing our best to get a plan of action.  Beside me is Paul, he’s ex-navy and the oldest of our group at forty-three. Beside him is Jason, a police officer from South Carolina.

Our team is comprised of a pharmacist, a nurse, two students, an accountant, an office worker, a webcomic artist, a police officer, and two guys who haven’t got jobs outside of this. But right now, our jobs and our lives back home don’t matter. What matters is we are here to take down tyranny, and we are damn good at our job. Finally the time comes, we know our roles and we start our assault.  

We’re met immediately with fearsome carnage as enemies swarm us from all sides. The fighting is utter chaos as bullets fly in all directions and our training takes over. “Watch out!” we hear Tim cry as Paul gets blindsided and goes down without a fight. Richard soon follows as we’re picked off one by one. 

A collective sigh echoes through our headsets as we hear Tim say, “It’s a wipe.” In moments we’re all standing outside the area as ghosts in a nearby graveyard. Tim starts going over what needs to happen for next time and we all start the long trek back to make another attempt on the dragon we’re fighting. This is raiding in World of Warcraft.

The Mean Between Two Extremes: A Culture of Both Push and Pull

Grant Tabler
Natalie Evans
MDST 3040-03
3 October 2011

The Mean Between Two Extremes: A Culture of Both Push and Pull

                In James Lull’s article The Push and Pull of Global Culture, Lull examines two seemingly divided cultures, and attempts to correlate and harmonize their usage. Lull eventually tries to argue that our changing culture requires a changing individual, saying that we must change the way we view, understand, and interface with culture to survive this new landscape.

Lull starts by examining a changing cultural paradigm. Noting that the post 9/11 world is one that has begun a shift from a culture based around community to a culture based in individualization. Lull looks at the ways in which humans understand themselves and their power structures in a more decentralized way. Through this increasing individualization humans are empowering themselves to be in control of their lives. In addition they are apparently working to be less reliant or less concerned with the community, the group, and any herd mentality that may imply. This aim at individualization, and therefore personal power, is what Lull deems the pull aspect of culture.

Virgin Ankles

This was an Assignment based around and examination of Folk lore for my contemporary narrative class, I was tasked with examining and dissecting this myth as it appears in this comic.

Grant Tabler
Final Paper for AHSS*2030 (Thursday)
for Dr. Greg Kelley, Media Studies, 4th Floor
Dec. 9th, 2010

Virgin Ankles

Comics have the ability to portray many aspects of a story in a short set of pictures and narration. It is through this brevity coupled with the approachability of comics that makes them a great medium for the dissemination of folk lore and legends. Many classic legends have been exemplified via comics in The Big Book of Urban Legends. This paper will analyse one of the legends illustrated there, “The Slasher Under the Car”, examining an interpreted meaning, and looking at how various comic elements work to amplify meaning.

This comic seems to set the story in the 1950s, the women are dressed conservatively, and in a style mimicking this period, the hairstyles and fashion mimic that of 1950’s America as well. The “gang members” are not the stereotyped gangs of today comprised of minorities in baggy clothing. Instead, they are represented as 1950’s greasers. They are all white, with slicked hair styles and leather jackets. This makes some sense, since this legend is documented by folklorist Jan Brunvand to have first appeared in this time period.(Brunvand 134-138) The comic illustrates dramatic tension in a very clear way. Throughout most this comic we only see the main characters from the knees up, we are lead to assume that these women could be the next targets—as indeed one is.

Anonymity Undone

Grant Tabler
Ian Reilly
MDST 2020
15 November 2010

Anonymity Undone

The Internet has long been seen as a medium of anonymity and freedom. With the lack of governing or regulations it has become an area of free expression. However, with this freedom of anonymous speech and expression comes the darker side of anonymity. The Internet also allows for people to post slanderous or hateful things with complete freedom and safety. However, recently Blizzard Entertainment decided to take a stand against this kind of behaviour on their enormous gaming forum for the game World of Warcraft. They proposed a system which would link the first and last name from each player’s account information to all posts made on these forums. The response was an outcry from the community to cancel this change. This proposed change encapsulates many of the debates about the decentralized, anonymous model of communication on the internet as a whole, with larger implications of accountability in other aspects of life. This paper intends to highlight some of the key debates related to this change and explore the larger implications this change holds for accountability in other aspects of our lives.

A Razorblade in Our Perspective

Grant Tabler
Greg Kelley
AHSS 2020
4 November 2010

A Razorblade in Our Perspective

Halloween is a time of year that is inherently conducive to a greater amount of freedom amongst its child participants. Children are able to dress up in costume, stay out late, and eat free candy that they receive from their neighbours on a night of general goodwill. However, when one hears of Halloween in the media, this childhood freedom is curtailed by some looming threat of malicious attackers out to hurt our vulnerable loved ones. Though there are numerous examples of this perspective, this paper will choose to focus on an analysis on this media phenomenon from a documentary. In “Bowling for Columbine”, filmmaker Michael Moore’s analysis of the media exemplifies their use of negativity, consonance, and typification to control the United States through fear.

The Media Revolution of the 19th Century

Grant Tabler
Jerry Chomyn
AHSS 2190
29 October 2010

The Media Revolution of the 19^th Century

Information is a commodity that we never seem to have enough of. We are inundated with so much information that it becomes increasingly difficult to find information that is useful to us. This is a symptom of something Neil Postman called “the curse of this information age” (Postman 5). Though we have not always had this information overload, it was not so long ago that technology was developed to combat information scarcity. In one century however, humanity invented the technologies that could not only help solve information scarcity, but also help bring about this information overload. In the 19^th century, spurred by the rapid growth of the industrial revolution, humanity brought forth technologies that are more significant to media than the inventions of any century that preceded it; this paper will highlight some of these inventions, and show how they laid the ground work for the modern information age.

Technocentricity

A scrap of thought I had floating around my documents since some time last year. The idea lead up to the formulation of my Term Paper for my History of Communications class.


"In my day we didn't have any of these modern conveniences"

This is a quote that our generation often associates with the older generation. It is a stereotype which they have perpetuated in which they have had a harder life and in which we, the privelleged new comers, are living a life of laziness with all our new fangled technology. This is an opinion that we ourselves have adopted and perpetuated in our culture to the point where we have developed what I will call a technocentric viewpoint of our world.

That is to say, we believe that any sufficently advanced technology, certainly anything we use daily in our modern lives must have come from our century, or at most the last 100 years. This is an ignorance that we apply because we really don't analyze our past. We think of things like x-rays, hydrogen fuel cells, fiber optics, computers, telephones, even things like radio waves came from scientists and inventors of our century, because how could those primitive 19th century ancestors of ours without any modern convieniences possibly gain such tools of innovation?

In truth all these things were invented in the 1800s...

Ethics Essay

Grant Tabler

Natalie Evans

AHSS 1080

20 April, 2010

                                                                                                                 

The Ethical Potential of Postmodern Media

            We live in postmodern times. The society we structure our lives within is one based around values which are not particularly flattering. With descriptions such as a lack of common sense and responsibility, and a declining ability to use reason to solve problems (Leslie 303), there seems to be a definite shift from the ethical perspectives that once defined cultural thinking. Given this divergent change in viewpoint, one must question what role the postmodern technologies that now define us play in the shaping of our ethics. For, postmodern culture is one that is based around an obsession with media, so much so, “they govern and shape all other relationships.” (Leslie 10)  The media that we use to structure our lives however are crowded with ethical issues themselves. Based on the ethical theories that have shaped cultures past we can see that, for good or ill, our current media are shaped by our postmodern culture.

Inference Culture: Final Response to Course, Essay

Grant Tabler
Ian Reilly
AHSS 1090
14 April 2010

A Utility Belt for Your Mind

Let me start by saying that I’m sorry that the other paper I’m handing in with this one is about The Matrix. I promise you I really am attempting to limit myself on the amount of Matrix based writing for these media studies courses. I thought I was alright with just the one paper and a large wiki post about The Matrix but alas, this is not the case. At this rate I may end up graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Matrix studies. Despite the possible redundancy of my obsessive need to reference the Matrix when referring to any aspect of media, this has allowed me to hit upon another idea worth exploring that I have come to understand based on this course. It is the idea of using inference to define reality.

An Arguement for the Betterment of the Republic: Final Exam Paper

Grant Tabler
Ian Reilly
AHSS 1090
14 April, 2010

The Third Pill Perspective

The Republic was a work by the philosopher Plato dealing with the governance of an ideal society. It is more than that though. The republic, as a philosophical idea, is the world as it could be; a world that we can all strive for. In this pursuit I would like to put forth an argument for the betterment of the Republic, a way of bettering our own world. Our society, in this age of digital media, is inundated with information. The downside is we often do not have a lot of perspective to go with it. We tend to take information at face value without analyzing it. We then end up making bad decisions based on this lack of information. To survive in this haphazard media landscape we need to look at not only what information we take in but how we attain that information. To do this, I purpose what I will call the third pill perspective.

Reality Simplified: Term Paper

Term Paper for my most recent Reilly course, the only courses that currently assign one.

Grant Tabler

Ian Reilly

AHSS 1090

31 March 2010

Reality Simplified

At some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI. –Morpheus from The Matrix

This statement, from the movie The Matrix, has interesting implications for our current society. For, we too are a society that, given the technologies of the new millennium, has fundamentally changed our ways of seeing and interpreting reality. Our reality remediates the information of the past, in much the same way as The Matrix’s machine implemented reality did within its own context. The machine implemented reality of The Matrix, is a remediation. As much as an email or ebook remediates their print medium. The Matrix system however, does this with reality itself. The machines’ matrix is a remediation at its core level because it is the process of sending or conveying the same information through a different medium and using different senses than the original source. This system is a remediation of reality because it conveys the information of reality without the tangible objects; it is delivered without the use of any senses. Reality simplified. The reality of The Matrix establishes itself as remediation through its similarity to other remediations, its use of immediacy and hypermediacy, and its adaptation of information into a new form.

A Whole Blue World

This is my Media adaptation project, Blue Media.

Though the group essay wasn't quite awe-inspiring, and will probably be the main affectation for likewise less than stellar grades (if indeed it has such an effect), I am still quite happy with my video as I had total control of it. Enjoy.



This project was an interesting one for it allowed me, as all projects should, to elaborate on feelings which I otherwise would perhaps have left unexplored. The point of this video, though I hope it's at least somewhat evident from the later parts of the video and the McLuhan quotes, is to raise awareness for the effect of the media environment we exist within. It is also to illustrate the point the McLuhan quotes make about media acting as environments. We are enveloped by them and often don't realize how much of ourselves is vested in these pervasive media.

The video is an adaptation of the song Blue by Eiffel 65. The change is in the reinterpretation of the lyrics. Instead of this being about depression, I have interpreted it as being about media. It's not that the character's life is filled with sadness, it is that this character's life is filled with media. All of the lyrics have come to represent their media representations. Such as the Blue Window being a "media window" such as TV with news media.

This adaptation, to quote my formal writing about it,
"required the creation and implementation of a wide variety of pictures, and video clips. The adaptation was created by looking at and listening to the lyrics of the song “Blue” quite extensively. The repetition in the lyrics allowed for a several interpretations of the best way to portray the media equivalent of each of the song’s lines. The video required the manipulation of many of the items shown within. For example, the culture jamming of the “Educated Decisions made simple” Acer Ad was one that was created exclusively for the video.

Some of the images were either a combination of several pictures, such as with the man in front of the large news media logo. And some of the images were fabricated entirely such as the keyhole of news networks looking onto the earth, which was used for the final iteration of the blue window lyric. The creation of the video took many hours of editing though the more difficult part was definitely attempting to find proper media representations for the experiences mentioned as being part of this blue little guy’s life."

Home Ice Advantage

Grant Tabler

Professor Evans

AHSS 1080

6 April, 2010

Home Ice Advantage

            The Olympics are an event of epic proportions. It is an arena of athletic achievement unrivalled by any single sporting championship, one fuelled by national pride. However, along with national pride comes a sense of favouritism, not just for the athletes of your country, but also for athletes of your chosen sport. When the winter Olympics begin anywhere Canada’s bias is set squarely on Hockey, never was this truer than in the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The darker side to this national pride is the advertising capitalization. Coca-cola released a commercial for the Vancouver Winter Olympics aimed at unethically exploiting national pride in order to boost sales of Coke.

Film Studies Essay

Grant Tabler

0676441

Essay #2

Film Study AHSS 1070 Section 01

Prof. Don Moore

1 April 2010

Reimagining Film through Stylization Variation 

            The film is a medium in constant flux, with genres that can change and reinvent themselves on a consistent basis. However, sometimes Films become placid and fall into a rut of recreating the same type or style of film ad nauseam. Often this leads to a reimagining of style, such as with movements like the French New Wave and Dogme95. The style of these films is has many noticeable similarities, though they are defined by their stylistic differences. These movements are aimed at telling their story in an impactful way, with varying degrees of success. The French New Wave stylization of sound, and aesthetics in Godard’s Breathless (Godard, 1960) made the film far more impactful than the lack of such stylizations in Von Trier’s Dogme95 film Breaking the Waves (Von Trier, 1996)

Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay on a course I had found mostly dry and redundant. It is evidently difficult for me to put forth a meaningful reflection that forced me to fill a minimum of 2000 words.

Grant Tabler

Stacey Johnson

MDST 1030

23 March 2010

A Reappraisal of My Way of Seeing

            Images are a way in which we define ourselves culturally. Our society is one that constantly endeavours to classify and catalogue the world around us through various media. With this in mind, a project to group together a series of images for scholarly commentary seemed appropriate for a journal in a Visual Culture class. An essay which reflects on the process of commenting on the images, a meta-reflection even, seemed somewhat less appropriate to myself and I’m sure others in this class, whether concerns of this type are raised or not. For, writing about writing always seems like a superficial endeavour. Despite any scepticism I may have towards this way of writing I shall, none the less, attempt to reflect on my visual journal with all the objectivity I can.

Regarding Term Paper

This is a superbowl commercial I found while doing another project recently, in another class for Ian, the same teacher who started us on these blogs actually. Anyway, although I'm sure there are thousands of examples of my term paper's point I particularly like this one as it seems to be my term paper "remediated" into video form. Funny that I found it while doing a project on remediation.



I found this video spoke to my term paper because it has all the same aspects. Everyone on the street is separated from each other, despite their proximity they're all in their own worlds. I found it particularly ironic in the scene where a woman is having trouble getting a stroller up a flight of stairs, a man sitting on the stairs on his laptop changes into his avatar which happens to be a superhero. Yet despite his media imagining of superhero status he still ignores, or cannot see the woman in need of help in the real world.

The following scene shows an interesting event as well. There is a kid sitting with his dog. The kid is in his own world using his PSP for some type of racing game, and the dog is just sitting and watching him with his ball. The dog rolls the ball to his would-be walker though to no avail, the owner is trapped in their media cocoon.

Coca-cola is quite clever with their final scene though. They not only show an almost Mcluhanist warning of media immersion, they also made a solicitation of their product by showing coca-cola as the only thing truly powerful enough to free people from their media-trance.

Though I suppose I can understand how the two characters both somehow ordered the same drink at that internet cafe esque location. The final exterior shots shows us that for some reason the internet cafe has a giant coca-cola logo on the roof rather than a name for the cafe. I guess the drink choices could be a bit limiting in that case.

Term Paper

The following is my Mass Communication term paper, to which I've made reference in various earlier posts. Most notably the laurel resting one... I don't believe it necessary to share the grade, for fear that it give you some predisposition towards it's worth and or value. I say only that I was more proud of it than of any essay I'd ever written.


Grant Tabler 
Ian Reilly 
AHSS 1060 Mass Communication 
November 10, 2009

The Instant World

We live in an age of digitization. On a daily basis we are assaulted by a flurry of high tech, solutions to all our problems. Usually the message is a simple one; buy our product to better yourself. However, recently there seems to be more products boasting the ability to make your life easier, happier, and better, with little effort on your part. In this respect, society seems to have lost its way, though not just because of technological advancements. Our need to have everything done automatically has led to an instant gratification market. We want things done quickly and easily with as little input from the user as possible, we have become increasingly dependent on automatic solutions, and I believe this has become especially prevalent because of new technology and available media.

With advances in technology, people are able to buy “miracle” products that don’t require any hard work or change in their behaviour. Instead, people can become thin and sexy without all that troublesome diet and exercise business. This is the essence of the instant gratification market. The instant gratification market is predicated on the idea that businesses are able to make large quantities of money by giving people “something for nothing”. In reality however, it is more of a nothing for something relationship. For, although the consumer sees the process as getting results without effort. What is really happening is the business is giving a temporary solution, and getting money out of it. This is only a temporary solution because it is too easy; it does not require the person to change their negative behaviours. 

Multiple Essays Submitted Together...

Grant Tabler

Alison Bruce

MDST 1010 – 01

December 7^th 2009

Squandering a Medium

Our media immersed culture thrives on our ability to quickly attain information. This ability is enhanced by online video hosting. YouTube and the National Film Board of Canada, have sites that allow the public free access to information. However these sites have different ideas when it comes to what should be posted and by whom.