Bound and Headed for Execution or: The Beginning

Welcome, welcome Nords and Khajits alike. If you are on this site you are probably already familiar with the popular game Skyrim from Bethesda Games that was released November 11, 2011. If not, let me give you a brief overview of the game. The game opens with the main character awakening in the back of a wagon, as the game is set in a fantasy world based loosely on the medieval period, to find his or her hands bound along with several other prisoners. You quickly discover that the main character has been caught in a raid meant to capture the leader of a group called the stormcloaks, a rebel group entrenched in civil war. As the four of you that were captured are led to your execution by beheading a dragon appears and destroys the city and the main character narrowly escapes. During this sequence the player is able to create their customized character from 7 races: Wood Elf, High Elf, Nord, Imperial, Orc, Khajit (cat people), and Argonians (lizard people). The rest of the game is played in an open world, which means that the character can roam the country of skyrim and talk to people in any order to discover quests. However, there are two main story lines that the player can follow. The first main storyline involves the main player choosing a side of the civil war and helping them win the war. The second storyline revolves around the dragons return to skyrim. The main character finds out that he or she is the legendary dragonborn, a person who can consume the souls of dragons and use their power.

While navigating through this website, look for the discussion of the principles of digitality at work in the various pages. The principles highlighted are taken from a text by Lev Manovich entitled The Language of New Media. The purpose of this website is to show how Lev Manovich's principles can be identified in the genre of Skyrim online media. Each page will define the terminology of Manovich's text and then show, through the examples that are present on each page, how that piece of media is using the principle discussed and conversely what point the given examples make about Manovich's terms.

Home Page: Minus the thousands of quotes I wanted to put everywhere

First Column

"We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams” 

― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Have you heard of the Buggers? Do you know about their invasion of Earth? Well, it's too late...a little boy named Ender, he almost wiped them out...

The Enderverse is a futuristic universe created by reknown novelist, Orson Scott Card. (The term “Enderverse” is widely used to describe the setting of a chain of book series. The name refers to the boy, Ender, who is the POV character in the capstone book, Ender’s Game.) The Enderverse is, essentially, our universe, and the history Card creates for his futuristic world is rooted in the current and past political climates of Earth.

Those who are fans of the Ender books might spend hours trying to convince you to read the series. They’ll explain how Card’s characters have lingered in their minds long after finishing the words on the page. Ender, Bean, Graff, Victor, Lem Jukes, it doesn’t matter whether the character is hero or villain, dipping into the mind of one of Card’s POV characters is an experience you’ll never forget. They follow you, shape the way you look at the world through your own eyes. 

Their way of viewing their universe is so different from one character to the next, and yet so human, so rich, that it is difficult to describe the Enderverse as a series of locations and events. Instead, it is a massive compilation of human experiences. 

It would be innacurate to even describe the Enderverse as the struggles of mankind in a setting where they discover they are not the only sentient species. The Enderverse is more individual than that, and it is experienced through its individuals. Card’s characters, especially Ender Wiggin, allow a reader to experience what the universe is like for “the other.” Whether your alien is human, formic, pequenino, or an artificial sentience whose only corporeal form is the wireless network between all the civilized worlds, experiencing the Enderverse is to learn a new way of seeing that which is alien.

Below are a number of sources that may serve as a further introduction to the Ender Universe. Most of this site is dedicated to fan-made artifacts and resources, but on this home page you can find more official links to follow. Reading the books is the best way to immerse oneself in the Enderverse, but even avid fans can only re-read them so many times before they find their relatives locking them away with concerns for health. So for those of you who are curious, for those of you who need to read about, talk about, and re-visit your favorite universe to get lost in, keep exploring this site.

(I may put the below resources in the second column, depending on where there is more room.)

A list of the Ender Stories in Chronological Order:

Color Coding:

• [color] Ender Series
• [color] Shadow Series
• [color] Formic Wars (Prequels)
• [color] Short Stories

• Earth Unaware
• Earth Afire
• Earth Awakens
• "The Swarm"
• "The Hive"
• "The Queens"
• Ender's Game
• Ender's Shadow
• A War of Gifts
• Shadow of the Hegemon
• Shadow Puppets
• Shadow of the Giant
• Ender in Exile
• Shadows in Flight
• First Meetings
• Speaker for the Dead
• Xenocide
• Children of the Mind
• Shadows Alive

[All of these will be linked to the wiki pages with summaries]

For more timelines in the Enderverse, check out the Ender Databases page. (with link to one of the pages on my site)

For more summaries of all of Card’s books, look here. 

Listing all of the Enderverse characters, even all of the prominent ones, would take much more room than this page should hold. Here is a “partial” (but actually very extensive) list for you. 

Bio for Orson Scott Card:

With over 50 novels written for enthusiastic readers to explore, Card has established a very devoted fanbase. He is an American writer who grew up in the Western United States. Card doesn’t just stick to one genre when he weaves stories, although he is most well-known for his science fiction. He has written fantasy, historical fiction, LDS & Christian fiction, screenplays, and even dabbled in comic books. His novel, Ender’s Game, was recently released as a motion picture. His audio play, however, published after the movie, comes more highly recommended from the author of this site. You can find it available for listening on Audible. 

[Much more than an audiobook, Ender’s Game Alive is a full cast dramatization of Ender's Game. Fans who were dissatisfied with the movie (which hardly did the book justice) will likely rate this screenplay (entirely written and controlled by Card) far higher than the movie release.]

Card's official site is called Hatrack River. It is a mountain's worth of resources for anyone interested in Card's works, philosophy, and writing tips. In fact, for those of you who may aspire to mirror Card’s success in creating spectacular universes for others to enjoy, you might like this: UncleOrson’s Writing Class.

Second Column

Why “Ender on the Nets”? This site is intended to chronicle parts of the digital footprint of the Enderverse. It is both a “tribute” to the Enderverse and a resource for fans—but it is also an exploration and display of fan culture and digital media. 

Much of the analysis and content on this site will take its angle from the thoughts of Lev Manovich (link to bio), expressed in The Language of New Media (link to summary). Manovich mourns the absence of a record for the emergence of cinema. He feels an exploration of its significance and impact on the culture of its time and our own has been buried,  reduced to fragments that we must now sift through from outside that timeline.

Manovich has decided not to stand so idly by and attempts to make an analysis of an equivalent modern genre, doing so from within its beginnings. His discussion of this genre, computer and digital media, is of particular interest for generations who treat ipods, laptops, and Bluetooth devices with as much reverence as people treat jewelry. We are a meme culture. Masters of the google search and addicts to the Youtube. What do all of these mediums have to say about us as a people? What insights do they give us into our own psyche and the world our children will grow up in?

This site can serve as an introduction to some Manovichian concepts that pose an answer to these questions. As you indulge yourself with the nerd feast I have gathered related to the Enderverse, I anticipate you’ll also find the commentary on computer culture and mediums enlightening.

Women in the Military: Old Stories, New Media

Women serving in the U.S. armed forces share a long and storied history, but it's just over the last few decades that their roles on the front lines have increasingly merged with those of their male counterparts. Along with countless tales of commitment and courage, women’s military service has generated ongoing friction and intolerance from comrades who consider armed conflict a man’s world. As anticipated by those harboring a male-dominant worldview, women’s service has opened the door to dissension among the ranks, lawsuits, and unwelcome Congressional tampering. This Website samples the range of cultural triumphs and tragedies celebrated and endured by women in the military. It is dedicated to the women in uniform who wish to serve their country with no more—or less—than the deference earned by the service of men in uniform.

Representing an exhibition of cultural objects accessed entirely on the Internet through search engines and hyperlinks, this site was created in fulfillment of the New Media Exhibition Website project assigned by Dr. Mark Pepper, Utah Valley University, for ENGL 3340, Digital Document Design. My rhetorical analysis of the objects exhibited on this site is based on the course text, The Language of the New Media by Lev Manovich. In this work, Manovich examines the roles of digital technology in communicating cultural experience in context with technologies used to generate earlier representational visual forms, from traditional drawing, painting, and sculpture to modern photography, animation, and cinema. In doing so, the author demonstrates our reliance on much of the same language used for those traditional forms to make sense of our present-day interaction with digital representation, visual and conceptual. 

While our tendency to apply familiar terms to emerging cultural trends is natural and even sensible, Manovich contends that our current language describing the causes and effects of computerized media, i.e., new media, is insufficient in understanding our relationship to digital technology and its relationship to us. His aim is to overcome this deficiency by developing the language of “the emergent conventions, recurrent design patterns, and key forms of new media” (12). He begins by classifying the visual objects that represented past cultural understanding together with current information and images we now generate and access on digital platforms as new media objects (15). Yet even when a new media object is nothing more than a digitized old-media image, its transcoding employs “the most fundamental quality of new media that has no historical precedent—programmability” (47).

The new media objects populating my exhibition represent videos, memes, and blogs created, altered, and/or hyperlinked by individuals and organizations of varying degrees of digital prowess and/or cultural sensitivity. “As is the case with all cultural representations,” Manovich advises, “new media representations are also inevitably biased. They represent/construct some features of physical reality at the expense of others, one worldview among many, one possible system of categories among numerous others” (15-16). Each represents a cultural interface (70) designed to inform the culture it addresses, and as such, each succeeds, albeit not necessarily with the intended result of the conveyors… Enjoy.

Begin With the End in Mind

While considering my final website, I decided to make one of the pages devoted to memes. I think the the Manovichian principle about modularity is most appropriate to discuss with Skyrim memes. Memes are able to take a single element, (most often a picture) and change the text to reflect a new meaning. What is interesting about Skyrim memes, specifically, is that rather than there being a single image that has the text varied Skyrim memes have a variety of pictures and a variety of text. The grander point that these memes make about modularity is that because of computer culture there is no element of a new media object that can not be removed and substituted for something new and ultimately change the original meaning. 

Since it represents a large part of the Skyrim community, my second page will highlight some prominent Mod videos. In this section I want to emphasize Manovich's principle of variability. In a non-digital society paintings, songs, and games are produced in a semi-permanent form. However, because of the non-permanent state of these art forms in the digital age, games can be created and then updated at a later date. Since video games are made from codes that have been programmed those codes can be accessed and changed, which is exactly what happens in the modding process. Mods allow players to safely alter the code of the game to make changes to gameplay and appearance. However, even mods are not permanent. Mod creators can return to their mod and make changes to improve performance or gameplay and then offer the update to the modding community. The larger point I wish to make about variability is that it is both a positive and negative effect of computerization: the positive effect of variability is that games can be produced and distributed quicker because game developers do not have to stress over making sure everything is perfect before it is sent out since the company can offer updates to fix bugs; the negative effect of variability is that nothing ever feels completed and the quality of material is less, more often.

I want the third page of my final website to consist of cosplay/fan videos. With these videos I want to discuss Manovich's principle of numerical representation. Specifically, I want to discuss how the game code and the cosplay/fan videos are more similar than they are different  As it relates to skyrim, the program developers create a code that portrays a fantasy group of people, loosely based on Nordic culture, that never actually existed in the real world. Then, fans of the game recreate the actions and apparel of these fantasy-based characters and create digital videos mimicking the game. Because of numerical representation, neither the game or the fan video is more "real" than the other. As soon as the fan video is recorded in digital format and placed on a computer it is encoded the exact same way as a game: as a system of 1's and 0's. The point that this page will make about numerical representation is that it complicates the idea of what is "real."

The final page of my website will feature Skyrim fan art. On this page I will discuss the idea of art in a digital culture and the medium as the message. Most of the fan art about Skyrim is not cut-and-paste art but it does rely on the work of previous artists. What Skyrim fan art highlights about the idea of art in a digital culture is that digital tools and programs allow artists to create art that uses other art as a base layer. In some fan art, fans grab still shots from the game and recreate them or create new scenes based on characters and creatures in the game. In both cases, however, skyrim art—whether programmer or fan created—stays within the digital realm; neither the original art or the recreation is made in a physical medium. By keeping the art within the medium that it was created in, fans send the message that the art is an experience-based, shared expression of fandom. In other words, the availability of the art is just as important as its content.

All My Dexter People, Let Me See Your Hands Up

So far, what I have come up with will look like a Dexter fan's play paradise, playing off of the comedy and the drama of the series.

Memes

I have found many memes of variability, much like Manovich described. Dozens of memes with different captions feature the same screenshot, and so it might be interesting to stick a bunch of these similar-but-different memes up on the website. This will show how each screenshot is interpreted differently by the viewer. Perhaps it is also evidence of online bandwagon-ing. Come on, people, come up with your own memes... Where has originality gone? Oh, yeah, it was swallowed up by viralness. That will be discussed here, too.

Videos

Among all of the fangirl videos that infest Youtube, there are some very interesting videos in the form of compilations. As Manovich said, "Printed word tradition which has initially dominated the language of cultural interfaces, is becoming less important, while the part played by cinematic 

elements is getting progressively stronger." Especially because of the fact that Dexter is a television show, this medium is very strong for Dexter fans. I will categorize different videos in an organized fashion using either embedded codes or hyperlinks, making them visually interesting and easy to navigate.

"Did You Know" Facts

I came up with the idea to practice using hyperlinks and lists by stating "did you know" facts about the television show, using hyperlinks to reference and back up each claim. This will create a small network of links for the viewer to click around and experience more interaction with the website. It's also a great way to provide layers of information in only a few paragraphs or lists (depending on the format I will end up choosing).

Dexter's Internal Controversies

On this page, I will take on more of a discussion format, using both images and text to talk about Dexter's backstory and context. I will probably bring up all of the different villains of the story, what he has sacrificed to feed his need for killing, and the controversy of whether Dexter is the protagonist or an antagonist. This will give me the chance to dive deeper into the story rather than just skim the surface with satire and short-term entertainment.

Ender on the Nets

So this is a tentative layout for my site:

Enderverse in 2D (memes, fan art)

For the memes, I will likely discuss modularity, viralness, and the medium as the message. Memes can be split into 2 parts, the base structure/image and the topic/message. Because they are digital and modular, memes have thousands of variations where the message is easily changed but the structure stays the same. Most of the memes I found for the Enderverse use an already-viral structure with an Ender-themed message. This highlights the unpredictably viral nature of this particular digital medium. Some structures stick and some do not. The ones that do stick really stick. I'll probably also talk about how the meme medium is particularly apt for expressing the messages for my subject. The audience and fan base for the Enderverse are very much a part of this digital generation. Although not all of the messages/comments on the memes involve digital or science-fictiony stuff, digital mediums work really well for this audience.

For the fan art, I will probably discuss variability, modularity, numerical representation, and the idea of the artist in digital culture. All of the Enderverse fan art is inherently based on something someone else initially created the concept for. Then, a lot of it is based on the movie art and digital representation of the universe. The concept of "artist" is challenged, as it so easily is with digital mediums.

Enderverse in 3D (Minecraft builds)

Again, I will probably discuss the idea of art and the artist in digital culture here. Numerical representation, automation, and modularity will be a big thing here. Minecraft creations always have some basis in computer-generated terrain and textures. The graphics are an obvious mixture of graphic and cultural transcoding, as is the creation itself. (Enderverse culture on top of minecraft culture, on top of pixel-art, on top of computer code.)

Vids

 Cutting and pasting, automation, and the idea of art will probably be discussed here. Clips of the movie aren't original creations, but they are new media objects. The music videos and fan trailors I found do a lot of automated graphics/sounds and mixing of pieces from other new media objects. They are very "new media" in that way.

Ender Databases

For this page, I'm going to discuss various fan sites for the Enderverse. I'll be discussing transcoding, database logic, and modularity here. Most of the sites are built from themes (modularity). It will be interesting to compare the blogs to the sites that also collect fan art/memes because these have different levels of database logic at work.

Legos...I love legos!

So, the primary type of video for my topic, the Enderverse, is video clips from the Ender's Game movie and reviews of the books/movie. It took some digging to find other things, primarily because most of the content for the Enderverse is not images or video. (There's only one book that has been made into a movie.) I found some fan trailers, a few book trailers, a few musical pieces inspired by the series (pretty painful to listen to, actually), and even a Halo tribute that was using trailer and movie footage to compare story lines and character origins. But then I stumbled upon my favorite...Enderverse Minecraft builds.

It was a little hard for me to do this post because many of the fan and amateur videos out there on my subject are not well done or fairly frivolous. There are a lot of people who see Ender's game as a movie with a bunch of little boys playing mock war games, and all they like to talk about is the battleroom. For me, the books are much deeper and more meaningful, and I have very strong opinions about them. Many of the videos about my subject were paying homage (but sometimes doing it very well). Others were trying to share their love of the books/movie or criticize aspects of them (some of these were good, others kind of lame or naive.). And a few were parodies (the majority of these weren't really funny).

I enjoyed the minecraft videos most because the narrators either took time to actually express thoughts and feelings about the universe that were well-thought-out, or they let their creations speak for themselves. I posted this video because it was the most impressive build, though it has no talking. I believe it is a great homage to the books and movie, and it's a great nostalgia trip for people who are familiar with the subject. It takes a lot of time to make a build this large (even in creative), and the artist/gamer was obviously trying to do a good job (and mostly succeeded). Even though Minecraft is just like legos, where the pieces are all there in set colors and etc., it takes skill to build something this cohesive with the level of detail present.