Mental Models and Cognitive Mapping in Narrative

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From the course by Vanderbilt University

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

67 оценки

Vanderbilt University

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

67 оценки

Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and experienced gamers who want to reflect on their passion, this course will explore what happens to stories, paintings, and films when they become the basis of massively multiplayer online games. The Lord of the Rings trilogy—the novels, films, and video game—are our central example of how “remediation” transforms familiar stories as they move across media. The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others. Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.

From the lesson

Space and Time in Three Media

Week 4's initial focus is our natural concepts of space and time, and how these dimensions inform the "storyworld" of a narrative. We then examine how directors, authors, and video game developers use these innate frameworks to tell stories, invoking Seymour Chapman's book "Film and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film." Close attention is paid to the mechanics of point of view, and how its use allows artists to connect with audiences. ***For details about this week's Readings, go to the Syllabus page in your Resources tab.

Mental Models and Cognitive Mapping in Narrative7:57

Storyworlds5:09

Meet the Instructors

Jay Clayton
Professor
English

Let me invite you to reflect on the question of space in stories.

David Herman, an important narrative theorist at

Ohio State University has developed a special

word to describe the spaces that we inhabit when we engage with a narrative.

He calls this space Storyworlds.

I use storyworld to suggest something of the world creating power of narrative.

Its ability to transport interpreters from the here and now of face-to-face

interaction to the here and now of the world being told about.

Ordinarily, when we think about spacial issues, we think about setting.

How does an author create a setting in a novel just

using words? >> He maps the setting.

>> Yeah. >> Mm-hm.

Describes maybe houses or, or geographical feature.

>> So he uses description, if she uses

description, do you all like description in novels?

>> I think it adds, description adds an element of richness to the story.

>> I love the word adds though, it never really captures

the supplementary nature of description. Well, let's get an example.

I have, had a picture of one of

my main characters in LOTRO at the Stone Trolls.

I want us to look at Tolkien's description of this scene.

And see how he describes the setting.

The sun was now high, and it shone down through the

half-stripped branches of the trees, and lit the path with bright patches of light.

There stood the trolls: three large trolls.

The picture there is a picture from the game.

You notice the. have stripped branches, you know, which

registers autumn which again is picked up with, with all those fallen golden leaves.

And, and the stippling of sunlight in patches on the

forest floor. Nicely rendered again visually in the

game. Herman, Draws attention to the automatic

process of cognitive mapping that takes place when we imagine a place based on a

description. Imagine this description without the

nice picture. How do we make sense of Tolkien's words?

How does your mind process that verbal description,

or setting? Well, Herman proposes that you

actually engage in an automatic process of cognitive

mapping. You situate yourself in relation to the

described objects and you map it, internally.

You cause the fused mental model that you construct when

you read a narrative, storyworld, you model the description,

and then you relate it to existing cognitive models

that you have of phenomenon in your real world.

You relate the description

of Tolkien of the sun shining down through the trees

to your real life experience of sunlit paths in a forest.

We know it's fall in this picture from contextual cues,

like half-stripped branches. So you form a mental model of Tolkien

by fusing the description with your existing ideas of somewhere

in the forest.

Here's Herman's explanation of mental modeling.

Stories trigger recipients,

to establish a more or less direct or oblique relationship between the stories

they are interpreting and the contexts in which they are interpreting them.

>> Well, one question that I have is, if these mental models come from

our lived experiences and what we've seen

and where imagination comes in with what we're,

what we're seeing when we're reading. >> You mean like a child who reads

this who doesn't have a clear image of the forest

A child who's lived in a city all of her life and doesn't have a clear image of it.

Any response to that?

>> Yeah, I think experience is definitely part of it, but

though I think that not all that experience necessarily has to

come from

real life, if you've read other things

that can inform something that you are reading now.

I think that certainly helps, but your question

makes me think of when I first read about

King's Cross Station in the first Harry Potter

book, I had never seen King's Cross so what

I went to in my mind was actually Union Station in Washington, DC.

>> That's great, and what

happened when you saw the movie? Did it fit your mental model?

>> Well unfortunately by the time I'd seen the

movie, I, I had seen pictures of King's Cross Station, so...

>> So you really- This is a great example because

you have a complex layering of models drawn from your

imagination. From descriptions in Harry Potter, and

from photographs you have then seen in fan literature, and finally this,

film maker's.

>> Right.

>> So I think that really helps it give a little depth to what Herman is saying.

That you draw off whatever sources you have, whether it's real life experience,

personal experience with forests, or just what you imagine a forest to look like.

>> Herman

goes on

>> To explain, this prompts readers to relate two types of mental models.

One that they've built up from cues in the text, the sunlit paths, the

tunnel forest and the other based on their prior experience with the real world.

Narratives ask readers to search for analogies

between these two classes of mental models,

the textual model and the real

life model of the world.

So, Killian, let's test this model of Herman's against fantasy literature.

Now, how can it work in fantasy worlds,

which are really supposed to be fairly imaginary?

>> Right, yeah. It seems like it would present a problem.

It seems like If the narrative departed too much from something

that I were able to relate to, then the novel would

cease to function appropriately for me.

But it reminds me of the ways at in so

many points in Tolkien, we get incredibly thick, topographical description.

We're allowed to orient ourselves very, very

specifically, almost as though we were reading..

a story of somebody's travels to the countryside, or something like that.

and these are the things, for me, at least, help

me to ground myself in what's happening, despite the fantastical side.

>> And there's such a variety of topographical description.

It's clear that Tolkien is in love

with the imaginary landscape that he's drawing, the Shire.

>> I think it's rural England, and English countryside.

>> Yeah. And even the towns where he grew up.

And it's a fantasy realm.

But it's a fantasy realm that takes its reality, its particularity from

modeling of, of those concrete worlds.

[MUSIC]

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