As in: Thinking

Jenny and I have been playing Katamari Damancy quite a bit recently. For those of you who haven't played it, the general idea is that you roll a sticky ball around and pick up stuff that you roll over. As you roll, the ball gets bigger and can pick up bigger stuff. The general goal is that you, the prince (bottom right corner) must repopulate the sky because your father, the king of all cosmos, has destroyed all the stars. (He's a weirdo, that king.) It's fun and pretty addictive.

I was thinking about this game in the context of a couple things:

1. New interfaces. One thing about new media that fascinates me is the invention of new interface metaphors. I've written about this before, and each semester I have my students in my Writing for New Media course experiment with interface metaphors as they work their way through Manovich.
2. Database Logic. The conundrum of writing the database has always been a noodle-scratcher for me. I love the notion of writing Benjamin-Arcades style, but the organization throws me for the loop. Ulmer once characterized one trait of new media as moving the burden of conclusion from the writer to the reader. Working in a rhizomatic way seems to necessitate that. As you write, you may or may not want to organize your bits and pieces into a single line of progression. If you don't want to do that, though, how do you give your reader the information? I usually open this discussion by having students read The Doll Games and talk about how it presents its info.

Those ideas said, perhaps Katamari Damancy gives us a new interface. What about producing a digital project laid out like a Katamari town. The different ideas are scattered around in a semi-reasonable fashion, but the reader can roll from one to the next following her interests. The screen would have a two part layout--the left would be the katamari ball and town, the right would be a scrolling/scrollable frame with the chunks of text attached to those objects that have been rolled: As the user rolled around the town, the text chunks would appear in the right menu. Clever programmers could produce some sort of active linking system that would build links between the chunks that relate or hook up especially well, so that as the page went along links appeared between chunks.

The reader could stop rolling at any time and scroll the right window up and down to read what he/she has collected. There could also be an 'export' function that allows the reader to save a clear .html version of the katamari they rolled.

Posted by briley at November 4, 2005 5:26 AM