The level layout alone gives us some insight into the effectiveness of the game’s opening. If you’ve never had the chance to play the game before, can you guess where Mario starts? Can you guess which direction he will be facing and where he’s supposed to go? After you have an idea, go ahead and watch the opening moment here (end at about 2:10).

By way of review, let’s break down how this reflects the aspects of interesting introductions I’ve discussed so far:

• An interesting introduction sounds good.

The sounds are really what make this opening moment so memorable to me. I’m not talking about the music either, although it is a fitting fanfare to bring players into this 3D world. The sounds that I remember most are actually the ones you hear after the music has ended: intermittent birdsong, the tap of Mario’s shoes, and the exuberant sounds as he leaps into the air. This gives the space and the characters in it another audio dimension to go along with the added spatial dimension, showcasing the power of the new hardware and the depth of this new world.

• An interesting introduction circumscribes, rather than describes, its subject.

The flythrough of the castle grounds could be considered a literal circumscription of the subject — we get to see the space which Mario will be exploring momentarily. But there is a second layer of circumscription in the use of the camera-wielding Lakitu. Lakitu is not the most iconic of Mario characters, usually coming up as an enemy in the later levels of the earlier games, so seeing him here (in what turns out to be a helpful role) may be a surprise for players. This not only builds up the suspense to see Mario in his polygonal glory, but allows players to see the space they will eventually begin exploring.

• An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

The flythrough does more than show off the castle — it gets players thinking about the possibilities of exploring a 3D space (which, again, was a novel concept in 1996). Lakitu’s flight under the castle’s drawbridge and over the green hills encourages players to think about how the space is connected and where they might traverse. Players with a keen eye might even notice an enticing secret: when Lakitu pulls back before going under the wooden bridge (at about 1:43 in the video), there is a door visible submerged beneath the castle’s moat.

The first time I noticed it, I immediately tried to swim down and check it out. Though it turns out to be nothing you can get to yet, its existence is enough to get players searching for secrets — a tactic the game rewards players for later.

• An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

In general, games tend to address their audiences more directly than other media do, mainly by describing how the non-diegetic mechanics and systems work. Lakitu’s existence, however, takes this to another level. The audible click and perspective shift right before Mario comes out of the pipe establishes that the audience is viewing this world through a moveable virtual camera. As this was probably the first game with 3D graphics players would have experienced, and establishing this visual metaphor is crucial for the rest of gameplay. The connection to the “Lakitu Bros reporting live” bit is later made explicit in this introductory sequence in order to reinforce this point.

What is remarkable about this scene with Lakitu is how it represents one of the few non-optional tutorials players get in these opening moments. As soon as players are able to take control of Mario, they are presented with these directions:

Ciao! You’ve reached Princess Toadstool’s castle via a warp pipe. Using the controller is a piece of cake. Press A to jump and B to attack. Press B to read signs, too. Use the Control Stick in the center of the controller to move Mario around. Now, head for the castle.

In a mere 51 words, the game has told new players all they need to know about movement. The signs scattered around the castle and the game’s multiple levels give players more tips, but I don’t remember ever needing to read them in order to figure out the game. Pretty much everything you need to know is given here or via Lakitu’s talk about the camera (which occurs after you have a chance to mess around with the controls). This leads to the final takeaway of interesting introductions:

• An interesting introduction leans forward

Although players are free to explore Super Mario 64’s opening space, such a space is designed to push players forward. If the fact that Mario’s position at the bottom of a hill directly faces an enticing castle didn’t make it clear enough, the game tells the player three separate times (in Peach’s letter, the opening tutorial, and Lakitu’s discussion about camera movement) to go to the castle. No one stops to remind Mario if he’s fooling around for too long in the garden, but these original instructions do encourage forward movement. There are also more subtle techniques for this as well: players who fall into the moat soon discover that there is a slight current that leads them directly to a beach at the right of the screen, which is an easy walk back on land and towards the castle.

This is what I mean by leaning forward rather than forcing someone forward. Each of the introductions I have discussed so far — the descriptions of holes in The Hobbit, the slow zoom into a TV in Us, or Super Mario 64’s castle exterior — are wonderful places to linger, but are designed so that one doesn’t linger too long. After all, beginnings only function if they have a text that follows; otherwise, they’d just seem incomplete.

… and it is in that spirit that I really ought to get back to writing my dissertation. I hope that this look back on some of my favorite opening moments has been as fun for you reading it as it has been for me to write it! For now, it’s time to lean ever more forward and (hopefully) get a text worth a great introduction.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Lakitu and Leaning In: What a Video Game Can Teach Us about Introduction appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Here’s a link to the opening moments of Us — go ahead and give it a watch. I’m only going to be talking about the lessons we can learn from the first two and a half minutes, but feel free to watch the whole thing. I’m keeping this intro spoiler-free, but if you haven’t seen Us, you really should.

I could easily spend pages ranting and raving about how Us exemplifies the tendencies from last week: how the rhythmic sound of waves dominating the first few seconds are simultaneously made to allude to the rushing of subterranean subway cars, the eerily hypnotic scraping of porcelain from Peele’s previous film, and even possibly the dreamlike beauty of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight; how the epigraph about “thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States” perfectly contextualizes the dark mystery at the center of the film; how the sound of waves (above us now) literally immerses audiences in the plot as these words rise out of the darkness to make themselves known; and how all of this foreshadows elements in the rest of the film …

In the interest of time, however, I want to focus on the next shot of the film: a slow zoom on a “Hands Across America” commercial playing on an old TV. As I see it, the staging of this scene embodies the next tendency for interesting introductions I want to look at:

3. An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

Initially, the “Hands Across America” commercial (sandwiched as it is between a news teaser and an ad for the Santa Cruz Board Walk) seems completely bizarre. This goes beyond circumscribing the film’s subject – it initially has no discernible relation to the plot at all. And that, along with the claustrophobic nature of the tight shot, gets viewers to start asking questions. Where and when are we? Why aren’t they showing the rest of the house? What does any of this have to do with a horror film?

The agonizingly slow zoom on the relatively static screen also encourages viewers to explore the objects in the periphery in a desperate search for meaning. Isn’t C.H.U.D. about subterranean monsters? Wasn’t there a part in The Goonies about abandoned tunnels? Taken together, the commercial and the props lying around give viewers plenty of chances to make connections and form theories from the scraps of information they already have. This primes viewers to start paying attention and later rewards them for doing so when the connections are made clear.

Attentive viewers may also notice something strange about the screen itself, especially in the moment between commercials: it contains a reflection. Maybe it’s just me, but this moment really gripped me, and I think I now know why:

4. An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

When I watched this on the plane, it took me a moment to realize the reflection in the screen wasn’t my own, despite the impossibility of that angle or proportion from where I was sitting. I was so used to seeing my own reflection on screens — or, alternatively, not seeing direct reflections of this sort depicted in movies due to the need for hiding cameras and lighting — that I immediately identified with this double.

Uncanny doublings like this are, of course, depicted in Us to an obsessive degree – they are the engine that drives its horror. But to introduce the motif in this way is to show an awareness of the audience’s position, to reach out past the wall separating the world of the story from the real world and address the audience as they sit in their chairs. In some ways, this frames the text as a conversation between the audience and the director and — just like when you’re addressed by an instructor during lecture — it makes you pay attention.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from these observations is simple: whether it’s through a seemingly off-topic anecdote that gets people making connections or through a conversational tone that addresses the audience as they are, interesting introductions grab your attention. The trick, as always, is how to achieve that in writing. If you’re stuck, maybe try writing an anecdote that is two degrees removed from your subject. The task of trying to connect to it, if nothing else, will give you a better idea of what you’re trying to say.

It will be interesting to see how all of this applies to video games — the medium which I am perhaps most familiar with — but I will leave that for next week.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Captivating “Us”: What a Film Can Teach Us About Introductions appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

Right off the bat, I think I’ve found my first approach to successful openings.

1. Interesting introductions sound good.

Go ahead and read the first sentence out loud. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” It has a certain rhythm to it which is both familiar and distinct. Let me show you what I mean:

It begins not with the even stressed and unstressed syllables of “Once upon a time” (iambic, in poetry terms), but with three syllable units (feet) that have a similar rhythm. You don’t even need a comma between “ground” and “there” because the rhythm already breaks up the line naturally! Similarly, the two-syllable iamb “there lived” breaks up the pattern of three-syllable feet enough to basically function as an invisible colon, setting up the final three-syllable introduction of “a hobbit.” If I did this right (say a word enough and you get any number of rhythms), this final three-syllable foot inverts the rhythm of the first two, rounding off the phrase and ending with that mysterious word (“hobbit”). Aside from introducing the fairytale world in a lyrical way, the sound gives a good first impression of the writing overall.

The second thing I appreciate most about this opening paragraph is how it goes about introducing the concept of hobbits, which leads me to a second strategy for good intros:

2. An interesting introduction circumscribes, rather than describes, its subject.

Look back at the opening again. After mentioning “hobbit” — the subject of the book and this part of the first chapter — one might expect to get a description of the creature’s stature, habits, and hairy feet straight away. Instead, Tolkien describes the hole in which the hobbit lives — or, more accurately, the holes in which the hobbit doesn’t live. Even though they are two degrees removed from the subject at hand, the details easily put readers in the mindset of a hobbit.

The first hole Tolkien describes — “nasty, dirty, wet” — evokes the rather domestic image of a furrowed garden plot after a rain, filled with “ends of worms” sliced by trowels and the “oozy smell” of natural fertilizer. The second hole (“dry, bare, sandy”) may well describe a patch of land unsuitable for gardening, which the narrator implies would be much better with snacks and a chair. The attitude described here — summarized by the phrase “and that means comfort” — is the same sort of homebody-ish attitude that hobbits seem to have in abundance.

Tolkien goes on to describe hobbits in more detail in the following paragraphs, but this indirect style of description still carries the weight for me because it trains readers to get into a hobbit’s head before they are even described. By circumscribing rather than directly describing his subject here, Tolkien presents a script for the reader’s inner monologue to perform as well as a virtual (head)space for them to inhabit. You are not reading about hobbits; you are reading as a hobbit. Primed in this way, readers can begin to combine the hobbits’ descriptions with the tone presented, internalizing the subject matter as they learn more about them.

So, what is the takeaway from all this? It certainly isn’t that you should break out a poetry textbook when starting your next paper or take the longest route possible to get to the point (Tolkien’s circumscription only lasts a paragraph for a reason!). Instead, it is useful to ask whether your first few lines puts readers in the right place. A good way of doing this is by reading your words aloud (perhaps over music) to catch the rhythm, and including language that evokes your subject without describing it directly. Hey, if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the middle of some writing project — why not try it?

Next week, I’ll be taking this discussion to film and ask: what can a movie’s opening moments tell us about writing good intros? In the meantime, try reading Tolkien’s intro one last time, but this time with Howard Shore’s music in the background. You won’t be disappointed.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Of Feet and Hobbit-Holes: Lessons Learned from a Literary Intro appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”

How do you feel about epigraphs? My partner once said she hated them, at least in the context of academic writing. Why not just get straight to what you want to say? Many readers find them pretty easy to skip over (as I’m sure at least a couple of you did when approaching this blog post) and if used incorrectly they can easily become unnecessary filler, pretentious excess, or both. After all, you don’t need Plato to tell you that “the beginning is the most important part of the work,” and except for this bit I won’t really be talking about ancient Greek philosophers at all. All it really does is add a bit of pageantry to a pretty straightforward series of blog posts on writing and reading introductions.

But that pageantry does have a purpose, it does something for the reader, however slight … right? But is that the right approach? Moreover, when does it work? At this point in my dissertation process — writing and rewriting what will become the first pages of my first chapter — an obsession with how to start things has caught me in a loop of rewriting.

This is, of course, a common problem. I have also been told that knowing it is a common problem doesn’t make it any easier to overcome. In the words of one of my advisors, academic writing is one of those skills that actually gets more difficult as you have more experience with it. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I realize it has taken me a longer time to write six pages now than it did to churn out thirty my first year in grad school, or when I scroll through the many versions of my prospectus while trying to find a particular source.

There have been plenty of blog posts discussing writing tips or offering methods for staying on task, and plenty more discussing the difficult and often isolating process of writing a dissertation (some of which are on this very site). These posts can be incredibly helpful and inspirational for the desperate graduate student looking at the long road of dissertation writing, due to the writer’s clever way of staying on task and/or their honesty about their struggles. However, seeing as I have not yet found an intuitive way of managing my time and already tend to overanalyze my writing struggles, I’d like to take a different approach. The goal of this series of posts is to make this reading material accessible and light, even for those without a lot of background in textual studies.

If my work in literary adaptation and new media have taught me anything, it would be that you can learn something from every text, no matter which medium or genre you are interested in. With that in mind, I am going to take a close look at some of my favorite opening moments in texts across print, film, and video games to see what makes them so memorable. With any luck, these deep dives will reveal something about what makes a good introduction in any genre, and just maybe help me break out of my writer’s block. If nothing else, it’ll be a great way to get back in touch with what got me into this line of work in the first place.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

The post Begin (Again): The Art of Openings appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

This censoring isn’t just for undergrads, either. I have found very few opportunities in academic writing where you are free to wear your love on your sleeve. I understand the usefulness of the genre, but it’s refreshing to have a forum where we can get more emotionally expressive. This renewed interest in personal within academia (one way to think of the so-called “affective turn”) is part of the impetus behind the virtual space that is this blog, after all: it gives us a chance to feel as well as think, and reach our communities as well as our peers.

All this is a roundabout way of introducing the fact that I haven’t been okay recently. There have been days where I have found myself in negative mental spaces without a clear path out, and there are nights where my dreams have taken me back to places haunted by bad memories. I could point out a number of reasons why this might be – the grad student workload, lack of good sleep, anxieties about the future, homesickness – but a diagnosis only goes so far when most of those things are unavoidable at this point in my life. Other contributors to this blog have taken on mental health before, so I think I’ll leave the specifics aside for now. Instead, I would like to spend this post doing one of the things I like best – taking a walk with someone I care about. I want to show you a place that I go when I’m feeling down: a little virtual island called Proteus.

Proteus is a short game created by independent designers Ed Key and David Kanaga in 2011. To call it a “game” is a bit of a misnomer. There are no rules, there are no enemies, there are no apparent goals. The only controls are the arrow keys to move, the mouse to look around, and the space bar (which makes your avatar appear to sit down). The game is pure spatiality: all the player is encouraged to do is explore and experience.

You emerge from the main menu and find yourself floating above a tranquil sea, with only the soft sound of the waves below you. As you look across the shimmering water, you might be able to see the faint outline of land beckoning you closer. Recognizable shapes begin to emerge from the fog as you approach: a blocky beach, a few twisted pixelated trees crowned in pink or green, maybe even the swell of a mountain to vary the landscape. As soon as you make landfall, the island erupts into the simulated sounds of spring: the warbles, tweets, and crooning of synthetic birdsong; the rustling static and base-toned murmuring of unseen electronic creatures; and through it all soft strings and the tinkling of a chiptune keyboard invoking the sound of a pleasant breeze and gently falling cherry blossoms. Despite being technologically generated, the sounds that engulf you are the sounds of life, and they ebb and flow as you wander around the island.

What you’ll actually see as you meander among the trees is unclear. Like Minecraft, Proteus is procedurally generated; the island’s topography, flora, and fauna are completely dependent upon algorithms over which you have no control. But though you will never see the same island twice, certain landmarks remain constant through multiple playthroughs. There is always a cabin nestled in the trees, there is always a circle of mysterious totems, there is always a lonely headstone at the top of the highest peak. What this creates for the player is a familiarity which retains the mystic wonder of discovery. I can feel intimately close to this virtual space, but I can never own it; I can know what to expect, but it will always surprise me. Few places, virtual or otherwise, are truly like that in the way Proteus is.

When night falls, something magical starts to happen. The stars – the only rounded figures in the pixelated world – start to float down to earth, swirling around a particular spot on the island. The curious explorer who approaches the circle of stardust is wrapped up in a flurry of motion and sound as time accelerates. The sun rises and sets, rainclouds race across the sky, wind whips through the leaves on the trees. Standing in the center of the circle brings all this chaos to a crescendo, and after your vision fades to white you find yourself no longer in spring, but in summer.

Every season brings a change in the island’s landscape and soundscape – summer brings its blooming flowers and buzzing flies, autumn its orange leaves and somber tones, winter its stark silent white – changing the tone of your exploration from joyful wonder to thoughtful reflection as you come to know the lay of the land. As the days get quieter and more familiar, the nights become increasingly fantastic with fireflies, shooting stars, and even the aurora borealis – a sight that even in its polygonal form fills me with the joy of home.

Though you can spend all your time exploring these little wonders (I never went past summer the first time I played), the game does have an ending. I won’t say what happens on that final winter’s night, but it never ceases to move me. For all its joy and wonder, Proteus teaches you that all things that change, even a sense of place, must come to an end. When you close your eyes on that first island, you will never see it again. All that will remain are the echoes of your emotional experience. That impermanence, for me, is beautiful.

The description I’ve given here hardly does it justice – Proteus really needs to be experienced to be understood. But I also find it’s best when experienced together. If you’re around where I happen to be, go ahead and ask. I’d love to play it with you, if only to see the look on your face when you first set foot on land. If you happen to get it and I’m not around, well…go up to the totem circle on the first night of autumn and just wait for the moon to rise. Maybe it’ll make you think of me. In any case, I think it’s a place worth sharing.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

The post Sharing Space: “Proteus” and the Personal appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In the course of teaching, I have occasionally had parents voice the concern that their child has been “spending too much time on Minecraft” and ask me for some advice on how to change that. Now, those sort of parental decisions are above my paygrade at this point in my life, and how one ought to approach limitations on computer activity depends too much on parenting styles and a child’s personality for me to say anything useful in that regard. But the way they phrased the question points to a bit of a misunderstanding of what the game really is: kids are not on Minecraft, they are in Minecraft.

Like many contemporary games, Minecraft is as much of a space as it is a system of rules. Each time they make a new world, players are dropped into the middle of a sprawling landscape which is constantly generated based on a set of algorithms (an operation known as procedural generation, in game terms). Grasslands and deserts, mountains and jungles, cave systems and mushroom-filled islands, even villages and abandoned temples have a chance of appearing every time a player reaches the edge of the known map. And this process never ends: the world only gets bigger and bigger as the player explores. With no mini-map to aid them initially, players are forced to make meaning out of the environment – taking note of landmarks, following the curve of riverbeds, getting to higher ground – as they seek out shelter before nightfall.

Besides being infinitely vast, the worlds of Minecraft are also infinitely transformable. Players can harvest, collect, or mine just about every type of block in the game and use them for their own creations, whether that’s smelting iron to make a sword or placing wooden planks down for the walls of a house. In this way, players are constantly leaving their mark on the environment and making it their own. Every hastily-made shelter, every empty mine shaft, every scar in the mountain or crater in the earth becomes imbued with meaning as sites of the player’s failures and accomplishments. But these structures and stories do not remain confined to the game world: they are shared by players across every medium available to them, whether through screenshots, videos, or merely word of mouth. Every voxel has a ballad, and every player becomes a bard, expanding the space of the virtual world even further into the material one.

That may have gone a bit too far into the poetic, but there is a sort of magic to a game space that (for many people) doesn’t make the transition to the real world. This is especially true for kids in my hometown of Anchorage, a city which has long winters, not insignificant criminal and animal dangers, and long distances between destinations – not to mention the general lack of a safe “third place” for youth to gather and play of their own accord. Yet Minecraft is a place that is infinitely traversable, a place children can exercise their agency and reveal their intelligence, a place that they can make their own without the help of adults and where they can play with their friends on top of it all. Is it any wonder why this is the place kids decide to spend their days?

I understand the danger in gaming compulsion – it is very addicting to find such a place of empowerment. I also understand the necessity of getting outside – you can’t grow up in Alaska without getting at least some taste of that lesson! – but there is so much more to Minecraft and similar games than sitting in front of a TV or killing time with YouTube videos. The only way to truly understand that fact is to take the game for what it is: a place of empowerment as well as play.

My reaction to the parents who are skeptical about the value of games or who think their child is playing too much is to first ask them much they know about Minecraft. Some have watched their children play the game or even have an account themselves, but more often than not they have only heard their child speak about it ad nauseum while having very little familiarity beyond the confusing jumble of jargon and technical language that is frankly hard to keep straight unless you have seen it in action.

And that is exactly my piece of advice to these parents: let your child show you their space. Treat the experience as if you were a tourist trying to get an understanding of a different country. Ask questions, try out the language, pick up the controls and let your guide coach you if need be, but give them a chance to show you what this virtual space means to them. Only after understanding what it means to exist in this space can you truly understand what it would mean for them to lose it. Perhaps you can show them what they love about the space can be found elsewhere as well.

The same advice can really be said of almost any game and almost any social relationship: if you want to know someone’s feelings, let them show you the places they like to go. In the spirit of that mindset, I want to show you a place I like to go when things are not particularly bright. But that is a task for next week.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

The post Appreciating Space: “Minecraft” and Empowerment appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

I was probably thinking something along those lines as my phone announced it was beginning to die. Yanked out of my own head for the time being, I found myself back in Oakwood Cemetery, on the steps of a mausoleum, with a tattered American flag in my hands. It wasn’t often I strayed off the path during my runs – my feet followed a 5k race route whose markers faded long ago – but since I found myself in a wandering mood, I decided to do some exploring.

Founded in 1859, Oakwood Cemetery lies about a block away from Syracuse University in what used to be the outskirts of town. The graveyard is sprawling; at 160 acres, Oakwood plays host to over 60,000 individuals and counting. Between the oaks, monuments, and mausoleums plotted along the rolling hills wind approximately 10 kilometers worth of trails (some paved, others dirt) shared by visitors and mourners alike. It is very easy to get lost among the stones, as I soon found out.

You never really understand just how odd a graveyard is until you try to walk among its stones. The place is full of conflicting messages. The architectural features of so many grave markers beckon visitors closer, whether than be because of interesting architectural features, places to sit, or just tiny print. Or all three, in the case of this massive monument:

This makes sense, of course – graveyards, like funerals, are for the living. We are encouraged to visit the resting places of our loved ones to mourn or to give gifts or simply to talk. In Western culture, at least, these acts help to create an aura of reverence around those who have passed on, sanctifying the ground under which their remains are buried. Much like the concept of nationhood, this layers a virtual space upon material reality, giving what were stones and dust the weight of the secret and the sacred.

This makes things incredibly hard to navigate when you have something like this blocking your path:

For the superstitious or the particularly pious, a graveyard is a nightmare to navigate. Perhaps the dead do not mind people stomping all over their resting places. There is, after all, six feet of earth and a coffin to insulate them from the tremors of the world above. But once I knew there was someone beloved under there, I created a virtual barrier of reverence in my mind. Such a thing is hard to unsee.

Another odd thing about graveyards is their aesthetic of incompleteness. All around Oakwood were stairs that led to nowhere, pillars holding nothing up, archways huddled over aborted paths, locked iron doors without working handles, and yards and yards of unused space. Even some of the gravestones themselves like stray slabs from unfinished foundations, especially those that have been overgrown or worn down with age. All of this lends cemeteries the same uncanny air a ruin might have, hinting at some former glory that now goes unremembered.

Oakwood in particular also has more mausoleums than I’ve ever seen in a graveyard, and these fascinate me most. They sit in the muddled middle between monument and place, having all the fixings of shelter but (for the most part) being eternally locked to anyone who would want to enter. Whereas headstones seem to jut into the physical space of the living, the barred doors of these larger structures create a clear barrier between the living and the dead. Gravestones can be touched, stroked, grasped as if they were virtual stand-ins for the one interred; the remains within mausoleums, it seems, can only be peered at through barred or broken windows.

How does one mourn at a mausoleum? Must it be opened to bridge the void between the living and deceased, or does the distance not matter? And what does it mean to sit on the steps while pondering these questions only to find you are standing on an actual welcome mat?

(Seriously, why is there a welcome mat?)

Graveyards are odd places, to be sure, but they are also very human (perhaps I repeat myself). The burial of the dead is one of those cultural touchstones that seem as ancient as they are ubiquitous, and are perhaps the oldest constructed spaces known to humankind. As easy as it is for some of us to put them out of mind in day-to-day life, it is important to remember that these “Cities of the Dead” (as one old flyer for Oakwood proclaims) are built for the living. This not only means that we are obliged to respect and protect them – burial grounds are frequently neglected, littered, or (all too frequently) bulldozed – but that we ought to find time to visit them in order to look into ourselves. We will all end up like those buried beneath, after all, and I find graveyards are one of the few urban places that are quiet and empty enough to allow for self-reflection.

So, what I’m saying is go visit a graveyard. Turn off your phone and take an hour to meander the grounds, read the epitaphs, pick up any litter that’s blown in. Take a look at what there is to see before it gets too cold. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find there is life among the stones.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

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I stopped and picked it up, turning the torn, cheap fabric in my hands over and over again. The object struck a strange chord with me, and I ended up sitting on the steps of a mausoleum and just staring at it until my phone battery drained down to 10%. The entire time, I didn’t notice a single person walk by.

A lot was going through my head then, and still more is going through it now. It got me thinking about space, place, and what it means to be home—“affective spatiality”, as one might translate the thought into an academic paper. The idea might loosely be defined as how spaces tell stories, convey emotion, and allow for meaningful interactions within them regardless of whether they are material or virtual. As such, these posts could conveniently be swept up in the dizzying amounts of ongoing “turns” within humanities discourse—the spatial turn, the affective turn, the turn towards digital technologies—all of which will be explained in good time. But right now, I’m not interested in the vertigo that can come from navigating the shifting sands of academic trends. Right now, I’m interested in a flag.

I am not the type who usually wears patriotism on my sleeve, but I’ve only ever identified as an American. Branches of my family have been here since at least the Civil War, sluffing off our Anglo-European identities somewhere during our trek across the Midwest. Myself, I grew up in the suburbs of Eagle River, Alaska, a conservative state with a relatively high proportion of national parks and military bases scattered across its landscape. Perhaps it was these facts that fueled my reaction to the flag on the ground. There is something tragic about it. Forget the fact that this particular flag was a one of a million identical facsimiles, the fact it was probably mechanically mass-produced overseas; forget the fact that the Stars and Stripes have been emblazoned on everything from party trays to boxer shorts—that flag stands for a place I have called my home, and it didn’t feel right to see it dusty and torn.

But what kind of place is America? In one sense it is very material, as tangible as the dirt caking the edges of that flag. Haven’t we taken pride in those “amber waves of grain”, those “purple mountain majesties” that adorn our anthems and postcards?  Don’t we take a similar pride in our great cities—Chicago, New York, Boston, LA—those behemoths that have been raised out of the earth by paid and unpaid labor in order to feed and clothe and house the human form? And yet, to see only the material was to see the object before me as cheap fabric and inexpensive dyes. From Florida to Alaska, from Puerto Rico to Guam, “America” is a name we give to acres and acres of material things which in and of themselves have no concept of ownership at all, despite our insistence to the contrary.

No, the America I am more interested in (both as a bumbling pop-culture/new media scholar and bumbling human being) is the immaterial “placeness” of America, the virtual America. In one sense, “virtual” means constructed and mediated. The South, the Midwest, the Northeast, the West Coast, Red States and Blue States, even the concept of States all together—America is a patchwork of these virtual places, each of which carries meanings and connotations that go beyond the geographic and into the human. Our identities are formed by these arbitrary distinctions, whether they are made by us or for us, and through us they are given actual, material form. That is why it bothers me to see a discarded flag; interwoven with those cheap threads are the virtual expressions of nationhood, and a tear in one seems to suggest a tear in the other.

But there is also an older sense of the virtual in which I am interested. As new media theorist Marie-Laure Ryan describes the concept in her book Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, “the virtual is not that which is deprived of existence but that which possesses the potential, or force, of developing into actual existence” (18). The virtual is the oak that lies dormant within the acorn; in other words, the virtual is about what could be rather than what is, the openness of multiple futures rather than the closed conception of one truth.

When I look around at Black Lives Matter Protesters and police officers, First Peoples and ambitious industrialists, ideologues from both sides of the aisle and the spaces in between, I see people who have put their faith into their own virtual America, an America not yet (nor ever) complete, but one moving ever closer to new potentialities. That is, to me, the core of American optimism.

Does that make us unique? No, or at least I’m not qualified to say. But I think that does make us American.

To be clear, I do not agree with all of these visions or the ones who try to weave them into our flag—my virtual America is one that will fight to keep particularly hateful virtualities from ever becoming actual—but I know that all of these people are my People. I cannot see them as otherwise. Regardless of how they constructed their virtual America—whether on an idealized version of a forgotten past or new understandings of the principles on which this nation was founded—they are all still fighting for a vision of the same material land on which we stand. As for me, my virtual United States depends upon a state of unity, at least on a human level of civility. That is the place and people that come to mind whenever I see a flag, no matter how superficial or gale-torn it may be.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

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