JOUR1111 Lecture 3: Featuring Act

This week's lecture saw Bruce take a backseat as guest speaker Skye Doherty offered her expertise on text-based storytelling. A sneaky stalking of other blogs on Monday night informed me that we knew about this beforehand. Clearly I need to spend more time stalking Blackboard. But hey, everyone likes a good surprise!

And this certainly was a good surprise. To me, Skye's lecture really showed the power of text. Almost every piece of media uses text in some form, be it through a simple description or a long analytical essay. It seems that most of what makes a story worth reading is born through text. Clearly, words are a powerful tool when used properly.

As it so happens, text-based journalism is one of the aspects of the profession that appeals to me the most, so this was a particularly significant lecture for me.

The standout moment, however, was when someone asked a question about the use of gaming in journalism, which resulted in a discussion about news based games; in particular, a morbidly amusing little game called Cutthroat Capitalism. To 'cut' a long story short, it's based on the business model of Somali pirates. I spent half an hour playing it at home, and quickly realised it was more than just an excuse to beat and threaten some British hostages. The game actually made me think about how this was probably happening right at that moment in the real world. If that isn't a good way to engage your audience through mostly text, I don't know what is!

With playtime over, I left the building in an enthusiastic state, mind bubbling at the possibilities of text. I lie - my mind was bubbling, but mostly with thoughts of food. Apparently, remembering my lunch is difficult.