Re-Read the following passages from Janet Murray's chapter on "Agency".  Then make a new Scalar Page (by clicking the + button in the toolbar), copy and paste your assigned passage and write a paraphrase.  Be sure to put the concept in your own words and to accurately represent the author's idea in this passage.  In-text citations are also required!  See the Handout on Summarizing and Paraphrasing on Canvas.


1. As I move forward, I feel a sense of powerfulness, of significant action, that is tied to my pleasure in the unfolding story. In an adventure game this pleasure also feels like winning. But in a narrative experience not structured as a win-lose contest the movement forward has the feeling of enacting a meaningful experience both consciously chosen and surprising. However, there is a drawback to the maze orientation: it moves the interactor toward a single solution, toward finding the one way out. (Murray, page 131)


2. But the unsolvable maze does hold promise as an expressive structure. Walking through a rhizome one enacts a story of wandering, of being enticed in conflicting directions, of remaining always open to surprise, of feeling helpless to orient oneself or to find an exit, but the story is also oddly reassuring. In the rhizome, one is constantly threatened but also continuously enclosed. (Murray, page132)



3. These violence-hub stories do not have a single solution like the adventure maze or a refusal of resolution like the postmodern stories; instead, they combine a clear sense of story structure with a multiplicity of meaningful plots. The navigation of the labyrinth is like pacing the floor; a physical manifestation of the effort to come to terms with the trauma, it represents the mind's repeated efforts to keep returning to a shocking event in an effort to absorb it and, finally, get past it. (Murray, page 136)


4. On the computer the journey story emphasizes navigation-the transitions between different places, the arrivals and departures-and the how-to's of the hero's repeated escapes from danger. One of the consistent pleasures of the journey story in every time and every medium is the unfolding of solutions to seemingly impossible situations. (Murray, page 136-7)