Literature: November 2007 Archive Page

Here is the beginning of a poem that recent SHU graduate Moira Richardson read at her father's funeral this morning.

I am the twinkle in your eyes,
Eternal laughter sparkling,
Strong and silent,
My father.

Jeremy Douglass has published a Creative Commons dissertation on interactive fiction. I recently brought a printout into my "Writing about Literature" class in order to help my undergrads (English majors, some of whom want to be professional writers or literature professors) see their homework assignments as points on a scale that includes books and beyond.

I ran the PDF through a text-to-speech program, and have been listening to it during my commute. I'm currently at 7 hrs 49 minutes of a 10-hr document. (I didn't include the index and the bibliography when I converted the file to sound.) 

Douglass does an excellent job acknowledging the debt that IF scholarship owes to the pioneering work of Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth (each of whom have treated IF as part of a larger study on digital narrative), and he also offers a good analysis of the full-length studies of IF by Buckles, Sloane, Montfort, and Maher.  He politely but unflinchingly points out how the limited number of IF works chosen for close readings has led to oversimplifications and assumptions in later scholarship.  Because IF is a rather obscure topic, scholars have to present a lot of formal exposition and generic exposition in order to clear a path to their more advanced insights, but Douglass moves beyond the basics very quickly, so there is much of value to ponder. (I will give it a traditional read-through when I'm finished listening to it...  depending on the audio version for the first read is an experiment that I'm rather enjoying.)

For me, the greatest pleasure in reading this work is the insightful close readings of moments, scenes, puzzles, and specific interactions that illustrate the greater theoretical point. I also felt challenged (in a good way) by his re-thinking of the categories into which the history of IF tends to be placed.  I will very likely assign at least

The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser's gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor's mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences. IF works interpreted in extended "close interactions" include Plotkin's Shade (1999), Barlow's Aisle (2000), Pontious's Rematch (2000), Foster and Ravipinto's Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and others. Experiences of these works are mediated by implications, frustrations, and the limiting figures of their protagonists.

In Game Design Review, Krystian Majewski takes a common creative writing mantra and rips it a new one in a way that I haven't been able to get out of my head for some time.

It seems counter-intuitive but actually, LESS emphasis on some parts of the story create MORE emotional response. This is something which goes well with Rowan Kaiser's recent article in The Escapist. He suggests applying the admonition "Show, don't tell". I would go even further and change it into "Do, don't show" to avoid any misunderstandings. The problem is, as always, that games aren't movies.


Nooo! Look behind you! Turn around! .. Gaaah! Give me that controller, you incompetent idiot!

When we watch a thriller, and we see Janet Leigh take a shower and the killer waiting outside it creates suspense because we foresee what will happen but we have no means to change the course of events. We are doomed to watch the murder happen and thus can do nothing but feel sorry for the victim.
Games are different. In games we CAN do something. The player IS Janet Leigh and the only way she would make the decision to take that shower is if she didn't knew that there is a killer outside. In games the emotional connection does not happen through emphaty but through responsibility. As soon a the player realizes a decision was made by somebody else in advance, he disconnects emotionally: "Oh, ok, it is is not my fault, it was meant to happen".

The phrasing's a little off... "do" is a command for the player, while "don't show" is a warning to the designer.  So to make sense, the catchphrase should be "Don't show, make the player do" or "Don't show me, let me do," but I admit that's not as catchy as "Do, don't show."  

It's times like this that the world needs Latin. I'm a bit rusty, there, but with a little help let's see... "[something] to enact, not [something] to be shown" would probably be "agere, non manifestandum." (See my recent blog which included an aside praising obscure terminology.)

In 2000, Salon posted an amusing spoof of Ginsberg's Howl.

I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital, burned-out, paranoid, postal,

dragging themselves through the Cappuccino streets of Palo Alto at Dawn looking for an equity-sharing, stock option fix,

HTML-headed Web-sters coding for the infinite broadband connection to that undiscovered e-commerce mother lode in the airy reaches of IP namespace,

who poverty and ripped Yahoo tee shirts, cubicle-eyed and wired on Starbucks sat up surfing in the virtual ether of one-million-dollar, one-bathroom condos next to the railroad tracks, skipping across the links of killer Web sites contemplating ... Java,

Lost Pig wins Interactive Fiction Competition 2007.

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

Second place: An Act of Murder

"Frederic Sheppard." Chief Inspector Duffy pulls at his moustache mournfully and stares up at the house through the windshield. "Theatrical sort, usually has a finger in some play or other. He bought up Gull Point about ten years ago. Never any complaints from the neighbours, never any scandals." He pulls at his moustache again. "He was found dead in the cove at the foot of the cliff behind the house about half an hour ago. Caller said it looked as though he fell from his study window."

Third Place: Lord Bellwater's Secret

As an aspiring groom in Lord Bellwater's household, recklessness has not been one of the qualities for which you, Bert Smith, would wish to be noted. However, desperate times call for desperate measures, and here you are in the early hours of the morning of Saturday 20th June 1863, undertaking the most reckless venture of your life.

In The Escapist, Tom Rhodes takes a stab at W.B. Yeats/Gordon Freeman slash crit. It's more of a nice try than a slam dunk; yes, it's possible to make these connections, and the insights are, well, insightful... but what the article lacks is an argument for why this interpretation is necessary, why it offers a better solution than so many other possible comparisons.

Half-Life 2 is the antithesis to Yeats' system, swapping the beast's triumphant aristocracy for Freeman's strive for equality and freedom. The name "Freeman" gives his mission more meaning than in the first game. In the original, he was a man trapped in extreme circumstances beyond his control, forced to fight not only extraterrestrial creatures but also contend with a military force dedicated to quashing the incident. In the sequel, he is so much more: a folk hero, a political icon, a quasi-religious figure, wielding his crowbar like God's wrath. When resistance members greet him in the game, they speak to him as if he's almost unreal, helping him in his cause, regardless of personal consequences. He has awakened after a "stony sleep," bringing a nightmare to the Combine's "rocking cradle" and its all too human figurehead. Both military commander and preacher, Freeman has come from "somewhere in the sands of the desert," and he is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man." His body is decked in orange and golden colors, much like a lion, but his head is that of a man, quietly contemplating his next move, your move, through the shadowy recesses of this ruined world in which he's been dropped.

I welcome any literate analysis of a video game, so I was happy to come across this.

But how do we apply the lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"?  Freeman is the best, but he doesn't do anything unless the player directs him; is the player, who is full with "passionate intensity" for the game, really "the worst"?  The Combine hardly counts as the "Mere anarchy... loosed upon the world."  Freeman seems to be the one sowing anarchy, since the surviving humans seem so willing to follow Freeman, but the game doesn't give us any background information about Freeman that suggests he has any goal other than to survive.

The essay focuses on what the poem might possibly mean, but it quotes only selectively from the work; literary analysis is only partly about what a text might mean; it's also about how the text communicates that meaning (word choice; form; use of or rejection of or modification of or creation of convention; ), and it needs to make an argument for why the author's proposed interpretation is not merely possible, and not merely plausible, but necessary.

Someone, get his crowbar.