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"Can a Game Be Literature?"
Outline of our talk at the
Richard Hugo House Sixth Annual Enquiry: Games,
Seattle, October 4, 2003.
Gary Smith and Mark Phillips, SmartMonsters
- INTRO: Can a Game be Literature? Gary & Mark bios. [Mark]
- HISTORY OF RPGs [Gary]
- D&D
- Adventure
- Zork
- MUD/Diku/Circle
- MOO/MUSH
- MMOG
- many of these have common features we wanted to keep or enhance:
- interactive: you do more than read
- multi-user, including international
- constructed of words
- playful
- many of these have common features we wanted to move away from:
- written for teenagers
- violence is centric or privileged
- written in English (which we haven't dealt with!)
- CONCEPTS BEHIND TC [Mark]
- multiple paths to character growth
- written for adults (which doesn't mean sex)
- extensible: infinite linked online worlds
- subjectivity (Modernism!)
- OVERVIEW OF THE TC WORLD [Gary]
- "rooms" and what's in 'em
- three zones called "thirds" which differ in culture
- NorthWest
- communal/collective
- hyper-democratic
- ecologistic
- non-violent
- center of learning
- "good"
- governance: collective
- cities: ancient Athens; medieval Baghdad; ancient Alexandria; speculation by Engels
- materials: wood, earth, paper, trees
- NorthEast
- individualistic/competitive
- hierarchical (slavery)
- industrial
- violent
- center of martial values, competition, acquisition
- "evil"
- governance: bureaucratic
- cities: 19th century London; 1920s New York; ancient Rome; Terry Gilliam's Brazil
- materials: steel, concrete, glass
- South
- technological
- highly segmented
- center of art and technology
- "neutral"
- governance: technocratic/technological
- cities: Diaspar; 21st century San Francisco; Terry Gilliam's Brazil
- materials: nanopolymer
- undifferentiated historical time: all times are simultaneously present
- cowboys, hoplites, astronauts, knights ride together on a mag-lev subway
- this is a Modernist convention (T.S. Eliot)
- much literary/cultural allusiveness:
- T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: Tiresias, etc.
- Joyce
- Jarry
- Gauguin
- the Caballah
- Oscar Wilde
- way more
- future plans:
- intelligent NPCs
- natural language processing
- machine translation
- bigger, more, faster, better
- TC AS LITERATURE [Mark]
- we answer the question re games a literature largely by reference to our technical practices
- key constraints:
- people don't like to read online
- authors can't rely on deterministic causality; implications for "plot"
- practices:
- compression
- allusiveness
- juxtaposition
- nondeterministic causality & "plot"
- can't rely on the order of experience
- spatial juxtaposition
- probablistic causality. explanation: fork in the road w/two signs, a drab one and a sexy one.
- "story" equals "plot" equals deterministic causality equals artifact of the codex book? Or, lack of codex constraint equals nondeterministic causality equals stories that are more like real life -- messy!
- nondeterministic causality and Postmodernism
- characterization
- flat versus round characters: E.M. Forster
- computer-based RPGs are especially good at flat characters. Mrs. Macawber everywhere!
- human players provide the round characters
- recycled characters -- another Modernist convention
- RPGs as Postmodern poetics
- Critique of the Novel as a One-Dimensional Form
- answer: any imaginary experience constructed of words is inherently literary. whether it's literature or not depends on:
- how conscious of its place in literary tradtion, that is, evolution of form, its authors are
- whether or not it's well-written
- if this is a reasonable answer, we're a form in search of masters
- Q&A
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"Burroughs's zone, or interzone, is a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world's architectural styles are are fused and all its races and cultures mingle .... Sometimes it is located in Latin America or North Africa, sometimes (as in The Ticket That Exploded, 1962) on another planet, sometimes (as in Cities of the Red Night,, 1981) in a lost civilization of the distant past. By contrast, Alasdair Gray's zone (in Lanark, 1981), a space of paradox modeled on the Wonderland and Looking-glass worlds of the Alice books, has been displaced to the ambiguous no man's land between cities .... Pynchon's zone is paradignmatic for the heterotopian space of postmodernist writing .... Here ... a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space which is associated with occupied Germany, but which is in fact located nowhere but in the written text itself."
--Brian McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction (info)
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