"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; the Paris Commune; the Russian Soviets of 1917; Paris, May 1968; utopian colonies of the 19th and 20th centuries; speculation by Engels on the breakdown of the division between city and country post-Capitalism
- 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; ancient Babylon; 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; 21st century Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Calcutta, and others; 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
- NorthWest
- TC AS LITERATURE [Mark]
- we answer the question re games as 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. Micawber everywhere!
- human players provide the round characters
- recycled characters -- another Modernist convention
- compression
- 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 tradition, 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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