Textologies

I particularly enjoyed the following exchange, if only because it served to reinforce a niggling suspicion I've been harbouring about one of my current guilty pleasures:

AVRICH: My friend Griffin suggested an idea for a game to teach writing. I thought it was very clever, considering that he's ten. He said, "What about a detective game, with questions and real clues?" Such a game would involve finding patterns and discovering evidence. It could be a great way to learn narrative.

WASIK: Could you modify a game like that to include real reading?

AVRICH: Yes, my idea would basically be a hybrid. In order to move to the next phase of the game, you would have to read literary texts and answer questions about them. The questions would grow more difficult, detailed, and arcane, and the answers would create a pattern, a text within a text. The text, a unique story determined by the player, would ultimately lead you to the goal of your quest: the secret scrolls of Atlantis, for example, or the buried wing of the library of Alexandria.

But within this frame mystery would be the mysteries of the English language, everything from basic rules of grammar to the obscure etymology of words-this word is Greek, this is from the old French, this is Arabic, and so on. Our language is full of historical and cultural riddles. Drama too: the conquests that transformed it could provide great visuals. A magician-mentor figure could guide you back in time to show you through the different eras: the Druids and the Romans, the Angles and the Saxons, William the Conqueror and William Shakespeare.

KOSTER: That's a great idea. Have you heard of alternate-reality gaming?

AVRICH: I don't think so, no.

KOSTER: It's a relatively new genre of game, in which the play links up with the real world in some way. The first well-known one was actually made as a promotional campaign for Ai, the Spielberg/Kubrick movie. In the credits at the bottom of the movie poster, a woman was credited as the film's "Sentient Machine Therapist." People who saw it knew that it had to be fake, but when they searched for the woman's name online, they found academic papers by her, websites that cited her. The more they dug, the more they found, and they had to keep up this exercise in close reading. Eventually they found their way to phone numbers, meeting places. In the end, many hundreds of players wound up playing this game to figure out the hidden history. The game you're describing sounds a lot like that. It's an exercise in a form of literacy.

AVRICH: That's the idea-to create a really great mystery story within the game, but where the reading supplements would be bits of actual literature.

KOSTER: I hate to make the analogy, but I also think the appeal would be very similar to that of The Da Vinci Code. Which is a very gamelike book, right?

AVRICH: Yes, that's true. The protagonists solve a series of riddles in order to move from level to level.

JOHNSON: One of the signs of how important gaming is now, I think, is that video games have started to influence our ideas of narrative, as opposed to the other way around. The best example of this is the television show Lost, this huge hit that is in some ways trying to build a television show structured like a video game. The show has all these little clues that you can only see if you freeze-frame on your TiVo.

KOSTER: Lost has run its own alternate-reality game, in fact. During its first season, in 2004, the show ran television commercials for a fictitious airline-what was it, Oceanic?

JOHNSON: Oceanic Airlines, yes.

KOSTER: And viewers could visit this airline's website and find hidden details about the show.

JOHNSON: As with video games, there are hint guides to Lost that have been created by fans online, all these fans with way too much time on their hands.

AVRICH: I have to admit, I love Lost. I've actually had conversations about Lost with my students that have turned into discussions of reading skills.

None of the preceding will be too mind-blowing to a regular reader of Infocult, but speaking for myself this relatively simplified treatment helped me to get a tighter grip on some conceptual strands that are ceaselessly pulling apart in my own thoughts.

And at the risk of busting all manner of good faith fair use limits on quotation, I can't resist pointing at the concluding thoughts:

AVRICH: My concern, really, is for language. Which I fear is becoming more uniform, more practical, less grammatical, less edited, and more bland.

KOSTER: What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation-of a painting, or a historical text-and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. To me, there's a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they're parasitic on things other people have written. It's a democratized writing, a democratized literacy.

THOMAS ZENGOTITA: This plays into the virtual revolution I was describing earlier. Everyone in the overdeveloped world will have the took they need to create this amazing stuff, whether it be blogs or films or games. None of it will rise to the peaks that we associate with names like Joyce or Proust, but a great deal of it will be fantastic. And there will be so much of it that it will inevitably divide into niches, into small groups devoted to the art that they are making. In a way it's the fulfillment of an ancient dream. Everyone can have a creative life and a meaningful dialogue with the culture. Everyone will be an artist, but the price is that no one will be a great artist. There will no longer be a place for such a being.

I mostly agree with these conclusions, though remain unconvinced that new media precludes the rise of genius. It all seems a little too mathematically tight to satisfy me. Elsewhere, the participants seem to find consensus around the notion that new media forms are fine for iterative plot development, but that they can't do interiority as well as traditional literature. In Koster's words "All nuance is lost in games. They are intrinsically and irredeemably formal in nature."

I suppose he oughta know. But aren't we in a very early stage in the development of these forms? Maybe somewhere -- either within an individual of Shakespearean scope and power or in a hive of complementary souls -- there lurks a transformative creative act that will transcend such limits?

technorati tags:gaming, education, narrative, ARG