Where's the Joystick on This Novel?

By David Corbett

I’ve been thinking a lot about games lately.

First, they fascinate me, even though I consider most of them pretty disappointing. The potential is mind-blowing, if potentially Orwellian.

Second, I’m realizing I’ve got a lot to learn from the world of games, as writers play a bigger part in game design.

In particular, game designers are learning they neglect story at their peril, just as many writers are learning it’s almost career suicide to ignore the vast appeal of games.

The success of both the Harry Potter and Hunger Games franchises point to J.K. Rowling’s and Suzanne Collins’s ingenious blending of mythic storytelling with video game techniques: specifically, the creation of an elaborate story world much like what you find in games, and a kind of score-keeping element. (Obviously, these aren’t the only two films that use game techniques as essential story elements. Remember Sucker Punch?)

Now, it’s no big secret that I have misgivings about the “mythic” slant on storytelling. I stand much more in the realm of Hemingway and the realist tradition, and I find a lot of so-called “mythic” storytelling with its insistence on “ancient archetypes” to be hokey, unconvincing, and cartoonish. It seems we’re now creating stories based on stories, and that’s never — never — a good sign.

That said: I’m not so dense I can’t tell which way the cultural wind is blowing. And as I said, the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series both employ conspicuously mythic elements: call it the world of sorcery in Harry Potter and the battles to the death of heroic saga in Hunger Games.

These series overcame the limitations of mimicry by translating these mythic stories into new, uniquely imagined places and times: a somewhat undefined present, as with Harry Potter, or the near future, as with Hunger Games. And it was by redefining the mythic contexts in modern terms that the writers did the psychological and emotional reimagining that brought these stories to life.

But it isn’t just the mythic storytelling that made these blockbusters unique. As I said, it was their use of video game elements as well. Specifically, they used the elaborate story worlds that games are known for – what used to be prosaically called setting – and they both employed elements of score-keeping.

First: an elaborate story world. Both the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series create unique and fascinating worlds. Those worlds were created lovingly and in painstaking detail. But they were also established over multiple books. Not every novel can do that. Remember, attention spans are diminishing down to an eye blink. You have to make your point powerfully and make it quick or your audience will click on the next distraction.

Get too caught up in establishing your story world and you risk bogging your story down in minutiae at the expense of dramatic movement. Thinking in terms of a multi-book series can help you plan out what elements of the story world get provided to the reader when.

Obviously, this can also be done in a single-volume novel, but the point is: if the story world is elaborate, you have to plan out how you reveal it, and not just provide it in an information dump.

But however you get it out, if there’s one thing the recent blockbusters tell us, it’s that people have not lost their hunger for fully realized and lovingly imagined fictive worlds. The more richly you can imagine the world of your story, the better. If you end up having to insert it with almost surgical precision rather than slather it on like whitewash — that’s writing.

The other game element you find in both stories is score-keeping. Games are built around this, and it’s often a core experience of gameplay: Who wins?

The score-keeping element in Hunger Games is pretty obvious: only one of the contestants survives. The question is: Will it be the protagonist?

In Harry Potter, the score-keeping resides in the fact that, as Harry becomes increasingly adept at wizardry, he rises to successively higher levels of knowledge but also conflict — the more he learns, the more profoundly he’s tested. Just as in a game.

But with Harry we don’t just see a number tallying upward. We see his gravitas increasing as his concern for the world, his embrace of his role not just as wizard but as leader, becomes more profound, responsible, mature. In this regard, novels still provide a more meaningful and emotional richer experience. But clearly the various media are cross-pollinating.

It can be incredibly useful to take your storytelling skills and adapt them to other media. Each one has certain strengths, each has limitations, and solving story problems across different media automatically enhances your ability to look at your story more objectively, so that you can analyze it more critically.

There’s one last element of storytelling in games I’d like to address, because it points to a kind of frontier in narrative, and should provide a brand new world of storytelling opportunities for writers.

As I mentioned up top, designers are learning that players more and more frequently admit that the games they prefer have a distinct story element, and that without this element the game reduces to a mere sequence of challenges and decisions — which in narrative terms, amount to a series of disjointed scenes. There’s no rising action or dramatic tension. There’s just, to use Toynbee’s phrase, “One damn thing after another.”

Writing for games requires the writer, or “narrative designer” as some call themselves, to try as best she can to match up the gameplay (or ludic narrative) with the story narrative. The what and how — with the why.

This problem is easier to state than to solve.  Even the best games suffer from what Clint Hocking has called ludonarrative dissonance — the inability of many games to match the playing experience with the narrative one.

The game he used as an example was Bioshock, which takes place in an underwater city designed as a kind of 1950s Ayn Rand objectivist utopia. Visually, the game is stunning.

Now, the writers hoped to have the game serve as both an example and a critique of the advantages and the limitations of Rand’s objectivist philosophy, which relies solely on rational self-interest. In particular, the designers hoped to demonstrate that the power achieved through rational self-interest is a trap, because power corrupts.

One problem: on the level of the game-playing, rational self-interest was exactly what the player normally needs in order to succeed — indeed, isn’t that what all single-player games are really about, the power gained from focused self-interest?

If the designers wanted to show how this self-involvement corrupts, they’d have to somehow show that by succeeding, you lose.

Not impossible, but a challenge. They didn’t do that, however. Instead, they required the player to go against his own game playing instincts — you could only succeed by helping another character named Atlas who’s goals are opposed to the game’s hero. You can only advance by undermining yourself. That wasn’t what the game’s theme was trying to establish, and so the narrative of the game and the mechanics of the gameplay were at odds.

This is now one of the major narrative problems facing game writers, and it’s an interesting one. They’re being encouraged and invited, finally, to make the writing an integral part of the design and not just something tacked on, like one more effect.

Up to now, reactions — that is, emotions — were often seen as just another bit of flash you built into the story world. More and more games are now trying to shape the story world so that the risks involved in decision-making have an emotional consequence, either through allegiances with other characters or by defining the stakes in some other dramatically significant way — not just in terms of score-keeping.

One great example is Marvel’s CIVIL WAR by Vicarious Visions.

Evan Skolnick, the writer, noted that most games don’t have a first act, or they don’t have a representation of the world as it exists before the events of the story begin. The game begins with the inciting incident — the entrance of the first monster you’re obliged to kill, for example.

But with CIVIL WAR they decided to lay out the full stories of the two warring camps. Rather than have a player decide, “Okay, I’ll be the good guys this time, the bad guys next time,” he instead had to choose sides in a war in which each side had a perfectly logical and defensible reason for its cause. The game required the player to deal with the consequences of choosing which side he wanted to be on.

More and more, we’re going to see games with this kind of thematic and character complexity, and a need to make sure it doesn’t conflict with the gameplay experience. What that means is that there will be work for writers in the video game industry.

The bay area is a major hub of this effort, as are Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and Montreal. It’s a very tight-knit world, jobs are often acquired on the basis of personal connections, and so networking is crucial. But if any of this interests you, you owe it to yourself to explore the matter a little further, and see if game design isn’t a place where your storytelling skills might not just be welcome, but necessary.

* * * * *

So, Murderateros — do you have a favorite video game? Does it have a truly unique story world? Does it have a narrative element that appeals to your desire for story?

Can you see yourself perhaps turning to game design as away to explore your storytelling skills?

* * * * *

Jukebox Heroes of the Week: I can’t Listen to Massive Attack and not envision an alternative world — a story world for a novel or game not yet created — and not just because of how visually voluptuous their live shows are. And what better way to describe the gaming experience than with the title to this song —Bulletproof Love:

ONCE IS (NOT?) ENOUGH

by Gar Anthony Haywood

As I write this, my daughter Maya and son Jackson, eleven and nine, respectively, are sitting in the den, listening to an audio book: HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN.  They are enthralled and amused, falling silent when things get scary and laughing hysterically when something funny happens.  To listen to them, you'd think they were having the time of their lives.

And I swear to God, this has to be the 463rd time they've listened to this book.

They've listened to all the other Harry Potter audio books just as often, finding each no less consistently entertaining.  And they re-read the actual Potter books just as zealously.  Clearly, J.K. Rowling's writing (and Jim Dale's reading) loses nothing in the way of impact the second, third, or 265th time around.

This strikes me as incredible, because I am a devout one-time-only reader.  I never re-read anything.  God knows I've read enough books deserving of a second or third read --- a lack of worthy titles isn't the problem.  So what is?

Three things:

1. Time.  Every minute you spend re-reading a book you've already had the pleasure of knowing is a minute you can't devote to something new and possibly just as remarkable.   That motto booksellers like to put on T-shirts --- SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME --- rings all too true for me.  I live in constant fear of missing out on a genuinely fantastic, undiscovered read somewhere, and I don't want to blow it by giving CHILDHOOD'S END a second look, especially if, ultimately, that second look only serves to prove that one should have been enough.
   
   Which leads me to my next reason for avoiding second reads. . .
   
   
2. Dashed expectations.  Almost thirty years ago, I read Elmore Leonard's novel STICK and loved it.  It changed my life.  My memory of it is that of a masterpiece, a how-to in crime writing.  But is it really?  If I re-read the book today and found it to be something short of all that, I'd be heartbroken.    Disillusioned.
   
   As I've aged and matured, I've become a more discerning reader.  Harder to please and dazzle.  Turns of phrase that I used to find mesmerizing irk me now as false and dissonant.  My standards for genius have been raised considerably.
   
   Granted, in this particular example, because it's Elmore Leonard we're talking about, it's possible I'd find STICK to be even better than I originally thought.  It's for sure I'd still enjoy it.  But why take the risk?  Why mess with perfection, even if it's a perfection based solely on the vagaries of memory?  Wouldn't my time be better spent seeking out the next Elmore Leonard, wherever he or she may be, instead?
   
   
3. Speed.  Sadly, regardless of whether I'm doing it for business or for pleasure, I read the same way I write: at a snail's pace.  Even when a book grabs me, I take it in slooooowly.  So the amount of time I invest in a book usually runs somewhere between a week to thirty days.  That's just the way I roll.  If I could read something and enjoy it in two or three days, tops, maybe I could afford to do more re-reading.  But I can't.  So I don't.

Needless to say, not every reader has the same aversion to re-reading that I do.  Some think life is too short NOT to re-read, depending on the book or books in question.  Why deny yourself the pleasure of a great read, these people ask, just because it's not entirely new to you?  Surely, some novels are not only up to the challenge of re-examination, they can in fact only be fully appreciated that way.  Just as some films require multiple viewings to be completely understood, some works of fiction demand multiple reads before all their surprises and nuances can be perceived and savored.

Hmmm.   That's a pretty convincing argument, even if I had to make it myself.  Convincing enough that I find myself wondering if it isn't time to reconsider my hard-and-fast position on this question.  Maybe I'd see things in a second reading of STICK that I missed the first time; things that would suggest, not that the novel is less than I've always thought it was, but more.

Well, maybe.

Because I remain dubious --- okay, I'm a chickenshit --- I'm going to enter into this re-reading business very carefully.  Tentatively.  So I'll be limiting my re-reads to three titles to start.  These are the books I've always been tempted to re-experience, having had them blow me away the first time, that I most suspect will not disappoint under the merciless glare of a highly anticipated second read.  In no particular order, they are:

• IN COLD BLOOD - Truman Capote
  
  
  I was only fourteen when I originally read this, so my impression of it as a work of literary genius could be colored by the naïveté of youth.  But I doubt it.  What I know for sure is that this was the first book I could not put down once I started it, and when it was over, I knew I had just read something that was on a completely different level from all I had read before.
  
  
• DARKER THAN AMBER - John D. MacDonald
  
  
  This was my first Travis McGee novel, and I only sought it out because it served as the basis for a movie of the same name, starring Rod Taylor, that I enjoyed quite a bit back in the late sixties.  Little could I have guessed how much better than the film the book would turn out to be, and that I would go on to devour every other McGee title by MacDonald I could get my hands on.
  
  I've never heard this particular title described as one of the best in the series, so it may ultimately disappoint, but I'm curious to see how much of MacDonald's brilliance I actually got a glimpse of by reading this McGee first.
  
  
• THE HORSE LATITUDES - Robert Ferrigno
  
  
  I remember this as a terrific read overall, an Elmore Leonard-esque tour de force with an LSD twist, and I have always believed its first two paragraphs make for the greatest opening to a thriller I have ever read.  Check this out:
  
  It didn't take much to set him off these days --- laughter from the apartment below, a flash of blond hair out of the corner of his eye.  Or, late at night, the sound of two car doors slamming in quick succession.  Especially that.  He imagined them walking to his place or her place, both of them eager but trying not to let it show, holding hands, tentatively at first, then the  man slipping his arm around her waist while she smiled and laid her head on his shoulder.
  
  There were nights when Danny missed Lauren so bad that he wanted to take a fat man and throw him through a plate-glass window.  Just for the sound of it.  Instead, he went swimming in the bay.

I don't know when I'll get around to these re-reads, exactly, but I plan to do a follow-up blog post on my reactions as soon as I do.  So stay tuned.  In the meantime:

Questions for the class: Do you re-read, and if so, how often?  Do some books disappoint on re-examination, or do they always live up to your time-held reverence for them?  If you don't re-read, what are your reasons for abstaining?  And if you could only re-read three books out of all those you've read in your lifetime, what would they be?

One Final Word: Look, I know I've been beating the subject of bland and unimaginative titles to death lately, and you've got to be sick and tired of hearing me gripe about it, so rather than write any more long Dumb Ass Title diatribes, I've decided to vent my spleen with the occasional addendum to posts on other subjects, an addendum I'll call:

TITLES FIT FOR A MORON

Today's winner: The upcoming Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller Oceans 11/12/13 knock-off, Tower Heist.

It Go Up and Down and Round And Round...

by J.D. Rhoades

As some of you may have noticed, I am NOT Robert Gregory Browne. This is Rob’s usual week, but he is, as they say,  glutes-high in Alligator mississippiensis. Everyone else in the world seems to be at Thrillerfest. (Heavy sigh). So when Rob  sent out a cry for help, I agreed to take his week, because...well, because  I’m a hell of a guy. It was short notice, so if things seem a bit random and disjointed...well, it’s not like anyone can tell the difference from the way I usually post.

Anyway, here’s what's on my mind recently:

Lately I keep seeing ads for a new Harry Potter-themed amusement park at Universal Studios in Orlando. “You can truly be part of Harry Potter’s World!” the ad promises breathlessly. I  don't know about you, but my first reaction was “I’m not sure I actually want to be part of a  world where an immensely powerful magic user who looks like James Carville's handsomer brother and who has a serious grudge against my family  spends most of his days trying to figure out how to kill me.” But it did get me thinking, which is always a dangerous proposition.

Now, J.K. Rowling seems like a nice lady, and hers is one of the great inspirational stories for writers: deprivation, determination,  rejection, perseverance, and finally riches beyond most people’s dreams of avarice (not beyond mine, but then I feed my dreams of avarice red meat, Wheaties,  and steroids).I'm glad to see her continuing to do well.

But, I  wondered, how is it fair that her characters get a theme park and others don’t? I mean, there are plenty of other writers who create vivid and intensely realized worlds. Why don’t we have them parks for them?

Imagine what forms some of these theme parks might take:

IAN RANKIN’S REBUSWORLD: Enter the world of Edinburgh’s most successful and  most surly detective! Have a drink in the famous Oxford Bar. Make the climb up the full-sized replica of Arthur’s Seat. Have another drink in the famous Oxford bar. Take a refreshing dip on the Firth of Forth waterslide before having another drink, maybe several, in the famous Oxford Bar. Management not responsible for liver damage.

MICHAEL CONNOLLY’S BOSCHLAND: Ride a replica of the Angel’s Flight inclined railway to get to this LA-themed attraction. Explore the scary storm drains of LA in the Black Echo Fun House. Ride the wet and wild Narrows log flume ride. Hope you like jazz, though, ‘cause that stuff’s playing ALL OVER THE FRIGGIN’ PARK.

LEE CHILD’S REACHER-RAMA: there are a lot of great, thrilling and  scary rides, but no matter how much cash or you take in or how many souvenirs you buy, you always walk out of the place with nothing on you but the clothes on your back and your toothbrush.

For you fantasy fans, there’s GEORGE R.R. MARTIN’S ICE N’ FIRE ISLAND: it’s going to be the most awesome thing ever if they can just  get the damn thing finished.

    Hmmm...okay. Maybe not such great ideas after all. But maybe some of you can pick your favorite fictional world (even your own)  and make it into a theme park. Give it a try, won’t you?

   Rob will be back in this spot next week.



What if?

Most writers I know adore a good what-if. That simple question is akin to creative crack, a cheap addiction with an extremely generous dealer.

After all, any topic is fodder for the what-if treatment. It’s the gift that, well, you know . . .

What if the Brits had won the American war for independence? What would our world look like today?

One particularly odd image in my answer to the above questions is imagining the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico singing God Save the Queen. It evokes a wonderful commercial I saw decades ago where the stereotypic Native American – one with long gray braids and a craggy face—eats a piece of pizza with a big smile and says, “Ah. Just like my mother used to make.”

You can bet those writers were playing with what-ifs.

What if Poirot grew tired of puzzles and opened a men’s clothing store?

Can’t you just see him measuring someone’s in seam? Of course, Poirot’s brilliant little gray cells would probably commit suicide from lack of stimulation.

What if Nancy Drew decided to drop out of high school and hitchhike through South America? What if she’d started toking reefer in junior high? What if her mother was in the picture?

I don’t know if Nancy would’ve butted into other people’s business or worked to solve crimes if her social horizons were broader, or if she'd broken a few laws herself. And, I doubt a mother would have let her do some of the things her father permitted simply because he couldn’t supervise his daughter all the time.

What if Sherlock had been well-adjusted? What if Watson was his true intellectual and observational equal?

What if Jane Eyre had had loving parents? What if Rochester had been a pleasant, happy fellow?

The mind just boggles, doesn't it?

I know readers play with what-ifs all the time too.

My children derive quite a bit of their literary pleasure from extrapolation. My-daughter-the-Harry-Potter devotee has applied her innate logic to several questions about the characters as adults. She has a sensible theory about whom Cho would marry and why. She’s got a good idea about what Teddy (Tonks’ and Prof. Lupin’s son) would be like today. She’s certain Draco would still be a prick.

My other daughter has spoken with me about Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice and has wondered aloud about what would’ve happened if Lizzie had been attracted to Darcy from the beginning.

“I can tell you one thing,” my daughter said to me yesterday. “It’d be a pretty short book.”

Every time I write a scene, I make dozens of decisions that feel monumental in the moment. When I commit something to paper –or computer screen –it seems like the only possible option. The best one ever. When I’m in that frame of mind, I bristle—a little—to think other people might rewrite my endings or create their own narratives around my characters' actions and motivations.

But when I’m in a what-if mood, writing is so much more fun. I let myself play and see where alternate decisions take me. And I love that people might invest so much emotional/mental attention to my work that they'd think about other possibilities.

Today, after the long weekend, I think it's time to get our own little gray cells working. So, let's stretch our creative muscles with this exercise:

Ask a what-if about any literary character, story or book
       and then – if you’re willing – give us an answer.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

One of the enjoyable and unanticipated results of being the sole ’Rati that posts on a weekly schedule is that I now get all of the guest bloggers. The next two weeks are going to provide me with a much appreciated mini-vacation. And, dear readers, you'll have the treat of two excellent writers. Talk about a win-win.

Look for

Julie Kramer on Monday, July 13

Rhys Bowen on Monday, July 20