Misadventure: Future
Fiction and the New Networks
This
article appeared in Style vol. 33 no. 2, pp. 184-203. I. Scary new networks
On her way to the
Pulitzer Prize for book reviewing, the New York Times critic Michiko
Kakutani took a memorable swipe at hypertext fiction, decreeing that the best
things in this line amount to "Myst and Warcraft II as
re-imagined by Robbe Grillet" (40). Given the generally dismissive
context of the article, her remark seems intended as a desultory putdown:
hypertext fictions are not really literary but belong to a lower order, the
computer games. Having jumped up from their cultural station, these things
seem not even to deserve proper mention: One well known hyperfiction concerns a man who fears
that his ex-wife and son have been killed in a car accident; another traces
the adventures of a cyberpunk hero battling an evil kingdom. (40) The first text so
efficiently summarized here is Michael Joyce's afternoon; the second
might be the adventure game Zork, though that featureless description could
fit many other titles as well. The lack of specific reference is no doubt
meaningful: since Kakutani believes that hypertexts defer too much to readers
and thus abrogate the high mystery of authorship, the people who make such
things might as well be nameless. Their work is all the same, or at least
equally contemptible. To test the dubiousness
of this conceit, imagine the following, written a few decades from now by
some scion of the house of Gates for a freshmen seminar at harvardOnline: In the 20th century the novel was still a marginally
popular form. One famous novel concerns a man obsessed with a woman who is
socially above him. Another traces the struggles of a young person against an
unjust society. This lampoon is no doubt
too hard on novelists, who generally do not deserve resentment. There might
in fact be common cause here. After all, Kakutani's write-off damns by
association Alain Robbe Grillet, arguably a very important (if suspiciously
"new") novelist. One might wonder about this targeting. Who's
afraid of Robbe Grillet, and why? Recent reports point to serious trouble in
the market for books, especially mainstream fiction. The rate of growth in
book sales has been falling steadily over the last seven years and the most
recent figures available at this writing reflect not growth but decline
(Carvajal). Have the prospects for commercial publishing become so dire
lately that any departure from time-tested practices seems threatening? Even if accurate, that
view seems too narrow. Kakutani's dislike of unruly or experimental fiction
in fact belongs to a larger cultural process whose implications touch more
than a single industry. As Donna Haraway observed more than a decade ago: we are living through a movement from an organic,
industrial society to a polymorphous, information system -- from all work to
all play, a deadly game. ...from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations
to the scary new networks... (Simians, 161) To be sure, Haraway's
concern about the "new networks" differs notably from Kakutani's
distaste for networked or polylinear writing. Here and in later essays
Haraway worries cogently about the implications of an "informatics of
domination" for social justice, even as she warily takes on hypertext as
a metaphor (Modest_Witness, 125). Kakutani's concerns seem parochial or tribal,
invested more in the unutterable Joyce (of all names) than the eponymous
Intel or Microsoft. Both critics, however, express deep skepticism about the
conjunction of networked information systems with systematic simulation or
gaming; both find the notion of promiscuous sign-play inimical or
"deadly," Kakutani to the aims of literature, Haraway to certain
forms of liberal society. Each may be right in her
way, at least in some measure. Thirteen years after Haraway's "Manifesto
for Cyborgs" first appeared, the informatics of domination has
engendered rampant globalization of trade, obscene concentration of wealth,
and lately an orgy of absurd stock speculation. Meanwhile in the narrower
sphere of popular culture, game makers have brought forth a steady stream of
sadistic kill-toys, from Doom and Quake to Duke Nukem
and Mortal Kombat, products tagged as moral menaces in the wake of
high school shooting sprees. The new networks are undeniably scary and our
games look deadly indeed. It seems hard, especially for those who grew up in
that comfortable, old "organic" society and now find themselves
sunk well into middle age, to avoid an impulse toward maintenance or
containment, a fundamentally conservative desire to uphold the past,
interrogate the present, and fend off an onrushing future. While it is useful to
distinguish between traditional and emergent strains of culture (as I will do
here, up to a point), that practice entails all the risks of generalization. It
is important to remember differences, particulars, and even in this age of
deconstruction, proper names. Such details reveal gaps and fissures in what
might otherwise seem a monolithic Other. They may also suggest unexplored
complexities within the traditional, and even paradoxical lines of
affiliation between old and new. By exploring some of these cultural
interstices -- beginning with the apparent gap between fiction and game -- I
will try to describe a less ominous interface between "organic" and
"information" culture, or at least suggest that something important
and interesting may be taking place on that site. The first of these
cultural fissues opens, paradoxically, on common ground. There is after all
some truth in what Kakutani says about electronic fictions and computer
games: the best of this work is indeed something along the lines of Myst
re-imagined by Robbe Grillet. One wonders, however, if the critic understood
the implications of her insight. Far from being the coup de critique Kakutani
intended, this dictum could be a blessing in disrespect's guise. For some
people concerned about the future of stories, Myst a II. Misadventure
A brief adjustment for
accuracy: Kakutani's actual synecdoche, "Myst and Warcraft II,"
is simply silly. Imagine glossing films of the 1970s as The Godfather
and The Four Musketeers, or recent fiction in terms of The Satanic
Verses and Return to Madison County. Like print products, computer
games address a range of audiences, so their quality and sophistication may
be expected to vary. Like literary texts, games also have meaningful
affiliations and genealogies. The Warcraft series and its cousins
derive from strategy games and tabletop war simulations. They generally have
few features that could be called literary in a traditional sense. Such
things may have some relevance to narrative -- the media theorist Espen
Aarseth says some very interesting things about the tactical games Doom
and Myth, for instance ("Aporia" 36) -- but to engage such
productions as substantive texts demands a more generous understanding than
critics like Kakutani generally allow. Warcraft II is pretty clearly a
straw man. Myst belongs to a different category,
and one that lies much closer on the cultural map to the tradition of the
book. Its genealogy may be traced in one line back to the role-playing
fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons, whose roots lie at least tenuously in
Tolkien. On the digital side Myst can claim descent from Adventure,
the textual exploration game created in the mid-1970s by Will Crowther and
Don Woods (see Aarseth, Cybertext 111), which became the design model
for the software house Infocom during the first years of the computer game
market in the early 1980s. Infocom "text adventures" like Steve
Maretzky's Mind Forever Voyaging and Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy (the author's own thoughtful reworking of his novel)
brought considerable sophistication and nuance to the form. Designed for
early computer systems that could not display graphics, these games depended
on prose descriptions delivered in response to commands typed by the reader. Unlike these earlier
productions, Myst was created for multimedia computers that support
color images, sound, animation, and video in addition to text display.
Instead of prose vignettes, Myst offers graphics that map the virtual
world from particular points of view. Rather than typing "go north"
or "look left," players click along the margins of the screen to
shift angle of view, or at the midpoint to advance along the current line of
sight. Sometimes objects within the scene may be manipulated by pointing and
clicking as well, and at various moments the player may access written
documents. Though different in appearance from the earlier text games, Myst is still recognizably related
to Adventure and its kin. Players find themselves in an unknown space that
presents logical puzzles (given visually instead of verbally) which must be
solved in order to reach other regions of the world. Though famously
successful from a commercial point of view (it was at one point the
best-selling computer game in history), Myst
represents something more than purely market-driven entertainment. As Steven
Jones points out, the Millers claim a literary model for their work, Jules
Verne's None of this reverence
for writing carried much weight with the critics, though. In his anatomy of
"interface culture," Steven Johnson cites another Pulitzer
laureate, Michael Dirda of the Washington Post, who gives Myst very low marks. According to
this reviewer there isn't much prose to speak of, the dramatic sequences seem
mawkish and crude, the quest-plot is "trite," and the characters
are "ciphers" (Johnson, 219). This last point draws a significant
response from Johnson, who sums up: If there are no lifelike characters in Myst's fictional world, that
is because the world itself is more important than the characters that [sic]
populate it. Denouncing Myst
for lack of character development is like finding fault with an office
building for lack of emotional sophistication. We don't expect our architects
to re-create the intensities of human consciousness -- why should we expect
anything more from our interface designers? (219-20) Johnson's reply to Dirda
has several virtues. He rightly suggests that eminent book critics, steeped
as they are in Gutenberg conventions, might not be the best judges of work in
new media (though admittedly Myst's
literary pretensions complicate that argument). More important, Johnson
insists on the importance of interface, or the structured mediation of
information, not as mere instrumentality but as a key constituent of the
text. Myst is not a
novel or a feature film, it is instead a different sort of creation whose
nearest non-electronic relative may be diorama. Any approach to this work
must take account of this fundamental difference from familiar forms. World
matters more here than characters or conflict, and in Myst the world is suffused with,
if not entirely given over to interface. Objects exist to orient us or point
our way, or they present themselves, in the case of valves, switches, doors,
and such, for active engagement. Unlike in print or cinema, successive
presentations of the text are elicited through feedback (as in Aarseth's
concept of "cybertext"), by selecting or manipulating an item in
the current view. Yet for all its valuable
insights (to which this brief summary does not do justice) Johnson's
commentary on Myst
also represents a fairly obvious misreading. As will become apparent, I think
this is a highly productive, or in Bloomian terms "strong"
misreading, and I would not disclaim Johnson's way of understanding Myst, since it is very close to my
own. Nonetheless, to say that the world matters more than the characters in Myst, though true enough, is to
tell only part of the story. Although they are clearly
secondary to the world and its affordances, the characters in Myst are not trivial. The Millers
clearly spent much time and effort, not to mention production budget, on the
video sequences in which characters address the player directly. These
sketchy figures are further developed through letters, diaries, and other
documents players encounter as they move through the game. Though it is
tempting to suggest that this attention to character was simply misguided, or
that the Millers as pioneers of a new form did not fully understand its
properties, such conclusions overlook an important fact. Like the world of
objects that comprises its interface, the characters in Myst serve the primary motivation
of the quest plot, or the object of the game. They are present in large
measure to urge us on. Johnson's account of Myst suggests that the game might
be reduced completely to interface: that it could become, to adapt Haraway's
terms, "all play," entirely disconnected from goals and outcomes,
understood not as a dramatic stage governed by unity of time but as a
persistent, stable environment open to leisurely exploration. I know that
some people engage Myst
on these terms, because like Johnson I am one of them. My first encounter
with both Myst and Riven, taking in each case several
weeks, began with aimless exploration, wholly driven by the fascinations of
the interface. In each instance, though, I had on hand a Hints and Solutions
book which could provide both help with particular puzzles and a general
anatomy or "walkthrough" for the game. The presence of these
revelatory texts puts another important wrinkle into the relationship of Myst and Riven to book culture. The
solution book represents the linear reduction into which the game can always
collapse, a kind of gravitational center for its various centrifugal
energies. The attraction of this center can be very hard or ultimately
impossible to resist. After many hours of dilatory play in which I solved
occasional puzzles only in order to to reach unseen portions of the world, I
finally succumbed to temporal economy and took the book tour. Life is linear
and short, but computer art, alas, tends to be fractal. Like all gifted designers
of adventure games, the Miller brothers shaped their world to accommodate my unendlich
style of play to a great extent. There is no immediate temporal necessity in Myst. In most cases the puzzles
have no deadlines. There are no adversaries in hot pursuit or threats of
messy death if one does not reach the next level. Yet Myst does have its quest plot, a
sense that the world is out of joint, a condition the player must put right.
Both Myst and Riven assign us to redeem
prisoners (Atrus and Catherine) and in the sequel many other lives hang in
the balance as well. In this regard Johnson's comparison of the game to an
office building reveals perhaps more than he intended -- for like the office
building, Myst is not
designed to accommodate pure play: the structure implies or expects a certain
performance as well. If we become all-players, fugitives from the absolute
hierarchy of the solution book, our textual orbit must be defined partly by
the pull of that antithetical object. The Johnsonian reader for whom
everything comes down to interface violates the spirit of the game. If we are
not losers exactly, neither are we winners. We wander through the premises in
our pajamas, interrupting conferences, annoying the staff, rearranging the
furniture, losing the way: miserable adventurers. We misadventurers are not
alone, however, and we come by our aimlessness honestly. For roughly the last
century modernist writers and at least some of their successors have
attempted to renegotiate conventions of 19th-century fiction, among these
consistent or sequential chronology. In this respect it seems quite revealing
that the Millers look back to Verne, who stands decidedly outside that
movement; but this was to be expected. The pragmatic puzzles of Adventure and
its kind are a very long way from the language games of Mrs. Dalloway,
Nova Express, and even afternoon. Yet works of real creativity
seem always to attract not the readers they expect but the misreaders they
deserve. Here at century's end the idea of functional linearity seems
inevitably to suggest dysfunction or at least complexity. The following
moment might be taken as representative: "This is some kind of plot, right?" Slothrop
sucking saliva from velvet pile. This is one of many
anti-climaxes that arrive toward the end of Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas
Pynchon's famously inconclusive novel of prophecy. Tyrone Slothrop, dressed
for the occasion in a plush pig costume, is about to vanish from the novel
into indefinite obscurity, taking with him all plots "polarized upon
himself," including the novel's ostensibly central quest. The prostitute
"Solange" (actually the major character Leni Pökler) marks
Slothrop's passage with a deeply meaningful massage. Slothrop goes out a
loser, a "tanker and feeb" as Pynchon puts it (738), but in this
outcome can be seen a certain "preterite" revolution -- if not
victory, then at least a deconstruction of history and other hierarchical
processes. This peculiar narrative
development has implications for literary (and quasi-literary) history as
well. Pynchon's clandestine transit system may offer a better descriptive
model for games like Myst
and Riven than
Johnson's office building, or the funhouses and theme parks he chooses not to
invoke. Tracks, trains, and conveyances appear prominently in both games, but
we should not be so literal in our understanding. The transit system is
metaphor, not the clue to some empirical puzzle. It is necessary to think
beyond the superficial aspect of the game: "Trains go on, and we grow
old," Pynchon notes elsewhere (284). As we learn from Johnson's
excellent misreading, the interface of Myst,
the complexity and seductiveness of its world of objects, places limits on
the centrality of its characters and their dramatic situation. Taking this
insight a step further, we might suggest that interface in these games also
militates against the demands of the quest plot and the gravitational
attraction of the solution book. In the visual interface of the game
everything is some kind of "plot" or linear vector, as Solange
turns the term; but the arrows indeed point all different ways. The interface
itself may represent a network of all plots that includes some not polarized
on anyone or anything in particular -- trajectories that lead to something
other than quest-adventures. If we can no longer summon enough sixties
idealism to believe this network leads to "freedom," we might at
least seek a finer understanding of networks, hierarchies, and virtual
spaces. III. Bugs in the system
Take the Riven beetles, for example. In
conventional transits of the game, these large, scarab-like insects are first
encountered in the Gate Room, an architectural puzzle that must be negotiated
in order to move beyond the first island. A large bronze fixture in beetle
form decorates each of five columns in the room.
Close inspection reveals
a ring and chain below each fixture, and when these chains are pulled (clicked
in virtual manipulation), the beetles' wing cases swing open to reveal
peepholes. Each peephole gives access to a stained glass window showing key
moments in local pre-history (for instance, the evil enchanter Gehn being
cast into his bookbound imprisonment). Since stained glass windows usually
denote a certain narrative seriousness, since the images also decorate the
game's CD sleeves, and since five-part divisions seem essential to the game's
topology, attentive players might regard the beetle windows as critical
clues. To solve the Gate Room puzzle the player must rotate the cylindrical
chamber so that one of its portals matches an opening in the outer wall.
Perhaps analyzing the vignette behind each carving might help in the
selection. Or it might not. The
window images can be helpful but not in any thematic or allusive way. The
interior of the Gate Room is largely uniform, so the beetle windows help to
distinguish each of the columns. Beyond this they have no direct consequence.
Players can solve the chamber problem without ever discovering the spyholes
concealed by the beetles' wings. Though many mechanical items in Myst and Riven act as binary switches whose
states control access to other parts of the game, the beetle fixtures in the
Gate Room do not function in this way. They are mainly decorative, worth
examining but only tangentially. They add to atmosphere or context, filling
in background, or what Such marginal details are
of course essential to any maze or puzzle: there must be red herrings, false
clues, and blind alleys for the game to pose any sort of challenge, and if
such digressions add to our sense of overall context, so much the better. The
beetle fixtures in the Gate Room serve this purpose well enough, but like
most things in Riven,
they are connected to other manifestations, deeply woven into the sign system
of the game. The beetle occurs again, and in this case its function seems
less a matter of simple imagineering. After passing through the Gate Room,
players can find their way to another island, part of which is thickly
forested. Approaching this forest for the first time, players will see a wild
version of the Riven beetle -- that is, a photorealistic animation of a large
insect making its way step-by-step along a tree trunk. The image is arresting
in several senses: the lifelike quality of the animation tends to draw
attention, especially if we recall the more limited graphics of Myst; and this can be a good
thing, since we cannot change our viewpoint until the animation runs through.
In a few seconds the
beetle completes its stroll up the tree trunk, at which point it opens its
wing-cases, revs up flight muscles and takes off in a tour de force of
three-dimensional rendering, its various parts and pieces behaving strikingly
like those of a real insect. As the creature leaves the frame, the noise of
its passage fades gracefully into an illusory distance, establishing an
auditory signature we will hear again in other parts of the forest. This
would seem to be a brilliant illustration of Johnson's point about the
importance of environmental effects in the Millers' work. The beetle appears
momentarily as figure and then fades into background or situation, enriching
our illusory sense of complicated, three-dimensional surroundings. It would
be easy to dismiss this moment as an exquisite grace note or atmospheric
suggestion in the style of Spielberg or Disney; but though the episode is all
these things, it is also part of a larger pattern whose meaning goes beyond
the practical concerns of simulation. For many players the
beetle encounter is the first of several with Riven's totem animals. In each case the animated
creature appears briefly and then flees, a pattern that marks these moments
as privileged brushes with (simulated) nature. The programming of the game
supports this impression: any appearance of the beetle sets a software
pointer which bypasses the animation for a certain, probably random number of
subsequent trials. Players who return repeatedly to the forest entrance will
not see the beetle again for a long while, though if they are very persistent
they can repeat the original experience. This arrangement reinforces a sense
of the game-world as ecology, a system with its own rules, rhythms, and cycles.
However, not all
time-based media elements in Riven
are rendered animations. Some are video sequences involving human actors,
shot against chroma-keyed backgrounds then digitally blended into the scene.
Several such vignettes occur. A little girl appears at a crossroads in the
woods. As players approach a collection of cliff dwellings, a sentinel cranks
up a warning siren. The little girl, or someone like her, appears again along
a path near a collection of cliff dwellings. If players knocks repeatedly at
the door of one of the cliff houses, a spyhole opens to reveal an enigmatic
face. A servant of the tyrant Gehn appears twice, once climbing into a tram
car and a second time running down a passageway in a subterranean space. In addition to these
short video sequences the game contains several extended scenes, including an
opening interview with Atrus and several possible endgames. However, the
brief human and animal encounters seem to stand on their own as variations on
a common theme: sudden appearances punctuated by flight or withdrawal. The
little girl runs away along one fork of the crossroad. The sentinel ducks out
of sight and does not reappear; players who make their way to the watchtower
find it empty. The second child is scooped up and carried away by an anxious
parent. The cliff house resident shuts the spyhole almost immediately. Gehn's
assistant is always a few steps ahead. In each case the figure who so
strongly engages players' attention moves quickly out of the frame -- and
since the game freezes players in place while this movement unfolds, they
cannot intervene. These effects might be
explained to some extent on purely pragmatic grounds. Limitations of home
computers, storage systems, and compression techniques circa 1997 imposed
significant constraints on video and animation. Player input had to be
suspended because time-based media make heavy demands on processors, and
because animations with branch points would have required alternative content
streams, hence considerably more storage. In order to save room for the
longer, cinematic sequences, incidental encounters had to be kept short.
Having the character fly, run, or otherwise exit the frame supplies simple
visual punctuation. If the Riven beetle is on some level an environmental
grace note, each character sequence seems likewise a cinematic tease, a
variation on the childhood game of hide and seek. Perhaps we should treat
these elements simply as embellishments or diversions, not inconsequential in
their way. Even if they are always running away, the furtive figures at least
suggest a human presence that was lacking in Myst, and thus a partial answer to critics like
Dirda. But again, simple
pragmatism will not fully account for the conceptual impact of the character
sequences. If these encounters enrich our sense of the world, they also vex
and disrupt. In these sequences, presence collapses frustratingly into
absence: the game of hide and seek never ends. These moments are paradoxical,
not simply constitutive, arousing tension and uncertainty even as they draw
us into the game. No pragmatic explanation can fully account for their
significance any more than the need for red herrings or atmospheric effects
rationalizes the Riven
beetles. The fugitive animals and people point to a more complex process at
work in the virtual world, and one which the game engineers perhaps did not
include in their designs. Diversions after all divert us from something, and
we might ask what. If the shy totem animals
and fugitive people of Riven
are aspects of its interface, as a Johnsonian reading would suggest, then
they mediate between the player and a body of information that is radically
inaccessible. As it happens, Riven
can tell us nothing further about the child on the pathway and relatively
little about the people of the cliff houses, beyond the fact that Gehn has
terrorized them for many years. They have no names and do not figure in the
quest plot except as potential victims of catastrophe should the player-hero
fail to save the world. These persons are in every sense extras: characters
brought on for secondary effect who quickly move outside the scene. Yet they
do not serve the same purpose as extras in conventional films. When they dash
away, these figures leave behind a wake or vacuum that demands investigation,
if not interpretation. To some extent this impulse feeds the purposes of the
game: it keeps players moving through the world, encountering situations in
which they may discover clues. But by the same token it also complicates our
relationship to the quest, for the more we attend to these extravagant or
extra-vagrant persons, the more we become aware not merely of sites unseen
but of lives and communities beyond the game. To focus upon these imaginary
spaces is to find oneself no longer "the adventurer" (the term by
which Infocom formally defined its players). It is to become something more
like a social historian, an ethnographer -- or maybe just a visitor passing
through. IV. Being Riven
Taking this analysis
narrowly, in the manner of our reviewer-laureates, we might find Riven simply deficient -- too
elliptical in its tendencies to constitute a proper adventure game, too
heavily invested in surface and interface to deliver the intensive experience
of novel or film. This product seems to fall outside generic categories,
tumbling into a conceptual gulf between narrative work and interface play,
between the hierarchy of quest-imperative and the disquieting networks of
world-making. In what one reader calls deficiency, however, another may find
genius. Critical authorities notwithstanding, the narrow view will not
suffice, if only because the Millers seem to have incorporated the terms of
its critique into the cosmology of their epic. Myst begins with an animation in which a man holding
a book tumbles into a fissure in the fabric of the universe which is both
symbol and literal product of the saga's primary catastrophe. Man and book
separate ("the book would not be destroyed as I had planned," the
narrator says with famous double meaning) but the fall into darkness resolves
into the stabilizing image of the book, the first object readers must engage
in order to enter the game. Yet the fissure cannot be
annealed or annulled even by the player's successful completion of the first
game. Shortly after entering Riven
the player sees in the middle distance a large brass instrument.
Investigation reveals this device to be a highly unusual telescope whose lens
is pointed not up at the heavens but down toward a shielded window that may
be opened to reveal a starry sky.
In fact this is not the sky
(at least not the one we are used to) but the same fissure into which Atrus
makes his epic fall at the beginning of the first game. As the name suggests,
the world of Riven is
built quite literally upon this rift, and we know from our initial briefing that
the construction is unstable; the world will soon collapse into its
underlying void. Riven
continually confronts us with evidence of conflict and instability (for
instance, the local enforcer who snatches our linking book away upon arrival,
only to be done in by a blowgun-packing guerrilla), and also with visual
echoes of its name, such as the giant dagger thrust into the landscape at one
point, or the plate-tectonic fracturing of islands out of an implied unity,
or even the bifurcate wing cases of the aptly named Riven beetles. Like all good
foundational metaphors, Riven's
rifts point "all different ways," as Solange might say: toward the
doom-sense of quaking California, toward the tenuous economic bubble of the
Long Boom whose surface tension supports the computer game industry, and
above all to the cultural situation of Rand and Robyn Miller, masters of an
art we have yet to understand, much less culturally accredit. "The book
would not be destroyed," Atrus tells us at the start of the first game.
As Steven Jones explains the latent content of this line, while games like Myst and Riven hardly spell the end of
books, they do represent the creation of something new in literary space
(Jones). That fresh invention opens a vast rift between hierarchical and
network sensibilities, story and interface, work and play -- the very fault
line along which the quest plot of the Millers' epic may crumble, in the
minds of some readers at least. Yet this apocalypse can be as much revelation
as cataclysm, for if it removes Myst
and Riven from the
well-ordered company of epic, novel, and drama, it suggests alternative links
to ode, dream-vision, prophecy, and other forms of crisis poetry -- forms in
which paradox and inconsistency represent not flaws but heroic virtues. Myst's and Riven's interesting problems may
even mark these games as the beginning of a distinctive project particularly
attuned to the themes of interface culture. The book will not be destroyed, and to place the Millers' work properly in context it is necessary to turn back to books; though not books by Robbe Grillet, Burroughs, Pynchon, Rushdie, or even Kathy Acker (even if the last comes very close). In a world founded on a cosmic rift, telescopes work only when inverted, pointed at strange openings and apertures instead of the dissimulating sky. Like games, the books that matter most in this regard generally fall beneath the notice of the literary referees. Consider if you will the comic book:
This panel comes from
another anomalous work or crisis poem, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comics
series Watchmen (1986-87), which like Myst and Riven
both defines and interrogates the boundaries of its form. Though this project
deserves much more extensive treatment than a single citation can supply, the
panel given above does show some crucial themes and features of the work. The
statuesque blue fellow is Moore and Gibbons' satiric revision of the
superhero -- a nuclear physicist accidentally turned into a superman and
rechristened comically (in every sense) "Dr. Manhattan." The hands
that frame the viewpoint belong to Laurie Juspeczyk, the character's
estranged second wife, who unlike her husband remains all too human. Thus Dr.
Manhattan's remark about the structure of time: having transcended the
clockwork state of ordinary humanity, he perceives time as a matrix or prism
and is frustrated by his wife's inability to perceive more than a single
facet of the "jewel." Typically, he can go further only by apparent
non sequitur, asking Laurie to leap back as far as she can in time and
memory. Such insights were hardly
new to narrative in the late 1980s. Dr. Manhattan's prismatic vision of time
might call to mind Proust, Mann, Borges, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, or any
number of high modernists including the numinous Robbe Grillet. In a more
popular vein, it might conjure up Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, who comes
similarly "unstuck in time" (23). Arguably, though, Moore and
Gibbons' invocation of jewel-time differs in a crucial respect from similar
conceptions in mainstream literary tradition, and this difference makes this
text highly relevant to Myst,
Riven, and the
cultural strain they represent. Watchmen is composed of overlapping,
tangled, and intersecting narrative lines, including double lives, nefarious
plots, stories within stories, and texts within texts. The architecture of
the work seems very close to Dr. Manhattan's image of time, "an
intricately structured jewel" -- though like Laurie we are unable to
perceive the design as a whole and until the final chapter can only guess at
linkages and relationships. The authors promote this uncertainty by
intercutting panels and sequences from different narrative lines and often
from distant points in time, future as well as past, so that readers must
work hard to construct continuity. Such challenges to conventional sequence
are of course a hallmark of modernist fiction, but in comics the effect is
inevitably connected to something beyond the single dimension of prose
syntax. In the complex temporality of Watchmen, the medium becomes, to evoke
McLuhan and Pynchon in a single image, very much the massage:
These panels come from
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, a highly revealing treatise on
this singularly misunderstood form of "sequential art" -- and a
discussion that operates, significantly, within its subject medium. Here
McCloud identifies as a general property what As McCloud sees it,
comics bring a different mental faculty into play, something called
"visual closure," which is our tendency to infer spatial context on
the basis of partial or fragmentary visual data (63). Like persistence of
vision, this mechanism emphasizes causal relationships and sequential
continuity; but unlike our response to cinema, the work of pattern completion
in comics does not depend on mechanical projection and thus is not limited to
a single axis of connection. Though we have been habituated to the
traditional succession of panels from top left to bottom right, our eyes
remain free to scan the page along multiple lines of sight; and since we must
understand each component panel itself as a simultaneous visual field, we are
in a sense encouraged to look along more than a single track. According to
McCloud, any sense of ordinary sequence imposed in comics always implies a
supplementary awareness of other, unconventional relationships, or at least a
background impression of the page as a whole. If films trick the eye with
persistence of vision, comics instead challenge the eye through an extension
of vision. Though this insight about
the structure and meaning of comics might help us put the dualistic dynamics
of Myst and Riven into larger perspective, our
foray into pulp fiction may seem something of a misadventure, if not a
misreading. On first consideration, adventure games may appear to have more
in common with cinema than with comics. [1]
After all, each local graphic in these games holds the screen until the
player calls up a transition, rather like a frozen frame -- a variation on
persistence of vision, but closely analogous. There are no visible boundaries
or "gutters" as in comics. The game world is designed for
immersion, not episodic seriality. The continuous sound track, animations,
and cinematic set pieces all contribute to the strong family resemblance to
cinema. Ironically, though, the
last element contains the strongest case for understanding Myst and Riven as something radically
different from film, or at least from narrative film in the
mass-entertainment mode. As we have seen, at least some of the video
sequences in Riven do
more than present exposition, fill in back story, or advance the plot. In the
hide-and-seek episodes characters and creatures run out of the frame, calling
our attention strongly to the literal boundaries of the scene -- to those
invisible gutters, as it were -- and thus also to the conceptual margins of
the text, the implied or unseen universe that falls outside the quest plot.
These moments reminds us that Myst
and Riven do share one
crucial feature with comics: reading or play is not constrained to a single
train of visual development. In fact players of graphical adventure games are
actively enjoined to explore, circulate, and browse. As Steven Johnson notes,
we should not expect "intensities of human consciousness" from
adventure games (at least not in the conventional, novelistic sense) because
these constructions are fundamentally and paradoxically extensive,
fundamentally riven, like their players, between one path and its
alternatives, between saga and interface, hierarchy and network. V. Interstitial fictions
Perhaps some will think,
however, that this recognition makes the critical misadventure worse, not
better. Why adduce comic books, of all things? This move would seem to ratify
Dirda's opinion of Myst
as sub-literature and Kakutani's claim that hypertext and experimental
fictions belong at the periphery of serious culture along with blood sports,
war games, hyperkinetic chases, muscleman fantasies, and other childish
things. It is tempting to reply to such charges in kind. One could point out
that numerically speaking most of the objects called novels are mediocre
genre pieces, increasingly tied in to movies, TV series, and yes even games (Myst has spun off several
novelizations). One might note likewise that every Reservoir Dogs
implies a hundred slash-and-splatter films unredeemed even by style. In terms
of the preceding analysis, this argument seems duly extensive -- call it a
flanking maneuver -- an attempt to map the networks that surround particular
hierarchies. But while this way of thinking may pose a useful response to the
textual puritans, it is not the most enlightening answer. The flanking argument
attempts to expand the frame of discussion, but perhaps its emphasis is
misplaced. Extensiveness after all does not necessarily imply unity, and the
frame may not be as important as its limits. It may be more productive to
dwell for a moment on if not in the gutter -- by which I mean both the
division between components in sequential art and by analogy any boundary
that separates cultural domains. In phenomena like comics and adventure
games, or for that matter in imaginative cybertexts and unconventional novels
and films, we may be seeing the emergence of a fictive sensibility more
finely attuned to gaps, inconsistencies, tensions, and fissures than to
unbroken traditional lines. The name Riven
(and the crisis-text it designates) might reflect our moment very truly
indeed. It may be time to give
these emergent, extensive fictions another name as well. In the early days
some used the letters IF to stand for interactive fiction, a designation
doomed by the limits of its first term -- as Michael Joyce used to say, the
only truly interactive system he could think of was the cardiac pacemaker
(135). [2]
I propose a new and certainly no less controversial reading for the old
initials: interstitial fiction, an extension of storytelling into and across
various gaps and fault lines. Some of these interstices separate intensity
from extensiveness, as we have now seen at length. Others represent the
unmapped spaces between familiar forms, as in the case of comics, which
borrow something from prose fiction (comics as over-illustrated stories) and
other elements from cinema (comics as runaway storyboards, or movies with
exceedingly low frame counts) but really belong to neither of these major
domains. Adventure games by the same token have their cinematic elements
(Rand Miller seems to have turned to screenwriting) but in some respects seem
more like architecture, or to speak the truth Steven Johnson suppresses, like
amusement parks. Yet again, they do not match any of these well understood
models in any final or satisfying sense. Our taxonomic uncertainty
suggests that we must try to understand these odd cultural objects according
to their departures from established forms, the mediations and affordances
they offer which might be understood as novel, if not new. In taking up these
features we come to a second and perhaps more important reading of the
intersitial: a commitment to the project of mapping across networks, riding
the trams and subways of our strangely prosperous Zone if not to
"freedom" then to some engagement with sign systems and their
contingencies that might be better expressed by Riven, say, than A Man in Full. This project
could be one of the more important consequences of Haraway's perceived shift
from hierarchies to networks; or as Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen put it:
"When depth gives way to surface, under-standing becomes inter-standing.
To comprehend is no longer to grasp what lies beneath but to glimpse what
lies between" ("Interstanding," 1). Interstitial fictions --
games and stories meaningfully and essentially Riven -- operate as much along the extensible fabric
of interface as in the stable circuit of signified and signifier. As such
they seem particularly appropriate to what one might call an object-oriented
culture, representing first approaches to a very new thing indeed: ...digital storytelling which proceeds not through
the use of conventional narrative, but rather, in interactions with the world
to be taken as real. Not the pale, poly-agonal representation of the real
supported by VR, although the attractiveness of immersive worlds is suggestive
of the search for textual transcendence. And not the circumscribed
interactions and dislocated knowledge of presentational game environments: Tomb
Raider is just Zork with a GUI. Rather, if I am correct, the
future fiction will comprise arrays of artifacts, in whose selection,
manufacture, and deployment will be manifested the art and artifice of a new
kind of narrative. (40) This is the writer John
McDaid's thumbnail sketch of a project he calls "artifactual
fiction," [3]
which at the moment seems a subclass of the interstitial but may some day
become its parent branch -- the hierarchies grow increasingly tangled in
these belated early days. While it is impossible to define the "new kind
of narrative" with full precision, McDaid's emphasis on discrete objects
or "arrays of artifacts" does suggest good reason to persist in
unnameable practices and keep probing the interstices of story. If comprehension
now lies as fully in "interstanding" as understanding, as much
along the unseen gutters as among the stars beneath our feet, then we need to
assess what arrays and networks can tell us about our situation. Myst a It remains to be seen
whether these interstitial fictions prove "deadly," in either
Haraway's sense or that of the current Congress, or whether some might have
value. To put this another way, if games are at root diversions, from what
does our play along the interface divert us, and to what alternative
destinations do we come by following scattered fingervectors? Perhaps a
world-game meant "to be taken as real" could prove as ominous as
any "pale, poly-agonal" figment of the corporate holosuite. Just as
possibly, by intervening in the process of seamless mediation by which we
construct our empires of signs, interstitial fiction might place a formidable
check on "textual transcendence." Both outcomes are possible and no
doubt likely, just as traditional narrative in words and images yields both
excellence and dross. The emerging interface culture needs better ways to
make and argue such distinctions. Certainly we are not well served by those
who would amalgamate Myst
and Riven with print
products, or lump everything electronic into the same easy target of abuse.
At least some computer games deserve to be taken much more seriously, as does
the notion of interstitial play; and though the results may often look like
error or misreading, these new texts may teach us a few things about the
glory of misadventure. Notes
Works Cited
Aarseth,
Espen. Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Aarseth,
Espen. "Aporia
and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock." In Cyberspace
Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, ed. Marie-Laure
Ryan. Carvajal,
Doreen. "As
Booksellers Shuffle, Readers Depart." New York Times 3 May 1999.
C13. Haraway,
Donna J. Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. Haraway,
Donna J. Modest_Witness@Next_Millennium.
FemaleMan(c)_Meets_OncoMouse(tm): Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, 1997. Johnson,
Steven. Interface
Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. Harper, 1997. Jones,
Steven. "The
Book of Myst in the Late Age of Print." Postmodern
Culture 7(2): January, 1997. [
www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.197/jones.197] Joyce,
Michael. Of
Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. U. Kakutani,
Michiko. "Never-Ending
Saga." New York Times Magazine 28 September, 1997. 40-41. McCloud,
Scott. Understanding
Comics: The Invisible Art. Tundra Press, 1993. McDaid,
John. "Halting,
Sphexishness, and Analysis Terminable and Interminable." SIGWeb
8.1 (February, 1999): 33-40. Miller, Rand and Robyn Miller. Myst.
Cyan Software, 1993. Miller, Rand and Robyn Miller. Riven:
The Sequel to Myst. Cyan Software, 1997. Moore,
Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. DC Comics, 1987. Pynchon,
Thomas. Gravity's
Rainbow. Viking,
1973. Taylor,
Mark and Esa Saarinen. Imagologies:
Media Philosophy.
Routledge, 1993. [This text is individually paginated in separate
sections. Quotations here are from the section called
"Interstanding."] Vonnegut,
Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. Dell, 1991. Copyright © 1999 by Stuart Moulthrop. |
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