English 115F Worlds of Wordcraft

[caladein]

That's not really answering my question.

At least for my part, he really was answering it.  Generally, I was making a point of how specific upper-division literature classes can get once your past the survey courses.

It's a Freshman seminar. The topic changes each semester. This year's:

FYS 115F-20. Freshman Seminar
Religion, Science and Literature: Apocalypse, Dystopia and Beyond
Fanning, J.
TR 1110-1215
The millennium’s end, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and the specter of global warming have precipitated what has been called the “doom boom.” This increased interest in stories about the end of the world and depictions of societies gone wrong has also been fed by technological advances and religious extremism. Will the Human Genome Project usher in a new eugenics? Can we avoid a nuclear 9/11?
 
For thousands of years, storytellers have been imagining the world’s complete destruction or transformation by forces beyond human control. In the 19th and 20th centuries, authors of speculative fiction turned their imaginations to communities corrupted or destroyed by unbridled scientific, religious or political ideologies. In this course, we will explore novels, short stories and films that present post-apocalyptic worlds and dystopias where the forces of nature and culture threaten to extinguish the human spirit. Readings span from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, to Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer-Prize-winning book The Road. Viewings include Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness.

Seminar's like this are generally required only for majors in that field, so this is a specialist English class, devoted to people pursuing an undergraduate degree in English. It's a perfectly fine first-year course for English majors, and quite useful -- if you don't find this sort of class and study interesting, you shouldn't be a bloody English major. Which I suspect is half the reason to require it.

A Freshman Seminar on Dystopian Literature would probably give me enough love for the major to slum through some of the more boring classes to come .

Also, you reminded me how weird UCLA is.  100-199 are for upper division courses, so most folk's 101s and 102s are single-digits.

[Khaldun]

First off, I think there's a lot to be said for studying how narrative works in everyday cultural practice, and for that purpose, any genre or context is as good as any other. A colleague of mine teaches a class where he looks at not just Beowulf but a lot of later reworkings of Beowulf, both high literature and popular culture. The students aren't just studying Beowulf as a remote work of "great culture", but also as a story that gets told, reused, rethought, integrated into culture. Most people are not going to write high-culture literature; a lot of people are going to have to rework older stories and tropes in their professional lives. That's some part of what advertisers do, of what politicians and policy experts do, it's some part of what lawyers do. Anybody who produces popular culture at any level does it. Anybody who does professional work where they have to persuade people to act a particular way is going to draw on deeply embedded narratives or stories if they're any good at it. They may do that fairly intuitively, but you get way better at communicating with people, motivating them, if you have a conscious sense of how stories work, how cultural touchstones form, and so on.

Second, there's just a basic pedagogical question here: do you study something by doing it or by reading about it? You could teach a class on narrative in popular culture (like the Beowulf one mentioned above) just by reading and viewing stuff and then writing standard analytical essays or papers about what you read and saw. With the right professor and syllabus, that works well enough. There's plenty of very good, demanding scholarship on narrative in games: Juul, Aarseth, Murray to start. It's stupid to argue that there aren't some interesting narrative issues with games that are distinctive in their own right, at any rate. Narratives that you experience interactively are fundamentally different in some important ways than narratives that you read in an unbroken experience or narratives that you view passively. If it's true that interactive forms of culture are going to be more important or dominant as this century goes on, it seems to me that it's a good thing to study how they work, whether they work, when they work, whether or not you're going to try and produce interactive media yourself. If it's a waste of time to study interactive narrative, it's a waste of time to study all narrative in any form. Which maybe some of you think, and ok, if you think that, don't waste time slagging on one English class, slag off the humanities as a whole.

If you think in addition that people learn well by experiencing or doing something as well as just studying it, then if you're going to teach about interactive narrative, you've got to find *some* way to have students experience games. I've only taught a few classes where gaming or interactive media are a part of the course, and I have to say that it is really hard to figure out how to work in an experiential component to the class in a serious way. It's important that you do *something* of that kind, I think: it's actually tremendously difficult to understand games or other interactive media just by reading a description of them or watching someone demonstrate one. Watch someone try to describe a video or computer game to a group of people who've never played one, or try to do it yourself. It's a really hard thing to do. Now if I were teaching about interactive narrative, would I have people play as much as this course seems to propose? No, I don't think I would. But it's not an absurd approach on the face of it. Would I make this a first-year course? No, I'd very much make it a smaller upper-level course. But this is also just a judgement call, and not transparently absurd.

It's pretty freaky to watch people as interested in games as you lot respond in such a knee-jerk way to this syllabus. Like I said, if you think this is rot because all the humanities are rot, fine. I don't agree, but that position has some coherence to it. If you have a fine-grained disagreement with some aspect of the pedagogical design, fine. But to say, "OMYFUCKINGGOD, someone's teaching about video games in English, English is for teaching DA CLASSICS in as passive and dull a manner as possible"? Seriously?

One other issue that I agree is worth considering is whether it's possible to think well and learn about narrative in interactive media or about the transformations of narrative across different media forms and across history without studying it formally in university in the first place. I'd say that yes, some people are effective auto-didacts who learn things like this completely on their own, for free. Or some people acquire this kind of knowledge through very lengthy experience, e.g., playing tons and tons of games over five or ten or twenty years. But if you're an 18-year old interested in narrative and cultural history and mass media, but haven't played games much, a course in university might actually be a more efficient and affordable way to open up those interests, broaden your mind, get some new ideas, than playing fifty or sixty games in your everyday life over a period of five or ten years. If you think of yourself as someone who understands interactive media and interactive storytelling through your own game-playing, and believe you can apply that understanding usefully in other work or aspects of your life, ask yourself this: how much time and money did you spend acquiring that knowledge?

[Khaldun]

Less wall-of-texty response to Soln.

1) Look, a lot of humanities courses don't have an immediate payoff where you can say something like, "I learned how mix polymers today in chem lab". If you don't like that, you not only don't like the humanities, you don't like the entire idea of a liberal arts education where some of the pay-off of that education comes in how you learn to think, and how that change in your thinking slowly percolates into your later professional life. Which is, again, a legit argument to be had about education, but don't get all bent out of shape about this one class, because you really don't like most higher education in the U.S., then.

2) However, if you want a humanities class to have an immediate technical payoff, e.g., that a student could say at the end of the class, "I can now do something that I couldn't do before", this course has a WAY bigger chance of producing that result than Chaucer 101. At the end of a traditional literature course on Chaucer, you know about Chaucer. Tell me what the immediate practical payoff of that is. At the end of this course, if it's taught well, some students might feel that they actually understand how to adapt narratives for use in other media, how to make convincing adaptations themselves, and so on. Which strikes me as being a potentially very useful and lucrative skill if you're any good at it.

[trias_e]

"OMYFUCKINGGOD, someone's teaching about video games in English, English is for teaching DA CLASSICS in as passive and dull a manner as possible"? Seriously?

Yep.  If you can't enjoy or learn from the classics, you sure as fuck better not be an english major.  Of course, they should be taught well and with passion.

It's stupid to argue that there aren't some interesting narrative issues with games that are distinctive in their own right, at any rate.

In current MMORPGs, I can't think of any interesting narrative issues whatsoever.  The 'interesting narrative issues' pretty much boil down to: "How can we get this guy to kill 10 foozles over and over again and not get bored?"    LOTRO, while being slightly more interesting because it is an adaptation of a great work of literature, still exists in this sphere.  Calling it interactive is an insult to interactive fiction (yeah, I'm thinking of you, choose-your-own-adventure).  It's more like a fanfic with graphics+progress quest.

Can anyone give me a single example of anything enlightening about narrative in any game he has his kids play in this course?  LOTRO, NWN2?  I mean something that will make you think 'wow, that's great writing and something I wish to emulate', or even better, something which makes one grow in some way as a person on a metaphysical or ethical level (which I think should be the real goal of humanities).  Studying LOTRO will teach you how to adapt Lord of the Rings into a Diku MMORPG.  That's about the extent of it's usefulness, as far as I can tell.  I'd like to proven wrong though.  Perhaps, if I could take the course, the professor would enlighten me to the intricate issues involved in this 'interactive' narrative.

(My experience with pop culture analysis in english has left me quite annoyed, if you can tell).

[Khaldun]

Why is it worth learning about classic literature? Intrinsically worth it, I mean? I have a good answer to this for my own purposes, but I find a lot of people who assume that's the point of English literature or the humanities have a flotilla of totally unexamined assumptions from not really knowing why something is "classic" to what the good consequences of having a society which shares a common understanding of the classics might end up being.

On your other question. Saying that the narrative content of LoTRO or NWN sucks ass is not necessarily something I'd disagree with, but you're missing the point if you think that the course is about glorifying how aesthetically wonderful the narrative content of LoTRO is. Even in a course on classic literature, you often end up teaching works that you or other critics think are very poor in quality. A Shakespeare course may often include "A Winter's Tale", which most Shakespeare critics think sucks ass. The interesting critical question becomes, "Why do we find this an inferior work?", which turns out to be a question you need to ask if your ideas about excellence aren't just recitations of what somebody else told you was excellent.

So certainly one thing this course could ask is, "Why do stories from other media frequently become derivative or generic when they're brought into the games medium?"

But that opens up other questions: do interactive media have a fundamentally, empirically different kind of narrative than other media? Is interactive storytelling something unique that we arguably haven't learned how to do well as yet? If we're not good at it yet, why aren't we good at it? The technology? The industry? The lack of good author tools? Espen Aarseth argues that interactive narrative is fundamentally different in other ways (he calls interactivity  "ergodic narrative") and that you need really different critical and intellectual tools for understanding how it works, when it works--in his case I think he would say that you're focusing on the wrong thing if you worry about how derivative the content is, because he would argue that the structure of how you consume an ergodic narrative is way more important than its content. (Most infamous case of this argument: that the only thing that mattered about Tomb Raider was the structure of the gameplay, not the fact that Lara Croft had big tits.)

Here's another angle of it that involves MMOGs in particular: are there "emergent narratives" in MMOGs? E.g., stories that form naturally or accidentally over time out of the action of gameplay? If so, what makes for a good "emergent narrative"? Is that the same thing as "immersion"? Is there any way to describe an emergent narrative, or do you have to experience it directly yourself?

What stories might be adapted into games that haven't been, that are suited to the form of games? Are there stories in games that compare favorably with stories from other media, and what are they? What would a story that developed "natively" out of games look like, if it wasn't derived from something like Lord of the Rings, etc.  How in practical, working terms do developers adapt stories from other sources, e.g., what creative choices did the designers of LoTRO actually make, and how can you "read" those in the environment of the game? Can we talk meaningfully about what makes for a good or bad choice in that kind of adaptation?

[trias_e]

Well, that's a good reply.  I can't argue with you too much and thinking about interactive narrative is fascinating.  However....

Is LOTRO (just as an example) even interactive narrative at all?  I'm having a hard time agreeing with this.  It seems to me that a MMORPG is no more interactive narrative than reading a book is interactive narrative because you had to go to the store to buy the book and you must flip the pages in some order.  The amount of 'interactivity' is superficial and irrelevent.

The only way to solve this is if we want to include gameplay itself as narrative, as perhaps some wish to do.  It seems to me we're just slapping labels on things that go far beyond their original meaning. 

If gameplay is narrative, then any interaction with human created systems are likely narrative as well.

Is the internet itself a sort of emergent narrative?

How about 'real life', or history?

As far as your first question, that's obviously a tough one to answer without derailing the thread incredibly.  Unlike, say, what makes good music, it's probably answerable almost purely in language, but the underlying wordless understanding is there.  (fuck you sapir-whorf).  Anyways, I'd say the classics vary in the basics in why they are valuable, but in the end are all very similar.  Some are likely more historic and a connection to a different time.  Some perhaps teach rhetoric or technical prowess.  But in the end, literature can be philosophy as art, history as art, and these inspire both connection to a higher spirit than simply that of our own zeitgeist (incredibly poorly worded here by myself), and the knowledge and growth of the human soul, speaking in Platonic terms.  Knowing what we are is the greatest thing we can do, and the classics teach us this.  Then we can know what's best for us in life.  Thanks Plato.

[Khaldun]

The point about LoTRO is well-taken, and in fact, that's a whole subset of academic argument about interactive media.  Quite a few of the scholars with an interest in the subject don't think that virtual worlds are actually a good example of the form at all. That includes the formalist critics like Aarseth and Juul, but even some of the people who are interested in "emergent narrative" within interactive media think virtual worlds are something else. It's why a lot of the interest in virtual worlds among scholars is actually among social scientists rather than humanities people.

I also think you're right that focusing this on gameplay is possibly too narrow. When I did a senior workshop for some humanities students here focused on new media and interactive media, I only did one week on games, and related them to social-networking sites, email, web pages, asynchronous forums, synchronous chat, etcetera.

Your answers to the first question are fine ones--the point is that it's not a simple given that the subject of English literature should be high art or the "classics", and even when it is, it's not always clear what makes something a classic. But I'm often fine with the idea that studies of popular culture or new cultural forms, etc., should belong under some other banner or heading. However, a lot of English departments have evolved towards including that kind of study--and *somebody* should be studying that material, and teaching it. "Nothing human is foreign to me": anything that lots of people do is by definition interesting and valid as a subject of study.

[Lantyssa]

The only interactive narrative in MMOs I can think of would be RP groups which create an improvisational story.  Otherwise it's just a new, and cumbersome, mechanic to make you turn the page the way things work right now.

[DraconianOne]

Totally, totally off topic but I'd just like to applaud these last few posts for being intelligent and constructive and I will deplore the day when the hoi polloi come in here and start their usual sweary abuse.

I'd also like to add to a couple of points but don't have time right at this minute which is a shame.

Keep it up.

[Morat20]

The point about LoTRO is well-taken, and in fact, that's a whole subset of academic argument about interactive media.  Quite a few of the scholars with an interest in the subject don't think that virtual worlds are actually a good example of the form at all. That includes the formalist critics like Aarseth and Juul, but even some of the people who are interested in "emergent narrative" within interactive media think virtual worlds are something else. It's why a lot of the interest in virtual worlds among scholars is actually among social scientists rather than humanities people.

I suspect the guy teaching the class shared that opinion -- looked like LoTR was chosen because they had the story in multiple forms (film, book, game) and thus you could do straight-up analysis. The other pairings looked to be Snow Crash and "Strange Days", and Elizabeth and The Faerie Queene -- not quite as on point.

They also did Neverwinter Nights 2 -- wouldn't have been my choice for narrative in a single person game. I'd have chosen Baldur's Gate. Or Planescape: Torment. Or Knights of the Old Republic 2 -- despite the ending -- and had them focus on the way much of the backstory was told through dialogue choices, rather than clunky exposition. It's was a very clever technique, one that uses the medium's strength (giving someone control over the dialogue) to fufill another goal entirely.

Your answers to the first question are fine ones--the point is that it's not a simple given that the subject of English literature should be high art or the "classics", and even when it is, it's not always clear what makes something a classic.

To hammer that point home, you might mention what contemporary opinion was of SEVERAL beloved classics. Quite a number of them were dismissed by their contemporary critics.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I think he chose LoTRO for exactly that reason--the course is based on tracing what happens to narratives when they transit from one media form to the next. (Rather like my colleague's course on Beowulf across many media and across time.)    It's an especially potent example for gaming just because you can really trace different histories of adaptation--you could look at how LoTRO enters digital games through its incorporation into pen-and-paper RPGs in the 1970s which then influenced MUD design; you could look at how LoTRO enters digital games through visualizations of various character archetypes in early graphical games (elves, dwarves, wizards); and then you could look at a really recent game that is directly inspired by either the books or the Jackson films. (I'd personally finish that up by showing the class Icecrown in World of Warcraft, where the visual influence of the Jackson films is so overwhelming.) It's a really good choice given the goals of the course.

I agree for single person I'd choose something else than NWN2, but I think the NWN2 choice was probably predicated on the fact that the students could potentially create narrative using NWN2, which they can't with many of the other choices. You could maybe choose another game that comes with modding or authoring tools but that has some distinctive narrative choices in the predesigned game.

[Endie]

Morat pretty much summed up why everyone doing a cliched, tabloid knee-jerk reaction to this course is being dumb.

All I would add is that the shock should be if English departments were not at the forefront of those interested in imaginary worlds involving massive participation by broad swathes of society who interact with others in the creation of fiction on a public stage, largely through extemporised performances.  Add in that this is sometimes in the spoken medium but more often in one that is almost purely textual and you have something that is more challenging and relevant to many that yet more bloody Dickens.

And complaining that the students muight be doing this before reading every last item of the canon is facile.  No, I am not a cultural relativist.  Yes, I believe that Chekhov is more important (no scare quotes) than the ramblings of xX_K1llahPunk_Xx.  But this area is being used to allow the same sort of questions to be asked, perhaps in a more jarring or thought-provoking way than would otherwise be likely to occur.