Urban Exploration

We have been watching Shameless, and the idea that being treated like shit by the residents of the urban areas that us top-knotted hipsters like to explore is by now a fairly well-understood trope. Craving authentic experiences suburbanites troll through the “shittiest bars on the South Side,” and we supposedly find them while insisting on creature comforts and treating the current inhabitants like inmates in a zoo.

The Detail offers a gamic (but mostly narrative) version of that experience, as the detectives – true to the genre from its inception – serve as our virtual guides. The landscape is hyperreal in its colors and depictions, the characters recognizable as stock at best, and we can follow one of three different experiences. They all lead to the same path.

The effectiveness of this guided tour via masquerade, however, is muted by the limitations of ourselves. The game limits us as well, offering a small number of possible responses, the consequences of which are not all that different. Clearly, the amount of immersion in this explorative experience is aided by the power of writing and acting in crime dramas like my clear favorite The Wire (and I also remember Homicide from back in the day), but in either case the amount of exploration possible is limited.

This exploration is one of a large set – colonial explorations discover savage natives, and wilderness explorations discover savage landscapes, and in essence crime fiction explorations do both. In a series like Shameless the goal is humanization, to make these Others not look like others, while in TD the accomplished effect is to make characters shallower (one arrestee has law books in his apartment, a detail that might be used to complicate his character, but the dialogue triggered by those law books simply notes what a pain in the ass he will be as a criminal who can figure out the legal system). These folks are different, as the game makes clear and that difference (and the chance to explore it risk-free) are hopefully worth the price of admission.

Does this sort of journey make texts like TD and Shameless yet another discovery voyage, a heroic journey to an altered, non-mundane land where us explorers can become heroes in our own minds (I apologize, Charles Dickens)? My hope, I think, is that instead we become more empathetic to those natives of these urban exploration zones, that the serialized nature of these texts enable us to connect to these characters by finding ourselves in similar situations.

The dumpy nature of the lead investigator helps as well, especially in contrast to hyper-masculinized comic book heroes. I was confused by his style of moving, as it seemed to be limited technically, but even so his slumped shoulders and way of moving his legs as if every step hurts lent to his humanity. As a tour guide he might rescue from a burning building, but I feel certain he’s seen some stuff.

Karen Lord – Redemption in Indigo

Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo features a protagonist, Paama, who goes toe-to-toe with Chance in order to retain the Chaos Stick. That she [SPOILER ALERT] willfully gives it back to him, and that both she and Chance learn something along the way is just one of the ways in which Lord’s novel messes with generic expectations. She ends up happily married to a younger man, after burying her first husband who ate himself to death.

• My synopsis does not do this novel justice. Paama is the antithesis of those sorts of supposedly genre-bending young female heroines that are featured in much current YA lit – she is married to a man she does not love but cannot hate, she is a great cook, she has no desire to learn how to wield the power she has been given, and she acts with compassion and empathy even when the results are not what she would like. 
• Lord’s narrator is lively, self-aware, and interested in engaging us in a conversation, even if it constantly defends itself from charges of defying what it feels our expectations will be. The narrator is far different than Paama, and often asks us not to judge her or other characters at surprising points in the novel – the one that struck me most was when Paama goes back to nurse Ansige, her first husband, as he dies from the consequences of over-eating. Ansige is set up as entirely unsympathetic, and yet Paama knows that her duty is to be with him until he passes. This is territory not often covered in this genre.
  • In that sense this novel comes directly from the land of folk tales, written with a postmodern sensibility and an eye towards redeeming our relationships with each other and with the forces in the world that causes things to happen that we do not understand. The narrative voice helps with this redemption with its energy and desire to always keep us looking outside the text.
• The natural forces in this novel are definitely not supernatural, and are also not aligned along a good-evil binary. Again, it is very unlike lots of YA fiction that’s out now, with barely-disguised good and evil aligned along metaphoric lines. I admire the effort that some of that fiction makes, but killing off characters does not necessarily make a novel complex, even when that plot-level action defies generic expectations.  What makes ASOIAF complex is not the fact that Ned Stark dies early on, but that GRRM (at least I though he was, before the teevee series) is looking at issues of planetary balance and the appearance of science in the Enlightement. Defying generic expectations does not necessarily equal complexity.
  • Part of the joy of Gaiman’s Sandman series was the ways in which entities simply operated in their own best interests, with complex understandings of how those interests meshed with those of other entities. Lord’s novel adds the idea of duty to that mix.
• This binary allows her to comment on humans and their needs through her narrator (which isn’t exactly human, but not exactly a djombi):
  

  Humans did not hold such power within themselves easily; they had a deep-seated need for symbols, talismans, and representations. (61)

• Her epilogue continues the feisty narrator theme. I cannot tell if she’s chastising academics or those who read for escape – I think it’s the latter, but I’m not completely sure. Representative of this trope from the many pieces of advice we get from the narrator is this one:
  

  For others a tale is a way of living vicariously, enjoying the adventures of others without having to go one step beyond their sphere of comfort. To them I say, what’s stopping you from getting on a ship and sailing halfway around the world? Tales are meant to be an inspiration, not a substitute. (157)

Emily Bitto – The Strays

Just finished Emily Bitto’s The Strays, which I guess is loosely based on an Australian artist’s collectives in the early twentieth century. The novel is narrated by a woman looking back on her time spent living at the collective as the friend of one of the daughters of the couple who own the property on which they all live. The name comes from the looseness of the parenting that the push to break paradigms and norms as an artist might drive people to.

Thoughts:

• That last sentence might lend one to think  that I read this novel as a condemnation of folks who intentionally try to rethink art and its place in and effect on our culture as parents. I don’t think the novel goes there necessarily, although their parenting skills are definitely not worthy of praise.
• The novel feels like more of a meditation on the costs of pushing any social envelope, and an examination of the consequences of artistic utopia (or its inevitable failing, perhaps)…
• And it is also absolutely feels like an extended meditation on motherhood…motherhood in many of its manifestations, and the difficulty of living up to social norms while also trying to create…
• First citation:
  

  …I wonder why I am compelled to collect and to examine the often painful traces of the past, like a madman counting over and over the same dozen objects in a wooden box; objects others would have long discarded. (174)

  I think I often do the opposite…but the image says alot about the narrator’s relationship with the world…

• Second citation:
  

  I am angry with myself. I failed to speak from that compartment in myself, as that persona who represents motherhood, the one who knows my daughter will always in some way look down on me; will not know my dark places and my desires, my ambivalences, even toward her; will think herself wiser, braver, more modern, her inner life more intriguing, her challenges more compelling. I have cherished the self who knows this and accepts it. It is without vanity, able to resist the urge to be understood. (178)

  This is one of the few places in the text where motherhood is directly spoken about by the narrator. She emphasizes the sort of foreknowledge and calm acceptance of the differences from her children that contribute to a self-idealization of being a mother that is nearly impossible to live up to.

• Third citation:
  

  (as she recalls talking to Helena and Eva about writing a memoir, and they tell her how their life has already been chronicled) What Helena says is true, I think to myself. The events of the Trenthams and their strays have long since been recorded in the pages of art history. And yet those books are about Evan and Jerome…always, as in the monographs devoted to Evan’s life and work, the artist himself was at the center, with Helena, Eva, Heloise at the distant peripheries. They were cast as ‘events’ that accounted for the prevalence of particular themes, detailed in the same manner as the influence of the war on Jerome. Heloise’s life a footnote explaining Jerome’s brilliant work. (204-5)

  Another trope throughout this novel is the writing of art histories – I particularly find the idea that people in an artist’s life become events that help art historians better understand the artist’s work. Yuck.

• Fourth citation (after reading a note from Helena to Maria:
  

  I remember that Helena longed for paradise, and was instead shut out.
  In many ways the circle was Helena’s project, not Evan’s. Her utopian vision;
  her attempt to make herself a family beyond the narrow lines of biology;her failure….she wanted to surround herself with people, to create a circle,
  to be adored and needed and never disliked by anyone…Helena craved siblings rather than dependent offspring, people with whom she could approach the wordless understanding, the secret codes and violent closeness shared by sisters. (213)One reading of Helena’s ‘longing’ for sisters rather than children can simply be that Helena did not have the tools to process all of this. This is not our narrator’s take, I think…

The Detail, Kentucky Route Zero, and Empathetic Responses

The problem, of course, with demarcating game texts as this or that is that that sort of characterization can lead to a fixation on some sort of Platonic ideal of what a pencil and ink game of any genre should look like. It assumes some type of prelapsarian utopia in which games capture the essential form of what they should be.

That’s difficult.

While I hope for some sort of gestaltian wholeness that can magically transform online experiences, point-and-click games perhaps offer a more realistic microcosm of our actual online experiences – garish colors, bold headlines, shaded scenes that we can effectively ignore. A game like TD might well mimic the reality of online experience more than I would like – snippets of news stories become definitive bits of information, the illusion of solving a crime offset by the actuality of being led by the nose through a series of already-spelled-out clues, other people who we imagine to be a specific way but who in reality are of course completely different, and so on.

In this sense, then, KRZ is a perfect online experience for a very specific set of the digerati – we are encouraged to start exploring the game’s depths immediately, and it turns out that the depths are worth exploring, with interesting people doing fascinating things that are not in and of themselves earth-shattering but are powerful reminders of the types of questions that digital culture asks of us.

The Detail fits a little less perfectly. The promised depths never materialize, perhaps because the game lost its funding, but it doesn’t go much beyond stereotypes – and in the places where it does the story feels forced. I’m wondering if there is a place for traditional hard-bitten story-telling of this type in point-and-click games, and I’m hoping to be proven wrong soon.

More to come on this, of course.

 

 

 

Representation and Mimesis

Working with Deadly Synchronicity made me think of Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, and the following passages came to mind, both from the first chapter of the book on The Odyssey. In particular, he comments on the ways that Homer handles the fact that it takes Odysseus three days to enact his revenge upon the suitors:

Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present,
which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which yet is measured: three days! (10)

And (comparing The Odyssey and the Old Testament story of Abraham):

N.K. Jemisin – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin takes up the dismantling of fantasy that Martin (and before him Delaney) and Esslemont and Erikson joyfully participate in, and the result was thought-provoking (and a great read). Thoughts:

• Jemisin incorporates different religious perspectives in this novel. Tolkien messed around with supernatural figures – Gandalf is a Maia or something like that if I remember correctly from the Silmarillion, and Sauron is a pretty direct corollary to Lucifer – but he followed Christian theology pretty closely. Martin has his characters invoke the gods all the time, but we never see their direct action. The MBOTF authors are brave enough to risk the idea of ascension for mortals, and they also pit gods against each other for reasons that appear almost petty. 
  • Jemisin comes at this from another perspective – what if mortals were able to chain gods and make them fulfill their wishes? Limits on godly powers certainly make for an interesting theology.
• Jemisin blends lots of religious traditions – I see traces of Greeks and Haitian (the god who rides in Yeine’s body like a loa) for a start – in a way that neatly allows this novel (and series) to think of world-building differently than we usually posit it in fantasy.
• Yeine is an interesting character, one who lives in her own head a lot. As a result, we get to live in her head too, and my guess is that Jemisin uses this limited perspective to question the foundations of world building in fantasy.
• More on this as I continue the series, of course…

Following Rules in Narratives

Reading this article from Game Studies forced me to think about rules, and the game that I have played recently that seemed most obsessed with rules from a narrative standpoint is The Detail. I won’t go into all the caveats I already discussed about the game sort of sucks (just recall that it wasn’t finished because the developers lost funding), but I hope that one piece of the narrative that definitely would have changed was the ending, which was rushed beyond belief.

Perhaps the biggest impact that The Wire as a series had on me was its willingness to show how everyone is compromised – the police and city government and those who are supposed to be righteous as well as those who are taking advantage of the demand around them in order to improve their own socio-economic standing. The feeling of injustice that happens at the end of the first season when one Barksdale is given a reduced sentence and the police and city council get their pictures in the paper with news of a huge drug bust that we as viewers know was compromised and much less than it could have been felt devastating, as did the union boss’s death at the end of the second season. There is no true justice is an important part of the message of the best of these types of detective fictions.

The Crime Board – know your rules

Rules happen within games, too, and part of the dismay I felt about watching The Detail run off the rails happened when the detectives stumble upon a torture scene. That attempt to make the criminals look less than human was too obvious, too clearly set within a rule set that says that bad guys must do really bad things. This sort of easy moralizing was something that The Wire intentionally avoided.