The Gamification of Literature

A few news items have popped up this week about Simon Meek and his company’s plans to release adaptations of literary works for game consoles — a version of the spy novel The Thirty Nine Steps is currently in production, and Meek mentions Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment as future candidates.

Meek is quick to say that he’s not trying to make game versions of these stories; instead, he’s using gaming platforms and game-building technologies to create adaptations of the books:

“Players enter the stories through the events that take place in that story, and at that point experience the story from the inside out,” he explains. “We place them in the world in which the story is set, and are using a combination of original art and games engine to create some truly stunning environments. Add to that audio design and original composition, and the world of the book is brought to life. On this stage, we then let the player progress through an array of media that is directly taken/reinterpreted from the book.” [Source]

These may not be “games,” but he still refers to the audience as “players” and elsewhere emphasizes the interactive nature of this new “experience” of the book. They may not be games in the sense of having a set of rules and victory conditions, but they are clearly being modeled on virtual worlds and the principles of game-based narrative (that is, variable or conditional navigation through a set of planned environments/encounters).

Now, I don’t have a problem with this idea on its face. It’s just one form of adaptation of out many. It will reveal its own artistic strengths and make its own artistic sacrifices as theatric, cinematic, graphic, and all other forms of adaptation do. I have some concerns about the concept that I’ll mention, though, with the understanding that I want to remain open-minded about how successful the actual execution might be. My main concern lies with the idea of experiencing the story “from the inside out.” First of all, is that actually any different from how we experience narratives in printed text? Do we feel alienated from the narration? Do we feel “outside” of the book because it’s just words on a page? If we’re hypothetical members of the generation that doesn’t read for pleasure, maybe text is alienating and foreign, and the idea of reconstructing a world in your imagination as you’re reading is burdensome and undesireable. But I still cling to the hope that such an experience of reading is hypothetical (and if this is a genuine cultural crisis — our kids don’t have the imaginative skills to make reading “work” — then I doubt that adaptations like this would do anything to solve that problem; if anything, they would seem to provide yet another form of “prosthetic” imagination, if you will, that frees you from the necessity of visualizing the story-world and its characters yourself).

In fact, this “immersive” experience of the book as 3d-rendered graphical world is actually more likely to put you at one remove from the characters, compared to what you would get from the text. In the text, point of view can collapse so that you share and inhabit the points of view of the characters (and not always just one at a time, but often in sophisticated and complex layerings). I can’t envision how this game-style version of the narrative can provide many point of view options besides a free-floating camera, that maybe becomes first-person occasionally (I don’t get the feeling from Meek’s descriptions that you would actually play as characters, but maybe you will). To my mind, this management of “the camera” (or however you control the point of view) adds an additional layer of mediation to the story — it puts you at an added remove from what would be “narration” in the text. It emphasizes the way in which you are outside of the text, the way in which you are a spectator, rather than drawing you inside in the way that narration can.

Another issue with this is that if control of point of view is suddenly ceded to the reader/player, that removes a major aspect of the artistic craft of the original. Film adaptation is already more limited in the kinds of points of view it can present, but it has its conventions and artistry in managing point of view. But if the idea is that I can observe the scene from any angle, if I can choose to look at whatever I want to look at, then a fundamental change has occurred in the nature of the art I’m looking at. It ceases to be the experience of precise selections and composition by the artist and becomes something like an architectural exercise. It ceases to be Hitchcock framing the looming Bates house in a low-angle shot (looming only because of that choice of angle) and becomes you the tourist with a camcorder wandering around the Universal Studios backlot. [If I were more familiar with The Thirty Nine Steps, I'd use a more appropriate example from it, but I'm not, so I won't.]

One could counter-argue that this freedom allows the reader/player to become an artist themselves, to create their own cinematography for their individualized adaptation. And sure, maybe that’s true. There are musicians that have made all the individual tracks make up a single recording available for fans to make their own remixes from, and there’s certainly value in that kind of creative experience. But it would be a mistake to overlook or understate the value that’s lost, as well. Perhaps the positive side is that people playing with “directing” their own version of the book through one of these game interfaces might develop a greater appreciation of the very challenging arts of cinematography and film editing, when they see how far short their own initial efforts fall. But I’m not convinced that this experience necessarily does much for furthering appreciation of point of view in the text, which is really a very different kind of technical challenge (despite the fact that so many creative writing texts lean on the cinematic metaphor as a crutch to describe point of view — to the ultimate disservice of their students, I suspect).

And that brings me to my last point, which is the naivete that I think is present in the assumption that books need “saving” through digital enhancement. I’m curious and intrigued by the idea of these virtual world adaptations, and I do think there’s something compelling (if not necessarily revolutionary) about the idea of transforming stories into these kinds of architectural constructs that can be navigated at will. But there’s a revolutionary streak the rhetoric here (the article I’ve been quoting from, for example, is ridiculously entitled “The Reinvention of Literature”), that seems totally unearned. Meek really rubs me the wrong way when we’re told:

Meek says he doesn’t like that electronic books still have people reading printed words on white pages that need to be turned. “Which doesn’t make any sense in a digital world,” he tells me. These electronic books are still too rooted in the form that gave them birth, the physical side of the media, he believes.

To me this sounds a bit like music industry people in the early days of MTV suggesting that music videos are the future of music consumption: why would you want just boring old music when you can have music and images? (I’m not sure if anyone actually argued this, but if they did the analogy would hold.) We’re already seeing a trend for e-books to be “appified” for the iPad generation, filled with links and embedded video and background sound effects or music that plays while you read specific scenes. And I’m not opposed to such aesthetic experiments, but I don’t think they’re the next step (much less a necessary one) in the evolution in literature. After all, if we really felt that text alone was insufficient, almost all our books would be done in the style of Illustrated Classics or graphic novels. Most audiobooks would be dramatizations performed by casts of actors rather than single narrating voices. But it has not been so. Meek may be bringing something interesting to the world of digital, game-like entertainments, but I don’t think he’s revolutionizing literature by any stretch of our apparently stunted imaginations.

P.S.: Anyone interested in a game that is literally about navigating a literary text should check out “Silent Conversation,” a lovely, atmospheric browser-based game by Gregory Weir. I think Weir achieves something far more aesthetically compelling with his particular approach to digital adaptation than it sounds like Meek will manage, even if does just boil down to an advanced version of concrete poetry.

[Hint for "Silent Conversation": if you just want a quick experience of what the game is like, I recommend that you do the brief tutorial (which you must do to unlock the first set of other texts), and then do William Carlos Williams' "XXII" and Matsuo Bashou's "There is an old pond..."  so that you can then unlock and play through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The prose texts are quite interesting in their own way, but they're pretty long and best tried after doing a sampler of the poetry.]

Also, for laughs, literary gamers might also enjoy the retro parody The Great Gatsby for NES or Moby Dick: The Video Game.

Patrick Lane is The Missouri Review’s web editor.

What's in a draft?

Photo by Pavel Tcholakov

A recent post on GalleyCat caught my eye: “Should You Keep an Error Log?” The issue is raised in regards primarily to nonfiction writers who might be able to protect themselves legally if they keep a consistent record of changes that they’ve made to their memoirs or their reporting, etc. Obviously, there are particular professional concerns in that context, but the idea of tracking changes more generally is an interesting one. Working with academic writing students, I’ve found using Microsoft Word’s “track changes” feature very handy — it’s great for editorial feedback, especially when you’re working with discrete draft submissions. Having a touch of the old “archive fever” (so to speak), I’m very interested in trying to keep track of my own previous drafts of things. I like the kind of time travel that affords. But I haven’t been able to make the “track changes” feature very useful in my own creative work.

Part of the problem is that I don’t really work in drafts — as I suspect fairly few of us do in a post-manuscript, post-typewriter age. I’m constantly tweaking and reordering, cutting, pasting, and replacing. For a while I made a deliberate choice to write out first drafts of things longhand on disposable notepads (an attempt to break down the fetishization of the notebook or blank book), which did give me some insight in to the merits of a strict first-draft, second-draft, third-draft compositional method, which amount to a kind of discipline. But these days, while I still do some longhand drafting, I’m more likely to be facing the blank screen. And so I find myself rewriting the same sentence four times before moving on to the next one, and rewriting it again after several paragraphs have been added, and then moving it to a completely new location at some point after that. If I try to look at the tracked changes of such a process, I basically see five stories’ worth of red ink in a mostly incomprehensible mess.

I’ve investigated Google Docs as a word processing platform, and although most of its features are too lackluster to convert me from Word (for serious writing projects — it’s great for collaborative notetaking and such), I do like its Wikipedia-style, “see how this document looked at any point on the drafting timeline” version history. My compromise solution, though I haven’t found it very satisfactory — is to simply save a new, date-stamped version of any piece I’m working whenever some significant period of time has lapsed. It’s rather arbitrary and incomplete, but it gives me some record of the text’s evolution without creating bloated files or comically overblown metadata.

But I’m curious if anyone does use Word’s “track changes” or Google’s “version history” or other such automated archival/versioning tools. Do we still write in discrete drafts? Should we be, or should we be encouraging our students to do so (at least as an experiment)? Do you keep a morgue of your old drafts or do you cremate the old corpses? It is valuable to keep the compositional past around and accessible, or is there risk in hanging on to dead weight?

Addendum:

Cory Doctorow, one of the pioneers of digital Creative Commons publishing, was partly behind the creation of a Linux application called flashbake (which unfortunately isn’t very user friendly, unless you’re a user who’s happy working via the command line) which also controls and tracks file versions. But in addition to recording the changes in your file (such as changing words in text file), it can also record what the weather was at that moment, what music was playing on iTunes when you writing that section, and what you were posting on Twitter at the time, among other things. I find that kind of tracking both fascinating and terrifying. It appeals to my information-hoarder nature, but that’s an obsession I don’t necessarily want to feed…

Patrick Lane is The Missouri Review’s web editor.

Literary Publishing and the Gender Gap

Photo by Anton Bielousov

A report called “The Count: 2010″ from the organization VIDA has recently been generating some buzz in the literary blogosphere. VIDA has counted up the number of female and male writers published in 14 periodicals; they also worked out the ratio of male to female book reviewers and male to female authors of reviewed books.

Since VIDA’s mission statement is “to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities,” the emphasis on reviewing makes sense, as does the choice of some of the publications: The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, etc. They also cover Harper’s, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker. Actual literary journals aren’t particularly well represented: Granta, Poetry, Tin House, the Paris Review, The Threepenney Review, and Boston Review being the only data sources that I would put in that category (and I would suspect that a broader survey of university-sponsored reviews and small independents might well show a more equitable gender representation).

At any rate, the numbers VIDA has found certainly don’t look very good (for newsprint and the glossies in particular), with male writers outnumbering females in many cases by between 2:1 or 3:1 (women outnumber men in only 2 of the 40 cases presented). VIDA’s tagline for their post is “Numbers don’t lie,” and they seem to assume that what this data means is self-evident, since they provide virtually no analysis of their own.

Commenters on the report have already made some very compelling critiques of VIDA’s data, pointing out that A) this is still a relatively small sample set (unless the question is limited,perhaps, to book reviewing on the national stage), and that B) it’s hard to know what these numbers mean without knowing the ratios in the submission pool. That is, many in comments have already jumped to the conclusion that editors must be biased: but is that really the “truth” these numbers aren’t lying about?

I certainly wouldn’t deny that there most likely is a significant gender gap in publishing (though I wouldn’t take this particular report as proof of that — though it does help justify the hypothesis), and such a gap is a problem (though is it a problem of bias, education, opportunities, or even genre definition?) that we should be investigating. But it’s important also to recognize where the data is problematic before launching into action campaigns or making accusations against editorial staff.

So in the interest of expanding the data set, here’s what I found crunching the numbers on the Missouri Review‘s most recent volume year (33).

Fiction (Male): 7

Fiction (Female): 10

Poetry (Male): 5

Poetry (Female): 7

Essay (Male): 8

Essay (Female): 3

Contributors Total (Male): 20

Contributors Total (Female): 20

So we actually hit (without any deliberate editorial policy) a perfect 50/50 gender split. Our essay ratio for this year is not as balanced, and that’s interesting, though I don’t know that one year’s data is enough to draw conclusions about. We haven’t collected statistics on our submitters to compare out publications rates against, either.

I’m not sure that our book review data is particularly applicable to the broader question, since our omnibus reviews aren’t restricted to current releases and are also highly reflective of the tastes and interests of each individual reviewer. However, here’s the data for Vol. 33

Reviewers (Male): 3

Reviewers (Female): 1

Writers Reviewed (Male): 13

Writers Reviewed (Female): 6

Interestingly, of our last two omnibus reviews, a male reviewer reviewed all male writers and a female reviewer reviewed all female writers. In raw data, we do seem to follow the national trend in book reviewing (at least over a single year), but again I would like to think the actual explanation is more complex than “we prefer to review male writers” — the particular topics reviewed have their own embedded ratios, for example, that shape the probabilities of what might be selected for review.

However, it is food for thought. A question for our readers and submitters: should literary editors read submissions blindly and choose solely on merit, or should editors actively seek equitable gender distribution in their publishing? Or is that — as I suspect — a false binary?

Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good Literary Blog?

A couple of days ago on this blog, Rob Foreman posted an interesting meditation on how literary magazines use blogs and micro-publishing platforms like Twitter and Facebook. His discussion got me thinking about two specific issues raised by this development.

The first is the ever bothersome question of quality. I am not of the camp that holds that there is something inherent to the blog medium (or the e-book medium or wiki medium, etc., etc.) that reduces quality. As I’ve argued before, the technology has no necessary effect on the quality of the writing (at least not in this case), but the market and consumer culture created or facilitated by applications of that technology can have a pronounced effect — i.e., online writing doesn’t have to cater to short attention spans, but it often does because that’s a quality amenable to most of the current online reading audience, based on how they prefer to use the technology.

But what does this have to do with literary magazines in particular? Literary magazines, especially those whose origins lie in print, have a particular fixation on quality. Indeed, “quality” is often mentioned in the journal’s mission statement (as it is in ours: “Discovering the best in fiction, essays and poetry”). I’ve heard much fretting (here and elsewhere) over the idea of publishing some pieces only online, with the fear that the online-only pieces might be perceived as inferior, as being those which didn’t “make the cut” for the definitive print issue. Most magazines have a vested interest (ideological, institutional, and, indeed, commercial) in maintaining the association of their brand with the idea of “quality.”

But then, in the life of every magazine editor, comes the moment when they are told “And now you should have daily blog content of some kind.” And very quickly, as the pressures of meeting such a content production demand mount up, the staff begins to ask itself, “Do our blog posts need to meet the same standards of quality that we hold for our conventionally published material?”

As Rob points out in his post, the “blog post” has been developing as a genre unto itself, a nonfiction (usually) form distinct from either conventional journalism or “the essay” [but see Addendum below]. And as a form that’s still rapidly evolving its conventions, it’s very difficult to even decide what constitutes a “quality” blog post. What is the standard for success or excellence? Is it the amount of discussion it generates (in which case, polemical or controversial posts have the edge)? Is it the depth of analysis it brings (in which case longer and detailed posts are better, despite the conventional “short attention span” wisdom)? Is it the degree of engagement it creates with its community (in which case posts asking readers questions or reaching out for reader feedback are privileged)?

The answer, of course, is that it can be any of these things. Which is liberating, of course, but that freedom can also breed uncertainty. A blog maybe seems like a simple enough thing on the surface, but this fluidity and multiplicity of function and rhetorical purpose can suddenly become an almost paralyzing lack of structure for people who take writing (and their journal’s public image and voice) very seriously.

Of course, there are enough lively magazine-hosted blogs out there to prove that such paralysis can be overcome. But I do think that many a magazine staff still struggles a bit to conceptualize what their blog writing is for (and I’ve certainly read plenty of blogs that seem to exist just because someone somewhere said “You should have a blog” without any deep consideration of why and for what purpose). Indeed, because many blog posts are still so reminiscent of “the essay,” I think it can be harder to draw a distinction between what a blog post does versus what an essay in the magazine would do, leading right back to the crisis of “is this piece good enough for us to ‘publish’?”

In some ways, then, micro-publishing is less of a challenge to magazines, because there’s little danger of anyone confusing a Tweet or status update with a conventional essay. But, as with blogs, I think it can be somewhat difficult for magazine staff to shift their conceptual gears from the traditional purpose of “publishing” to the more interaction-oriented needs of the social media marketscape.

I’m sure we’ll all get the hang of it in time; I’m not pessimistic about this. I just find it fascinating that journals who have been so accustomed to publishing and promoting short-form work can face more difficulty in adopting these new forms of publication than some other fields.

Oh, and I promised discussion of a second issue. This one I will only gesture to in passing, and that’s the issue of compensation. I don’t think there’s a crisis here yet, and many magazines do arrange special compensation for blog post contributors. But I do think we should keep an eye on how practices develop in this regard. As Rob mentions, it’s becoming an assumption now that staff members will contribute to a magazine’s blog and participate in discussions that happen there and on Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes, this new job responsibility is added to all the other responsibilities without necessarily increasing staff compensation.

For people who hold staff positions, this kind of “mission creep” may just come with the territory — it’s probably not a major problem. But I think there should be some concern about using students and interns as cheap or immediate sources of online content. There is a potential for exploitation there that we should simply be aware of. Again, I haven’t seen this as a significant problem yet in the real world, but I think that it’s a concern that should be on the industry’s radar.

Addendum on the term “blog”: I’d just like to note that I’ve used the term “blog post” here somewhat against my own preferred practice. Normally, I’d try to distinguish the medium from the message. That is, anything posted on a blog is a “blog post.” That could, in fact, be an essay or a poem or a piece of hard journalism, etc. In purist’s terms, a “blog” is a publishing technology, not a genre of writing. That said, Rob is certainly right that there is a genre developing which we have generally given the label “blog.” I think this is problematic (I’ve had arguments with people about claims like “Blogs aren’t ‘real’ journalism” — “real” journalism can certainly be published via a blog as much as it can be published on newsprint or via broadcast; but the person using “blogs” in this context isn’t talking about a technology, they’re talking about a genre, albeit an ill-defined one), but the genre does need to be acknowledged in some way. And hence I have followed Rob in contrasting “blogs” with “essays,” though I would like to attach this caveat to that.

T he Missouri Review

Discovering the best in fiction, essays, and poetry