Indignant Desert Birds

From what I can tell, there are 3 forms of what I’ll call “narrative entertainments”– Books, TV/Movies (film), and Video games.* Each type of narrative makes a different type of shadow on Plato’s cave, attempting to capture a different aspect of reality.

Books are fantastic at creating rich worlds, and showing how people live and think while within them. Books by their nature take place within the mind of the reader. They are, in this sense, an almost pure form of imagination, unconstrained by a need to produce actual artifacts. Books, then, are great at showing the microcosm how an individual mind works, and also very good at simply stating the rules by which a society operates. And yet, the fact that they take place within a reader’s mind has it’s own inherent drawbacks– A poorly described commonplace item, can lead readers to have a wildly different idea of what’s going on than the author intended. This isn’t always the author’s fault– try this exercise:

Take the sentence “Tom sat atop the elephant”, and rework it for someone who has never seen or heard of an elephant. Make it interesting, concise, and fit the tone of the story. 10 different people will come away having drawn 10 different pictures.

The other end of this is film. Film cannot exist without showing the viewer “things”, “artifacts”, “pictures”, “etc”**. Its language is that of camera work and forced angles. Narrative “voice” is controlled not simply by the words used by actors, but also by how the camera responds to various actions. The biggest strength of film (other than it’s communal nature) is that it can take the great writer’s axiom literally: “show don’t say”.

What film doesn’t do very well is show us the interiority of a person’s experience. All actions must exist as shown, with none of the self-justifications and denial that real people experience regularly. Evil is nearly always presented as “other”, and morality is very often shallow.

Games are a very new art form, and are still seeking a universal expressive language***. For now, this certainly counts as a major weaknesses. The strengths of gaming lay in it’s ability to place a player in the middle of an experience, forcing them to make decisions. Granted: players are making decisions at a remove from how actual persons might do them. Still, players aren’t reading someone’s thoughts about balancing a budget, and they’re not seeing someone balance a budget, if they’re playing SimCity or Dawn of Discovery, they’re having to make the choice between guns and butter. Most of us don’t want to slaughter civilians in real life… but it can be interesting to explore the life of someone who has to make the choice of kill or be killed.

All of this is prelude to tomorrow’s post about the movie version of Nine. Stay tuned…

*I feel that I should say something here about audio entertainment. But Alas! I just don’t know it well enough to make intelligent comments. For our purposes, we can think of books and audio as being much the same, though I know there’s a lot of room to call BS on that..

**Yes, yes, I did that on purpose

***Speaking of not having a universal expressive language! English sucks: by all the rules of grammar, that should have been “an universal”, but it sounds funky.

Tags: books, games, media, movies and television // 4 Comments »