Seven Lions

You’d imagine that, at some point, when all things approach infinity, we’ll be able to link Utah Phillips with Zork.  The former, a storyteller and a wobbly, seems at least categorically dissimilar enough from the latter, the ur-Interactive Fiction, to avoid easy, triples-formatted, linking.*  But I’ve stumbled on evidence to the contrary, in my constant attempts to keep up with the development of what the French refer to as le jeu incroyable: Dwarf Fortress.  I’m not sure if it can be explained, or merely described:

On one of the forum threads at DF is a game of interactive fiction being played between a host and his interlocutors.  Apparently the eighth installment of a series that, if I remember a-right, may have involved a surrealist examination of death and the afterlife.  If you don’t know what interactive fiction is, or the adventure games that came out of it, then there’s not much I can do for you.  You’re probably an actuary, or a lawyer, and you may have been the president of your frat*** which pretty much limited your early gaming time to Mario Bros and Zaxxon.  Interactive fiction was some of the earliest computer games, like Zork and Adventure.  Using text to describe a scene, the game allowed the user to type commands such as “tell Cyclops about Odysseus”, which were interpreted by primitive parsers with spotty results, and were just about the greatest things ever invented.  The medium still exists, with IF writers creating strange and ambitious projects like Bad Machine or adventure game writers failing with yet-another-failed remake of Space Quest.  But in the mainstream, it’s as dead as buggywhips, and been replaced by bazooka-ladled action games and incomprehensible JRPGs and various other historical flavors of ultra-violence, and Farmville.

All that’s old news, but what’s happening in this forum thread is something I’ve never seen before.****  Instead of coding the game, whether raw or with the various IF utilities available now, the story is being told by a single individual acting as both graphics and parser.  Rooms and items are drawn up in advance, posted on the thread, and then a mob of forum-ites argue about what the next step should be (invariably with some rather awful suggestions followed by chastising and community self-policing that labels the originators of such suggestions as trolls) and then the storyteller “parses the commands” (with a few silly results) and posts the new graphics that result from the “player” actions.  It’s the re-absorption of a method of digital storytelling back into a very analog and humane medium^ while maintaining the structure and memes of the original (bad suggestions can be disarmed by using the idea of the parser to respond “I don’t understand what you mean by X”).  The storyteller as parser is not so alien as one would think–the parsers of many IF games were known and expected to have a personality, often mocking you for your foolish ideas or for your mistakes (and, in many cases, the way that your foolish mistakes lead to your demise).  To see it come back and be adopted by an individual outside of the code and embraced by an audience is, well, a sign of something.

*Utah Phillips played Zork!  Utah Phillips is the same as Zork!  I wonder if exclamation points belong in triples and if they’re handled or if the nerds just see “bang” and don’t even understand that punctuation is useful for more than rogue-like games and procedural code.

**Procedurally developed agrarian landscapes!

***With one notable exception.  Hey Riley!  Did you hear that AGDI released a version of Quest for Glory II with updated graphics and a pizza elemental???

****Though it may be quite common in the wild, I’m not much of a forum-guy.

^If you’re going to call photoshop and forums “The Digital Humanities” then you might as well call it the Breathing Humanities or the Human-Operated Humanities.

Just finished watching Will Wright’s presentation for the Games for Learning Institute.  It’s cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will Wright, who’s actually considering the difference between “the social landscape and the material landscape” and has been doing so for years.  The talk itself focused on the concept of games and stories as schema, fostering understanding of our world through lessons and cause-effect chains.

Wright obviously has been engrossed in story for his entire career, and during the unplanned delay before the talk engaged with an audience and pointed out that games do not supplant the linear narratives of books, but rather modify and complement them.  This comes up at the end of the talk, where he discusses Fractal Entertainment– How modern “properties” or “worlds” are not a single piece of media, but rather multiple expressions (some cinematic, some interactive, some linear, some board game, some RPG).  This includes not only top-down licensed expressions but also crowd-driven epiphenomena such as machinima and graphic novels based on Sims gameplay.

Also interesting is the concept of emergence not only within a game but also around a game, where the activity that surrounds, say, Wii Bowling, is as important to the enjoyment and definition of the game as the hardware and software.  As Wright puts it, the absurd gesticulations one makes while trying to bowl with a plastic stick.  But emergence plays a role outside the story proper, and becomes part of the meta-story, where the story is dissected and used as lesson (Wright notes that Blade Runner is the inspiration for city planners for The Dystopian Future to Avoid) and also as Story deconstructed into components to create what the designer calls “possibility space”.  And once that space is created, story emerges from it, to start the dialectical chain all over again.

Of course, story is too narrow, and Wright deals with this by settling on describing movies and books as linear narratives, which is broad enough not only to cover romance novels but also monographs and encyclopedias.  The convergence presented by Wright is mirrored by the convergence of high end research, focusing on model building and schema pattern strategies.  And while these schemas and models are arbitrary, they allow, as Wright points out, the ability to map the patterns that emerge within possibility space.

So many years of so many toys has left the theorists of the world in flux.  That’s why we have so many would-be philosophers with no background in the matter and so many academics struggling to understand their place in  society cut loose from the linear narrative.  It’s good to see someone like Will Wright, who is knowledgeable and systematic in his understanding of how the digital world and the social world mesh and the new subtleties available as a result of that meshing.  And on top of all that, there’s a great story about the Soviet space program accidentally crash-landing in China.

“Dinner for wolves”

There’s such an insidious breakdown in the quality of a story after you write it down. It’s not even the writing, it’s that people read it and they just accept. Like they’re listening to old-time mystics, like these things happen because they were meant to happen, no matter how terrible the fight or touching the makeup. In reality, they’re so much more emotional. You lose that in writing because you can’t express to the reader the uncertainty. To them, we make up because it says, on page thirty-three, ‘They make up’.

But there are forms of storytelling that have been able to avoid that.

There was this old computer game, Zork. You run around solving puzzles and fighting, but you could mix something up, do the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it didn’t let you know. You keep playing, oblivious to the fact that you can’t win.

It’s simple, really. You run around collecting treasure—platinum and jewels and… stuff. Well, one of the treasures is this Faberge egg, all covered with jewels and gilt. But the egg isn’t the treasure, it’s what’s inside: this little bird, made of gold. No matter what you do to open it, the bird always gets broken and ruined. Like in life, there’s no warning and, just like in life, there’s nothing you could do to fix it. Video games nowadays, they’re determinist, derivative or just plain porn. But those old games, they were like life.

Life, not random but not determinist, not like a book. Why does every linear work need conflict, suffering and pain, why can’t it just be a happy story about love? Because it follows a pattern, it has to: because linear narratives can only do so much.

In Zork, there’s this thief, he prowls around while you’re playing, and if you’ve got something valuable he takes it, that’s why when you find the treasure, you have to lock it up. If you let him have the egg, he’ll open it. Turns out you can get the egg back, later, and next to it is this beautiful clockwork canary.

But I don’t know if it sang, because I always broke it.

Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Unknown Troper?  Yeah, maybe.

Because while you’ve been desperately trying to keep up with the mind-shattering connectedness of Facebook and Twitter, an entire culture based on shows, books and, well, tropes you’ve probably never heard of has sprung up, organized itself and managed to co-opt the very classics you’ve neglected to read.  Didn’t realize the Epic of Gilgamesh has elements of a Zombie Apocalypse in it or that the Anenid has anything in common with The Blues Brothers?  That’s because you don’t get it.  Somehow, while we weren’t looking, the Internet soup finally managed to get that Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons and All Purpose Cat Girl Nuku Nuku really do make up a common culture with Daoism, Lando Calrissian, 西游记, Final Fantasy, hip hop, the Lolrus and, well, everything.

It’s all tied together with a common understanding of comic book superhero powers, video game mechanics and memetic mashups.  Even the academics recognize that there’s something that ties together all these strange, seemingly dissimilar cultural artifacts.  Don’t know what a critical existence failure is or the tripartite model of videogame space?  Would you be able to recognize a 30 Xanatos Pile-Up?  If you’re sure by now that I’m making this up, put yourself in my shoes, I have to live here.

Son of the Great River has been out for two months now and I’m happy to report the reviews have been solidly positive so far.  Book reviews get scattered all over the Internet, and it’s a rather maddening trap to start googling yourself and your book, so I’m sticking with what was posted either on GoodReads or Amazon.com.  Here’s a sample of what people are saying about it:

This is an enjoyable tale that reminds me of a quaint mixture of Pocahontas, White Fang and the Horseclans Saga. Plenty of primitive splendor comingled with an epic adventure rich in people and interesting places. I cracked open this novelette with an open mind and was pleasantly surprised. The story has some excellent illustrations to aid in the spinning of this yarn. In conclusion I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in some light reading.

(4/5 Stars)

Young adult novel set during the Bronze Age. Two teenage boys leave their homes, and find different adventures; both growing up along the way. There’s plenty of action, and a bit of romance thrown in as well. I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed it considering the YA genre isn’t usually my thing. Once I started it though I found it hard to put down and zipped through it in a few hours (it’s very short). I would recommend for fans of historical fiction, or readers of YA fiction.

(4/5 Stars)

Incredibly entertaining, and a very quick read. Action scenes are spectacular, historical detail spot-on, and characters interesting. This work is as pure an example of fairy-tale as there is; it teaches without being moralistic, is about juveniles but is never sophomoric. Because the four protagonists must deal with adult issues–how to “leave the nest” and become autonomous, how to negotiate corruption without losing purity, how, in short, to be both child and adult simultaneously–Son of the Great River is perfect for the young-adult who, by virtue of that transitional state, is struggling (without necessarily knowing it) to integrate multiple, oftentimes conflicting selves. Some of the characters succeed, some don’t. According to Meeks not all of us make it. But because of the familiarity of the characters, any modern young adult who reads will have no trouble recognizing him or her self in one of the protagonists, and so be able to relate. The illustrations by Hajra Meeks are subtle and beautifully sketched, providing template for young readers and their imaginations without imposing scenario or how characters are supposed to be seen. A fantastic, must-read book for all, most especially for boys who claim they hate reading.

(5/5 Stars)

Slow to start, and full of mystery but a nice and slow way to pass time, just like the mountains and the river.
Not for those who like conflict through and through.
But the ending (especially the last twenty pages) really came alive and every new page seemed to offer something different.

(3/5 Stars)

This last one was actually one of my favorites, even though it was the lowest rating numerically.  It’s one of the vicissitudes of grading that we begin to expect grade inflation, but a first time author should be happy to receive 3/5 stars by an impartial reviewer, and the meat of the review is quite positive.  Now, go out and buy a copy so I’ll have something to quote the next time I do this!

I got to put on my Author Hat and meet with a bunch of 4th, 5th and 6th-graders and discuss the process of writing, the story in Son of the Great River, and numerous other topics, not least of which was Edward Cullen and Stephanie Meyer.  When I was told that Son of the Great River was best suited for intermediate audiences, I blanched at the prospect, because I thought it meant the book was overly simplistic.  After visiting a class full of small, precocious people, and the brave souls who teach them, I realized that I couldn’t think of better company.  I think if we play our cards right, these kids might end up saving the world (Unlike their facebook and twitter-addled older siblings that I teach at university).

It’s remarkable how young people resemble and diverge from their cynical, gimmicky elders.  There’s such a sharpened idealism and awareness that you feel the weight of responsibility on you with every topic you address, so I took full advantage of it.  I spoke about my book, of course, but just like any audience, they didn’t just want to buy a book, but also an author, and I was happy to play that role, too.  I got to explain in gory detail how the editing process works (With pantomimed slaps and imaginary editors shaking their heads in disdain for my over-exuberant comma use) and why my earlier books weren’t published (“Because they weren’t any good.” a 5th-grader said under his breath, to which I smiled and pointed and exclaimed “Exactly!” and after that simple act, he watched me with rapt attention) but also how they’d be growing up in a completely different world of content delivery.  Now, I didn’t use those words, instead I talked about the Espresso Book Machine and amateur actors, directors and cartoonists using YouTube to build their audiences.  And they’re not just content creators but fans, critics and reviewers, like Grady Harp, whose voices can outweigh their local paper or television station.

It was amazingly fun, enlightening and, as if that wasn’t enough, I got to check my mail later and receive dozens of notes like these:

Dear Mr. Meeks, thank you for coming.  I thought your speech was really good.  You have inspired me to make my own story.  And I would be glad to read yours.

Sincerely, Nova

Dear Mr. Meeks,

Thank you for coming to our classroom. You inspired me to write a book of my own. I am not going to put pictures in it though. When I am done with it I am going to make copies of it and give it to my friends and family. When I go to my father’s house I am going to go online and go to your site. Tell your wife she draws very well. And I think it would be cool if she could come and talk about art.                                                                                                                                                                                    From, Gage

Dear Mr. Meeks,

My class and I loved hearing about your book you wrote and about publishing. It made makes me really want to write a book! We would all love to have your wife come and show us her art. I can’t wait to read your book!! Thank you for coming!

From, Lydia

Thanks for introducing your book!

Over the summer I hope to make a short film about your book. I would also like to draw some pictures to. I truly hope to read your book.

Elinor

Suffice to say, I’m bringing Hajra the next time, and I could care less if I ever sell another copy of Son of the Great River as long as I can have an effect like that.

I keep meaning to write something about poor Jared Diamond’s woes and the shadenfreude that the entire discipline of anthropology is currently feeling.  Other topics that should have already been thrown into the giant hopper but haven’t:

I’ve started racking up good reviews for Son of the Great River, including librarians and middle-schoolers.  I doubt I’ll be quitting my day job any time soon, but it’s nice to know that it wasn’t terrible.  Interestingly, when you speak to modern 4th-6th graders these days, it does restore a bit of your confidence in humanity.  If you think this blog is a rambling, off-topic bit of lunacy, you should see me linking deforestation to video games to YouTube to writing (And while you may not follow along with all the connections, I assure you they’re very brightly lit for 4th graders).  Web 3.0 is the 4th Grade and I’m glad to be a part of it.

I need to review books like I promised.  There’s a particularly rivetting review of Civic Agriculture that only exists in my head (And, as an environmental historian, I should be making some comment about Nature-Society interactions–can you believe I said nothing about the situation in Punjab??).  Confound the bonds of customary target audience hucksterism, I will review books at random times, especially when they have nothing to do with my PhD.

Art and Social Computing.  I want to join DeviantArt and show off my unit icons for Bughunter and my obscure flash games, but the wife won’t let me on account of it diluting her brand.

Then there’s all the review’s trickling in of Lih’s book on Wikipedia.  It sounds terribly superficial, I can’t wait…

But, really, I’m in the middle of trying to churn out dissertation- and conference-think, so the only bit of thoughtfulness I can give is a quote from someone else about digital map-based geographic locationally spatial media:

The rapid developments occurring at the intersection of geographic computing and web-based information technology cannot be identified with any single label, nor are they effectively described by any single body of academic literature. A variety of terms are in use for one or another aspect of this domain, including “web mapping”, “neogeography”, “social cartography”, “the geoweb”, “webGIS” and “volunteered geographic information”.

Now if you don’t mind, I need to call some 4th graders and find out about this Semantic Web thing.

I’ve been reading Ricoeur’s From Text to Action, and I think I’m starting to see the link now between the creation of media (either text or digital) and the creation of literature (here I’ll flatter myself and claim that Son of the Great River is literature) and the continuing tribulations of the publishing industry.  Ricour makes the point that writing, and here I’d assume also any other form of knowledge representation, such as animated explanations of the Creative Commons license, is structured work, and as such falls under the auspices of techne and praxis rather than poiesis.  As any aspiring author can tell you, convincing bookstores to carry your book has little to do with the quality of a book (Whether in its production or in its writing) and everything to do with your book as a product.  And it’s not just the chain bookstores.  Independent bookstore owners, what few of them remain, are just as likely to make their decision based on your distribution capacity without opening the cover as any Borders manager.

Part of this stems from the destruction of the old means of discovering, marketing and releasing books that results from the continued ability of the Internet to cut out the intermediaries, but a large portion comes from the unwillingness of the writer to acknowledge that they are creating a work.  When someone refers to a labor of love, the emphasis is on the love, not the labor.  As Ricouer points out, the creation of a work is an event, but it’s an event that begins “the temporal phenomenon of exhange, the establishment of a dialogue that can be started, continued or interrupted.”  There’s a certain sense of this, but it’s currently wrapped up in the rubric of marketing.  Writers create websites and post blogs and engage with their audience because it’s good business, but really it’s this dialogue that’s the poietic aspect of media creation.  This is why peer production like Wikipedia works.  It’s not that a bunch of writers get together to write about Slavery in Ancient Rome, it’s that one writer works on relaying knowledge of ancient Roman slavery and another writer sees this, is intrigued or bothered by the claims of the first, and adds to or amends it.  This is the dialectic, and it exists even with static works, because the reading and criticism of the work grows far beyond that work.  Ownership supports techne, but it damages poiesis, which is to say that it promotes the creation of a work through mechanisms to reward the worker (Be it money or acclaim) but it damages the establishment of a dialogue because the dialogue wants to be free.

There’s another exciting aspet to Ricouer’s claims that needs to be pointed out.  A work itself is not just the document, but also the means with which the document is presented to an audience.  Ricouer uses the example of ordering someone to give you a cup of water.  It’s not just the substance of the language, but the forcefulness of the demand.  In the same way, when I released my different animated mockups of an animated clearinghouse for verbs and processes, it wasn’t just the concept of the clearinghouse, but also the fact that one was frame-by-frame and linear, for which I felt I had to add notations in the Youtube video to explain as it ran, whereas the other was interactive and, due to the interactivity, I felt that the user would more readily understand the concept.  By the same vein, releasing Son of the Great River had elements beyond the storyline to signal to the audience the type of work.  The obvious aspects are its cover and illustrations, which indicate a direction toward a more idealistic audience, but also the method that it was released, print-on-demand, is part of the dialog.  Print-on-demand is still seen as a last resort of the desperate author, though this is starting to change, but if, like me, you’ve consciously chosen this over pursuing traditional publishing, then it becomes the “perlocutionary act” of Ricouer, where the statement I’m trying to make is one of hopefulness and in contention with the current publishing industry’s focus on selling widgets.  Regardless of whether you decide to buy my book, I think it’s time to recognize that some authors are making a statement with their distribution choices, and that it’s as much a part of their work as their writing or their art.  Hopefully, this claim can be taken at face value, and not as a marketing ploy.

Rheem would have self-published

I can finally announce that my new novel, Son of the Great River, is available on Amazon.  If you’d prefer it in eBook form, you can buy it direct from the publisher.  But wait, you say, this book is published through some whacko outfit called Booklocker and so it can’t be any good!  You’re not alone in worrying about the quality of print-on-demand books, but before you scoff and run away, let’s take a look at what you really mean when you think of print-on-demand or vanity press books.

You had to pay to have your book published!!

Yes, that’s true.  I plunked down the cost of a new iPhone 3G with 16GB of memory to put my book out.  I didn’t have to.  I could have taken it to a POD shop that actually pays you to publish their book or I could have published it through one of a host of small publishing houses that might do a run of 1500 or even 2500 books.  But then I give up the contract rights for my book, because both these avenues make their money not just off a major cut of the book but in selling the rights to a book to a larger publisher if it proves successful.  Why do that when I can sell my book through bn.com and Amazon to a wider audience than I would find in a bookstore industry that continues to suffer and decline?  I love bookstores, but then we all loved newspapers, too, and the Internet is putting the squeeze on both.  Part of my motivation to go POD has to do with my experience with the digital humanities, and the recognition that we now live in a society that allows an author to reach an audience by circumventing many of the traditional gatekeepers.

It’s POD, so it can’t be a quality book

It’s true that there are horrendously bad POD books out there, which traditionally published writers have noted with disturbing glee.  But anyone who looks closely at the binding and cover quality of books on the shelves today will tell you that bad Photoshop covers are no longer limited to inhabitants of Something Awful.  And it’s not just the reprinted classics on your Borders bookshelves.  I’d put Son of the Great River‘s cover and illustrations up against any of the intermediate fiction that’s out on a bookstore shelf today.

That’s not the kind of quality I meant!!

Yes, many POD publishers don’t seem to care if they’re putting out a book by an author that doesn’t understand gerunds and commas.  But Son of the Great river was professionally edited (Even though, like most first editions, I’m sure there’s typos).  Take a look at the free excerpt (PDF) if you don’t believe me.  Traditionally published authors have already begun to notice that there are quality POD books out there.  And, really, take a look at what passes for quality fiction being published by the largest publishers in the industry.  Look at the titles, look at the back covers, wade through the stilted prose.

But if it really is a good book, why didn’t you pursue a major publisher?

There’s the theoretical reason I’d hit on above, that really the new means of distribution allow authors to market and sell their books to a wide audience, and that is important.  But there’s also the love of writing.  I wanted to write a book and have people read it, I didn’t want to go through the dehumanizing process of harassing publishing houses and agents and all the gatekeepers just so I could claim to be part of a special club, which is how too many traditionally published authors feel.  It’s like the Screen Actors Guild, nowadays, with people who don’t actually make money doing what they do but at least they can point to some kind of external symbol of approval for their hopes and dreams.  After all, what’s a $25,000 dollar advance going to buy me, anyway?  A base model Ford Taurus, I suppose?  I just love to write, and I’ve been told that the book I wrote was pretty good and ultimately, if a few folks read it and it brings them some happiness and thoughtfulness, then that’s enough for me.