Now that I’ve challenged the heterosexuality of your pure, innocent gondoliers, let’s explore the gritty underbelly of the planet they gondolier upon. Not that the underbelly is really very gritty; normally it’s just pleasantly soft and susceptible to the application of stimuli, like that of a cat. It isn’t perfect, no, but it’d be boring if it was.
Why thank God for the apocalypse? Because it gives me something to write about that isn’t Aria. Not that I dislike writing about Aria, but it has a way of possessing me via dark, indefinable magics and forcing me to serve its needs. It’s an unforgiving master. And I haven’t even watched the second or third seasons yet.
On second thought, I suppose it’s inappropriate to muse on Aria in a post which is, to some degree, about Fallout 3. The Capital Wasteland is most assuredly no place for gondolas. Hell, it’s no place for human beings, and that’s part of what makes it such a compelling setting, at least for me. If, like me, you find a certain creepiness in isolation, in abandoned radio loops and vast, empty spaces, in “towns” populated by two or three or four people, Fallout 3 will do horrible things to your sanity. Horrible, awesome things. Which, coincidentally, brings us back to our good buddy Steve Gaynor. The three-way parallel he draws is simple:
Literature excels at exploring the internal (psychological, subjective) aspects of a character’s personal experiences and memories.
Film excels at conveying narrative via a precisely authored sequence of meaningful moments in time.
And video games excel at fostering the experience of being in a particular place via direct inhabitation of an autonomous agent.
Oversimplification this may be, but Gaynor raises an interesting question: how are we to account for the idea of setting in video games? As much as it’s “the place where they are,” as in, say, a novel, it can also become “the place where I am,” and few games have made that idea more evident to me than Fallout 3.
Before we get into Fallout 3 and setting specifically, though, I want to lay some groundwork — and by “some,” I mean a lot, and in the disorganized spirit of exploratory writing, so now would be a good time to pour yourself a glass of your favorite hard liquor.
There’s not much introduction to do. Anatomy of Criticism, being a book, continues. Here’s part one of my reading of the first essay, “Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes.” I’ve broken this up into two parts partly because I’m really tired and I’m not sure if I’m processing very well today, and partly because the essay is broken into sections on tragedy and comedy, making my tired-decision easier to make.
At least she has clothes in this one...
As you’re probably already aware, I’m blogging my way through Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. I already had an idea for an actual anime post, and I’ve only read the introduction. Even though this was inspired by Frye, I probably won’t reference him too much. Really, this is just my obligatory Kannagi post. Everyone’s doing one, and who am I to argue with the crowd? Well, I do it all the time, but never mind that now.
I will swiftly run out of images of girls reading, but for now...
Part one of my grand adventure was a little strange. After sleeping on it, I think it’s because I wussed out and posted before finishing the entire first section of the book. I left you, the reader, with a partial view, much as Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity through a police officer’s report on his act; he protested vigorously that, to be fairly tried, the judge and jury needed to see his act directly, but his appeals were denied. Frye, were he alive and Googling himself every few minutes, would likely protest in much the same way to my butchering of his “Polemical Introduction.” Here’s part two of the introduction, wherein I finish it, find more that’s useful, get the seeds (already) of an anime post based on same, and find Frye apologizing for much of what seems strange.
We’ve gotten increasingly critical here at Super Fanicom, which I think is no problem at all. Though I do want to do an actual, you know, anime post pretty soon, to help cleanse the pallet a bit. I’m afraid I can’t do that yet, though, and am even proposing starting a series of posts on theory. In defense of this little project of mine, I think these will be relatively short. Here’s the skinny: I’m finally getting around to reading the whole of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. I’ve read parts before now, but never the whole thing, or in anything approaching linear order. I thought as I read I would post along with thoughts for each section. This is the “Polemical Introduction,” pt. 1.
I have to admit, this one’s a little ridiculous, even for us. Ghostlightning, lelangir, Cuchlann, and I all somehow ended up in a chat a scant few hours ago. Initially, the topic was Kannagi, but, when matters of disparate theory arose, things got a little crazy. The title is apt; in fact, what you’ll see after the break is no less than 11,001 words of our discourse and debate. Is it worth reading? Absolutely.
It’s a good thing the concept of tl;dr doesn’t exist on Super Fanicom.
I woke up today thinking about the use of external aids in completing video games, and I wonder if we can fit that into our ongoing discourse about games, so allow me to throw a few random ideas at you.
My feelings toward player’s guides and the like are mixed. While I feel that they “ruin” the experience of a game’s central plot for me, I have no problem using them to find and obtain nonessential extras. The game I have in mind is Fallout 3; I completed the ten or so hours of my 60-hour file devoted to advancing the main plot without any external guidance, but I’ve made extensive use of The Vault in finding unique weapons and bobbleheads and such. Now, insofar as player agency results in the forward movement of the story, all 60 hours constitute the game’s plot, or at least the game experience’s plot; why do I approach one-sixth of that plot with a different attitude toward external aid than I do the remaining five-sixths? I don’t really know, but I doubt it’s indicative of some core difference between “main plot” and “side plot” in games.
Let me ask this: how might we best characterize external aid, anyway?
Is it a kind of criticism? After all, it details one possible playthrough of a game — ostensibly, one possible reading of a text. And I think that, like criticism, it’s certainly entertainment in itself. When I was younger, I used to read those Prima player’s guides for fun. I bought guides for games I didn’t own. I remember devoting hours to reading through The Mynock’s Guide to Final Fantasy III (back when FF6 was still called Final Fantasy III here…God I’m old) despite my near-encyclopedic knowledge of that game, and for no reason other than that I wanted to see how someone else experienced the game. It’s not that I felt I had something to gain, intellectually, from diverse readings, as I do now; I simply enjoyed it.
Can we say that my use of external aid to complete optional content in Fallout 3, the pausing and minimizing of the game and the perusal of websites throughout, helped define my gameplay? That it’s part of the human narrative of my playing, which the game narrative itself may well simply be a part of as well? I don’t hear such a thing often said of literature and the criticism thereof — that is, I’m not sure how many people would tell you that my reading experience of Ulysses continues to this very moment because I keep reading criticism of it and tying it into other narratives. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here; a more analogous situation would be reading Ulysses for the first time with a copy of Ulysses Annotated on hand. To what extent is Joyce (not Joyce the man, but Joyce the author-consciousness) responsible for that reading experience? To what extent are Don Gifford and Robert Seidman responsible? How much responsibility rests upon the sources they consulted when writing Ulysses Annotated? And can we answer these questions by way of addressing analogous questions in the largely unstudied realm of video games?
I’ve been seeing some meta-narrative stuff concerning blogging, anime, blah blah blah. As my father is currently watching a basketball game on our only tv — mine is in Memphis — I am stuck in my room, so here I am, doing some of this meta-criticism as well. Don’t expect anything amazing. My only real contribution, when I get around to it, is in bringing Stanley Fish to the party.
Depressingly accurate...
For anyone who missed the previous references, this past semester I took a course in the Gothic novel. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot of things about the beginnings of the fantasy genre — as the Gothic genre is typically viewed. I just happened to be taking in all of Pontifus’ attempts at video game theory as our final paper proposals were due, and I sent my professor two viable options: the alteration of mad scientists through time and what that reflects about their culture, and the Gothic in survival horror video games.