Escape from the self-imposed genre ghetto (Wish Fulfillment, Part 2)
In Michael Chabon’s essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story”, I find this thoughtful writer, who has been on my reading list for some time, brings into clearer focus some things I was talking about in Part 1.¹ He deftly separates the issues of marketing and creation, discusses the ghettoization of genre fiction, and the difference between actual rules and conventions.
Right off the bat, I am clearly the audience he is simultaneously writing to and satirizing—anyone who knows me will see how neatly skewered I am by his admonishment to those who disdain entertainment in literature:
Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from [entertainment’s] productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short remains junk, and too much junk is bad for you—bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
Touché, Chabon. But he is actually pushing to expand the definition of entertainment, just as I was suggesting we should endeavor to broaden the focus of our medium of games. He provides a list, which he says is partial, including:
[The] engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazon river boat, or in Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in Nabokov and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page of Proust (vol. 3); a duel to the death with broadswords on the ancient coast of Zingara; the outrageousness of whale slaughter or human slaughter in Melville or McCarthy; the outrageousness of Dr. Charles Bovary’s clubfoot-correcting device; the outrageousness of the outrage in a page of Philip Roth; words written in smoke across the sky of London on a day in June 1923; a momentary gain in one’s own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-hearted glee; the recounting of a portentous birth, a disastrous wedding, or a midnight deathwatch in the Neva.
Of course, based on the media integrity ethos I’ve discussed previously, the types of entertainment to be found in games would be different, but I’d argue they can and should be just as varied.
But Chabon also finds the conventions within genres of fiction are tightly restricted. He finds himself bored as a reader and bored as an author. Carefully codified, decades-old rules and formulae for the creation of works of genre fiction have left them tired and stagnant.
And this was where the essay began to resonate with my thoughts on examining our medium’s rules, seeing which ones actually serve us and our audiences, and looking at advancing the form in terms of the ways it can deliver meaning to an audience as well as the types of meaning that can be thus conveyed.
In Chabon’s rubric, rather than a rule, wish fulfillment can clearly be seen as the convention of a certain genre of games. The fact until quite recently a primarily male, young adult audience was thought of by many as essentially the audience for games makes it easy to unravel why rather than being understood as a convention it came to be held as such a sacred truth. And it remains true if you are trying to make a story-driven action game intended as a power-fantasy for members of this demographic, wish fulfillment is clearly worth consideration.
But it’s a “rule” only as much as any element set forth by How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way constitutes a rule for all two-dimensional art. I also think taken to its logical conclusion, the result—and one we can certainly see in games—is very limited types of characters, particularly protagonists, being created. To draw a parallel to yet another medium, this is what has led to the recently criticized lack of diversity in film.
As for games, I had to fight hard for the race and gender mix of playable characters in Diablo II: many players and team members said they did not want to play female characters or characters of color. My feeling was that presenting people with a variety of backgrounds and motivations was important to the creation of an expansive, rich, and well-rounded world, as was a sense of inclusiveness for players. In fact, this might be called wish fulfillment, just not in the commonly understood way of pandering to a homogeneous demographic.
In ChronoBlade, sadly, I lost this fight: Lucas was supposed to be Asian, Thera was supposed to be a tough Mycenaean warrior; none of this came to pass. We still wrote Thera as we had envisioned her, but there was some cognitive dissonance because of her stereotypical appearance. The characters were still decently varied, just not as much as I’d have liked. Certainly a large number of other factors were involved in the greater success of the former and the lesser of the latter, but I’d argue this is essentially the first choice the player was presented with in both games, and so of major importance to the player’s decision to engage with them or not.
Regarding Chabon’s feelings of the stifling of genres, another thing to note is there are two axes of “growth” in games, one being the content and the other being technology. I think it’s easy to see the technology progress and feel change is occurring, but this can also be a trap—using the analogy of literature, moving from a scribal copy of The Canterbury Tales to a Kindle edition changes only the delivery; the content is essentially similar.
Another element of stagnation Chabon finds in his own medium relates to the arbitrary and ossified definition of what is literature, and so worthy, versus genre fiction, and therefore junk. Basically, the powers that be—critics, academicians, etc.—decide what is lauded and what is trashed. The forces of marketing reinforce this, leading to what he calls the ghettoization of the bookstore, corresponding to what is labelled literature versus the bookshelf slums genre fiction is consigned to. Although I enjoy bookstores, I believe one benefit of online sales is these barriers will tend to break down over time.
This at least is a problem we don’t have to deal with in games. In brick-and-mortar game stores there has for some time been a shelf war that has denied some games a place, but with online sales, tech-savvy gameplayers generally have no problem finding whatever game they are looking for regardless of where or how it is made available. Players can also define the genres themselves on outlets such as Steam. There seems to be a general trend in this direction, which I think will continue, where creators and audiences engage more directly. Also, pointedly, Steam has a tag for Female Protagonist, suggesting players want to move away from the types of main characters gamemakers have focused on in the past, and this was just one easily identifiable element. Indeed, games are one of the more successful categories on crowdfunding venues such as Kickstarter, allowing players to directly influence what gets made, rather than just choosing from what’s available.
Another factor holding back ghettoization in games is the constant change keeping stagnation from taking hold. For example, looking back at early game titles on any given platform, there’s very little homogeneity, but later, “best practices” begin to emerge. However, things loosen up again when a new gaming device like the smartphone appears. Although there are occasional changes to film and literature, they are much more incremental (with a few exceptions), and so do less in terms of the freeing up of forms.
Therefore, it seems very much up to us as games creators to decide if we want to hew closely to the conventions of whichever genre we are working in, or instead to understand clearly what those rules are and choose to break them in order to transcend that genre. Hybrid games clearly do this and it’s a great luxury—if a novelist writes an SF/ mystery, marketing folks have to choose which bookstore ghetto to put it in, while for us this choice might affect marketability, but not much.
Finally, of his favorite authors, Chabon says they,
[…] derive their power and their entertainment value from a fruitful self-consciousness about the conventions of their chosen genre, a heightened awareness of its history, of the cycle of innovation, exhaustion, and replenishment. When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following to play.
Read previous articles in the Wish Fulfillment series
Notes
- Michael Chabon, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story”, collected in Maps and Legends, 2008.
Deru Kugi 