Gibson on Story
I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative since the Develop conference. William Gibson, in this interview, says something important about it:
That’s the problem with his game, he says. “If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world — particularly badly in Africa — they might have said, ‘Not bad. A little toasty. That’s kind of interesting.’
“But I’d say — ‘ But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and everything else we’ve been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic results.’ And they’d say, ‘You’ve already got this thing you call AIDS. Let’s not –’
“And I’d say, ‘ But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.’ Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security.”
(The whole interview is breathtaking).
Media such as novels and films are designed to give people chunks of story, one at a time, generally highly tuned up so as to flow into each other.
Firstly: Games are different, and the way they can tell stories is new. While the overall story may be linear, the way the player experiences the components of it can easily be non-linear and non-compulsory. Bioshock and Stalker seem to be the best recent examples.
Secondly: Stories are something we inherently whittle reality into. Before a narrative is ever some kind of packaged media experience, it is a cognitive process. Stories are abstract versions of events with most of the mundane and repetitive parts stripped out. They’re how we communicate efficiently and engagingly. When someone asks you what you did today, you tell them a story.
I suspect a lot of people who think about narrative don’t see this because fiction appears like an act of construction. Most of the stories we tell ourselves and each other are actually an act of filtration.
(Mini rant about the Washington Post website: annoying reg wall (praise be) that kicks in after two pages, even if the third page you visit is one you’ve already been to. After sign in, a full page ad saying “You will be redirected to the page you want shortly”, and when you finally get there, garish animated column ads that take up almost as much hspace as the content. WTF? It’s 2007, and they’ve made a website into something more annoying to use than a newspaper).