matthew flaming

Not too long ago I was in a bar with a friend, talking about if and how video games can function as art. Like most grandiose barroom conversations, we glossed over a few small details: for example, the whole question of What Is Art? And while maybe someday I’ll take a tilt at that windmill, right now I just don’t have the energy; my daughter has been sick, and it’s the end of a long week.

In sober retrospect though, that discussion has got me wondering about a more immediate and answerable issue: why video games don’t work as art for me. In particular, I’m thinking about the flavor of video game (I use the term broadly) that seems to aspire most specifically to the status of art, both through its relatively abstract structure and its appeal to the conventions of narrative: the text adventure, aka “interactive fiction.”

For those not familiar with the genre, this overview is from the website of Adam Cadre, among the most respected contemporary IF authors:

To most people who’ve heard of it, the entry for “interactive fiction” in their mental dictionaries goes something like this: “Interactive fiction, noun. A fancy name for text adventures, a type of computer game popular in the early 1980s despite having no graphics. Usually involved wandering around in caves solving complicated puzzles, and became completely obsolete around the time Reagan left office, as graphics became less crappy.”

The problem with this definition is that the medium of interactive fiction is no more a relic of the 1980s than the novel is a relic of the 17th century. If you’ve never encountered it before, it works like this: you start up the program and it prints out the first paragraph or two (or, um, nine) of a story. Then suddenly there’s an angle bracket and a blinking cursor: it’s your turn to type. For in interactive fiction (IF for short), you don’t just read the story — you get to shape it. Usually you’ll be typing instructions for one of the characters to follow — and unlike in a “choose your own adventure” story, you’re not just picking from a menu, but can type anything you can think of.

It seems to me that, in other words, “interactive fiction” aspires to an organic storytelling experience, which (at least partially) effaces the distinction between listener and teller. In practice though, the effect is often the exact opposite of a natural conversational flow — what I privately think of as synonym hell, trying to find the exact combination of words that the game expects:

Even aside from this essentially technical limitation though, I think there’s a deeper issue which gets in the way of my enjoyment of IF. Way back when, I went through a (very brief) phase of reading “choose your own adventure” books. (In particular, I remember one memorably titled You Are a Shark!) The problem with these books was not, as Adam Cadre suggests, the limited and/or stupid choices available to me as a reader at each juncture of the plot. Instead, it was the fact of having to make those choices at all.

For me, maybe the greatest pleasure and promise of reading is the opportunity to spend a few hours or days hanging out in someone else’s head: the chance to look at the world as it might seem to someone else, with different priorities, impulses, and insights. Reading great books is an opportunity to try on different modes of being. But in order for that magic to work, the characters in a story need to come alive. On an intuitive level, we need to be able to project our own selfhood into theirs.

So the issue with “interactive fiction” — like “choose your own adventure” — is that it deprives the characters in a story of their own personhood. How can I believe that a character is “real” if they can’t even make their own decisions — but instead rely on me to choose door X vs. door Y, stay and fight or run away? The net result is to hollow out the characters, making them nothing more than puppets. So rather than creating a bridge between myself and anther kind of living, “interactive fiction” winds up feeling to me like a kind of sad masquerade in which I remain myself, but less so — since the richness of real life is narrowed down to a constrained and essentially foreign set of choices imposed by the author, with no basis in my own selfhood or that of anyone else.

Over at The Millions, novelist Bill Morris has an interesting article on the declining quality of rejection letters in the publishing business, and how important the exceptions to this rule can be for aspiring writers.

Long ago, I wrote a number of heartfelt and extremely convoluted short stories. Crouched in the damp basement of the little rented house where I lived, I would send out little packets of query/story/SASE to the addresses listed in Writer’s Market like the message-bearing bottles of a shipwrecked castaway, hoping against hope that a few of my missives would find their way into the hands of a kindred spirit.

After dozens of curt rejections, I was at the brink of despair (not for the first or last time) when I received an unusually thick response envelope from a small literary journal. Inside, I discovered a typewritten (!) letter from the journal’s editor, David Castleman, who — he wrote — was himself a poet, lived alone in a shanty with his two cats, and labored in a lumberyard north of San Francisco to support himself. Mr. Castleman went on to offer his encouragement, and a brief friendly correspondence between us followed.

Although I lost touch with Mr. Castleman years ago, I still think back fondly on his letter. The sense of camaraderie in shared aspirations and struggle that his words provided helped me to continue the slow, arduous process of becoming a writer.

Portland is the DIY capitol of the west coast, and possibly the United States. Homebrew enterprise and tactics for circumventing traditional media are a kind of local obsession here; self-publication of some kind is nearly a coming-of-age ritual for Portlandrian youth.

One of the more interesting ventures along these lines is Matthew Stadler’s project, the Publication Studio. Run out of a downtown storefront, the studio produces small runs of print-on-demand books, largely by writers who have escaped mainstream recognition. In this video, he talks about his vision for the future of publishing:

What is Publication? A talk by Matthew Stadler from Publication Studio on Vimeo.

Although he’s talking about the effects of new technologies like print-on-demand and e-books, one thing that strikes me about his comments is how much they feel like a throwback to older approaches to publishing.

The alleged promise of e-books and like is that they put publication within reach for everyone. Now you too can be a published author! And in a few cases, I expect that these technologies will result in otherwise neglected geniuses being saved from a lifetime of basement solitude. But if there’s malaise in the contemporary literary world, by and large it’s not the result of too few books being published. In fact, it’s the opposite: wandering through the aisles of my local bookstore, the bedeviling question is how to avoid being overwhelmed by the tsunami of dreck on all sides, how to sift through the zillion titles on offer and find the handful that will actually speak to me.

So the problem — at least for a reader — isn’t a poverty of titles, but rather of guidance. Although this is nominally the role of trusted reviewers, the sheer mass of newly-released books (not to mention self-published works) coupled with shrinking newspaper arts sections means the traditional critical establishment simply can’t keep up. And even if it could, a broad-based reviewing machine (like, say, the NYRB) doesn’t really speak to my particular tastes. The web may help to some degree, but again the insane volume of things to review must daunt even the most dauntless blogger.

Enter the editor. Back in the dark ages of publishing, the role of an editor was — among other things — to select books for their list which fit a particular aesthetic. Rather than spewing out new titles helter-skelter, editors worked to cultivate a particular kind of work and a particular kind of reader. (Max Perkins, anyone?) And it’s this kind of thoughtful, community-building publication that Stadler ultimately seems to be talking about:

Publication requires being a good host, being sensitive to context, to people, being willing to hear…. Publication requires consistency….

The quick changes, the premium on novelty, the need for a next debut novelist once the last one has moved, tiresomely, on to their second novel, is not a happy companion to publication.

With this approach to publishing, readers could become devotees not just of specific authors but of editors as well. The editor is a long-distance friend, whose taste and judgment the reader can rely upon. It’s a model that, I believe, is increasingly relevant in a world of overwhelming plurality, and one that a number of publishers have begun to revive: examples include small imprints like Amy Einhorn Books (shameless plug: Amy is my editor), Pamela Dorman Books, and others.

As Matthew Stadler notes:

Don’t fear the coming pluralism. The vastness and variety of books… is in fact a very rich ecology that makes for a healthy literary culture of production and innovation.

Yes, this is true — but that richness only becomes apparent if we as readers have trusted allies to help us find our way.

In 1989, Laurie Anderson released her third album, Strange Angels. Many people, including myself, continue to feel that much of her best work is on the album. Her songs here are brilliantly expressive and coherent; lyrically, many of them read like short stories.

When I was in high school, probably my favorite track was “The Dream Before”:

Laurie Anderson – The Dream Before from J. Christian Guerrero on Vimeo.

I remember being fourteen or fifteen, sitting in the living room of a beach house on a tropical island at night, my mom and younger sister asleep, listening to this song and being filled with youthful directionless yearning. Ultimately, it inspired me to write two short stories which were later published (but are now, thankfully, forgotten). One of the stories was also called “The Dream Before” and included a note to Laurie Anderson acknowledging the debt.

Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time — which only occurred to me years later at college — was that Anderson’s song is itself based on a famous passage written by Walter Benjamin in his essay Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Benjamin himself was writing in reaction to Paul Klee’s 1920 painting, “Angelus Novus”:

Of this painting, Benjamin wrote:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

I’ve been running behind lately; I blame it on the Indian summer we’re having here in Portland, days of hazy, lovely sunshine that make it hard not to slack off a bit. So I’m belated in remembering the 70th (Jesus) anniversary of Walter Benjamin’s death.

Benjamin died on 27 September 1940 at the age of 48 in Portbou, Catalonia, Spain. He was attempting to escape from the Nazis to the United States, where Max Horkheimer had negotiated a visa for him.

He apparently committed suicide, via an overdose of morphine, in his room at the small hotel where he was staying.

From the Leeds Arcades Project:

On his fateful final journey over the Pyrennees Benjamin was carrying the famous suitcase, which allegedly contained a manuscript; “It looks to me as if his life was worth less to him than the manuscript.” – Lisa Fittko

That last night in the Fonda de Francia, Walter made 4 last phonecalls. He was charged 8.80 pesetas for these calls. Where these phonecalls were to, remains a mystery. Its likely they were to the American Embassy in Barcelona, but this is not verifiable.