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WIG&TSSIP: POV and “Involvement”

November 16, 2011 By Mark 2 Comments

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Storytelling as a discipline seems to have a permanence about it. Most people, particularly most authors, would probably agree that stories are inherent in the life experience of human beings. We embrace fiction so completely and effortlessly that suspension of disbelief may someday be defined as a brain state akin to hypnosis or meditation.

This sense of permanence affects how we innately relate to fiction, but it is also possible to advance one’s knowledge as a practitioner. Folk tales spun by people in all cultures around the globe can be shaped, improved and expanded by craft, whether the intended objective is entertainment, education or propaganda. And it’s possible to go even farther.

Painting, music, food, movement, storytelling — all of these things have practical applications, but can also be turned to purely creative ends. If aspiring to art is a bit more vague than aiming for income, or at least harder to quantify, I think most people still understand the impetus. Whatever form means, whatever composition means, whatever context and content mean, all of them (and more) can be treated as ends in themselves, and subsequently explored on that basis alone. Art for art’s sake.

It is the eternal and intrinsic potential for making art that compels Hills (and me, and others) to insist that there are no rules in fiction writing. To many would-be storytellers this seems utterly preposterous: if there are no rules then what can be known? But knowledge is not what rules define. Rules work because they impose order through constraints and controls. When you drive across town you knowingly subject yourself (or not, as the case may be) to dozens if not hundreds of traffic and motor-vehicle laws and customs. But if those rules didn’t exist, or you simply decided to ignore all of them, you wouldn’t suddenly be oblivious to where you were or wanted to go.

What Hills says, what artists say, is that if your goal (art) puts you at odds with a rule or convention, then you ignore the rule and stay true to your artistic pursuit. There are no rules so inviolate that you cannot break them for sufficient cause. And yet we also know that certain methods in fiction (and other mediums) achieve certain effects: that relationships hold despite our aversion to calling them rules.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: character, emotion, point of view, pov, Rust Hills, WIG&TSSIP

To Speak or Not to Speak

August 2, 2002 By Mark Leave a Comment

For the first time since I began speaking at the GDC three years ago I let the deadline for abstracts pass without submitting my roundtable proposal. I am still not sure why I no longer have an interest in moderating roundtables on the subject of Creating Emotional Involvement in Interactive Entertainment, but I am certain that I do not. As the deadline passed a few days ago I felt nothing but relief, despite the fact that I still believe emotional involvement is the key to our industry’s long-term success.

While I hope the industry will take this objective seriously in the future, right now, in general, the status quo stills reigns. Having seen the current approach in action for the better part of a decade, I confess I do not have the conviction necessary to protest against yet another round of graphics adoration and feature masturbation. Until the money people actually demand design and storytelling competence from developers, I don’t think all the lectures and roundtables in the world are going to convince developers to improve their skills and products.

For the record the ratings I received from the attendees at my roundtables were always very high, and there were always a number of committed people who were very interested in the subject matter. Unfortunately, they weren’t the ones turning yet another five million dollar budget into a steaming pile of development waste.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: emotion, emotional involvement, GDC, interactivity