Video games tell stories differently

I’m a sometime player but definite outsider to video game culture. Nevertheless, I find the possibilities of the form – not to mention the narrative potential – to be incredibly interesting, so I went along to the Stories and Systems panel (Saturday 1 Sept, 11:30am) to hear what Paul Callaghan, Christy Dena, Alison Croggon and Dan Golding had to say about it.

Golding opened the proceedings with a seemingly innocuous proposition for the rest of the panel to consider: Video games can tell stories like novels, like films, like art. To many in the audience and certainly to the panel, I think, it was self-evident that yes, of course video games can tell stories. But, as Paul Callaghan proceeded to explain, video games have a ‘unique texture’ as a narrative medium. The narrative structures are the same – story arcs still exist, characters develop, plot unfolds – but the crucial point is that the medium is different. The tools for communicating the story are different, and the art is in using those tools to best effect.

Christy Dena, also a video game developer, took this a bit further, explaining how despite the principles of the narrative being the same, the interactive nature of gaming often meant that particular parts of the narrative – often, for example, the opening act – sometimes had to be extended or further detailed in order to take into account the active learning of the player. There is also, Alison Croggon suggested, the possibility of narrative multiplicity in games that doesn’t exist for novels or films. The player is inserted into the action in a different way, triggering the narrative progress in a different way, and controlling, to a certain extent, which direction the story takes.

From here the dicussion moved into questions of the narrative politics of video games and the industrialisation driving their production. In this way, the panel suggested, perhaps there was a parallel to be drawn between Hollywood and video game production. Mass culture and market forces dictate more than anything the kinds of narratives that are produced and therefore those that saturate the field. Thus the prevalence of ultra-violence, sexism and racism in games themselves.

The most interesting part of the discussion began, I think, when Callaghan suggested that the notion of choice in video games is entirely illusory. Player agency is a common myth in some games, he said, but the world in which the player inhabits is entirely authored, and so, therefore, are their choices. It’s obviously true, I think, that the potential choices a player can make within a game are restricted by the world that has been created for them. However, within that, surely there is the possibility for independent variation? I’m thinking most specifically of those games of ‘emergent narrative’ (Golding’s term) in which the player is effectively given a blank canvas and asked to create a world from scratch. One is required to play by the rules, of course, but within those rules there’s scope for choice.

Then again, perhaps it throws into question our understanding of the notion of choice more generally. There is a reason, after all, why the video game itself is a recurring entity in conundrums posed in philosophy classes. Quite apart from being excellent fun to play, they have a very great capacity for encouraging us to reconsider our notion of reality and our understanding of our own agency.

Off the page and on the stage

Since Simon Callow’s opening keynote for MWF last week, ‘Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World’, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between writing, the performing arts and society more generally.

In Alison Croggon‘s discussion of Patrick White as playwright on Sunday, she made note of many of the peculiarities of writing for the stage. It’s a great talk and you should read it in full, but these passages in particular really got me thinking:

Playwrights differ from other writers because the demands of their form are different. Writing a play requires another kind of imagination to that of a novel: a precise sense of the spatial dynamics of a stage, a musical intuition for the rhythms of spoken language, a certain fondness for the necessary vulgarities and strict limitations of theatre.

Above all, a playwright is a writer who collaborates: she profoundly understands that writing is only one aspect of the complex process of making and receiving a work of art. This is true of all writing, of course: publication is a long process of negotiation, from contracts to editing, from writing to book design. But in the theatre these processes are naked, and challenge the illusion that the writer is a solitary figure making a solitary work of art. The successful realisation of a play depends as much on the other artists who collaborate in a production as it does on a writer: the production crew, the lighting and set designers, the director, the actors. This is, as many playwrights have said in different ways, both the misery and the joy of theatre.

It’s one of the essential contradictions of the practice of writing books, I think, that so much solitude is required to create a work of art that, while similarly received in solitude, is actually about forging connections between people. There are so many stages of production between author and reader, and yet what we are engaging in when we read a book is a process of protracted communication. The theatre, by contrast, is essentially and immediately a collaborative art. As Callow noted last Thursday, the construction and production of a show demands that all sections of a company are in synch, are in constant communication with each other, and working towards a collective goal. If one part should slip, if one department should fall behind or omit a crucial detail, the whole structure collapses.

Furthermore, this process is constantly in dialogue with the needs and expectations of an audience, and the success or failure of that endeavour is sealed in that crucial moment when the audience and artists share space. The ‘healing’ (Callow’s word) that happens between actor and audience is not actually merely a product of great performance on the part of one and receptiveness on the other: it’s a product of the cumulative and collaborative process of shaping physical space and narrative which reaches its zenith in that moment.

Callow’s talk last Thursday was as much a meditation on the demands of that form, its challenges and its capacity for creating truly extraordinary experiences, as it was an investigation into the life of Charles Dickens. I did not realise that so much of Dickens’ work involved the stage. In the later years of his life he toured around the country performing – not his plays but his novels – a common enough practice at book launches these days but rarely ever an art. It eventually led to his death, but in his practice he did something wonderful: he managed to reduce that distance between the author and audience to the smallest conceivable space; a writer performing his writing (and by all accounts, performing it astonishingly well) for an audience who was, in that moment, profoundly moved.

Callow argued that Dickens saw theatre as an entity which represented a capacity for social unification. The idea that society can work together for a collective goal, and that every corner of that society may be not merely crucial to its machinations but also have a stake in the outcome, is as simple as it is profound. That these collective goals may have the capacity to transcend our experiences of the everyday is more important still.

How to eat at a grand buffet and attend MWF

Writers’ festival programs are like the buffet at the Grand Hyatt: a big ol’ fancy tease. That first glance is near overwhelming: towers of cakes and pastries, silver platters featuring rows of fresh seafood, fruit, nuts, ganache and coconut, sausage rolls the size of your thumbnail and cream puffs like clouds of angel’s breath. You’re eying off that lemon meringue pie like nobody’s business, but there are also those delectable little salmon quiches and dear god, yes, butterfly cakes dusted with chocolate. You have died and gone to culinary heaven, and yet the unfortunate truth is that even if you tried your hardest, even if you wholly devoted yourself to that most divine of tasks, you could not eat it all. It’s unlikely you could even sample everything, and you resign yourself to the fact that you will need to make a judicious and limited selection. But how do you choose? 

My research¹ indicates that Festival Indecision² is a common affliction. Those of us on a shoestring budget in particular know the symptoms of FI all too well, and while we probably won’t ever get to a Grand Hyatt buffet (I did gatecrash it once, though, true story, and there was, like, a wall of champagne) we might be able to make it to a couple of writers’ festival events.

So, in the interests of fellow sufferers, I have come up with a selection of ways to choose which MWF sessions to attend. (Warning: some of these suggestions may have adverse side effects, but desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.)

Ahem:

 

How to Choose Between MWF Events

1. Send a barrage of emails to the publicists or agents of the authors on your shortlist. Attend the sessions of anyone who replies. If they reply angrily, buy a copy of their book. If you already have it, buy a copy for your mum. If they take out a restraining order, we don’t know each other and you never heard this from me.

2. Play a game of pool with your bestie, assigning an MWF event to each ball. The order of balls pocketed is the order in which you must buy your MWF tickets. Buy tickets accordingly until you hit your budget. If you lose the game, buy your bestie a round. If you win, buy yourself a ticket to Friday Night Live.

3. Borrow a harried friend’s child for the week and take them along to the Schools’ program. Your stressed out friend will be grateful for the break and you’ll remember how awesome kids’ books are and regret ever having to grow up and read totes srs literature.

4a. Stick the pages of the MWF 2012 Program to the dartboard at your local pub. Throw the darts. Attend any session skewered. If the dart knocks over another patron’s beer, invite them along, too. If you accidentally hit another patron, attend every Big Ideas session. If you get into a fight with the big burly regulars because you’ve plastered the dartboard with newspaper, run.

4b. Variation: accost passers-by and get them to throw the darts for you, thereby availing you of all responsibility for the outcome. If the session sucks (Unlikely! But even the food at the Grand Hyatt sucks sometimes³) you can blame that old stringy guy with the weird eye.

5. Make it your festival mission to uncover the identity of @WFQuestions. Pretend you’re playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Use her tweet-stream as a guide to the festival. Wear your running shoes in case she finds you first, waves her dream beads in your face and tries to sell your her erotic e-book 50 Planes of Sexy Flying.

 

Now: what are your suggestions for dealing with the dreaded Festival Indecision? And if MWF 2012 were a buffet, who would be the meringue?

––

¹ listening to my friends complain
² a real disease
³ I guess

On the unfamiliarity of home

When I was 18, I moved to Poland. It wasn’t the first time in my life that I’d spent a significant amount of time away from Melbourne but it was the first time I’d left without my family. I grew up in the middle-class inner south-east, and spent a lot of my childhood years in around Brighton, Caulfield and Moorabbin, somewhere on the bus lines between Chadstone Shopping Centre and Southland. Trips to the CBD were rare until I got old enough to go nightclubbing, at which point I found the bright lights of the skyscrapers, the honking of car horns, the late night the rattle of trams a balm for whatever late-teen angst I still harboured.

When I moved overseas, however, I felt like I’d lost something. The familiarity of the streetscapes, the rhythmic rocking of the Frankston train, the unpredictable splashes of sunlight and even the graffiti in the city alleys – all of this had been like an anchor for me, but I had never really noticed it as such. Met with the stripped facades of the old communist-era buildings, filthy snow on the Wałbrzych roads, and the bitter cold of the Polish winter wind, I started looking back home again, seeing it clearly, I felt, for the first time. Perhaps that realisation that you know nothing at all about your own city, your own country, is jarring for everyone. For me, faced with such new landscapes, the fact that I knew nothing about the origins of that place I called home made me feel ashamed.

It’s a strange relationship that people have with places. That idea of ownership – of allocating segments of concrete and dirt and air – is baffling on so many levels and yet so much of our lives is controlled by the administration of property, by the occupation of it, the purchasing of it – or the stealing of it. By the struggle for control over objects, over our own space, over that of other people. The places we grow up in shape us so much and yet so often we wander through them glaze-eyed, myopic, only half awake.

Or perhaps I’m just talking about myself. 

In any case, there’s nothing quite like having your eyes opened to those familiar places, gazing on them anew, rediscovering them, or finding hidden parts of them for the first time. There are nine different walks around Melbourne happening as part of MWF2012, and all of them represent a unique opportunity for you to get to know more about this history-rich, fascinating and complicated city:

• Melbourne’s Bohemia with Tony Moore
• When We Think About Melbourne with Jenny Sinclair
• JJ Clark and the Australian Renaissance with Andrew Dodd
• The Natural Origins of Melbourne with Dr Gary Presland
• Melbourne’s Street Art Tours with various local street artists
• Finding Melbourne’s Heart and Soul with Sophie Cunningham
• Street Fashion with Badaude

And the always popular:

• Melbourne’s Hidden Dragons with Carole Wilkinson
• Eclectic Bookshops (East) and Eclectic Bookshops (West) with Shelley Cohney

For extra dates and times other than those linked direct above, please see the full list of Food, Wine and Walks events.

Gold canary

Hello there, I’m Mark Welker, the final prong in the 2012 MWF Blogger spork.

I’m a reader, writer and occasional film maker. I have profiles on eighteen different social networks. I own eight electronic screens. Eight hours a day I spend in an office, and all eight of those are spent in front of a screen. I sleep eight hours (on average) each night. What remains is both precious and yet frequently squandered.

I have 126 subscriptions in my Google Reader account.

At some moment in the last four years, I came to think of time as something to be maximised. Crammed full. Aspiring to be ‘busy‘. Today, hardly a minute of my life goes by without some form of information retrieval. My kindred souls and I define a whole new suite of lifestyle demographic buckets, with names like ‘Emerging Digerati’ and ‘Suburban Overclocker’.

It hasn’t always been like this. My parents were books, literally. The sound of my childhood I most relate to is that of my mother’s pages turning in the last moments before bedtime. Yet, in the last few years, I’ve come to find myself far from the tree I fell from.

A friend of mine recently remarked that she never felt more quiet than when reading. This is also how I feel. That cubby house of peace seems to be more relevant, more necessary to retreat into than ever.

So in my bag is dog-eared copy of Douglass Rushkoff’s Program or be Programmed, on my kindle a half finished copy of Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and somewhere in the middle of my bedside reading stack is William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry.

I’m the most vulnerable reader I know. Someone who was once prolifically bookish, and now in many ways, I’m the canary-in-the-coal-mine of the 2012 festival. Just a reader, distractible as they come, looking for a way back in. I’m just here to read folks. To get excited, and to share some of that excitement with you.

You can find me on:

Pinterest, Findings, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, Google+, Last.fm, Behance, LinkedIn, listgeeks, Readmill, Soundcloud and Readability

News in freefall

To me, the New News conference at MWF 2011 reverberated with anxiety. Packed sessions were dominated by knitted brows and pensive looks. Conversations on stage shone with a cheery veneer, but frustration gathered steam as the sessions wore on, and between the huffs and puffs of disagreement, the cracks would start to show.

It’s not hard to see why. Journalists, editors, and media professionals of all kinds these days exist on the edge of a precipice. It has been this way for a while now – so long, in fact, that it feels like permanent teetering. Journalism was never a particularly lucrative career, but with ‘old’ media under increasing threat and ‘new’ media paying a pittance, if that, one can forgive news professionals for feeling a little bit stressed. Recent restructuring and mass layoffs at Fairfax, further job cuts at News Ltd, dramatic slumps in print news circulation and ballooning public apathy towards politics, industry, international affairs and the other domains of ‘serious’ reportage just increase the sense of vertigo. It’s a hard time to be a journalist in Australia.

In many ways, what’s happening to newspapers and news media more generally in Australia cannot be extricated from the political interests of those who control it. The issue of how the media intersects with and shapes politics in Australia and around the world – one of the most interesting questions raised during last year’s conference and discussed at length – has never been more crucial. It might seem audacious to a casual observer for mining magnates with such obvious conflicts of interest to actively and unashamedly try to buy their way onto the boards of a major newspapers in order to have editorial influence. Yet corporations with such vested interests in government policy and practice have been controlling our mainstream media for years.

In my opinion, the current state of the news media is yet another example of broader social and structural problems that go beyond just a failure to understand or adapt to what is no longer ‘new’ but rather ubiquitous technology. But what can we do about it? How do you protect media workers’ rights in an industry that relies increasingly on user-driven and unpaid content? How do we respond to this as individuals and as a community? What are the options for people who engage with news media and what are the options for writers, publishers and broadcasters? What’s the role of the ABC and independent grass-roots organisations in an industry dominated by corporate-driven publication and broadcast?

These are just some of the questions that need to be asked, and answered, sooner rather than later. And if you’re not involved in the conversation yet, now is a pretty good time to dive right in.

 

The New News Conference is on again at MWF 2012. Guests already announced include Margaret Symons, Chris Uhlmann, Tim Dunlop and Derryn Hinch. You can book a dedicated New News pass now or keep an eye out for the Program Launch on 20 July. These sessions sold out speedily last year so if you’re keen, book early.

 

Reintroducing…

Hello again! My name is Stephanie and I’m one third of the official blogging team for Melbourne Writers Festival 2012. This is my second year in the job, along with veteran Angela Meyer and newbie Mark Welker, and I’m looking forward to getting to know you all a bit better as the festival draws closer.

Here’s an awful picture of me, 2 years ago, in the middle of the unseasonably rainy Australian desert.

In case we haven’t already met, I’m a writer and an arts lover, and if you’ve spent any time in the Melbourne arts scene then we have probably passed one another in a hallway somewhere. You might have seen my by-line in some local literary journals, or perhaps in the Emerging Writers’ Festival program. I also work for Melbourne Theatre Company. I see a lot of shows, so I spend a significant amount of time in foyers and auditoriums, and if you’re a regular theatre-goer then I’ve probably tripped over your legs more than once.

I’m interested in politics, media, arts and culture, industry and creativity, but what I am most interested in is writing. As a reader, I enjoy plot-driven fiction that tests my ideas about the world, and non-fiction that is socially and politically conscious. As a writer, I write about everything from remote Australia to lingerie football. For the curious, my internet home is Ginger & Honey, and my home-away-from-home is the Overland Journal blog, where I have been writing since 2010, and have my own column called La Fille Mal Gardée.

I have recently finished writing my first novel, Big River. I have also just been awarded my PhD and will happily respond to being called ‘Doctor!’ although I don’t promise to be able to cure you of all your ills. In fact, I may induce them. Sorry.

If you want to get in touch you can come and say hi on Twitter (my handle is @gingerandhoney), leave comments here, or shoot me an email (gingerandhoney at gmail dot com).

Onward to the festival!

Situational reading: a digital fairytale

E-reader cir. 1935. Source: http://www.boingboing.net

If you’re reading this blog it’s probably a safe assumption that you love to read. We’re going to upfront – this blog is about e-reading. But please don’t go! We have a story to tell you. This is the tale of how an evil, stubborn, neglectful reader banished so many types of books and reading into the dark only to stumble upon a few magical new ways of reading where they can enjoy more books than ever before.

Once upon a time, there was a bedside table. Upon this table, was a stack of books. Not just any stack but a never-ending stack that grew and grew. Atop this mountain a tome perched precariously. It might have been War and Peace, Tess of the D’urbervilles or Moby Dick (it depends on who you ask exactly). This book has been left alone for a long, long time.

The evil reader delays tackling its dense prose, until one day the evil reader curses the challenging classic back to the bottom of the pile and replaces it with a bestseller (again, it may be The Slap, Water for Elephants or Fifty Shades of Grey; it depends on who you ask).

But who should arrive at this crucial turning point for modern readers but the charming digital prince! Who takes the dense text up in his arms and turns it into a digital format that can be read or listened to on so many different devices in so many different situations that the evil reader can’t help but pick it up again in a matter of days.

Now you might think that the story ends here. That the reader turns out to not be so evil and rides off into the sunset (on the 5.30pm train) slipping am e-reader out of their bag and beginning Moby Dick again. But not so, in fact an even more wonderful thing happens. The reader is completely transformed into a situational reader and begins to change their stubborn ‘one at a time/must finish what I start’ ways.

Since they enjoyed their reading on public transport so much they could read a sneaky romance novel and no one would judge them for their whim because they can’t tell what they’re reading – perhaps a little thrill in itself!

Then again, why should the reader restrict themselves to reading at all? It’s been a tough week, surely the most suitable book right now would be an eye resting audio while in the bath. Not running the risk of dropping and ruining paper or electronics — the reader downloads a sci-fi to their iPod.

Short stories read on their smart phone have crept their way into the readers lunch break routine – they sometimes even get through two or three to create a sense of achievement even if their work isn’t achieving results quite as fast.

And Poof! Just like that, our stubborn reader has suddenly turned into a muli-platform, multi-book, multi-situational reader.

This is the moral of our story ladies and gentlemen: The modern reader doesn’t need to dig in their heels and stick to one-at-a-time stubborn reading but instead can embrace the immense choices reading has to offer. Especially when they take the time to really match the book with their situation and mood. When we get the combination of book, format and situation just right the reader will get their happy ending – even if that particular book is subject to a zombie invasion.

By Cherry Byford — Melbourne Writers Festival intern and e-book lover

There and Back Again

There and back again within a week. Usually a trip to France involves years of idle dreaming, months of detailed planning and weeks of anxious anticipation. But this one was different. This time, it was the festival organisers to whom the planning and anticipation fell. For me, it was mostly a matter of turning up and keeping my eyes an ears open. I was invited to represent the Melbourne Writers Festival at meetings for the Word Alliance, a network of major writers festivals, of which Etonnants Voyageurs is a part.

Michel Le Bris, Etonnants Voyageurs director, centre left. Photo: Ouestfrance.fr

The Word Alliance was embraced warmly by Etonnants Voyageurs, reflecting as it does, many of the values of the St Malo festival. The local media reported on the visit and canvassed that issues discussed at meetings.

The annual St Malo literature and film festival, Etonnants Voyageurs, is unlike any other. It is certainly a major event, pulling around 60,000 people over the four days (including a schools program that I missed) to it’s broad offering of panels, readings, exhibitions, screenings, book market and more besides. And given the absolutely perfect weather that arrived in time for the long weekend. The spring that stubbornly failed to appear for months unrolled itself in one glorious long weekend of blue, blue skies and gentle breezes.

At least, unlike any that you would find in Australia. I came away from the three days with the sense that this is very much an auteurs festival, auteur in the sense that the festival director firmly controls the direction of the event. This festival takes as its purpose the task of widening the boundaries of ‘French writing’, which it redefines around the idea ‘writing in French’. This immediately opens up the definition to include the many Francophone countries and cultures, and implicitly challenge the Paris as the bastion and tastemaker of literature. The 6th arrondissement is not the be all and end all of French writing.

The idea of ‘la France pluriel’, multicultural, multi-ethnic France, is central to the festival’s agenda. I discovered that Rennes, the nearby city and capital of the Brittany region, recorded the highest socialist vote, and lowest vote for far right candidates, in the recent election. A politically progressive literature festival has found a good home in the region.

Like any good festival there was far more happening than one could hope to see. The main venue held a number of exhibitions, including a selection of grueling images under the banner Le bande dessinee speaks to the world. I could only describe the images as uncompromising, showing the violence and consequences of war and conflict in places like Chechnya, Rwanda and Cambodia. If you ever doubted that graphic novels could handle serious subjects here was a show to banish the doubt.

Poets in French, Arabic, Spanish and Flemish were heard; novelists in French and American, humorists, travelers, photographers, directors, essayists, memoirists and more were on stage. The variety of venues, both in the conference centre and the theatres, cinemas and schools of St Malo gives the program a nicely varied and authentic quality. It was also a good excuse to explore the narrow streets within the walls.

My trip was supported by the Institut Francais and the festival. Thanks to Emmanuel, Michel Le Bris, the logistics team and Word Alliance colleagues, from whom I learned a very great deal.

by Mike Shuttleworth, Melbourne Writers Festival Program Manager

This blog first appeared on What Swerves.

Festival Fever

Melburnians are incredibly lucky when it comes to festival selections, with options abound for  film, literature, music and theatre buffs. The Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Emerging Writers Festival have rolled by, and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival is on the home stretch. Before you have a weekend to spare, the Melbourne International Animation Festival kicks off on the 17th.

But for the hardcore festival addicts, take a deep breath, because August (also referred to as the “crazy festival season”)  is on its way. Your physical and digital mailboxes are about to be bombarded with festival programs, guides, and those delightful little ads masquerading as postcards. Stock up on permanent markers and start practicing your circling and crossing skills now, dear festival-goers.

Crazy festival season kicks off with Melbourne International Film Festival, which will take over most of Melbourne’s cinemas on 2 August. Word of advice: no matter how much you may value German-style efficiency, four movies in one day is not a good idea.

Following MIFF is the festival we at MWFBlog all hold dear: Melbourne Writers Festival. On 23 August, over 350 authors will converge on Federation Square and selected venues around town to participate in over 250 events. It will be a literature-heavy, thought-provoking 11 days. We can’t spill any names just yet, but the full program will be available in The Age and online on 20 July.

Keep those diaries out because Melbourne Spring Fashion Week begins only three days after Melbourne Writers Festival, followed by the Melbourne Fringe Festival and finally the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Were you as overwhelmed reading that roll call of festivals as we were writing it?

All you can do is have your organisational hats at the ready, so that when the peak of festival fever hits in August, at least you’ll be (somewhat) prepared. In the meantime, enjoy the eye of the storm while it lasts.