Drawing Digital Boundaries Conceptualizing Literature, Poetry, Narrative, and Games in the Digital Age

Laura Wimberley San José State University December 8, 2008

Introduction This paper grapples with the questions: What is electronic literature? Are video games electronic literature? And why does it matter how we define our terms and draw these boundaries? I argue against two definitions of electronic literature: one, presented by Hayles (2007) is too broad, and the other, characterized by Aarseth (2004), is too narrow. My thesis is that electronic literature should be divided into two categories, drawn from Torodov (2007): the evocative and the narrative. The evocative are poetic, experimental, sometimes using chance, not always comprehensible according to ordinary grammar. This category is typified by many of the works in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, & Strickland, 2006). The narrative have the classic elements of a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end (Tannenbaum, 2008). By this criterion, many important video games, such as World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and Everquest, are narrative electronic texts. There are three key consequences for this argument. First of all, and most trivially, librarians need categorical clarity for classification. Secondly, more importantly, but at this point no longer shockingly, is that it dissolves the distinction between "high" and "low" culture.




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Finally, most intriguingly, is that this dissolves the category of literature altogether. By drawing a distinction between digital versions of traditional novels, epic poetry, and drama on the one side, and lyric poetry and what Ryan calls "innovative... aleatory" texts on the other side, the distinction between interactive narrative and evocative electronic art emphasizes content over form - narrative versus evocative content, instead of verbal versus visual form. This transition to a content-, rather than form-based, conceptual framework, would keep digital humanities in line with emergent Web 2.0 paradigms.

What is literature? Before we can determine whether video games are electronic literature, we must first define literature. The “electronic” part seems fairly well-settled: all of the texts (and let us, at least for the moment, take “text” in its broadest, semiotic sense) require at a minimum, a power source, computer chip, and display screen for a human to interact with them. The current that links these three components requires electricity. But what is literature? Definitions of literature date back to Aristotle, and so to choose only one seems almost arbitrary. However, the French theorist Tzevtan Todorov (2007) offers a synthetic approach to the question. In the West, from Aristotle through the eighteenth century, there was generally a consensus that literature was defined by fiction: it was the art of language imitating the world or some ideal. However, beginning with the Romantics, a new definition emerged. Literature, like other arts, became a unity, complete in itself: “a system, a systematic language which draws attention to itself, which becomes autotelic.” (Todorov, 2007, pg. 5) Both of these definitions persist to this day, and we need both of them to capture what we ordinarily think of as literature: “These are indeed its two essential and complementary aspects, whatever they are called:




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pleasure and instruction, beauty and truth, gratuitous play and imitation, syntax and semantics…” (Todorov, 2007, pg. 11-12) This appreciation for both definitions comes at cost – it dissolves the entire category of literature, because Todorov can find no rules of discourse that include all literature but exclude non-literature. Instead, he argues that “from a structural point of view, each type of discourse usually referred to as literary has nonliterary relatives which resemble it more than do other types of literary discourse. For example, a certain type of lyric poetry has more rules in common with prayer than with a historical novel of the War and Peace variety. Thus the opposition between literature and nonliterature is replaced by a typology of the various types of discourse.” (Todorov, 2007, pg. 11) To apply Todorov’s argument to electronic literature, then, we see a long-standing division at work. Electronic literature and video games both participate in similar discourses of human-computer interaction: mouse movement and clicking, for example, tend to mean the same thing in both environments. But they are largely different forms: much electronic literature (at least that receiving scholarly attention) is what I have called evocative – the Romantic, selfcontained art for its own sake, while many video games (at least those receiving scholarly attention) are narrative – classical, progressive, referential to the real or a commonly shared mythic world. If electronic literature is literature, by the definition of beauty for its own sake, then so are at least some video games, by the definition of representative fiction. Video games do also share discursive rules with things that are not literature, but that is true, as Todorov argues, of all literary forms.




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What is electronic literature? Adelaide Morris characterizes the Electronic Literature Collection in part by what it is not (2007). Digital poetry does not have a rhyme, meter, stanza, or even lines; instead the primary unit is the morpheme. These poems do not even have a clear speaker or narrative voice: they are often created in collaboration between a poet and a programmer, and, more importantly, they are experienced as collaborative between the author and the reader. It is often the reader, or the machine, who triggers the appearance of words or events. Thus the poem is not an object but a flow, and so is evocative rather than narrative. As she puts it: I want to put the term "literature" under pressure by isolating for analysis several charged and compact linguistic constructions I will position as "poems." Although this means scanting an equally compelling subset of materials that more closely resemble "narrative" or "fiction," [emphasis added]...it includes a rich mix of constructions - ambient poetry, concrete poetry, audio or sound poetry, kinetic poetry, procedural poetry, poetic mash-ups, codework, database poems, hypertext poems, 3D poems, instrumental texts, and textual instruments - engineered to subvert... linear thinking... They are "poetry," however, as the collection's keyword list explains, both because they are "under continual construction (poiesis) by [their] creators and receivers" and because their creative and cognitive strategies resemble those of experimental print poetry. Morris sees infinite cognitive possibilities in electronic literature. She quotes 1960s computer visionary Ted Nelson's definition of these texts as "thinkertoys" - "a computer display system that helps you envision complex alternatives". Morris argues, in the tradition of McLuhan and others, that our technology defines our thinking. Our tools not only convey knowledge but constitute it: that is, they not only communicate data, but also define what is




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worth knowing and what can be known. The transition from print to electronic media opens up a vast new realm of possibilities that permits us all to seize authorial control of "poetic hacks" and redefine knowledge, but that redefinition will never be secure. The price of lack of hierarchical control is lack of all control, a lack of certainty. Morris, seeing beauty in "the weird, uneven transitions between sovereign, disciplinary, and control societies and the mutating subject positions available" seems to implicitly predict that this trade-off will be well worth it. This overall theme, of the constant creation and recreation of knowledge by all participants, is one that Morris sees emerging from the poetry of the ELC, and it is a Romantic vision. This electronic literature is purely self-expressive, or, in Todorov’s words, “the function of poetry is essentially to emphasize the ‘message’ itself.” (2007, pg.5) Christopher Funkhouser (2008) traces the lineage of this type of electronic literature to Stephane Mallarmé's 1897 poem, "A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance" and the Dadaists, also citing the influence of musician John Cage and other aleatoric artists, and the Concrete poets of the 1950s. Arriving at the present day, Funkhouser (2007) draws on Lyotard to argue that “the text's identity as a computer form, containing expanded semiotic operations, often subjects the reader to an unfamiliar type of reading. In negotiating the interface, a reader's experience involves thoughtfully participating in the textual activity and thereby experiencing the poem on compounded visceral and cognitive levels.” In other words, the interaction with the electronic literature is the point of the experience: it is autotelic. “fps” by Aya Karpinska (2008) is a good example of this "evocative" category of electronic artistic texts, typical of the type of work discussed by Funkhouser and by Morris. There is no sound, and the initial visual interface is blank white, with twelve boxes indicated




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only by light gray outlines of the corners. Mousing over the boxes triggers the gradual appearance and dissolution of plain black sans serif text, interspersed with strobe-like flashes of abstract outlines, vaguely reminiscent of topographical maps or migraine auras. The text “beautifully irreverent and new/ somehow surrounded by an empty audience/ this streaming stimulus (seems)/ awkward like borrowed skin” – refers to itself. Nothing is representative or narrative in any way; the point is the form. While “fps” epitomizes this branch of electronic literature, it is not unrepresentative; texts in the electronic literature collection such as “The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans and “Code Movie 1” by Giselle Beiguelman and Helga Stein are similarly about exploring beauty in form rather than about representing truth in content. However, not all definitions of electronic literature are as judicious as Morris’s and Funkhouser’s. In her article "Electronic Literature: What is it?", N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic literature as inclusive of "hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art, and the Flash poem..." (2007). The ELO defines e-literature even more broadly, as born-digital "work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer." (ELO, 2008).

What are video games? These definitions offered by Hayles and the ELO, by implication, must include video games. Hayles specifically mentions interactive fiction, and interactive fiction was the direct forerunner of many of the most popular current video games: "recent Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs, or MMOs), such as World of Warcraft, Star Wars




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Galaxies, and Everquest, are in many ways graphical versions of earlier text-based systems" of interactive fiction (Montfort, 2008). Video games certainly meet the ELC definition: they use computers, and as I will argue, they have the important literary aspect of narrative. Video games are clearly not a monolith; they come in all scopes and scales, with all kinds of game play. I follow Aarseth (2004, pg. 364) in limiting this discussion to games in virtual environments. This conception of video games rules out the simplest puzzle games and digitizations of traditional games, such as Minesweeper or Solitaire. I also follow Aarseth in excluding games of skill, such as Wii Tennis (exactly what it sounds like, a game where the movement of the controller moves a virtual tennis racket), or Guitar Hero (a virtual guitar, with points awarded for proficient accompaniment of popular songs.) Clearly neither of these types of games is electronic literature in either of Todorov’s categories. There are two types of video games that are up for consideration, however: what Aarseth calls “quest” games, and what are commonly called “sandbox” games. In a quest game, the player’s character “must move through a landscape in order to fulfill a goal while mastering a series of challenges” (Aarseth, 2004, pg. 368); the Diablo series is a clear example of a fairly rigid quest game. In a “sandbox” game, the player simply explores the world, interacting with the objects and characters in it out of curiosity but with no fixed goal; Second Life is a pure sandbox. Some games have elements of both: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City offers the player an opportunity to quest from small-time hoodlum to drug lord kingpin, but is more commonly played as a crime spree in the sandbox. My argument primarily concerns quest games, but I will touch on sandbox games. Aarseth is one of the most prominent thinkers in the field, and one of the most strongly opposed to the understanding of games as narratives. Hayles also specifically aligns herself with




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Aarseth, who is one of the primary opponents of the narrative understanding of games, in her article that defines electronic literature so broadly that games must be included; Aarseth approvingly cites Hayles’s demand, despite her sweeping definition, that electronic literature not be lumped in with video games (Aarseth, 2004b, pg. 53). Aarseth specifically argues against the use of literary tools, even the simplest label of “story”, on any video game. His argument is that either: 1) players get to choose their actions, in which case there is no stable, sequential narrative, or 2) there is a stable, sequential narrative, but then it is no longer a game, but rather a dull, pre-determined, false interactivity. Rightfully discarding the latter as too dreary to address, Aarseth (2004a) argues that the former type of games are characterized by "quests" rather than narratives. Quoting Tronstad, he argues, “Stories in general belong to the order of meaning, together with the constatives, and not to the order of the act. Quests, on the other hand, are basically performative… As soon as they are solved, though, they turn into constatives. The reason quests can be easily confused with ‘stories’ is that we are normally analyzing the quest in retrospective, after we’ve already solved it.” In other words, quests are not stories because they cannot be repeated, and because we only study them after we have finished the experience. The first of these claims depends entirely on the game, and the second is a nonsensical comparison: responsible scholars do not analyze novels they haven’t read or films they haven’t watched to the end. Some games bear repeated play, and some do not. The greater the “sandbox” elements, or the wider variety of avatar characteristics, the more variation there is in the repeat play; in a sufficiently large, random world, with a sufficiently different set of initial characteristics, the means to the end of the quest will be quite different. Or in other games, like Age of Wonders, one could play with identical initial settings and replicate the quest precisely, aiming only for a better score. And of course, some narrative print literature does not bear rereading: the classic




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murder mystery, for example, usually loses its allure after the reader knows the solution to the puzzle. The ability of a reader to enjoy a repeat interaction depends on the quality of the literature, not its form. Instead of the quest being an alternative to narrative, it is in fact the ur-narrative of the West, as Joseph Campbell argues, and so this claim by Aarseth only reinforces the argument that video games are narrative. The entire fantasy genre, including many of the most influential video games (Age of Wonders, Everquest, World of Warcraft) derives, by way of Dungeons & Dragons, from the world of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, which was a deliberate attempt to create a mythic, epic hero’s journey. This shared imaginary world, with its common conventions of elvish archers and ax-wielding dwarves, for these games is the referent that literature as fiction requires. Setting, including the world’s physics, is often one of the most important features to video game play, usually at the expense of characterization, but the same is true of the literary genres – science fiction and fantasy – by which most game designers and fans are inspired (Jenkins, 2004).

The architecture, urban planning, topography, ocean currents, or planetary

orbits of a game setting create the sandbox for the user to explore, and afford opportunities for interactivity. Linking these two points together, Jenkins argues that game designers can create plot spatially. While the overarching plot may progress sequentially – often similarly to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey – play within stages can proceed in a variety of sequences, with a variety of outcomes, skipping some parts and more fully exploring others. This potential for variation in subplots allows the player the satisfaction of control (avoiding the trap of the dull false




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interaction), while still allowing the game the progress and resolution of rising action, climax, and dénouement. Montfort (2008) argues that interactive fiction (and, presumably, by extension video games) is not narrative, but rather more akin to the literary form of the riddle than the novel. I argue that this is incomplete. While any given interaction may look like a riddle, the narrative emerges out of the sequence and trajectory; there is significant difference between interactive fiction and a joke book. Riddles, for example, do not have setting, which games in immersive worlds have by definition. The riddles, or puzzles, can form most of the each at each stage, but the sequencing of the stages makes the narrative. Marie Ryan specifies that a narrative script “pictures a world situated in time and populated by intelligent agents. The time span framed by the representation encompasses a series of different states mediated by accidental happenings and deliberate actions. To understand the sequence as narrative means to be capable of reconstructing the motivations of the agents and the causal connections between events and states. As a mental representation of a temporal sequence of events, narrative is not only linear – or multi-linear… - but vectoral: a plot must be followed in a specific direction, from birth to death, beginning to end.” Ryan (2004, pg. 417) distinguishes between a narrative script, which is a type of meaning evoked in the mind, and a narrative text, which is an artifact specifically created to evoke that script. This distinction helps us to clarify that while people make narrative scripts of all the events in our lives, not all of those random events plus independent actors add up to a real text. What Aarseth seems to be saying with the idea of a “quest as act” is that the narrative in questing video games is an evoked script, not a text. But unlike an ordinary real life, the video




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game is a deliberately created artifact intended by the design team to evoke that script. Video games are narrative texts that call forth narrative scripts. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a clear example of a game that has all of Ryan’s components of narrative script. The setting is situated in a richly developed time and space; because it builds on three prior games, it includes a complex and contested socio-political history and detailed maps (Tanenbaum, 2008). The non-player characters have their own motivations and skills; this game uses a particularly advanced form of artificial intelligence, Radiant AI, for the NPCs, whose behavior can surprise players (Tanenbaum, 2008). More than most games, Oblivion is clearly vectoral. Dead characters, even low-level enemies and monsters, stay dead for the duration of the game, and their bodies lie where they fall (instead of neatly disappearing in a cloud of pixels, to regenerate the next time the player enters the dungeon, as in most other combat games) (Tanenbaum, 2008). The overarching narrative structure is a classic quest - to close the gates of Hell and save the king’s heir, who has been raised as a commoner. Oblivion is told partly through image and sound, but a great deal through text as well – the player character reads books; dialog between the player character and NPCs is written. Thus Oblivion is fictive, a representation of events in an imaginary world, and therefore literature.

Conclusion Hayles and the ELO define electronic literature as anything digital with literary elements, but the fact that these definitions include video games makes them unworkably broad. The same analytic tools are not applicable to both World of Warcraft and to a randomized Flash poem like "fps". This problem stems from a fundamental confusion in the idea of the literary, as identified by Todorov.




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 I propose that we can gain clarity by first dividing electronic texts into two categories: the

evocative and the narrative. The evocative are poetic, experimental, sometimes using chance, not always comprehensible according to ordinary grammar. The narrative have the classic elements of a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end. By this criterion, video games are narrative electronic texts, and can be rightly counted as literature. Given games’ status as literature, they become the concern of academic librarians. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has begun collecting and circulating a video games collection, and McMaster University in Ontario has even hired a dedicated immersive learning (i.e., gaming) librarian (Tappeiner & Lyons, 2008). These new media require new collection, circulation, and classification policies. These adaptations are vital for libraries to make, however, because this shift in thinking about video games as literature is emblematic of larger shifts engendered by digital humanities and all of Web 2.0. Lyric poetry, novels, and experimental drama looked to be all one thing – literature – in part because they were literally all belles letters, beautiful printed words. But in a Web 2.0 world, form – the printed word – becomes separated from content – fictional versus autotelic, narrative versus freeform. Electronic literature, with all of its variegated forms, forces us to evaluate based on content, and frees us – as Morris promised – from our old categorizations.




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References Aarseth, E. (2004a). Quest games as post-narrative discourse. in Ryan, M.L., ed. Narrative across media: The languages of storytelling. University of Nebraska: Lincoln. Aarseth, E. (2004b). Genre trouble: Narrativism and the art of simulation. In Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Harrigan, P., eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. MIT: Cambridge. Beiguelman, G. & Stein, H. (2006). Code movie 1. In Hayles, N.K., Montfort, N., Rettberg, S., & Strickland, S. eds. Electronic Literature Collection, 1. Electronic Literature Organization: College Park, Maryland. Retrieved December 8, 2008 from http://collection.eliterature.org/1/ Electronic Literature Organization. (2008). About. Retrieved December 8, 2008 from http://eliterature.org/about/ Funkhouser, C. (2008). Digital poetry: A look at generative, visual, and interconnected possibilities in its first four decades. In Schreibman, S. & Siemens, R., eds. A companion to digital literary studies. Blackwell: Oxford. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/ Hayles, N.K., Montfort, N., Rettberg, S., & Strickland, S. (2006). Electronic Literature Collection, 1. Electronic Literature Organization: College Park, Maryland. Retrieved November 9, 2008 from http://collection.eliterature.org/1/ Hayles, N. K. (2007, Jan. 2). Electronic literature: what is it?. Electronic Literature Organization. Retrieved December 7, 2008 from http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html




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 Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. In Wardrip-Fruin, N. & Harrigan, P., eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. MIT: Cambridge. Karpinska, A. (2008, Spring). fps. New River Journal. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/08Spring/index.html.

Mactavish, A. (2008). Licensed to play: Digital games, player modifications, and authorized production. In Schreibman, S. & Siemens, R., eds. A companion to digital literary studies. Blackwell: Oxford. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/ Montfort, N. (2008). Riddle machines: The history and nature of interactive fiction. In Schreibman, S. & Siemens, R., eds. A companion to digital literary studies. Blackwell: Oxford. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/ Morris, A. (2007, Oct. 1). How to think (with) thinkertoys: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. Electronic book review. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/distributed Ryan, M. L. (2004). Multivariant narratives. In Schreibman, S., Siemans, R., & Unsworth, J., eds. A companion to digital humanities. Blackwell: Malden, MA. Stefans, B.K. (2006). The dreamlife of letters. In Hayles, N.K., Montfort, N., Rettberg, S., & Strickland, S. eds. Electronic Literature Collection, 1. Electronic Literature Organization: College Park, Maryland. Retrieved December 8, 2008 from http://collection.eliterature.org/1/




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 Tanenbaum, J. (2008). Believability, adaptivity, and performativity: Three lenses for the analysis of interactive storytelling. Thesis, Simon Frasier University. Retrieved October 24, 2008 from http://www.sfu.ca/~joshuat/Joshua-Tanenbaum-MA-Thesis-Final.pdf Tappeiner, Elizabeth & Lyons, Catherine. (2008). Selection criteria for academic video game collections. Collection Building 27(3): 121-125. Todorov, T. (2007). The notion of literature. Trans. Moss, L. & Braunrot, B. New Literary History 38(1): 1-12. Originally published (1973). What Is Literature? New Literary History 5(1). Retrieved December 7, 2008 from Project MUSE.