Fishing for controversy - Spoilers and scholars

Eminent scholar and literary critic Stanley Fish said something dumb on Monday, and the great thing about eminent scholars and literary critics is what good exercise disagreeing with them can be. In this case, Dr. Fish mounted a defense of his column from two weeks ago, in which he gave away a plot point of the Hunger Games trilogy.* In response to a flurry of frustrated comments, he made the following claims:

1. We actually enjoy stories more after they’ve been spoiled.

2. The only books that can truly be “spoiled” are ones whose only value is suspense, i.e. inferior ones.

Tacit corollary: If you have a problem with knowing the ending of a book in advance, you’re either reading the wrong books or you’re reading the books wrong.

If you know me you might be surprised that I’m staking out my opposition to spoilers. Wasn’t it I who casually read about the ending of The Usual Suspects** mere days before the culmination of my friend’s years-long quest to find a copy to show to me? Did I not come to fantasy by paging through a companion encyclopedia to The Lord of the Rings, pausing with particular enjoyment at the entry for Gollum, which described his character arc in full? Well, yes. But we shouldn't always do unto others as we do unto ourselves.

Fish argues that the pleasure of rereading is greater than the pleasure of reading something the first time. I don’t disagree with this point. Many times has it been said that the difference between serious readers and the rest of humanity is that serious readers will read the same book more than once. I may not, as Girlfriend does, reread The Lord of the Rings ever year, but I know the pleasure of coming back to something and reading it more deeply, with more knowledge.*** If nothing else, we get better at understanding a story with each pass. But because one pleasure is greater is no reason not to have both, says I.

Fish even brings Science! to bear in defense of his first point, which in a literary argument is a little like bringing a shotgun gun to a knife fight. But, like a consummate knife-fighter holding a shotgun, he’s more assailable here than he ought to be. One preexisting opinion and one study do not combine to form a fact, or even a consensus, and it’s beyond ambition to suppose that modern psychology is able to comparatively measure two disparate kinds of enjoyment.

Are they disparate? Fish admits as much, but he dismisses the entire value of a spoiler-free read as “suspense,” and he argues that suspense can be recaptured on subsequent readings. What he is describing, though, is one form of tension, and not the whole pleasure of experiencing a story for the first time.

With foreknowledge, we can enjoy dramatic irony in knowing from the beginning, say, that our hero is really a tomato. We appreciate the double-meanings and ambiguities that allow this fact to exist in the story alongside an impression that the hero is a human being. We may even wish, caught up in the emotional tide of the story, that it were not so that the hero was a tomato. But having been told in advance, perhaps by an eminent scholar and literary critic, that the hero is a tomato, we will never—not once—wonder as the tension mounts if the hero is really a pineapple, or an automobile. We cannot have uncertainty.

I was only recently introduced as an adult to serious mystery writing—Dorothy Sayers’ novels—and I found that a great deal of the pleasure came from trying to outguess the novel. Often I was wrong, or only partly right (never completely right), but the novels were rich with possibilities in that first reading. For a moment, everyone could be the killer, in every possible way, and not in a winking “or so it seems but we know better” sense.

Having had and enjoyed that experience, I can go back and read the books again. Knowing the truth of the story I can enjoy hints and ironies and depths that I hadn’t seen before, and that is in no way diminished by my having read the book once before in ignorance.

There's been argument about the authority of the author and the reader's freedom to interpret, but nowhere do those two factors coexist in such perfection as before the story is finished. The million possibilities the reader brings, and the winnowing of those possibilities by the author into the complete text, are a part of any story. For Fish, though, it seems the story might as well be over before it's begun.

You can’t write an academic paper about how you had the wrong idea about what was going on in a book, at least not if you hope to be an eminent scholar and literary critic. However I would feel sorry for anyone who had become so good at rereading that they had forgotten how to read a book for the first time. I would resent someone who casually damaged someone else’s ability to enjoy what they no longer could. I would lose respect for anyone who purported to be a scholar of reading and displayed such ignorance of—or contempt for—the way most people experience most stories.

It’s been observed that writing is like sex: first you do it by yourself, then you do it with a few close friends, and finally you do it for money. I would say that reading is as well: the first time you do it wrong, then you get better with experience, but it would be sad to skip the first time.

* Full disclosure: I have not read the article in which he does this, because I have not read The Hunger Games, and, as you will see, I take the issue of spoilers more seriously than Fish does.

** On a forum thread called “The Ultimate Spoiler Thread,” where each new post spoiled a different book or movie.

*** Tangent: Watch Arrested Development twice. It’s ridiculous.

Bat-servations

This started as a reply to a comment on my last post, but it just kept getting longer in the conception.

Having seen The Avengers, I saw the latest trailer for The Dark Knight Rises as well. So, let's talk about that.

Okay. Batman Begins was surprisingly good. The Dark Knight was surprisingly better. If The Dark Knight Rises is as much better than The Dark Knight as The Dark Knight was than Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan may actually become a god.

Do I give TDK too much credit? I really don't think I do. Begins may have been the best Batman movie to date, when it came out, but TDK actually transcended. It gave people new ways to see the world, which I think is a big part of what art is for. The Joker's makeup and Glasgow smile became new shorthand for a modern kind of evil.*

All that to say that I am braced for disappointment by TDKR, because there's a lot more room to go down than up. It may do me good to lower my expectations, anyway.

But what about the trailer? Well, the hopes and fears it provokes in me can be sorted by character.

Batman: I think I've guessed how this movie will go down, but I hope to be surprised along the way. For now, I'm glad that the movie's marketing has gotten ahead of the "Batman dies" thing. That is, a lot of people are thinking it. If we did die in this movie, it would be an easy mistake to underestimate fans' intelligence and studiously avoid mentioning the possibility, so that it would come as a "surprise." Instead, the trailer is full of "maybe."

Bane: It's hard to tell where they're taking this guy. He's got some sort of xenomorph thing going on with his face. When they put a bag on Cillian Murphy's head and called him "Scarecrow," it made sense to me, but whatever they've put on Tom Hardy's face is harder to believe than the leather fetish/luchador mask in the comics. He's clearly got it in for Batman personally, and that's about all I can tell.

Catwoman: I've always worried about what they would do with her, because she's an easy character to make ridiculous. The workplace romance she has going with Batman will be a hard sell after what happened in TDK. Most of all I'm just afraid that she'll fall victim to what I call Julia Roberts syndrome: the belief that when the camera is pointed at an attractive woman, nothing interesting can go on for fear of distracting the audience. On the other hand, in what little we see of her in the trailer, I'm almost worried that she'll be--dare I say?--under-sexualized, a failing I had not thought Catwoman even eligible for. In what is surely, granted, an emotionally climactic scene, she seems so darn sincere. This from a character whose persona normally says, "Come play with fire." 

John Blake: Who the hell is Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing? I'm as glad to see him in this movie as the next guy, but what is he doing? If nothing else, he's promising that the movie will have more plot than I can extrapolate from a teaser trailer and Wikipedia.

* To be clear, I think photoshopping it onto a politician's face is a vicious and puerile way to make a point. If we must be so crass, though, the toothbrush mustache was overdue for retirement. The point is that it speaks to the penetration of the image.

Superheroes, Spartans, and dwarves!

Yesterday Girlfriend and I went ahead and saw The Avengers--ahem, Marvel's The Avengers, no doubt to ameliorate the confusion of three or so people expecting a new John Steed movie. I'm not too sure what to say about it. Any accurate account of my opinion would probably be unfair considering the extent to which I enjoyed the movie; just saying that I enjoyed it would give the wrong impression, too. (I suppose this is a knot that movie reviewers learn how to cut early on.) I enjoyed watching The Avengers on a big screen. I do not think it would have held my attention on my television. It was, as I told a few people, a lot of scenes, the majority of which were entertaining. That they don't add up to much is probably not the fault of any of the artists involved. After all, we know whose movie this really is. It's in the title.

 I was not invested in this being a good movie. Since Iron Man 2 I haven't had hopes to speak of for Marvel movies. If Batman weren't still going, I would be ready to call this comic book movie thing over. The Disney Renaissance lasted 10 years, generously defined; if we're having a Golden Age of Comic Book Movies, well, it's been 11 years since Spider-Man.

One place I do hope the magic is lasting out the decade is in the Lord of the Rings franchise, for franchise it has become, and The Hobbit is coming (and coming again next year, because why not?). I wouldn't mind seeing a comparison of how much money is riding on these two enterprises.

Now, back when I played Halo: Reach I noticed a problem that I almost wrote about at the time, and looking forward to The Hobbit I see the chance for the same mistake. It turns out that good characterization can ruin a good character.

I played the Halo games, and I, for one, thought the character of the Master Chief was a very good one. I'm not going to call the series an example of deep or transcendent literature, but the Master Chief was a nearly flawless action hero. He wasn't exactly flat; his character had some conspicuous, gaping holes. He was Spartan 117, and he had extra kung fu where most of his personality should have been. This was apparently the human cost of the Spartan program. There was pathos in it. That's how he came off to me, anyway.

Then came Halo: Reach, where we had the privilege of meeting six other Spartans. Now they had to be differentiated. (Actually, did they? For the story Bungie wanted to tell, but I wonder.) They had to be characterized, and humanized. For the Halo series, some of them were pretty well-rounded. Jorge maybe even had depth--at the very least, there were tensions in his character that made him interesting. The gentle giant thing isn't the freshest character angle, but I liked him. He certainly didn't seem to have parts of his soul missing.

Suddenly, what the hell was wrong with Master Chief? If the other Spartans were capable of feeling the tragedy of war--capable of feeling fear and empathy--capable of bonding with and mourning comrades--then 117 lost his excuse. Now, apparently, the Spartan project wasn't dehumanizing. Master Chief must have had his Clint Eastwood growl when he shipped out to boot camp. He doesn't care because he doesn't care. The pathos is gone. Suddenly, he's either a cardboard character or a psychopath.

So I had that problem with Halo: Reach. By elevating its characters above their type, it made the old hero--first and foremost an excellent specimen of a type--and undermined him. If I ever go back to play the campaign in any of the Halos, I will probably ignore the characterization in Reach, but I can't unplay it.

So, Tolkien gave us elves and dwarves. In The Lord of the Rings he could use the different races and types. Dwarves were a certain way, elves were a certain way, and you didn't need to think about it too hard. Tolkien helped us out by never making us deal with more than one dwarf, or more than one elf, at a time. So Gimli and Legolas stand out as distinct from the rest of the Fellowship, and they have personalities, even without ever being much more than representatives of a cultural type.

I'm not going to get on Tolkien's case at all. The Lord of the Rings movies flattened out Legolas and Gimli even further--Gimli in particular. And to be fair, the movies' Gimli is not the character Halo's Master Chief is. He comes dangerously close to being the sum of the running gags around him.

So Gimli is, at best, a type. The shallowness of his characterization is supported, inasmuch as it is supported, by the absence of other dwarves to compare him to. So what am I worried about? The 13 dwarves in The Hobbit. In the book, not all of them are characterized. In the movie, they're all going to have to be differentiated, at least. Maybe even well-developed--actors get bored, after all. Which is fine, except I suspect it's going to get harder to appreciate the LOTR trilogy on its own terms.

This is Peter Jackson's fault, more or less. He left The Lord of the Rings open to this. Admittedly, his neglect in this area may have freed him up to do awesome things in other areas of the movies. And really, I'd rather see The Hobbit be as good as it (they) can be. I just wish everything could be perfect and everyone could win. You know.

The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

I've thought recently about just how many characters I've invented--not as a writer but as a player of video games and role-playing games. It is more than many but fewer than some. That's the point I was getting at in my last post: that the act of choosing and creating characters is becoming a common and frequent cultural experience. It means something to make these choices. At the very least it reflects something in us.

Video games are becoming a major way that people interact with stories. It's worth noticing, then, that it's often the role of the player, not the designer, to create the protagonist. Halo and its iconic Master Chief rose and fell in the last decade. The hero of the games we play today is mutable.

Granted, this trend is largely the work of a few studios, but Bioware, Bethesda, and the caretakers of MMORPGs are doing a lot more than their share of the storytelling.

Truly granular character creation has become a hallmark of western RPGs. These are really the video game equivalent of the bildungsroman, with the player's hand on every brick as it comes down. The whole game might be a character creation mode: the first hour or so is spent defining the character in broad strokes such as sex, name, appearance, and aptitudes; the next 20 to 100 hours are spent deciding how the character reacts to various scenarios.*

I confess that, from everything I've heard, I could speak more authoritatively on this subject if I had played the Mass Effect games. There, I am told, is a rich narrative that changes profoundly based on the choices you make about and with your character, not just a world you move through in a set direction making cosmetic choices as you go. When I have $100 and 100 hours to spare I will look into this further.

I actually came to truly intensive character creation through wrestling games. (There was a run of very good wrestling video games in the late 90s that you didn't need to care for actual professional wrestling to enjoy.) I could spend hours on that, building a ridiculous costume piece by piece, and choosing exactly what kind of punch my character threw when I pushed the button this way or that way. The legitimately boggling slider festival that opens Skyrim is comparatively manageable.

But one of these is more like sculpture and the other is more like writing. Role-playing video games adapted the free-form character crafting of their tabletop forebears and combined it with the cosmetic characterization element. The upshot was that you could make yourself a character in the story, either in the sense of making one for yourself or making one out of yourself. With an amount of obsessive application that's hardly even abnormal in this day and age, one could create a Tussaud-quality likeness for their in-game avatar. And of course these are almost all fantasy role-playing games, meaning you choose an "class" for your character such as a wizard, a warrior, or a thief.

So here there is no stable of characters to choose among, but a whole spectrum of possibility. What do we choose? I almost always used myself as a model. My own given name--not Cory, the other one--was suitably exotic to suit a fantasy protagonist.

So when I discovered the D&D-inspired Baldur's Gate 2 my first character was a sorcerer named Corodon, Neutral Good by alignment and apt to talk his way out of danger when he could. He was an elf, and his skin was blue (not drow indigo, but more cyan) so he was suitably bizarre, but otherwise he was who I wanted to be in the game. With class a variable, and skin color brought back within the bounds of normalcy and self-identification, this continued to be my first character in games I've played of the same sort until today, more or less.

Oddly, I didn't follow the selection heuristic I mentioned in my last post. My characters tended to be idealized versions of myself. After the blue skin experiment, I didn't take the opportunity again to make a character alien or monstrous, even when the Elder Scrolls games made it a viable option.

The penchant for charismatic characters comes partly from the sort of morals I wanted to play and partly from the practicalities of the games themselves. Bioware in particular filled its games with lavish dialogue trees, so that talking your way out of (or into) a situation was always at least interesting. I wanted to be able to talk my way through trouble because I wanted to see how the game would handle it--the story that got told that way was more interesting to me than the one where every problem got solved through fights.

The idealized self was my go-to through about halfway through Dragon Age, two years ago. That's when I looked at my digital "self" and found myself profoundly bored with him. Instead of stepping into the character's place in the world, I was out here, looking at a character who, because he had no real differences from me, was a blank. I, the audience, liked or disliked characters, and approved or disapproved of developments, but my protagonist didn't: he was a vessel, not a character. Also his face, which was sort of like mine but not quite, got very hard to look at after a while.

Such is the danger of this type of association. It also runs up against the frustrations of finite character choices. This turned me off Mass Effect very early on. My protagonist was me, according to me, but I often had to make decisions where what I would have done wasn't an option. This made the story that the game was willing to tell more galling than engrossing.

My friend Bryan found a solution of sorts. In Mass Effect he modeled his character not on himself, but on Edward James Olmos, best known to us as William Adama in Battlestar Galactica. The likeness was only approximate, but what he found was a face with character--and not his own. So when the character followed Bryan's instructions in a way he didn't expect, the result was a surprising development that revealed something of the character's character, not a failure of the interface.

Naturally I stole the idea. I confess that it has done less for my experience of Skyrim than I had hoped. But then as a writer I have always been greedy for dictatorial, rather than merely interpretive, control over stories I participate in.

I never get the same sense of flamboyant self-expression from most RPGs that ask me to build a character as opposed to the ones that ask me to choose one.

The most freedom I can remember in character creation was in a plucky Telnet game called RetroMUD. Being entirely text-based, a player described their character's appearance in words, meaning practically anything was possible. The game also offered a truly preposterous array of races (including dragons, titans, atomies, robots, and squid) and more character classes than it's really safe to think about. Just writing about RetroMUD actually makes me want to play it again, not because it was good as a game or I was any good at it, but because it is a world where you can really be someone, and that someone is almost anyone.

But really, RetroMUD is so much text-based that playing it is almost like writing. It teeters on the far edge of the continuum between Reading and Writing, where the big guns of gaming stay, ultimately, tethered to the Reading end by the authorship of the designer.

* I say "deciding" somewhat pointedly. Rare (in my experience) is the game where doing the "right" thing is really more difficult than the alternative. Bioshock came close with the choice of saving or harvesting the little sisters, but couldn't resist compensating you more or less in-kind for the resources you gave up by sparing them. But fictional interactive ethics aren't quite a topic for today.

The selves we choose, and the selves we create, Part 1

"Call me _______."

So might have begun Moby Dick, the video game. All the canon material would refer to the main character as "Ishmael," of course, but the actual audience would have been divided. Some would keep Ishmael, some would name him after themselves, and some would come up with something else entirely.

"Call me Jack."

"Call me Gaheris."

"Call me Batman."

A couple articles I found on Medium Difficulty the other day got me thinking about the more general implications of character selection/creation. It's something we do a lot now, those of us who play games, anyway. It's a literary act. We might divide interactive narratives up this way: the ones that give you one character to play as, the ones that ask you to choose from a stable, and the ones that ask you to build a character yourself.

I hadn't realized before, but with the mainstreaming of video games I think it's safe to say that most people below a certain age have chosen or built a character at some point. World of Warcraft alone accounts for millions upon millions of characters created, and since it has reached its tendrils into distant corners of the culture, it has probably introduced a great many people to the act who otherwise wouldn't have. My cursory search didn't turn up hard numbers on WoW, but City of Heroes (which doesn't hold a candle to WoW) counts 43 million characters created over eight years. So this is a thing that people do.

Video games, more than most any other medium, are venues for the self-expression of the consumer, the audience. A game asks (or tells), "Who will you be?" "What will you do?" and "Can you do it?" These are the questions we, as an audience, ask most media, not the other way around.

Granted, previous generations have also had to choose who they would "play as": cowboys or Indians, cops or robbers, Allies or Axis. (And of course there is Nothing New Under the Sun, but if we made that an end of it, how would we feed the writers?) But never, I suspect, so often and with so many variations. And in these games, you choose your role in your own narrative. To create a whole narrative and then ask the individual audience to choose a protagonist is a quietly radical change.

Especially when we are young, character selection is about self-identification. When we are older, if we still play games, we approach characters in a more jaded manner; we perhaps know better who we are, and look more to try on another skin for a while.

Some games, such as the Legend of Zelda series, only asked me to name my character, but this in itself was a choice that spoke to how I would engage the game. (Link and Ishmael have a lot in common in terms of depth of characterization.) "Cory" fit into the perversely constrained name space of games translated from the Japanese, so I was inclined to use it when a blank-canvas hero needed a modicum of characterization. I did want to be in the game, so it was Cory rather than Link or Crono or Ness. Until, again, I got old and jaded.

There was always, of course, the option of taking the game entirely on its own terms and using the canonical name. (Earthbound is an intriguing exception in that it presented its "canonical" names as fallbacks in case you couldn't think of anything yourself.) Later on I would choose obscure and intriguing names, like Gareth, Nimue, and Arvel, to make the characters mine but not me. Other players (especially of a certain age) took a still different approach, noticing that many vulgarities also fit in the little name box. I never much appreciated this approach, mostly because I got no pleasure from that sort of transgression. I wanted to inhabit the fantasy, not mock it, and there's something a bit lame about being too cool for one's own video games. At any rate, merely letting the player choose the character's name opens up at least four distinct kinds of engagement.

Games of a different sort offered a choice from a small stable of characters. When I was young the choices were simple. I preferred Luigi to Mario when there was little to distinguish them but their palettes. In games where characters had statistics given I gravitated towards the fastest, because I equated speed with finesse and superiority, even though I was myself incapable of finesse.

Street Fighter II, then fighting games in general, broadened the horizons. At least I know of no precedent to the 8, then 12, then 16 playable characters in Street Fighter II's various iterations. Mortal Kombat was anemic in comparison with 7, but still offered a wide array. Between the two of them I developed the heuristic that would determine my character identification for a good long while.

I might stop to mention that back then (in my day) video games had manuals, and these manuals told you a lot more than just how to play the game. In fighting games especially, they contained backstory for all of the playable characters. When I rented a game (these also being the days before manual theft became so pervasive that the game rental outfits gave up entirely on including manuals with rentals) I spent the car ride home poring over this information, determining what I thought of all the characters and who I would play.

Consciously, I chose characters who I saw as morally in the right. Sometimes, as in Mortal Kombat, this had to be a relative judgment. In my mind that was the determining factor. Scorpion was the ghost of a ninja who wanted revenge on Sub-Zero for murdering him and his family; this was the guy I was pulling for. Obviously, in retrospect, moral righteousness was not my only determining factor. Sonya Blade was pursuing a international criminal, and wasn't an undead abomination or a professional murderer. Raiden was a god. But I stuck with Scorpion.

Really it was the monsters, the outcasts, that I was drawn to. I related to Scorpion's inhumanity as well as his sense of grievance. In Street Fighter II, I played Blanka, the feral and inexplicably green jungle warrior. Later, when I played Killer Instinct, I played the werewolf in search of a cure for his condition, or the ice alien who just wanted to go home. In retrospect, I went for monsters first, unless they were explicitly evil. But if someone had green skin and a hunchback, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. (And it always was him, which may or may not say as much about game design as it does about me.)

But these games offered many choices, and many ways to choose: nationality, fighting style, sex (or sex appeal), or purely pragmatic reasons (which character am I most successful with?). One could play a hero or a villain, and being the villain did not mean taking it upon oneself to lose for the sake of the narrative. Fighting games, in fact, were my introduction to the multiple ending--every character's story was different.

This post has gotten quite long, so I will leave it there for now. Character selection was one ritual of my youth, but character creation (when I discovered it) was another, more involved, more expressive, and more suited to its own post in Part 2.