(How) Will Interactive Storytelling Alter Our Perception of Ourselves?

For the past few weeks, I've been following stories about the new Playstation 3 game, Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain follows the story of a serial killer told through 4 different perspectives. The story unfolds through video clips rendered in a real-time graphics engine that is stunningly life-like. Sort of like the old Dragon's Lair games or Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you use the controller to make decisions for the character or perform certain actions. Depending on how you choose, the story alters, but never stops.

Heavy Rain is being described as a much more immersive and engaging experience than most games, blending genres and mediums to create a new form of storytelling- a type of story that many people have envisioned as a perfect project for video games- taking a cinema-esque experience and making it interactive, creating a world in which your choices count, making you a part of the experience. While Heavy Rain doesn't seem to fully realize this gilded dream quite yet, it is a step in the right direction. BTW- Gizmodo has an excellent editorial up about the successes and limitations of the game.

What I am wondering is how things will change if this more interactive form of storytelling becomes a dominant media format. In the nineteenth century, novels emerged as the dominant method for expressing the values and beliefs of our selves and our culture. For the last seventy years of so, film has taken on this role. These are the mediums through which we understand the stories of our lives. We imagine ourselves as movie characters or novel protagonists. We subtly create soundtracks in our heads to different moments, we think in lines from books from time to time, we imagine our prom night the way we saw it in Sixteen Candles, or we expect the type of love John Cusack encounters in a thousand and one romantic comedies. These expectations alter our perceptions of the world and reinforce, or create, in our minds the notion that there is a story to our lives, one to be played out in a certain way, with certain essential events occurring in line with story arcs at least somewhat dictated or influenced by the media we consume.

Mark Wilson, in his article on Gizmodo, has already discussed how video games could come to later the way stories are told. He writes,

If titles like Heavy Rain show us anything, it's that, yes, technology is unlocking new ways to tell a story. While most video games focus on a very linear plot, modeling themselves after movies and theater, they have the great potential to allow the audience to explore parts of a story that could have happened, altering fiction to better emulate real life and challenging the construct of a story as we know it—all well allowing the viewer to feel like they're somehow involved beyond mere spectating. Fiction evolves from a series of events to a series of choices, much like life.

Building on his point, if this genre develops into an art form in which we experience a multitude of consequences, in which there is not one path through which we progress, but a multitude of paths based on our own choices, will our concept of narratives in our own lives alter? Instead of imagining the perfect prom that we saw on a TV show, will we imagine a plethora of options based on diverse factors? Will we resign ourselves to the inevitability of chance? Will we see our selves as more responsible in the creation of our fate? We will stop pushing for idealized experiences? Or, is our desire to create narratives and story arcs too embedded in our psychology- either our psychology as humans or our psychology as western thinkers inclined to think with these types of stories regardless of media influence?

Our Confused Randian Values

Adam Kirsch has a review in The New York Times of Anne Heller's new book on Ayn Rand. The piece seeks to explore the connections between Rand's philosophy and the meandering modern Republican party. He winds up exploring Rand's life and values, with indirect comparisons to our current political landscape. The most interesting part to me was his questioning of Rand's placing of businessman and entrepreneurs on pedestals. He writes,

Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees. Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Kirsch, via Heller, emphasizes the the contradicting values expressed to American students. There is a lot of talk about following your dreams and passions, about making a difference in the world. At the same time, an MBA from Wharton is impressive, while having a "career" as an artist is seen as just that- a career in quotation marks, a career that is not really a career at all, as it does not typically result in wealth. Rand's genius, or failing, depending on what angle you are coming from, is to subsume the value of artistic or philosophically inclined thinkers in her descriptions of businessmen. This is a great point to note for those who have conflicting opinions on Rand's philosophy. I always found myself inclined to agree with the gist of her argument in terms of radical individualism and the strive toward human greatness, yet was still strangely unnerved by the way in which she seemed to manifest these concepts.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller- Book Review by Adam Kirsch

Is it Okay to Be Unhappy? Kierkegaard in The NY Times

A few months ago, philosophy professor Gordon Marino wrote an editorial for The New York Times, Kierkegaard on the Couch. Marino looks at how we treat issues of depression and despair in the modern age. While Marino focuses on identifying differences between despair and depression, for me the important question raised by his article was the issue of how we respond to unhappiness in our society. It seems to me as if American society sees most manifestations of unhappiness as a problem to be treated by medicine or therapy. The concept of valuing our melancholy musings is all but lost. The goal of therapy is not to deeper or clarify your thinking on deeper issues, but to "fix" you for having them. Clearly, I am referring to only a specific type of unhappiness/depression and this type is not the only manifestation of unhappiness or depression. For some, therapy and medication may be helpful and/or necessary. However, it seems that psychiatric care is almost always the first option. Serious spirituality has been relegated to new age practitioners and the church. Even here, the aim seems to be to "fix" the problem, to fix you, as if there is something wrong with deep and problematic quandaries. As the respectability and influence of humanities departments in colleges sinks, and our society pushes more and more towards a medical and scientific conception of thinking, I wonder what the place is for serious thought that fails to be uplifting.

Scholes on the Value of the Humanities

I'm currently making my way through The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes. It's quite a fascinating look at how some of the traditionally successful aspects of English as an academic discipline are now being challenged. I think Scholes's analysis goes beyond just English though. In highlighting literature's receding place in our culture, his thoughts have implications beyond academics. He seems to be highlighting not just a crisis of literature, but a crisis of values in our society. He writes,

"What this society wants of those who graduate from its schools and colleges with degrees in the humanities-- as opposed to what those who claim to speak for it say it wants-- are, at worst, docility and grammatical competence, at best, reliability and a high level of textual skills. What this society does not want from our educational institutions is a group of people imbued with critical skills and values that are frankly antagonistic to those that prevail our marketplaces, courts, and legislative bodies." (emphasis in original)

Beyond the obvious implications for English (or philosophy or any of the humanities for that matter), Scholes highlights a real problem for humanities graduates, and for our society. There is no tablet of values for the English or humanities classroom. These classes do, however, preach, explicitly or not, the search for meaning, the search for truth, the thoughtfulness to interrogate texts and values. They teach a humanistic worldview, one that aims students at something resembling Plato's concept of "the good" or Nietzsche's "artist." What place does our society hold for such values?

A Wikipedia article on "quarter life crises" might help to shed more light on the problem. The article describes a quarter life crisis as such:

"After entering adult life and coming to terms with its responsibilities, some individuals find themselves experiencing career stagnation or extreme insecurity. The individual often realizes the real world is tougher, more competitive and less forgiving than they imagined. Furthermore, the qualifications they have spent so much time and money earning are not likely to prepare them for this disillusionment."

If this is the case, could a humanistic education actually be harming our students? While many of the values taught through the humanities are ones that I agree with and believe in, it seems that there needs to be some outlet for them outside of a university setting. I wonder, in our day and age, what outlet is there for critical and transcendent thinking outside of the classroom?

Our Confused Randian Values

Adam Kirsch has a piece in The New York Times on Anne Heller's new book on Ayn Rand seeks to explore the connections between Rand's philosophy and the meandering modern Republican party. He winds up going more into exploring Rand's life and values as they are showcased in Heller's book. The most interesting part to me was his questioning of Rand's pedestalling of businessman and entrepreneurs. He writes,

Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

The Grind: Nietzsche on Dreaming

So, since at this point, I'm trying out new methods of cataloguing and expressing various segments of thought in writing, I figure I'd try out naming different segments in an effort to organize and catalogue (huzzah) various trains of thought. This segment, this named category, will follow a certain train of thought I've been on for some time: a dissatisfaction with the way careerism and concepts of happiness function in American society. Sometime when I'm feeling inspired, I'll maybe try to write up some intro or summary of thoughts thus far, but for now, I'd like to set up a platform for writing about these thoughts. And so, it'll be called, for now, with all embarrassed self-consciousness, The Grind. Funny to be self conscious and embarrassed about something no one is reading.

Anyway, I found this quote from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche a fitting way to start off:

Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were his privilege, also his characteristic and enviable happiness. He believes himself capable of realizing every kind of arc and angle simply with the lightest impulse; he knows the feeling of a certain divine frivolity, an "upward" without tension and constraint, a "downward" without condescension and humiliation-without gravity! How could a human being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find that the word "happiness" had a different color and definition in his waking life, too? How could he fail to desire happiness differently? "Rising" as described by poets must seem to him, compared with this "flying", too earthbound muscle-bound, forced, too "grave."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #193