Backstory (was RE: [MUD-Dev] New poll)

[Zak Jarvis]

> From: Raph Koster [rkoster at austin.rr.com]
> Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2000 2:22 PM

> >From: Zak Jarvis [zak at voidmonster.com]
> >Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2000 2:20 PM
> >
> >It's worth noting here that as a medium, the Hollywood movie
> >has had about 5,900 fewer years to evolve than the novel.
> >It's quite likely that movies will ultimately take a more
> >novel-like format, or at least some of them. The short
> >story is the original narrative. Certainly quite a lot of
> >early stories are epic in stature, but in execution they
> >*are* short stories.
>
> Technically, the novel is only a few centuries old. The earliest
> examples of the form are epistolary novels, Cervantes, and so on.

I certainly bow to your significantly greater knowledge on this subject,
but I'd like to clarify my meaning a tad, 'cause I still think I have a
point. ;)

My point there being that the medium in which the novel evolved is much,
much older than the medium of cinema.

> The short story is definitely not the original narrative. That
> credit likely belongs to epic poems, which took poetic form
> so that narratives could be more easily remembered. Many of
> the epic poems have characteristics of the novel, among them
> the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad (though not so much the
> Odyssey).

Here I was really muddying my waters with terminology I'm not truly
qualified to use. ;)

I think what I wanted to be saying was that the short story has more in
common in size and structure with the earliest forms of oral narrative --
which Gilgamesh, the songs of Inanna, Dumuzi, Ninsuna, Geshtinanna and
Ereshkigal or the Rig Veda all clearly are, in a written form -- than with
the much later evolution of the novel, but that they're all more or less on
a line. Homer comes at a date later enough that I'm sticking with the
Sumerian and the Vedic for examples.

> Plays also predate the short story, and they definitely have
> more novelistic characteristics (multiple main characters and
> plot threads, etc.

Of course, it's very easy to argue that film is a direct descendant of
plays, which relates back into the whole written form of narrative which
starts wonking the semantics of this argument until it bleeds green ichor
and becomes an indistinguishable mass that makes no sense to anyone.

However, to save this argument from that messy fate, I'll try and defend my
point a bit further (and hopefully not pound it further into sludge).

Anyone who has seen a Peter Greenaway film (most especially Prospero's
Books, but really any of them will do) knows that film can indeed
completely transcend the form of the play (it is not at all lost on me that
there is great irony in that choice of examples, since it's based on The
Tempest). Perhaps better still as an example is Cronenberg's eXistenZ,
since it's not based on any existing work. Plus it's worth pimping the
movie again. I really think anyone involved in multi-player game design
should see it, even if they can't quite stomach the Cronenberg-ity of the
film. My (now belabored) point being that film has evolved very separately
from literature, but hasn't had nearly as much time to mature, and so it is
with games except more so.

> Technically speaking movies tend to have most in common structurally with
> the novelette, a publishing category determined by word length,
> but which is a proto-novelistic form.

And yet through virtue of larger print, Zelazny managed to publish the
Amber books as individual novels...

-Zak Jarvis (who has just spent 8 hours solid of his day discussing game
design, and is thus probably running around in tight little pedantic
circles.)
 http://www.voidmonster.com





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