Birth of an art form

[Student of Trinity]

Sometime in the, what, 18th century?, the novel was born. There had been long epics before, but nothing quite like a novel. It was a new genre, and it took off. There've been a few similar episodes in history, I guess. Some art forms have been with us since we daubed stick figures on cave walls, but some have been discovered.

 

I think we're seeing one now: the casual computer game. The things that you download for $7 and play through in four hours, but that have some sort of story and theme, not just zapping stuff.

 

Sure, we have to recognize computer and video games in general as a recently discovered art form. But I think that's old news, now. And the big titles are like major motion pictures these days. But underneath them, a new layer has grown up. All kinds of little shops are making phone apps and casual games and indie games. It's a cottage industry.

 

The first generations of computer games were really crude. Pong, I can say from childhood experience, wasn't just lame; it was fully paralyzed. Adults might have been fascinated by the concept of it, but for kids, man, it was about as fun watching the black-and-white TV screen fade to a bright white dot in the center when you turned it off. But when graphics crept above a certain threshold, then together with a neat game idea you had something new and engaging.

 

Now there seems to be a new class of games with graphics and sound that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, but are low-end now. The technical features are good enough that you're clearly in a new medium from Donkey Kong, with lots of new opportunities and demands. But the game can't stand on those features; it has to be about something else. I think this makes it a new art form.

 

Does it make any sense at all to think of Avadon being in the same category as, say, Trainyard or Angry Birds? Obviously not at the most fine-grained level. But I think there's a level worth speaking on, where they may be classed together.

[Aoslare]

The novel metaphor confuses me. You are distinguishing this 'new class of games' by being low-end yet having adequate "technical features" and also by having a theme. However, novels are -not- distinguished from other sorts of writing by any technical features of language, nor by theme. They are distinguished by basic structure, and perhaps to a lesser degree by format and organization.

 

It seems to me that a more appropriate metaphor might be the development of, say, free verse: a versatile modification of an already-existing format.

[Student of Trinity]

Yeah, I don't mean casual games are much like novels, only that they are a new form, the way novels were once a new form.

[Aoslare]

I still think the comparison is ill-fitting. The development of the novel was a particularly rare thing, unimpeachably broad in its implications; Angry Birds and Avadon, not so much.

[Triumph]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

But when graphics crept above a certain threshold, then together with a neat game idea you had something new and engaging.

Now there seems to be a new class of games with graphics and sound that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago, but are low-end now.

I am intrigued by this graphics threshold of which you speak. What is it? Could you give examples of a games just below it and just above it? Is predominantly a matter of graphics, or does it equally require gameplay?

And then in the second part of what I quoted: these games that are above your "graphical interestingness" threshold and are "low-end now," are at a level that has been around for quite some time, and was once high-end, but has now been far surpassed by the latest high-end games. Does being low-end somehow distinguish them? Is that a significant quality of these games?

I guess I'm trying better understand and define this "new form" you've delineated so I can decide whether I think it really exists.

[Tracer Bullet]

Graphics have nothing to do with it. It's how they're used. Some of today's best animated arcade-style games can't hold a candle to the game-play of Loderunner Master by Broderbund. And many if not all of the best puzzle games ever were made before the new millennium. And if this threshold you speak of is REALLY outdated, then let me say, there were OK games back then, too.

[Dantius]

Isn't the Tale of Genji widely regarded as the first novel in history? That's a wee little bit older than the 18th century...

[Alorael at Large]

I think Avadon and Angry Birds only share the low-budget category. The big difference between them is actually a fundamental one of form: casual game versus... I don't know what the official term is, but maybe "involved time-sink" works. Let's call them long-form.

 

Neither one is new. Pong was a casual game. Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders are all iconic and rather aged casual games that are still regularly remade. long-form games took longer to get going, in part simply due to disk space and memory requirements, but you can see the urge towards games that weren't just about mastery, score, and casual fun origins in ADVENT and its text-adventure progeny.

 

[Edit: Earliest novel is a nebulous subject. What about The Golden Ass, which is older than The Tale of Genji by several centuries? What about the Iliad, which, except for being written in verse, does a passable job of having characters, plot, and even a dash of development. There's no clear first novel; there aren't even clear criteria for defining novels.]

 

Roguelikes introduced a kind of hybrid casual-long hybrid; they're all about achievements (or not dying), but the format is more long-form.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the other change you've noted is the transition from the days when anyone could whip up a game on a computer, assuming anyone had one to whip on, to the days of major studios and big budgets. Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way: acceptable graphics and gameplay can be produced for very little, and people will play those games, be they five minutes on a fun Flash gimmick game or hours sunk into Spiderweb's retro RPGs.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Biology of Broken Things

What about the Iliad, which, except for being written in verse, does a passable job of having characters, plot, and even a dash of development. There's no clear first novel; there aren't even clear criteria for defining novels.

If characters, plot, development, and relatively long-form are all you need, then I think Gilgamesh is a pretty clear first novel.

[Triumph]

And so we've now reduced the "novel" to nothing more than a long story. Wow.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Triumph

And so we've now reduced the "novel" to nothing more than a long story. Wow.

Don't be ridiculous, we all obviously have Internet connections. That makes us experts on every conceivable subject within the realm of human knowledge. We can reduce your pithy "novel" to anything we please AND YOU ARE POWERLESS TO STOP US MUWAHAHAHAHA.

*cough*

Sorry. Did I say something?

[Aoslare]

Well, let's see. Wikipedia first says "A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose" and then suggests: "The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction." It then proceeds to list pretty much every example from this thread (most of them with accurate dates).

 

A novel by any other name...

[Alorael at Large]

Is there a technical definition of a novel? I'm unaware of one, but I am not a literary critic (of novels or otherwise), or a literary historian, or anything of the sort. Still, I doubt there is one; the boundaries are necessarily fluid, and given the necessarily arbitrary nature of any such definition, I doubt that there's any clear consensus among the experts, whoever they may be.

 

Are long stories novels? Maybe. After all, we have short stories, novellas, and novels based mostly on length. Are large portions of the Old Testament novels? You can follow the Moses from birth to death as he leads the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, and it's all written in prose.

 

—Alorael, who has, in fact, heard the Epic of Gilgamesh referred to as the first novel. It might be worth distinguishing between original works and collections, however: epic poems, from Gilgamesh to the Iliad to Beowulf, tend not to have authors so much as codifiers.

[Tracer Bullet]

A novel is a product of the imagination. An act of creation on the part of the author. In this sense, NO ancient epic is a novel.

[Khoth]

Someone still made them up. Might not have been one person, and might not have been the guy who wrote it down, but why should that matter?

[Erebus the Black]

For me the true interest threshold of a child was the difference between the graphics of games such as alleycat to candyland, loom to day of the tentacle 2. The move from a "dead"/"dull" colour pallet to a "rich" pallet.

 

Originally Posted By: Biology of Broken Things

You can follow the Moses from birth to death as he leads the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, and it's all written in prose.

 

Sure, but there are large chunks of rules and laws interwoven within the story.

 

the Moses?

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: Voice of Atalante

A novel is a product of the imagination. An act of creation on the part of the author. In this sense, NO ancient epic is a novel.

Unless you don't believe the deeds and events related in those epics actually ever happened like they have been written down. I've also read novels based on real people so, no, I don't think the way you're distinguishing between novels and epics makes any sense.

[Student of Trinity]

Quasi-novel-like things did indeed get produced before Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe. But they came along at a rate of about one in the entire world every five hundred years. Then suddenly they're published every week, on every corner and to every taste; they're a thousand pages give or take a few, and I want to be a paperback writer.

 

That's what I mean by birth of an art form. And that's what I see happening with all these little games.

 

Do Spiderweb games really fit the bill? Maybe not. But how about this as a prediction:

 

Within five years Jeff will be releasing six chapter-length app-games per year, instead of one long game per year. His games have already gotten pretty strongly chapterized; he writes them chapter by chapter, and you play through them that way. If he takes the small step of releasing them that way, too, then he gets to reach a much bigger market. It might not quite make sense yet, but I bet it will within a few years.

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: Alorael

You can follow the Moses from birth to death as he leads the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan...

Is it just me or does this sound like an advertisement for a Bible game? Let's follow the Moses

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

That's what I mean by birth of an art form. And that's what I see happening with all these little games.

Do Spiderweb games really fit the bill? Maybe not. But how about this as a prediction:

Within five years Jeff will be releasing six chapter-length app-games per year, instead of one long game per year. His games have already gotten pretty strongly chapterized; he writes them chapter by chapter, and you play through them that way. If he takes the small step of releasing them that way, too, then he gets to reach a much bigger market. It might not quite make sense yet, but I bet it will within a few years.

Isn't this rather the birth of a market for an existing art form? But I can see where you're coming from. Unless it spreads it may just as well not have existed.

I do like your prediction. Hey, if it works for Monkey Island, why shouldn't it work for Jeff's campaigns?

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Within five years Jeff will be releasing six chapter-length app-games per year, instead of one long game per year. His games have already gotten pretty strongly chapterized; he writes them chapter by chapter, and you play through them that way. If he takes the small step of releasing them that way, too, then he gets to reach a much bigger market. It might not quite make sense yet, but I bet it will within a few years.

I strongly disagree with that prediction. This prediction makes sense for a chunk of the CRPG market in general, definitely including some portion of the old-school niche. But it fails to take into account both Jeff's willingness to follow through on his own ideas even when they are different from what everyone else is doing, and his formidable obstinacy and resistance to change.

[Student of Trinity]

Well, we'll see.

 

Jeff is stubborn, all right. But I think it will get so easy for him to dole his games out in chunks, he'll just be unable to resist.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

Originally Posted By: Alorael

You can follow the Moses from birth to death as he leads the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, and it's all written in prose.

Sure, but there are large chunks of rules and laws interwoven within the story.

The appendix as an art form wasn't really popularized until Tolkien. ;-)

(Great. Now I'm wondering how Tolkien would have organized the Pentateuch.)

EDIT: Man, a Spiderweb game focused on small, self-contained chapters would be awesome! Jeff should really start making something like that! Maybe he'll even allow for third-party content generation! Cool!

(In all seriousness, chapter-based releases could work, but would they significantly increase sales? Also, the effort needed to release/market a chapter isn't that much less than the effort needed to release an entire game. Spiderweb is a small company, so I doubt they'd incur unnecessary overhead.)

[Aoslare]

Yeah, I think this fits with the question of a price point. Jeff has blogged about how everyone tells him his games cost too much, but he seems quite sure the sales increase of an iPhone-game-level price drop would not even nearly come close to making up for the loss in profits from people who buy it even for the higher price.

[Student of Trinity]

Dropping his one game a year to iPhone-game price would kill him. But converting his one game a year into six iPhone-games, each at 1/6 the price, might help him a lot. Most people who were willing to pay full price for the full game would happily buy the whole series, so he's not losing much. He can release his one demo chapter as a free 'lite' version, and then he hooks anyone who might want to pay just a few bucks to go just a bit further, instead of only those willing to take the plunge for $30 and the whole rest of the game at one crack.

 

Where I maybe see a problem is this. A lot of the appeal of playing one of Jeff's long games is building up your character through the successive stages. So obviously an app-ified version would have to somehow allow import of characters from the previous chapter. But even the fact that it was possible to jump ahead, and simply start at the end game, might somehow take away some of the thrill.

 

I dunno. It's possible as it is to edit a 'trainer' into one of Jeff's games, or simply turn on the editor. Does that remove the fun of building up your character honestly? For me, not really. So maybe this isn't a problem.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

(Great. Now I'm wondering how Tolkien would have organized the Pentateuch.)

He would probably dump the laws and genealogical information into an appendix since they slow down the story development.

[Student of Trinity]

The concept of editing a sacred text is interesting. It's generally accepted by academic scholars that the present text of the Bible was assembled from previous documents, often in several stages. But texts that are regarded as sacred as they are being assembled tend not to be edited for coherence or to present a clear message.

 

Or at least, if they are edited that way, we never know!

 

What we can see are a lot of pretty blatant inconsistencies or awkwardnesses, that look just as though somebody simply stuck two or more texts together, with little effort at joining them smoothly. There's quite a lot of that in the Bible, to the point where there are rarely more than few pages in a row that really seem to have been composed together from scratch. The Bible as a whole is a grab-bag collection of several dozen 'books'; but most of those books are themselves collections.

 

To imagine that on top of all that crude redaction, there were also a lot of smooth editing, would seem to add up to an implausibly large amount of editing in total. People presumably did have a few other things to do with their time, in millennia past, than sit around constantly revising the scriptures. So the conjecture is that the patchwork assembling we can detect is pretty much the only editing that occurred.

 

I think that says something about the mindset that would take any interest in a sacred text, anyway. People feel free to collect and combine divine revelations, but not to eliminate or alter them. The most extreme instance of this is the persistence of the four canonical Christian gospels, with no serious effort ever having been made to merge them into a single straight version.

 

So this attitude tends to produce pretty heterogeneous documents that are open to a range of interpretations. That's probably a survival trait for sacred texts.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Voice of Atalante

A novel is a product of the imagination. An act of creation on the part of the author. In this sense, NO ancient epic is a novel.

That's a way to define novels, but what makes that necessary? How is it then possible to novelize movies?

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

For me the true interest threshold of a child was the difference between the graphics of games such as alleycat to candyland, loom to day of the tentacle 2. The move from a "dead"/"dull" colour pallet to a "rich" pallet.

Maybe. I'd argue that the latter of those changes was also about audience. Loom wasn't really intended for children. In fact, text-heavy games (like Loom initially, but not Loom in its second and current incarnation) have a fairly high barrier to entry. Now that video games can talk that barrier has gone way down.

Originally Posted By: Biology of Broken Things

You can follow the Moses from birth to death as he leads the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, and it's all written in prose.

Sure, but there are large chunks of rules and laws interwoven within the story.
The editing wasn't good enough.

—Alorael, who made one little mistake in deciding that Moses was more compelling than the Israelites that he'll never live down. But the Moses is pretty cool anyway.

[Tracer Bullet]

Originally Posted By: Locmaar

Unless you don't believe the deeds and events related in those epics actually ever happened like they have been written down. I've also read novels based on real people so, no, I don't think the way you're distinguishing between novels and epics makes any sense.

It does. A novel is an individual act of creation. No one would have heard of, say, Arrakis, were it not for one individual--the author. Things like Beowulf, despite the fact that we are reputed to have only one original text, were the product of a collective imagination, whether or not ne individual did the compiling. Make sense now?

[Aoslare]

I understand the distinction you're drawing, but I don't see how that's an integral part of what makes a novel.

 

For comparison, most fairy tales were the product of a collective imagination. But there are also so-called 'literary' fairy tales created by a single individual: Hans Christian Anderson is probably the most famous writer of them, but it was a popular genre for a while. Distinctions are often made between the two types of stories, but nobody objects to both being called fairy tales. Why does the novel require this distinction?

 

Here's another problem. Is it the EXACT FORM of the work that has to have been created by one person, or the IDEAS of it (the characters, plot, etc.)? For example, suppose I decided to take the story of Beowulf and write a book-length story based on it. I might add things in a few places, and include a lot of elaboration, rumination, and description not present in the original. Clearly my book is _not_ the same thing as the original Beowulf. But is it a novel?

 

If the answer is "yes" -- then the Standard Akkadian version of the Gilgamesh epic is too; we know that its source material was around for at least a millenia beforehand and presumably did not have a single author, but that version (the main version of Gilgamesh we have) was indeed written by a single person, one Sin-leqe-uninni. (And don't tell me that it was an oral tradition simply transcribed by one person, because there is no "simple transcription" in Akkadian -- the same sentence can be read in many ways, and written in even more in Akkadian, thanks to some fluid syntactic structures and its frequent insertion of pieces of Sumerian.)

 

If, however, the answer is "no" -- then a whole SLEW of books typically referred to as "novels" that are based on mythological stories are not, in fact, novels. Mary Renault's _The King Must Die_, Ursula LeGuin's _Lavinia_, nearly everything by Robert Graves and Marion Zimmer Bradley... this list goes on.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Slartucker

Here's another problem. Is it the EXACT FORM of the work that has to have been created by one person, or the IDEAS of it (the characters, plot, etc.)? For example, suppose I decided to take the story of Beowulf and write a book-length story based on it. I might add things in a few places, and include a lot of elaboration, rumination, and description not present in the original. Clearly my book is _not_ the same thing as the original Beowulf. But is it a novel?

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton (sort of).

[Locmaar]

Originally Posted By: The Voice of Atalantë

Originally Posted By: Locmaar

Unless you don't believe the deeds and events related in those epics actually ever happened like they have been written down. I've also read novels based on real people so, no, I don't think the way you're distinguishing between novels and epics makes any sense.

It does. A novel is an individual act of creation. No one would have heard of, say, Arrakis, were it not for one individual--the author. Things like Beowulf, despite the fact that we are reputed to have only one original text, were the product of a collective imagination, whether or not ne individual did the compiling. Make sense now?

An idea maybe an individual act of creation, a character, a story... but an entire novel? I don't know. There are just too many cultural and/or historical references contained within most novels to still call them individual acts of creation. I'm sure we can find a difference between most epics (like the Silmarillion) and most novels (like Riven Rock) but individuality in the act of creation does not work for distinguishing between the two.

Also, there's no reason why it should as others have pointed out.