I’ve been preoccupied with a passage in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” for most of the week: on pages 4-5, Jenkins argues that games should be situated within the tradition of spatial stories. Spatial stories (The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey—his examples) he writes, have been marginalized in the canon in literature precisely for their preoccupation with space:
"They are much loved by readers, to be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards defined around classically constructed novels. In many cases, the characters – our guides through these richly developed worlds – are stripped down to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment into a series of episodes and encounters….Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds." (4-5)
I agree with Jenkins that the space of novels has an intimate and specific connection with their beloved-ness (as opposed to their aesthetic respectability), which is why the article excited me – when I think of wanting to go back to the books that are beloved to me (and there’s probably something to be said about nostalgia here as well), I think of wanting to go back to “the world of Harry Potter” or “the world of Jane Austen.” That said, I disagree – strongly, apparently – with most of what he writes in the passage above, especially the idea that what is compelling about space in these novels is space alone. I want to claim that the world of the novels is not the world of the novel without the rest of the novel, without being sure how much of it. Is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them really “the world of Harry Potter”? Are the new Star Wars movies really the “same world” as the original three? Is Fanny Price in the same world as Elizabeth Bennett? I have no definitive answers to these questions (I would hazard: no, yes, yes), but I ask them to point out that space is inseparably and essentially inflected by character and by authorial voice, maybe even by plot, and that perhaps this works differently in different novels.
This is the bittersweet paradox of reading (and watching!): books seem to extend beyond themselves, to create characters who exceed their textual sources, and worlds in which we could always attend another ball, or play another Quidditch match – but don’t. We can’t “go back.” We can only re-read. The fact that many consumers clearly have an appetite for more Star Wars movies, the now-published juvenilia of Jane Austen, a copy of the screenplay of The Cursed Child, might suggest that I’m holding a minority opinion, that lots of consumers do think these worlds are satisfyingly extended, not simply echoed. But I think it could equally suggest that there is a never-fulfilled but continually-reproduced longing for media to extend beyond themselves. Hence the ever-expanding “world of Harry Potter.”
Jenkins writes as if there is something mutually exclusive about space and character; he writes almost as if attention to space withers attention to other elements of the novel like plot and psychology. I think the stakes of his argument are pretty clear in this paragraph: like Murray, wants to claim that space is the distinctive property of games – that games, as a medium, have the ability to do space best, and by doing so, wants to help us see the games as a serious aesthetic medium, the kind of medium that could unleash the true powers of Tolstoy. He may be right – his article made me excited about the unique spatial potential of games. But I don’t understand why the uniqueness of game space must translate to the isolation of game space from other literary elements, through which it is inflected and which do a lot of the work of making it compelling. In other words, I’m questioning whether space can be a “solution” to the problem of narrativity vs. interactivity (insofar as it substitutes for narrative and things created in narrative like character and voice) without limiting, rather than opening up and celebrating, the unique spatial possibilities of games.