This week I was particularly interested in the allusions both Jenkins and Murray made to digital media as a kind of theater. What role does theater take in Jenkins’ and Murray’s arguments?
Jenkins draws upon two historical dramatic forms, commedia del arte and the stage melodrama, in the course of his essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Jenkins refers to commedia as a historical antecedent of spatial narratives because the flexible and improvisatory structure of the lassi is able to accommodate plot/exposition/story while also being a performance/spectacle, remarking that:
“In commedia del arte […] the masks define the relationships between the characters and give us some sense of their goals and desires. The masks set limits on the action, even though the performance as a whole is created through improvisations. The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions […] the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical tradition.” (Jenkins 8)
In this example, the game player is compared to the commedia actor, both of whom have command (literally) over the action of the plot by virtue of their attunement to media conventions. This seems to suggest the importance of media literacy for becoming a masterful video gamer, just as performing in a commedia lassi requires a mastery over the codified gestures and sayings of genres of character. Jenkins configures game playing as a kind of performance, something echoed in Murray when she argues that the “interactor’s navigation of virtual space has been shaped into a dramatic enactment of plot” (Murray 14). Murray continues this analogy when she compares the navigation of space afforded by computers to “a kind of dance” Murray 14). Both media scholars refer to media users as performers of a kind, though neither are particularly attentive to where these performances are located (ostensibly the computer becomes a kind of arena or stage for their actions).
However, later, both Jenkins and Murray address media users as audience members external to the performances media stage. Jenkins discusses the melodrama as offering “a better understanding of how artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant narrative information” (Jenkins 10). While all of Jenkins’ examples of melodrama are films, the reference to the theatrical movement upon which Hitchcock and other drew inspiration cannot be dismissed entirely. Melodrama, and Victorian melodrama in particular was notable both for its technological innovations and its populist appeal, often borrowing tricks and scenarios from other forms of popular entertainment (phantasmagoria, pleasure gardens). In the present day, melodrama is often derisive, describing works with overwrought plots, raw emotional appeal, and spectacle. Jenkins’ use of melodrama casts the game player as an audience member, their rapt attention fallen prey to the populist appeal of the melodrama.
Murray echoes this appeal to the media user’s rapt attention. She quotes Weizenbaum, the developer of ELIZA as saying that people believed ELIZA was real, “’just as theatergoers, in the grip of suspended belief, soon forget that the action they are witnessing is not ‘real’” (Murray 8). Later she describes a door shutting behind a player in Zork as “startling and immediate, like the firing of a prop gun on the stage of a theater” (Murray 13). Again, the game player as audience member is wholly taken in by the stage spectacle in a state of suspended disbelief.
I’m struggling to bring this around to any real conclusion beyond the fact that theater appears in these works as a useful heuristic for the kind of attention to plot and space media elicit. Taken together, these authors suggest that media offers us the chance to be both actors and audience members, kept in a simultaneous state of savvy interaction and rapt spectatorship. It’s interesting to contrast this with Richmond’s paper on vulgar boredom and the ways a slackened state of attention to media helps us to be with ourselves. Has media changed, or has the way we’ve written about media changed? Are Murray and Jenkins' observations just an instance of what Bolter and Grusin might call remediation, finding old media in new media, or has media changed such that these theatrical metaphors feel outdated?
Works Cited
Jenkins, Henry. "Game Design as Narrative Architecture." http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~bogost/courses/spring07/lcc3710/readings/jenkins_game-design.pdfv
Murray, Janet. "From Additive to Expressive Form." Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1997. (Note that the page numbers were cut off from the PDFs we had for class, so I've just used the page number in the PDF).