Democratic Fiction

No, it's not a post about the continuing fiction saga that the Bush administration is pumping out or how un-democratic their actions are - this is a relatively non-political blog after all.

What I'm talking about is this post - The Democratization of Fiction - on a Man!festo blog.

It proposes that

conventional fiction media (prose, film, theater, TV and the rest) are essentially aristocratic in nature: the Artist creates, the audience consumes. Games, contrariwise, allow individual players to participate in the creation of their fictional experience. The developers still shape and constrain that experience, to be sure, but there is no experience without the active engagement of the player; the player may well do something with the construct that the developers had not anticipated; and the ultimate experience is a collaboration in which both sides participate, not something handed down from On High by the Great Artiste. It is, in other words, the antithesis of aristocratic; games are a way for everyman to participate in creating his or her own narrative experience. Games are a democratic artform for a democratic age.

This reminds me of a reading by Steve Himmer I had my students do last term when they were studying weblogs. In it, the writer described the weblog as ergodic literature, a kind of cybertext that is

neither exclusively organic or inorganic, electronic or paper-based, but rather any organization of information that includes a feedback loop, a way for the reader to influence and even orchestrate the production of a text through the process of reading.

The writer of the Man!festo blog proposes that game designers elicit more feedback from players directly, not through their intermediaries of marketers and retailers and sets out to do so. It strikes me that the democracy in a democratic game development platform such as they suggest is less democratic than what Himmer is talking about regarding weblogs. The experience of the blog reader is truly demographic. Not only does the reader have full control of what she reads or how long she spends on any given site or link, but she also has the ability to respond either via commenting functions or by creating and posting her own blog post on any given subject.

Gamers might have the same freedom to create democratic games if the developers find a way of allowing the gamers to actually create those games. If there was a platform like blogger and other hosting programs that allowed gamers to directly respond to their favorite games and even to change them through their interaction, or even to be able to write their own, it might begin to approach the 'democracy' of weblogs. It would be interesting to see - perhaps something built on the model of Machinima (this one uses the settings and characters from the video game The Movies to create a film of one of Bram Stoker's short stories) could accomplish the same kind of democracy that the weblog has.

Having said all that, I think the idea of 'democracy' in video game production and in weblog construction is really two different things. The democracy of video game production proposed by Man!festo is really a better and more direct feedback mechanism, like commenting features on a weblog. I'm not sure how it could ever approach the democracy of blogging because the gap between a gamer's skill level in a given game and her ability to create a game is much larger than the relatively non-existent gap between a blog reader's choice of reading material and her ability to type something in response. There are a lot of experts needed to create a video game whereas any idiot can create a blog... take what you're reading as a case in point!