Literary Theory

Virtual worlds fall awkwardly between literary theory and dramatic theory, and are claimed by both.

• Literature. Authors tell stories. Some stories have multiple authors. Some stories are made by the telling. Some stories are modified as they are told. Some stories are improvised as the author proceeds. Some stories are interactive with the reader. Some stories allow the reader to become the author.

• Drama. Actors perform plays. Some plays have multiple dramatists. Some plays are scripted. Some plays are frameworks. Some plays are improvised by the actors. Some plays are interactive with the audience. Some plays allow the audience to become actors.

The view of literary theorists is that ultimately action in virtual worlds is textual ¹, therefore literature. The view of drama theorists is that ultimately action is performance, therefore drama. Researchers from both fields realize that the other has a point, however, and that with virtual worlds they share common ground. Occupying that ground already is the role-playing community, who have basically had to develop their own theories from scratch and now find that these are attracting more widespread attention.

So, literature first.

From the point of view of virtual world designers, the most interesting thing that students of Literature have to say about virtual worlds is that they do not have story in the conventional sense. Virtual worlds are open storytelling environments—that’s precisely what literary theorists find exciting about them. It’s almost taken as a given that conventional storytelling ideas do not apply to virtual worlds. There are plenty of reasons why virtual world designers might want them to apply ², but there doesn’t appear to be any interest in this from people whose job it is to study story. Indeed, some come right out and say as much: Jesper Juul, looking at ³ narrative as it occurs in computer games in general ⁴, concludes that the two are in conflict and that “it is the strength of the computer game that it doesn’t tell stories.”

The major work on literary theory as applied to virtual worlds is Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext ⁵. Although his book covers a wide range of what Aarseth calls ergodic literature ⁶, the author is himself a former player of TinyMUD (the original, rather than the codebase class) and he devotes a chapter to the subject of virtual worlds. Ergodic literature is not so much text as a machine that generates expressions of text, and therefore virtual worlds are extreme examples of the concept in action. Although cautioning against romanticizing the reading and writing processes of virtual worlds, Aarseth is upbeat about their prospects as a meaningful mode of literary communication.

Aarseth’s and others’ views are taken to task ⁷ by Julian Kücklich, who sees a number of problems with the application of literary terminology to virtual worlds (and, from the examples he gives, he has a point, too). His solution is to view virtual worlds as a deconstructive process, where people discover meaning only by taking it apart. It’s possible that both he and Aarseth are right, however, and that it depends on the players as to which applies ⁸.

Some other papers concerning literature and virtual worlds:

• Jeffery Young, 1994 ⁹. Young evangelizes on behalf of virtual worlds as places where human beings can express themselves. He wants virtual worlds to be studied for their speech and for their writing, and with controlled enthusiasm explains exactly why. That this paper seems a little dated now is perhaps because Young succeeded in his aims.

• Mikael Cardell, 1994 ¹⁰. In this early attempt to look at virtual worlds from the point of view of literary theory, Cardell compares the processes involved in the construction of virtual worlds with those of a literary world (that of Lord of the Rings) and concludes that they are fundamentally the same. Nevertheless, although virtual worlds are used as locations for storytelling—quests in particular—he sees little evidence of contextual role-playing in most of them except for social experimentation (for example, cross-gender play).

• Phil Goetz, 1994 ¹¹. This is a classic article that shows how virtual worlds can be used for highly literate role-play. Although the sample transcripts it presents suffer from dead-on-the-page syndrome, nevertheless Goetz makes his point. If you want to know what literary role-play is like in practice, this is where to find out.

• Catherine Wylie, 1999 ¹². In this paper, Wylie argues that virtual worlds are the natural successors of the ancient “memory theatre” approach to storytelling, where stories were told aloud rather than being written down. Such stories evolved in the telling, as the storyteller and listeners engaged in a dialogue. She sees virtual worlds as offering the same opportunity for their communities to direct the moral tide, which are unavailable in other common examples of post-modernism in action.

• Torill Mortensen, 2002 ¹³. Mortensen’s concern is that literary theorists have difficulty understanding virtual worlds because they are removed from them; they speak with experience of literature, but not of virtual worlds. She suggests that instead of looking at virtual worlds remotely, researchers should roll up their sleeves and actually play them ¹⁴. Only through such ethnography-like fieldwork can anyone hope to understand what it really means to be a “manipulating reader.” Interestingly, her own experience of this results in an explanation that reads very much like the hero’s journey.