ducksanddrakes

While there are many ambitious histories of reading (example / example / example), I have never come across a focused study of re-reading [UPDATE: Jason Mittell of JustTV passes along this excellent recommendation].  But academics re-read all the time.  To prepare classes, I’m often taking a second (or tenth) look at The Epic of Gilgamesh, Taxi Driver, Theory of the Leisure Class, or Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, after which I invariably realize how juvenile my previous impression had been, and congratulate myself on the insight and acuity of the new one.

Sure it’s a fatuous delusion; it might be the most necessary delusion in my profession.

Nowadays, humanistic educators do seem to be some of last few few re-readers out there.  It’s our assignment to backpedal while others proceed, to rewind kindly, to stare at that at which we once gawked.  The downside is that I miss out on those miraculous moments of new encounter, like the first time I saw Goya’s Black Paintings, watched Modern Times or read The Inferno.  Research is the hunting and gathering of scholarly endeavor; teaching is the animal husbandry.

But enough about me, let’s talk about video games.

The other day, I came across this review of Halo 3: ODST by Phillip Lobo.  A fan of Dante himself, Lobo begins his review with an epigraph from Inferno, and then explains himself:

Central to the plot of Bungie Entertainment’s newest installment in the Halo franchise is a descent through nine subterranean levels with the guidance of an artificial intelligence named ‘Vergil’. In the space of this shift between vowels, of course, a vast space of difference is set up [...] These allusions are attempts at a literary tone, and while Dante’s Inferno may require such a tone, Halo 3: ODST certainly does not. On its own it constitutes a compelling literary endeavor.

Ponder the term “compelling literary endeavor.”   Under what reasoning does Lobo make this claim?  If Halo 3 has an obvious “literary tone,” what the content of that tone?

Frankly, nowadays it is hardly revolutionary to point out that games often borrow from novels, comic books and movies.  McLuhan himself says that the content of any medium is another medium.  But in pursuing Lobo’s easy proposition we might serendipitously develop a more interesting question: how does gaming invent a category of “the literary?”   Maybe you think video games are trivial, but if it’s your job to teach Gilgamesh to a generation whose primal experience of narrative fiction comes from something like Halo, then you ought to ask how the latter shapes how the former can be apprehended.  In doing so, we can even get a handle on aspects of the contemporary habit of reading – and re-reading – in a way that might inform future pedagogy.

So what components go in to Lobo’s compelling endeavor?  First of all, there is the use of first-person point-of-view, a “canonical component” of the Halo franchise.  I am not convinced that POV is more literary than cinematic; also, I would argue that this interface is more “second person” than first.   Although we experience a world by occupying the point of view of a putative body inhabiting the fiction, we also receive direct address from narrators and issue plans laterally into that world.  Characters look at us and ask us to choose our own adventures, addressing us as a second person singular, the least common mode in literary writing.

Still, it’s clear that the use of the “first-person POV” feels arty to many gamers.  And Lobo has stronger evidence for his literary characterization in how the game appropriates content from genre fiction.  In Halo, humanity is at war with a theocracy called “The Covenant.”  The adventure begins with a prologue describing an attack on earth, as our player-character (known as “the Rookie”)  and his squad are dropped from an orbital platform to defend “New Mombasa.”  Gameplay begins six hours after our drop, and we must search for the other members of our squad from which we were separated in the descent.

Lobo summarizes what ensues:

In order to regroup with the rest of his squad, to discover if they are even alive, the Rookie (guided by the player) locates pieces of evidence, artifacts, traces that are scattered about the nested streets of the futuristic city.

These traces – a bent and useless sniper rifle, a spent cartridge of medical foam, a helmet embedded into a flickering screen – mark the passage of the Rookie’s companions. The noir trope of the detective is being playfully engaged with here. Locating a trace sets off a flashback, transferring the player into the consciousness of one of the Rookie’s squadmates, revealing the manner in which this trace got to where it was; at least, this is the assumption one immediately makes. A closer look at the text of the game, however, reveals moments of uncertainty, gaps in memory and possible knowledge, that suggest reading ODST as a oneiristic text, a narrative seeped in waking dreams, with the Rookie as the dreamer.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  What Lobo has in mind is that the game is a mystery, and as such it uses semiotic ambiguity, flashbacks, uncertainty of identity, and fantasy in much the way that a modern novel might.

We get sequences like this:

A sniper rifle is found, barrel bent entirely, hanging from a power cable. The flashback recounts a battle high atop the mega-skyscrapers of New Mombasa, during which the rifle is knocked off the edge, disappearing into a layer of clouds below. These clouds, the gray mist separating the sunlit heroism of the Rookie’s squadmates and the Rookie’s own nighttime investigations, is the veil of subjectivity, a barrier that denies absolute knowledge, and marks the edge of dreaming.

Notice how much stock Lobo puts in relativistic knowledge, “subjectivist” settings and anachrony.  This is not to say that Halo is The Turn of the Screw, but it is worth noting that the pleasure that the Henry James reader feels is similar to that of the gamer.  Just as the reader must learn about relative levels of reliability as he or she reads – it’s an active epistemological process – so to does the gamer conceptualize uneven certainties in a world that becomes increasingly more configured during the course of our encounter with it. Lobo explains that the gamer must “construct a history” in a process that is itself “unstructured, ahistorical” and “directionless.”   It is in this reconstruction that the “artistic validity” of the enterprise appears – in ambiguities, circuitousness and resistance to sutured closure.

The point is that in constructing a general literary category appropriate to Halo 3, Lobo has in mind a very specific effect: the epistemological mystery – the feeling that there is a great deal of spin and play in between the irruption of a sign and the assignment of meaningful knowledge to it.  Indeed, the author seems utterly uninterested in the latter half of the gameplay, after the mystery has been solved and the Rookie proceeds to rescue his captain and return to the sunlit surface where “the morning rises and his dreams are made true.”

So here’s my question: if epistemological mystery is at the heart of popular gaming, which is a big part of modern adolescence, then what leverage does this situation provide for the study of old-fashioned print and paper writing?

For one thing, it suggests that it would be shrewd for educators to start out putting a premium on philosophical and aesthetic approaches, rather than ideological ones, focusing on the kind of thinking that goes on in interpretive literary situations.  Introductory courses could foreground those aspects of literature that feature incremental knowledge-acquisition – outright mysteries will do, but so will Sophocles, Voltaire, Dostoevsky and Montaigne. Indeed, the model of ambiguity and play that drives Halo curiously puts students more in the realm of Proust and Tarkovsky than in the hands of Hemingway and Eisenstein.

Finally, consider Lobo’s last observation about the pleasure of playing Halo 3:

There is another narrative, a collected narrative in stills and audio files, that the player can acquire by finding certain spots throughout the wandering, and I admit that I didn’t finish gathering these story pieces before I finished the rest of the game. Therefore I am unable to speak to what role these fragments play. But I have every intention of going back and hunting them down, piece by piece, until I have the whole picture. This is a game well worth sinking into, a dream worthy of analysis, an investigation that, for me, hasn’t quite ended.

One vital facet of video games is that they are replayed, in a kind of regularized repetitive encounter that humanists should recognize – a search for alternative narratives, hidden levels and fuller meanings.  That should be good news.  If Halo is literature (or, serves a similar role to literary fiction) then the history of re-reading may actually be entering a golden age.

And we should use that fact to shape teaching.  What might happen if we deliberately cut crucial details, scenes and passages from classic novels and films, then ask students to generate scenarios for filling in the gap, and identify the ramifications of each option?  Why not assign the same text in senior seminar that you assigned in the intro lecture?  How about instructing students to reread a book after they have already written an essay about it, then write a second paper on an unrelated subject, but using exactly the same sources?    Instead of text-then-theory or theory-then-text, let’s give text-theory-text a go.

This approach would at least build new skills on familiar ones, rather than pitting the old against the new.  Today’s students may have a woefully inadequate attention-span, and their practice of close reading is no match for those of a generation inured in 19th century novels, modernist poets and the French New Wave.  But what the incoming class does have is a pre-existing instinct for going back over old ground, hounding out additional pieces of fragmented fictional worlds that they missed the first time through.

Denigrate that instinct all you like, but exploit it.  We err in trying to make the video game generation into astute readers; we’d have more success making them into astute re-readers.  At least it’s something we’ve got in common.