Punday, Daniel. "Involvement, Interruption, and Inevitability: Melancholy as an Aesthetic Principle in Game Narratives." SubStance 3rd ser. 33.105 (2004): 80-107. Print.
The reading I chose for this week deals with the literary quality of video games and hypertext fiction. I would like to apply this to the end of my future paper, when I project into the future of technologically influenced fictional works.
Daniel Punday, in his article Involvement, Interruption, and Inevitability: Melancholy as an Aesthetic Principle in Game Narratives, discusses themes common to both digital texts and traditional fiction, and he goes on to discuss the potential emotional impacts different texts have on readers. Purday claims that both game makers and hypertext writers have even more control and influence over their work that pen-and-paper authors, despite interactivity. Digital writers control the pace of new information, while traditional authors must worry about people skipping to the last chapter. Although, he does concede that there is a dichotomy between narrative and user autonomy, with the most autonomous games and hypertexts having the least directed narratives.
Comparisons are then made between “subliterary” sentimental fiction and video games, mainly in reference to similar pacing. While sentimental fiction has an emotionally charged plot, interrupted by long spells of purple prose meant to give the reader time to reflect, games have plot interrupted by bouts of play. Purday relies largely on graphic adventures for examples, and cites the game dialog and cutscenes interrupted by player involvement. Because of the structural similarities, games and sentimental fiction are of equal literary quality.
The text then moves into more and more abstract literature. The next comparison is between nonlinear games and American metafiction. Purday argues that both forms of storytelling abandon linear narrative as a way to convey emotional development. In Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse,” Barth constantly interrupts his own narrative and stifles his own characters’ attempts to get to a funhouse. As that story does not follow any traditional structure, so games and hypertexts need not either. Instead, the constant sense of divorce from any familiar structure instills in the reader a sense of loss and frustration – creating an emotion in the reader or player directly, rather than via a protagonist or narrator. Purday claims this shunning of traditional structure is yet another similarity games have with already accepted forms of fiction, those in the postmodernist movement.
The author then speaks at great length about the differences between “mourning” and “melancholy.” Mourning, as used in this paper and in Freudian terms, is the process where grief is slowly worn away, returning one to a sense of normalcy and adding the experience to one’s character. Melancholy is self contained loss with no end, such as the unresolved “Lost in the Funhouse,” which never returns the reader to a normal narrative. He claims that games share this melancholy state, and follow a structure based on loss, which necessitates goal achievement and a futile attempt to remedy it.
As Purday assumes some familiarity with story structure and digital fiction, this article would best be suited for someone with a middling understanding of both. The sections comparing gaming narratives and hypertext with literary trends were intriguing, and I would recommend this to someone interested in tying digital fiction to the rest of literary canon.
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Incidentally, the word count for this post, without the works cited and paper tie-in explanation, is 483, but it goes up to 546 with the citation/explanation at the top. I hope this is okay, because this further explanation at the bottom isn't helping any.
