4 Books and 4 Games

I recently was charged with putting together a short presentation to introduce myself to the incoming LDT cohort, with the caveat that I shouldn't do the classic academic "here's my research" thing. So I decided instead to highlight four books and four games that have been important to me.

The not-so-subtle hidden message here is that I increasingly believe that games and books belong on the same cultural plane. Game literacy is as much a reality as book literacy. Games are as diverse in purpose, genre, quality, and artistry as books are. Games are, for many people, as important in shaping our selves as books.

But I didn't talk about any of that in my talk. I just shared the titles and a little about why each book or game has been important to me. So that's what I'm going to do here.

Book One - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, by Douglas Adams

Or, "the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's trilogy," which ended up having five books and vague prospects of a sixth at the time of Adams's unfortunate death. This series of books was what made me a reader. I remember my dad reading them to me when I was little. I also remember picking them up and reading them on my own once I realized that I didn't need someone else to read to me. I still read them once every couple of years. Many of the jokes are old friends, but I'm continually amazed how each time I read the series I find new things to guffaw at that I never fully appreciated before.

For a time, at least, Adams was also a major influence on my writing as well. I'm not as funny as he is, by any stretch, and I fear that becoming more of an academic has in many ways made me a less fluid writer. Even so, deep down a lot of my assumptions about what good writing looks like come from my early experiences as a reader huddled up with Ford and Arthur as they chased Chesterfield sofas across the plains of prehistoric Earth.

Game One - Civilization II, by Microprose

If Hitchhiker's Guide made me a reader, Civilization II made me a gamer. I had played many games prior to discovering Civlization, in truth, but most of those were sports games on an old Sega Genesis. They were fun, but they were also arcade-y and action-y. Not really my style, in the long run. Civilization was my first brush with PC strategy gaming, and like so many young nerds of my generation, my first afternoon with the game quickly turned into my first night, my first gaming all-nighter. I distinctly remember that first session, and my shock at seeing my clock reading 5:00 AM (well passed my bedtime). I remember resolving to play just a few more turns, but ultimately completing an entire game before finally calling it quits at 10 or so in the morning.

The Civilization games aren't just addictive, though. They are deep, complex, strategic. They reward careful planning. They encourage exploration and discovery. It was a revelation to young me that games could be more than just button-mashing. My mind had to work when I played Civilization, and it was glorious. I maintain that strategy games have made me smarter, more strategic in my thinking in the real world, more metacognitive. That started with Civilization II.

Book Two - Phenomenology of the Spirit, by Hegel

Of course I had to pick a program book from St. John's for this list, and with some difficulty I settled on Hegel. Phenomenology of the Spirit is a horrible mess. It reads like a poorly written instruction manual that has been translated from English to German and back several times. But underneath its horrid language it's brilliant, and more importantly, it absolutely permeates the modern Academy. Dialectical materialism - a Marxist offshoot of Hegelian logic - is the basis of almost all modern social and literary criticism, but more to the point the very notion of dialectic and perfectibility underlies the very scientific processes that drive every field of research. Hegelian thought may be strange in many ways, but it is strange in precisely the ways that academic research as a whole is strange. Of all the valuable experiences bestowed upon me by the St. John's program, perhaps none has been so (surprisingly) relevant as those gleaned by reading Hegel.

Game Two - Football Manager, by Sports Interactive

I was never a soccer fan growing up, but after seeing numerous glowing reviews of the FM series on various sports sim forums - especially those of Out of the Part Baseball - I decided to give it a shot. The result: over time, this game has supplanted all other sports simulations in my gaming library. I don't really want to know how much time I've put into my longest running save file, which I started playing back in 2010 and still dip into today.

I especially include this game, though, not because I love it, but because of what it demonstrates about the value of simulations for learning. I literally knew nothing about soccer tactics before I started playing FM. My brother played the sport growing up, sure, but I gained little by osmosis from him. And I've never watched much soccer beyond the World Cup and the occasional European Champions League match or MLS final. And yet I've become totally conversant in the tactics of the game by virtue of my experience with FM. I can watch the sport on TV and recognize the influence of formations, play styles, and approaches to the game that otherwise would be totally invisible to me, and all because of a simulation game. I'm an advocate of games as teachers of metacognition, but I think that some games can also teach content. In this case the content may not "matter" in the way that, say, history or math content does, but it is nevertheless, to me, a proof case.

Book Three - Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

My advisors would be the first to tell you that I've struggled to pin down my educational identity. What, really, do I specialize in? Well, if I had to pick a sub-area of education that I feel most expert in it would be curriculum design. That's not so much my research area - which is part of my problem as a researcher - as a part of educational practice I'm comfortable with, but it is nevertheless a vital skill in a variety of settings (including in constructing research studies; often curriculum needs to be written before a study can be conducted). Understanding by Design is the book that summarizes where I stand on curriculum. It was enlightening to encounter and read as a Master's student in 2009, and it remains central to my thinking about curriculum today.

Game Three - Journey, by That Game Company

I'm a PC strategy gamer at heart, but that doesn't mean that I haven't played other types of games. An important thread of modern research and debate in gaming has to do with the ability of games to weave narratives. A lot of the hullabaloo over whether games count as art comes down to this question: can they tell a story? I don't think that's a fair question to ask because it leaves out too many types of games. Some games aren't trying to tell a story, and some games are engines for a variety of stories without having a specific agenda. Nevertheless, games that are trying to tell a story can, and they can do it well. Journey, I'd say, is perhaps the best example of a game that is also a work of art and a narrative (even though there is no text in the entire game).

I debated with myself as to whether I should have put the Mass Effect series in this slot, or Shadow of the Colossus. The former is obviously a testament to RPG story-telling on a grand scale, while the latter is perhaps closer to Journey in its haunting beauty and vast landscapes. But both of those games, at their heart, are not made or broken by their story telling. Mass Effect is an RPG with a story, but it's also an action game, a fighting game, a shooter. That doesn't make it bad, but it does mean that there are really two distinct things going on: action game and story. The two rarely intersect.

Shadow of the Colossus is, similarly, a puzzle game at heart. Its puzzles are unbelievably beautiful, and it's not exactly conventional in its approach... but each challenge does have a specific answer that you need to puzzle out. It has a well-constructed story intervening, and a beautiful game world to go with it, and yes, the story and the game mechanics are better integrated than they are in Mass Effect, but you really are trying to solve puzzles.

Journey, on the other hand, really is a story. Inasmuch as it has puzzles - and it does - they are trivial and minimalist. The point of the experience is to have an experience. A literary experience, I'd say. The brilliant multiplayer integration - the most graceful I've ever seen - only adds to that experience. In short, it's a work of art that matches any novel I've read or movie I've seen, and I can't do justice to it in this little space.

Book Four - Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

This is my favorite book. I've read it I don't know how many times, I've taught it as part of my creative writing class, and I often pick it up to read a random passage. It's a book about just about everything: love, storytelling, imagination, history, leadership, perception, architectural design. You name it. It's the best book about epistemology that I've ever read.

Above all, at this point in my life, it speaks to me about the challenge of doing social sciences research. People are complex things, learning is a complex process, and making sense of the world doesn't just happen. I often wonder what Calvino's writing process was like for this book; whether he sat at a desk imagining or if he wandered the streets of Venice and composed his passages from actual witnessed scenes. Probably a combination. Regardless, his efforts (or at least his character Marco Polo's) strike me as much like the researcher's: trying to tell the story of a place when there are dozens of stories, trying to communicate with an audience that does not speak your language, trying to master an empire of knowledge when such an empire is inherently unmasterable.

Game Four - Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and Victoria series, by Paradox Interactive

These "grand strategy" historical simulation games are among my favorites as a game player, but also signify an important future direction in my research. Increasingly I have come to realize that I can't just leave games to the side. I've often thought that I care too much about games to research them, but I have begun to think that maybe I care too much about games to not research them. True, research in games is expanding rapidly, and there are lots of people excited about, at the very least, the commercial opportunities that games for learning represents. But I think there's also a more idealist opportunity here: there are games which I suspect are good at teaching thinking, and might be good at teaching content too.

Researchers have investigated historical simulation games for teaching history before, but I don't know that they've looked at any of these games. They're too complex, probably, for a traditional classroom. The barriers to entry are too high. They take too long to learn to play.

But difficulty is a poor excuse for ignoring what could be tremendous educational resources. Historical simulations of this scale are fascinating not just because they contain tremendous amounts of historical content, but also because they are consciously designed artifacts that are themselves opportunities for conversation. What is abstracted and in what way? What does the geographical setting or the game mechanics say about the view of history the game designers hold? Do the historical time period divisions between these games make sense? Why or why not?

In short, there's not just history here, there's historiography. As a curriculum designer, that's exciting to me, and as a researcher there's an opportunity to see not just if games generically can support learning generically, but if the very best that games have to offer in historical simulation can teach not just history, but historical thinking.

Lacertilian Politics

In the process of rereading (for the so-embarrassingly-many-I-can't-remembereth time) the 5-book long Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy," I stumbled across a passage I did not particularly remember, but which I think is as good a summary of electoral politics as you'll find anywhere.  It goes thus:

[A giant robot from outer space] held up a hand.
"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this ...
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see."
[Arthur Dent speaking] "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford ... "nothing so simple.  Nothing anything like so straightforward.  On its world, the people are people.  The leaders are lizards.  The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford.  "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get red of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said ford.  "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

Needless to say, the next time I'm accused of "wasting my vote" on a third party candidate who has no hope of winning, I think I'll refer the accuser to this passage.  At a certain point you just have to stop voting for the lizards, don't you?

Reflecting on The Once and Future King

I've never been an Arthurian Legend buff, really.  Knights in shining armor and round tables didn't grab my imagination in the way that, say, spaceships or fictional baseball leagues did.  Not that I was opposed to the idea, but the child's fascination with the dragons and unicorns and fairies and such of fantasy worlds never grabbed me.  No wonder I read a lot more Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov than I did, well, whoever the famous fantasy authors are supposed to be.  While I did, like a good little nerd, read and love Tolkein, I got through half of the first Harry Potter book before giving up, whereas the Ender's Game saga captivated me for months.

So what I'm saying is, I've always been a science fiction reader, and never a fantasy reader.  I took a flier, however, on T.H. White's The Once and Future King, a book most famous among my generation for the film adaptation of its first section, The Sword in the Stone.  It's a kind of historical fiction / fantasy hybrid, based upon the historical myth of King Arthur, but infused with non-nonchalant cameos by witches, wizards, unicorns, and a particularly strange knight errant and his complex Questing Beast.  Indeed, a big part of what makes White's retelling of the Arthur story so engaging is the non-fantastical treatment he gives to the fantastic.  When, for example, the trio of young Orkney tribesmen (Gawaine, Agravaine, and Gareth) venture out to capture a unicorn, the reader is tempted to suspect that there are no unicorns, and that the errand is a foolish and impossible one.  And yet, the unicorn appears - thanks to the presence of a maiden with the party, who they use as bait - and is promptly savagely killed by Agravaine, the most ruthless and bloodthirsty of the brothers.

The unicorn scene is perhaps the most emotionally intense of the novel, not merely because of the brutal destruction of the beautiful unicorn, or even the recognition by the other two brothers of how horrible their actions really are.  No, it's so intense principally because of how well White walks a paradoxical line between the matter-of-fact appearance of the unicorn and the wonder even the bloodthirsty brothers have for the creature.  Agravaine kills the animal, it seems, because it is beautiful and pure, his own brutality and the complicity of his brothers a condemnation of the brutality and complicity of human nature when faced with not only the natural, but the wondrous.

Of course, these Orkney brothers will be among the principal of Arthur's knights.  The time White spends describing them and their home serves a dual purpose of providing background for some of the book's major conflicts and, perhaps more importantly, showing the reader what it is that Arthur has to work with when he strives to replace the rule of Might and Force with the rule of Justice and Law.  The men who will enforce his new order are the same men who would murder a unicorn for no good reason, simply out of their own malice.  What hope does his round table have.

The Once and Future King is, in the end, a tragic story.  It is no wonder that the first section and the first section alone was made into a movie, for it is Arthur's childhood that is the stuff of joy and magic.  Indeed, magic and wonder conspicuously decrease as the story progresses, as Arthur ages, as Merlyn is whisked away to a solitary imprisonment.  A story that begins with Arthur being turned into a fish, a bird, and an ant ends with men firing canons at each other, with the entire line of King Pellinore (the knight errant) and his Questing Beast slain, with a heartfelt conversation between Arthur and a young page who's charge it is to remember the idea of justice.

The contextual shell of the book is that effort, then, to install justice in place of might.  King Arthur is an idealist, a young squire elevated to his station as King thanks to happenstance, but thanks also to a wily magician cum tutor in Merlyn.  It is interesting that Arthur himself blames Merlyn, in the end, for many of his failing.  Merlyn is a man of ideas, it turns out, ideas that Arthur believes almost unquestioningly, simply because of his faith in the magician.  While those ideas may still be good, Arthur's attempts to make them reality - to turn his medieval English world into a more just and lawful one - are thwarted by the nature of the men who he is trying to reform.  We might put it this way: Arthur is always just and good, and never needed to be made into those things.  Little wonder, then, that he can't figure out how to change other people, when he has so little experience changing himself.

Of course, the story is more complicated than that, because there are chapters in which White describes the incredible successes of Arthur.  Oh, those chapters have their own mocking tone, intentional over-exaggerations about the transformations of the land.  One of those hyperbole's ends with the wonder flourish, "a plethora of napkins," while another describes how, where once the roads were too dangerous to travel, not pilgrims can tell each other dirty stories on the way to Canterbury.  Such jokes, however, belie the real improvement of Arthur's England.  While over-the-top to the point of being impossible to take seriously, the descriptions of the land before Arthur's reign are as terrible as the new order is wonderful, and it is impossible not to think that, while the advent of a Chaucerian world may be cause for derision, it is also a significant improvement over a world where Chaucer would be unceremoniously slaughtered.

The heart of the novel, however, is not Arthur's search for a just society.  Indeed, a book that begins with the education that is supposed to aid that effort - and ends with its failure - is in fact mostly concerned with Sir Lancelot and his relationship with Arthur, with Guenevere, and with God.  This quadrangle has a chapter devoted to it explicitly, wherein White talks frankly - in the tone of a history professor, more than a novelist - about Lancelot's complex emotional and romantic entanglements.  Of course, the most obvious outcomes of the Lancelot story are the ones that influence Arthur's efforts, but that's what makes the telling of them so strange.

What I mean is, in a novel about King Arthur, it is odd that a full half of the book barely mentions Arthur at all.  The first section, the aforementioned Sword in the Stone, is Arthur heavy, as is the closing Candle in the Wind, but the second section, The Queen of Air and Darkness, and the third, The Ill-Made Knight, focus on the Orkney clan and Lancelot respectively.  Arthur is in the background of these sections, but whereas he is a person - a child - in the first section, he more and more becomes a symbol, an archetype, an idea as the novel goes on.  Such, we must suppose, is the fate of Kings.

Lancelot, on the other hand, is unquestionably a man, and a compelling one at that.  The story of his illicit romance with Guenevere is the most human drama of the novel.  It is not, however, a Romeo and Juliet tale, nor is it told with particular exuberance or wonder.  No, White paints a very real picture of their love, neither glorifying nor denigrating it.  They simply are, as if they are meant to be.  And yet, so much time is spent on the circumstances of their love, on the single-minded education of Lancelot in his personal quest to become the greatest knight in the world, and on the simple religious devotion the knight has for both his lover and his God.  It is Lancelot himself - likely in recognition of his hypocrisy in loving and emulating Arthur, whilst cuckolding him at the same time - who chooses the epithet "le chevalier mal fet," or the "Ill-made knight."  That moniker, while at least in part a jest - after all, if Lancelot is ill-made, what are Gawaine or Agravaine, or any of the other, lesser knights? - it is also revealing not only of Lancelot himself, but of King Arthur and his effort to establish Good over Might by use of might.  What knight - even the best in the world - could be anything but ill-made?

The real value of The Once and Future King, however, is not its political, moral, or romantic lessons.  It is a thought-stimulating book to be sure, but much like Cervantes's Don Quixote, that there is depth to the novel doesn't mean that it's not a pleasure to read.  Above all, The Once and Future King is a good story, at once beautiful and joyful, and ugly and tragic.  It shows the best of human nature and the worst, and at various times it made even a seasoned, cynical reader like me laugh and (nearly) cry.  Hey, it even compelled me to write a blog post.  I had the book recommended to me, and I picked it up with the skepticism of a man who usually prefers lasers to lances in his light reading.  What I found is that impressive and seemingly paradoxical combination of light and meaningful reading, of a book where a page called Wart can be turned into a falcon or a goose, and thus learn more about the world than he every could just staying a boy.

In all, The Once and Future King is as wonderful a simultaneous celebration and condemnation of humanity as you'll ever find.  And while you read it, you won't care which it is, because it's just that fun.

Psuedo-Art: Book Titles

I'm fascinated by the modern inclination towards combining mundane things together to make "high art."  You know, like modern art exhibits with microwaves sitting on top of a row of stained coffee mugs, or insanely famous paintings of soup cans.  Far from being offended by the notion that such seemingly random hogwash can pass as artistic, I'm completely sincere when I say I'm fascinated.  Stuff like that is so interesting.

Just as the world of visual art has transformed into something that is neither real, surreal, impressionistic, or any other kind of traditional category, there have been a great many works of music and poetry that do the same thing.  Carson Cistulli's poetry, for example, is the product of a time that has recovered from the fanaticism and occasional incomprehensibility of the beats only to discover that the same spirit is available in much subtler tones.

Perhaps the most understated locus for what we deem - for lack of a better word - "post-modern" art is in the way we title our books.  Gone are the days when a play about a couple of lovebirds is called Romeo and Juliet.  Gone, even are the days when we were satisfied with West Side Story as a retelling.  Now we demand far stranger combinations, which are yet unpretentious.  I think of a book I just finished - a book that is hardly destined for fame or worthy of historical mention.  The book was called Gun, With Occasional Music.

What's most interesting to me is that even mediocre books often have great titles.  Gun, With Occasional Music.  That's one of the most fascinating and compelling titles I've seen, and while the book is entertaining, it could hardly hope to live up to that title.  The cover only makes the title more effective (and yes, that is a kangaroo in a suit).  The fairly standard - sans kangaroo anyway - detective scene here has a title far too mysterious for a mystery.

I'm too disconnected from contemporary literature to dig up the most recent of recent titles, but perusing the nearest bookshelf brings up all kinds of strange and unexpected amalgams of words.  Consider a few, some famous and well-known, others already forgotten:
Insect Dreams: the Half-Life of Gregor Samsa
The God of Small Things
Stripper Lessons
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
A Confederacy of Dunces
House of Sand and Fog

Certainly there have been great book titles throughout history (simple though it may be, War and Peace is about as compelling a title as you'll find), but there's something different in these modern editions.  The cynic might say it's marketing, and I've fallen for the trap, but I don't think that's totally fair.  I think there's more effort put into crafting titles today in part because of the role of sales in the literary world, but also because I think they signal a recognition that books occupy a place somewhere in between the fantastical and the mundane.

A good title, then, is like a good haiku; it surprises, it intrigues, and it creates a whole sense of meaning all its own.  I have not read The God of Small Things, but it still works on my imagination.  And even having finished Gun, With Occasional Music, I can recreate an entirely different meaning from those four words than what the book itself suggests.

A Portrait of a Bookshelf

When you're young and moving from place to place, you have to make difficult decisions about what to do with your books. As a college student I lugged books back and forth from Colorado to Santa Fe, then had to decide which to ship to Honolulu when my family moved there. Now that I'm back in school - in California this time - I had to choose a small selection to send once more across the Pacific. I always sent more books flying around than I need to, of course. Who has time to read - much less read philosophy - when you're a full time student?

I think that some of the books I chose to ship from Hawaii this time I knew I would not read. I sent them more as reminders of concepts, as artifacts of my academic heritage as a Johnny. Other books I think I sincerely believed I might pick up on some odd afternoon. Still others I simply hoped I might finally find time and motivation to read.

So which books did I send? That's the subject of the post. I don't know that I'll hit everything, but there a few indicative selections worth mentioning.

Have Read and Enjoyed, but Unlikely to Read Again Division

Hegel - Phenomenology of the Spirit
Hume - A Treatise of Human Nature
Plato - Republic
Smith - The Wealth of Nations

Yeah, I know. In retrospect, the Hegel is a little bit over-the-top. A small part of my mind probably thought that I might pick up Hume and maybe (maybe) Smith at some point. I loved Hume, and there are parts I haven't read that I really do want to. And, really, The Wealth of Nations is a seminal and still highly pertinent book, but Hegel? If you're not familiar, Hegel is probably one of the most unclear writers in the history of Western philosophy. Just a random quotation to demonstrate:

"We found that a law existed when the relation was such that the universal organic property in an organic system had made itself into a Thing, and in this Thing had a structured copy of itself, so that both were the same being, present in the once case as a universal moment, and in the other, as a Thing."

Yep, I'll be picking that up for fun. I suppose I should chalk the decision to bring Hegel up to Nostalgia, or the craziness of last-minute book selections. I do suppose it would look impressive (and/or pretentious) to visitors, if I had any.

As for Plato, I feel I don't need to justify that one. Who doesn't have a copy of the Republic on their shelf these days?

Have Read and Still Sincerely Hope to Pick Up Again, but Probably Won't Division

Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the whole, 5-book trilogy)
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Pascal - Pensees
Plutarch - Lives

Because I still hope to read these - or at least leaf through them - I don't consider them bad decisions. But really, how likely is it that I'll pick up any of these books? Adams is great, and hilarious, and odds are at some point I'll pull down the series and read it again. But odds also are that time is after my graduation in August. Cervantes is, of course, much heavier reading than Adams, though just as fun. Heavier, however, means less likely. Heinlein I haven't read in a long time, but it's a pretty long book, and not as humorous as Adams or Cervantes.

Pascal and Plutarch are much more serious, though in very different ways. Pascal can be agonizing, but fortunately he writes in little fragments (mainly because he died before he could finish the book, but still). Those fragments make for quick reading, but usually require much contemplation as well. Plutarch's various biographies occupy that awkward space between just a tad too long to read in one sitting and too short to devote serious energy to. I wrote one of my bigger papers at St. John's on Plutarch, so I do have a soft spot for him, and do tend to carry his Lives wherever I move around, but I rarely actually read them (even though there are many I haven't touched yet).

Honestly Do Intend to Pick Up Again Division

Montaigne - Essays
Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Whitman - Song of Myself

Now we're getting into the inner sanctum. Each of these three works I fully do intend to read at least part of. All three books come in larger volumes that I haven't read all of yet, so there's ample opportunity not only for review, but for new exploration. In fact, this summer I already started to read some Montaigne I hadn't read before, so it's far from absurd to imagine that might continue at some point.

As for Nietzsche and Whitman, those two may seem diametrically opposed in many ways, but they also represent two of the more influential works on my own way of thinking. Even though they would probably disagree about a great many things, it is indicative that both loved the music of Beethoven. So perhaps they are not so different after all. Smells like a post for a later time.

Books I Haven't Read Division

Plato - Laws

As with the other divisions, I'm leaving out some things here. In this case, the Laws just about sums it up. When will I read this? It's Plato's second longest dialogue - behind the Republic - and apparently one of his more complicated and enigmatic. Socrates, his usual star, isn't the chief interlocutor (and maybe isn't in it at all? Someone who has read it can let me know...), and it's subject-matter is, as always, heavy. Sometimes our aspirations outstrip possibility.

Reference Books and Religious Books

I won't list all of these, but a substantial portion of my current library is occupied by astrology reference books, a handful of music books, and some of the heavy-hitters from various religions.* All-in-all, these are the books I actually use most. The religious books probably could be fit more into some of the categories above, but the astrology books reside on the lowest shelf, closest to me, because I find myself referencing them whenever I'm running a chart.

* Bible, Rig Veda, Upanisads, Confucian Annalects, Discourses of Buddha, that kind of thing. I do have to admit that I have the New Testament in Greek, but not in English. Consequently, I also have my Greek-English Dictionary, which I will pretend is useful despite the Internet.

Astrology is a post for another time, however. For now, it's back to paper-writing and PhD application-completing.

Storytelling and the Digital Age

I've been thinking a lot about stories recently. What is a story? Why do we love them so much? Does it matter if a story is true? What does it mean for a story to be true, anyway? Some of those questions are at the heart of doing research in the Social Sciences (like Education), but they are also important in the way that we live day-to-day, and the way we communicate with others.

These questions are at the forefront of The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, which I am currently rereading. The story itself is blissfully inconsequential, full of absurdity and drama, humor and even a little sarcasm. That makes it enjoyable to read, but it's not the kind of book that warrants dissection. No, it's basically a children's adventure, meant to be read aloud, meant to be immersive and silly. But it is punctuated by another story: Goldman's narrative about hearing the story as a child, trying to pass it on to his own child (a son, which he does not have), and finding that he needed to abridge the original. This story is as fictitious as the story about Buttercup and Westley, but it is so believable that myriad forums and websites have discussions about whether or not it is actually true. Was there a Morgenstern (the supposed author of the original story)? Is The Princess Bride really based on true events? How could Goldman simply invent this incredibly elaborate and utterly conceivable back story, and why would he?

Mixed in with this background story is a thin layer of truth. Goldman was married at the time he was writing The Princess Bride, and it was born as a story to tell his daughters, and he did end up getting divorced from his wife (as the background story suggests is likely). He even includes a few parenthetical stories in the various introductions - and there are many - that say "this is a true story," to set them apart.

Why does Goldman tell the story this way? I won't pretend to be able to get into his head, nor will I try. Rather, I wonder why we tell stories at all. I know that they are enjoyable, and engaging, and immersive. I know that most people love to imagine different worlds, to take on different identities and to play with the possibilities those worlds and identities propose. So much learning happens, indeed, from the ability to imagine oneself as someone else, to take on a new identity. So much happiness comes from the ability to imagine a better world, or at least a different one. Perhaps that is why the Waldorf schools emphasize myth and imagination so much.

Learning and fun aren't the only reasons here, though. There's also the story teller, who is not always seeking to teach. Perhaps he is always seeking to entertain, but with what tools, and why? Is there a desire for self-expression, no matter how fictitious the story ends up being? Is there a pride in invention? Is there a sense of community the storyteller becomes a part of?

I think of Homer, and the story of Achilles. So much of that story must have been false, but it didn't matter anymore. It was a story that captured what it was to be a Greek, what it was to be a man, to struggle with the knowledge of your own mortality, to be great and finite all at once. It was also a story of clashing steel and spears and gruesome deaths made poetry. All of those things we find in our modern stories - whether they be movies or books or the innovative blog posts at Cardboard Gods or just a series of pictures. I would argue that some video games are build to tell stories, too, some obviously so - Mass Effect, The Witcher, God of War - some not as overtly, but in a way, more deeply - Fall from Heaven, Europa Universalis, Out of the Park Baseball, PeaceMaker. Stories come in so many forms, with such variety in authorship, reality, and audience.

What was the Iliad to Homer? Who was it for? His audience has turned out to be thousands of years worth of Westerners, even though his audience was originally just groups of interested men and their children who they desired to grow up warriors. Was it for Homer, too? And was his audience also an author? That is the modern trend, where blogs are replacing the page, and interactive games are replacing the TV screen, and people are connected with each other almost always, and having conversations. Authorship and audience are becoming the same thing, and yet, that doesn't seem so strange. It's certainly not a return of what stories used to be, but it is a moving forward that simultaneously looks back. "The human voice is making a comeback," a Professor here at Stanford told me. She's right, and while the story is once again becoming central to what it means to communicate, to think, and to learn, it is a very different kind of story that we are beginning to see. Let me tell a little story, to give a little perspective before the end of this post.

The original movies were just films of a stage play. There was no zooming, no panning, no cut-scenes or splicing or, really, editing of any kind. The movie was shot from beginning to end, because it was just another medium to capture and distribute a whole methodology of storytelling that already existed (and had existed for millenia). It wasn't until much later that film makers distanced themselves from their theatrical roots, and began to take advantage of their ability to mix in music, to cut from one actor to another, to take things out of order (consider an extreme version of this: Memento). Eventually, film makers imagined things that it would have been impossible not only to do without film, but even to imagine without film. Technology is often like that.

The kinds of stories, the kind of communication and co-authorship, the kinds of interactive games computers and the internet make possible are only now starting to become apparent. For a long time, computers have been used to do what we always did before, just faster. Even the name - computer - suggests that it does little except perform mathematical operations. Stories, however, that would have been unimaginable before the internet are now starting to crop up. Games are allowing for stories to be told in a way that was inconceivable not twenty years ago. Authorship is becoming collaborative at a level unseen in history. And the effect is probably going to be greater than what anyone anticipates. The internet is one of the most world-changing inventions of human history, not because of what it has done, but because of what it is yet to do.

I cannot say what exactly will change, and how, and to what degree. But through it all there will be language - of one kind or another - and stories, and self-expression, and communication. Indeed, these things are becoming more and more prominent. Those who bemoan the death of reading fail to recognize that, in many ways, more people are reading more often than ever before. They're just reading blogs and tweets and text messages and facebook walls. That may not be satisfying to we bibliophiles, who cling to the printed page, but it shows a profound potential for art and beauty and good writing even in the digital age. What that writing is, and will be, what stories will be told, who knows? Regardless, the future of reading and writing - the future of stories - is an exciting one.