Narrative, Science, and Unpredictability

So, Brian, I feel as though you and your friends are taking me traveling in a new land, strangely like the one I already live in.

I've just realized that our conversation is not just about new forms of narrative. It's also about new forms of science. It's a resurrection, in a new location, of the old conversation about two cultures.

I realized this when you spoke about alternative reality games being like "science in the round"--a phrase I've never heard before, though I like the three-dimensionality of it. It puts me in mind, not only of the "pre-disciplinary" science of the eighteenth-century, but also of much contemporary work on "science with a social dimension," the sort of science that attends (for example) to gender, or that pays attention to the specifics of location, of the "somewhere" that science is practiced.

Sean Steward actually goes so far as to say that, in creating alternative reality games, you guys "just accidentally re-invented Science as pop culture entertainment"; that science was "the first, or greatest, example of massively multi-player collaborative investigation and problem solving." Whoosh. That comment just expanded the range of our discussion ten-fold, from one located in the humanities to one that incorporates science--really all of inquiry.

I spent some time this morning with Sean's very acute and astute description of Alternate Reality Games, and I want to talk a little bit here about what I noticed, about both what seemed very old, and what seemed to me very new, in his account. The humanities part comes first. What struck me most is how much your all's new art form resembles what we do in traditional college literature classes, where reading a book is NOT a private activity, but rather a fundamentally interactive project: "presented with the evidence of the text," students "tell the story as they see it," and then we re-write it together, incorporating all our different perspectives. This is reader-response theory, again: readers have a key role in creating the fiction, "influencing
what happens to Narnia" by means of their interpretations of what's been written. Readers have always done this. Seems to me that alternative reality games make this activity visible and physical. But it's always already been happening in the readers' imaginations, and always already happening collectively when groups of readers get together, when readers of a shared text share a "sense of the communal discovery of a new world."

So, all that seems very old, and I now find myself quite interested in this new version of practices that seem to me well worn in time. But of course what is new here is the communication platform. I'm very struck by Sean's argument that "every communication platform can (and eventually will) create an art form. The novel is part of what the printing press means," and alternative reality games are exploring "what web-based story-telling wants to be." How nicely that sets up my upcoming new course, from novels to blogs!)

But I think that what you are doing goes much further than trying out a form of story limited to a certain communication platform. I think you are actually exploring what story-telling can be, and refusing it the limits that conventional narrative theory (not to mention more contemporary postmodern theory) has accorded it. This is where your work moves beyond the humanities, into science, and into inquiry more generally.

Sean insists that, "when there is no frame around a story, you have to be really careful about reminding the audience that it is, after all, 'just' a story." But once you begin thinking about all processes of inquiry as forms of story-making, and even about science as a particularly disciplined version of story telling and story revising, then the distinction between your communication platform and the world in which it resides gets seriously eroded. In their refusal to be "bound by a communication platform," in caring primarily "about the story, not the platform," alternative reality games are of course highlighting this elision.

The other thing they are highlighting is the fundamental sociality of story telling and sharing. "The world of the infosphere," Sean says, "the web and google and email and instant messenger and cell phones, is about two fundamental activities: searching for things, and gossiping." So much has been made of the power of the internet to perform new, extensive searches (Thomas Friedman is great on this), but it's combining the power to search with the power to talk about what you've found with others, to pass on the gift, that is making the 'net such a strong force in our lives.

This became crystal clear to me when I heard Sean describe your platform as a "front porch space":

"In a Canadian winter, there is a sharp distinction between the Interior (private, personal) space of your home, and the Exterior (public) space outside your front door....in California, I spend a lot of time between those two places, in what you might call Patio Space, or, in the South, Front Porch space... personal, but public....you can see the people on the street, and they can talk to you. Perhaps they will come in and sit a spell....The contemporary web-based culture of blogs and livejournals exists in Front Porch space ...ARGs exist there too in the
personal-but-shared space of IRC channels and community sites. The front porch and the irc channel exist for the mingling of work and gossip."

This image made suddenly vivid to me why I have found the web such a compatible space for my own intellectual and professional work. Growing up in the south, I spent lots of time on front porches, learning about life by listening to stories, and learning to pass it on by telling them. In adulthood, it's clearly this speculative, storytelling, "humanitizing" aspect that has drawn me to and kept me on the web.

So: that's what I learned today. Thank you!

And here's my next question. Sean says that the first basic strategy of interactivity in alternative reality games is "Power without control: Give players power over the narrative in carefully defined situations." What I understand this to mean is that (for example), one of your projects might involve getting your players from A to B. They get to chose the route, but where they end up is decided ahead of time.

If so, this may be where we part company. So much of my own teaching has had to do with giving students increased power over their own education, increased control over the making of their own product. And I've been increasingly drawn to the position that--for example, in assessing what a student learns--we need not identify, ahead of time, what the goals are, where the endpoint of the exploration needs to lie. That it is possible to give our students experiences, and measure what they have learned from them, without measuring it against a pre-determined rubric of what is "right" and "wrong," without saying ahead of time where it is they need to go.

What do you think?