AAWP 2016: Authorised Theft

Creativity is often still Romantically conceived and valued in terms of its purity and originality. However, this paper argues that theft – or revisionism – has been a fundamental methodology of creative practice from ancient times through to the digital age. Creativity is visionary only insofar as it is revisionary, and this is because, as common sense confirms, it always emerges from within a cultural domain. The first section of this paper outlines a revisionary theory of creative praxis that contests the Romantic concept of the auto-intoxicated creative practitioner. Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I advance a theory of revisionary creativity grounded in the ‘field of cultural production.’ The second part of the paper explores how literary revisionism manifests itself as a central methodology of creative practice in the digital era. The paper concludes with a brief study of an interactive digital narrative project that draws attention to theft or revisionism as its central methodology. We Tell Stories is a collaborative venture between Penguin Books in the UK and the digital games developer Six-to-Start, which consists of a series of six interactive digital narratives, each one of which revises a literary genre or classic story. In line with David Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation, this project of theft or appropriation illustrates the revisionary interplay and competition between different media in the cultural field. Certainly the revisionary methodologies of We Tell Stories, as this paper argues, are inextricable from a transitional publishing economy in which the digital both threatens conventional literary publishing and embodies its commercial future.

In the twentieth century many writers experimented with the form of the novel, from the Modernists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; to the Oulipo group of Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec; to contemporary writers such as Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski and Robert Coover. Despite their attempts the overall shape of fiction narrative has not been significantly altered in the popular consciousness. Meanwhile, an entirely new and extremely popular medium for narrative has emerged in recent decades—that present in interactive digital entertainment, or video games—and its writers and developers are grappling with many of the experimental narrative techniques previously attempted by many fiction writers. In this paper I compare the works of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style to the games Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and The Stanley Parable, and argue that there are significant parallels in their use of randomness and narrative repetition and revision. I conclude that significant narrative experimentation is now being played out in the minds of many game writers and designers around the world, and suggest that a popular revolution in narrative form anticipated by writers such as Queneau and Johnson might not take place in the novel at all, but in games. 

This paper will trace my creative process as I move from writer of traditional literature to digital literature. This proposes a number of challenges for the traditional writer moving into game writing. They must understand the reader is a player with motivations related to gameplay (solving puzzles, achievement, progression). Narrative can provide a context (a game world) and incentive (reward) for gameplay, but challenge is to communicate the motivations of the characters within the story to the player. These challenges are tied to the ability of the writer to communicate the story to the development team and work with them to articulate it in the game.
       Facing these challenges meant shifting to a design approach to storytelling as a narrative designer. An approach with a revisionist methodology: thieving the voyage and return plot structure and retelling it with a game narrative toolbox. This analysis of my writing practice shows that literary theft was crucial for considering the wider possibilities of interactivity that move beyond read-response theoretical understandings (Iser 1976) of how the reader constructs their understanding of the text. Given a game is an ergodic text, the player will construct the meaning of the narrative in this way and also construct their game experience.  I argue writing for games requires the author to also imagine the reader’s and the player’s interactions, and this paper investigates the implications of this on the creative writing process.