Flying In Draenor: An Academic Question

For a while now Wilhelm has been trying to bring discussions on issues like the recent Blizzard Flying Controversy back to one fundamental question:

"For me, the great unanswered question in all of this remains how much control over their game should a developer be allowed, whether or not the dev’s view of how their game should be played should trump the player’s view, whether MMO studios be dictating a “right way” to play and should players accept that or not?"

With rather delicious irony commenters have largely ridden over that idea, preferring to bang on about whether they do or don't like to see flying in MMOs and whether or not Blizzard are dealing with the issue in an effective or even-handed manner. The notable exception is Azuriel at In An Age, who picks out the same Wilhelm quote I did to topline his own post.

Once again, though, Azuriel quickly becomes more interested in the underlying reason for the decision/reversal, spinning out a convincing explanation for how it might have happened that still doesn't really answer the question Wilhelm is asking. Which is hardly surprising. It's a question that no-one has really been able to answer in the last half century, though entire careers have been built on the attempt.

When I studied English at Cambridge in the early 1980s there was a war going on although I barely noticed it. I was largely taught by dons of the traditionalist mode, who still harked back to the strictures of Empson and Leavis. We mostly worked under the edicts of New Criticism in which close textual reading was everything.

At least I guess we did. I just read the books, turned in the essays on time and tried not to think about it. No-one really talked about this kind of thing in my clique, probably because most of the people I hung out with were reading Maths or Natural Sciences. My crowd was more interested in going to see Dolly Mixture at The Locomotive in between catching a dozen movies a week at the multiplicity of college Film Socs. and crashing every staircase party we could find. I didn't really take my studies seriously at university - I was mostly there for the social life and the popular culture, something I have never regretted and would still recommend as the best way to spend your college years.

In my final year, however, an event occured that made it impossible to ignore the fact that Something Big was happening. A huge row blew up between the Leavisites, the incumbent establishment of the English Department, and their sworn enemies, an ill-defined loose collective of supposed radicals fronted, largely unwillingly, by Frank Kermode.

It all came to a head over the question of whether Colin McCabe, a flag-waver for the Left and for the kind of structural approach to literary analysis abhorred by the Leavisites, believed by some to be both a drug-dealer and arms-runner, should or should not be promoted to full tenure within the English Department of Cambridge University, generally reckoned at that time to be the best in the world.

I remember going to a protest rally of some kind at the Faculty of English. I can't even remember which side it was for although I would by default have been against whatever I perceived to be the status quo. There were film crews from the main TV networks there and I watched it all play out on TV later that evening, almost certainly the only time Structuralism has featured on the Six O'Clock News.

McCabe wrote a clear and entertaining precis of his side of the affair that was published in The New Statesman a few years back. The Leavisites won their battle, McCabe left, Kermode resigned and I graduated and went back to reading comics and playing video games. I was a decade in recovery before I could read another "serious" novel.

That was probably a lucky break because the decade in question was the 1980s and it was a very good time not to be taking yourself too seriously while at the same time taking things that weren't seen as serious very seriously indeed. All the concepts I'd blithely ignored throughout my university career, if indeed I'd known they even existed, blew up around me.

My post-university social circle talked about Derrida and Foucault with the same intensity and informality they talked about Morrissey and Marr. The New Musical Express, my bible since the early 1970s, ceased to be the agit-prop, situationist playground of refugees from the collapsed underground press and instead became the domain of theory-addled autodidacts like Ian Penman and Paul Morley. After they drove it into the ground, commercially if not intellectually, I jumped ship to Smash Hits. Not even ironically although, of course, in the 1980s it was literally impossible to do anything unironically. Ironically.

Postmodernism was the sea in which we swam and I took to it like a fish to water. Nothing meant what it meant and even if it did no-one knew what that was. Every time I tried to explain my take on what William Gibson was getting at in Count Zero or what the lyrics of Rattlesnakes were trying to say, someone would handwave it all away with a derisive "that's the Intentional Fallacy" .

All these years, right up to researching this piece, I believed "The Intentional Fallacy" , which snorts that it's no business of the author to claim he knows what he's writing about, was some key tenet of Structuralist thinking, probably penned by some inscrutable Frenchman in 1975. Guess what? Turns out it was written in the mid 1940s and it forms one of the key planks of The New Criticism so beloved of the structuralism-loathing Leavisites. It's like the way if you go far enough to the Left you meet yourself coming back on the Right. Or something.

If you go to Literary Festivals, something I strongly advise against, or listen to programs like Radio 4's Bookclub, which I absolutely forbid, you will hear a seemingly endless procession of readers asking authors, sometimes aggressively, more often fawningly, what they "meant" by something they wrote. It always strikes me as about as useful an exercise as asking a cat what's on its mind.

Having grown up and formed my ideas in the smelting pot of uncertainty I find it a lot more uncomfortable trying to pin down what something is "for" or what it "means" than I do just letting it be what it wants to be, what I want it to be and what it becomes when those two things rub against each other. This is, in part, why I play MMORPGs the way I play them, why I often state that all MMOs are sandboxes and why, as a user, I never feel constrained by the intentions of makers.

In reply to something I said in the comment thread to Wilhelm's post linked at the top of this piece he observed "If they opt to not add flying, who is somebody to then exclaim that such an interpretation of the game is wrong? I mean, by bringing that up you are, by analogy, almost claiming domain to edit somebody else’s work."

Well, yes, I am. I do lay claim to that domain. It's a domain that all readers have over all books, all viewers over all films and all players over all games. I edit the work in my mind and it becomes my work. Every reading of every novel is a new work of art.

Although, of course, all of this is breaking down under technology, or perhaps it is. Playing an online game is like reading a book with the author still writing it. It's as if the words on the page could change while you slept so the character who died last night is alive again in the morning and the city she lived in has become a village. The malleability of form must surely soon outpace the ability of critics to parse it, if that didn't happen long ago.

Gaming may be at the forefront of the wave but it's a wave beneath which all certainty in narrative art will soon be drowned. This isn't a very helpful response to Wilhelm's question but it's the one I have. It's just too big a question for anything plainer.

Oh, when it comes to MMOs, the pragmatic answer might be that these are commercial projects, in which the only real point of conflict is what makes the most money now versus what might make more money for a longer time and the only "right way" to play might be the one that keeps the money rolling in, but that's an argument that derails when it runs up against the abutment of art. An Economics or Business Studies grad writing in response to Wilhelm's question might make it fly but I can't.

I can only respond as who I am - ex-punk, post-postmodernist, English grad, vacillating moral relativist. Until tomorrow, when I might be someone else, with a different answer.