Dayten Rose

 

I’m reading Flicker, a book by psychologist Jeffrey Zacks about what happens in our brains when we watch movies. Haven’t finished yet, so what I have to say is half-baked — suffice it to say I like the book, although I always surprise myself by not liking psychology very much — but it makes an argument that shows itself everywhere around the psychology of movies. Namely, it makes a case that films will sooner or later be usurped by, or otherwise incorporate elements of, video games.

Usually, the bones of this argument are something like:

1. For a very long time, movies and video games didn’t exist.
2. Then, movies did exist and video games didn’t. Movies became very popular, though they are sometimes criticized as a passive medium.
3. Video games revealed new frontiers of interactivity in media, thereby solving the fatal flaw of movie watching.

C. Thi Nguyen, discoverer of the “stupid game” and archpriest of whatever it is I’m doing here, devotes the length of his book Games: Agency as Art (which came in the mail just before Flicker, and which I’m so excited to read) to defining the art form of games. He writes:

Games… are a distinct art form. They offer us access to a unique artistic horizon and a distinctive set of social goods. They are special as an art because they engage with human practicality — with our ability to decide and to do.

What irks me about the “movies will eventually become games” argument is that it assumes either that all art will converge into one perfected art form, or it denies that games are unique as a medium, instead supposing that they exist as some benign growth waiting to be reabsorbed into the body of other media.

Movies are new, but passive forms of engagement are not. Books, plays, operas, ballads, folk songs, water cooler conversations, murals, histories, oral tradition. Video games are new, but our ability to interfere with narratives is hardly new. At a campfire, you could always shout over the storyteller. Games in general are ancient.

Both forms need to exist. One emerges from our trust that other people have stories to tell, and that those stories are functionally or aesthetically useful; the other comes from our need for cognitive enrichment, for fun. Both inscribe some kind of information for posterity. Movies — and books, too, though in different specifics — write down narratives. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games inscribe mindsets, forms of agency, certain methods of engagement. His argument is really persuasive, from what all I’ve read so far.

Anyway, thank you letting me share my befuddlement with this problem. Not all art is either narrative or practical. A lot is neither. A lot is both. None would dominate the culture if they weren’t emerging naturally and, to some extent or another, necessesarily. Which makes it especially funny that, as far as I know, no interactive movie experiment (like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) ever captured prolonged interest.

Four of Japan’s top five literary best sellers in 2007 were written on cell phones.

The authors of cell phone novels — associated mostly with women aged 10-29, the Twilight set — were limited by the technology of early smartphones, but that was fine. Limitations create art. Cell phone novels read line-by-line, rarely in paragraphs, and use white space to lend their narratives poetic luster. Here’s an example from takatsu’s Move:

Narrative precedes concerns like rhyme and meter. If you’re familiar with prose poems, you can think of cell phone novels like poem prose, optimized for a mobile screen. Fans read cell phone novels how they were written, i.e. over long commutes.

They weren’t light reading, though. Stories were “dark, sensational, and sexual.” The first cell phone novel, Deep Love, follows a young woman, Ayu, who turns to sex work to save her dying boyfriend. She dies of HIV. Ayu conveys this all in confidence, so that the line blurs between character, hurriedly outlining her story, and author, pouring themselves into their phone with little filter. Authors describe a personal connection to the content of their narratives — the word we’d use now is “self-insert” — although Deep Love itself was written by a man in his thirties.

(By the way, I had a ton of trouble accessing the classic cell phone novels — Deep Love; I, Girlfriend — because the genre lived and died in Japanese. It originated in 2002, the year of “Hot in Herre” and Die Another Day. I read mostly excerpts from the second-wave Western cell phone novels of 2008, the year of ghost peppers, Bitcoin, Quantum of Solace. Maho iLand, the usual haunt for cell phone novels, remains active and free to read.)

As the cell phone novel climbed in reputation, three basic viewpoints emerged.

1. I sure do enjoy reading cell phone novels. (This was mostly the claim of young women, although by 2007 everyone from major publishers to literary critics had gotten a hand on the ball.)
2. Cell phone novels will destroy the author and the novel. They’re poisoning the minds of young people ew icky gross.
3. Aw, these are so precious. They’re almost like real literature!

The breezy style of cell phone novels, the sort of Notes app tone with no extensive editing, didn’t help their purchase with the literati. I see “substandard grammar.” I see “sudsy” and “cutesy.”

Even praises of the genre focused on its utility. Publishers reached out to cell phone novelists, offering them the chance to publish their work as a “proper book.” At least the girls are reading; maybe this whole cell phone fad will do some good; next they might read actual fiction.

It wasn’t all pretentious. National competitions recognized and uplifted talented young writers, outpourings of gratitude from fans flooded the often anonymous authors’ inboxes. And despite their grousing, traditional publishers did capitalize on popular cell phone novels, transmuting them into manga, anime, and “proper books.”

Keep reading.