Recently I was at a poetry reading in New York. It's part and parcel of being a writer. Someone I knew from long ago was doing a
thoroughly mediocre job of reading some thoroughly mediocre work, interspersing
predictable poems with overlong stories about the intended meaning and origin
of each poem in a fashion that was simultaneously dull and insulting to the
intelligence (or just the ability to interpret art) of the audience. Then, out of the blue, something interesting
happened. This young-ish poet read a
poem from a young-er girl she babysat in the middle of her own work. There was a flimsy premise attached to the
act, something about it inspiring additional poems, but the work itself was
actually quite good. The audience, for
the first time, responded to her poetry, and the poet, perhaps realizing that,
or perhaps simply making a joke to make herself seem relatable, told the
audience "I'm tremendously jealous of how great a poet she is."
There was a layer of irony to the comment, certainly, but
also a layer of honesty. The awkward
silence had been broken by a twinge of laughter. The momentum of the reading had shifted.
There's sometimes a sense among writers that one person's
success precludes or prevents another's.
There are certainly reasons you could cite as to why jealousy is a real
and valid emotion to feel as a writer.
We live in an aggressive publishing world, wherein competition for attention
is more crowded and tighter than it has ever been before as the apparatus to
share work becomes simultaneously broader (as digital tools rise to prominence)
and narrower (as large scale publishers die a death of their own devising, their
companies collapsing under their own weight as the big-box retail chains they
relied on for distribution die out). We,
as writers, are also frequently encouraged to directly compete with one
another, not just for publishing space, but for funding, with organizations
presenting fellowships, grants, and sponsorships using the language and
framework of competition to pit authors against one another. There are a number of frameworks where
competition is a very real concern, and the fear that another's success will
undermine even your potential for visibility is actually quite valid.
Not that this is exclusive to writers. Painters are a part of a considerably more
high-stakes game: successful painters can make astounding sums of money
incredibly quickly by catching on at the right time in the right way, and then
just as quickly fade after periods of brief invisibility of occlusion. Musicians are also looking at a dying
distribution apparatus still coming to terms with a digital new world, and are,
as a result, competing for fewer and fewer pieces of the proverbial pie as
large scale record labels sell fewer and fewer physical albums and take larger
and larger portions of digital sales.
But there's something particular about writers, about the intensity with
which this jealousy seems to pervade our social and academic interactions, the
construction of our art, and the way we interact with our peers, that makes for
a particularly odd and toxic relationship between peers.
Competition is normal, especially between artists, but
collaboration can often run alongside it.
Imitation, influence, and discourse form the basis of many artistic
movements and evolutionary trends of writing that have come to shape some of
the great works of literary canon. Hell,
a competition held at Lord Byron's house (which may or may not have actually
happened) gave us two of the greatest works of "horror literature" in
the history of the English language: Shelley's Frankenstein and Pollidori's "The Vampyre." Art exists in a space where it is constantly
adapting and imitating. Overlapping
influences are a part of what makes the finished product of creative endeavors
so god damn neat. Two writers exploring
a similar concept at a similar moment, like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
can generate something remarkable (in the case I just mentioned: the generation
of the genre of cyberpunk, and conceptualizations of constructs commonplace in
society today, like the internet and transhumanism). These parallel movements towards some endeavor
have often lead to something far greater than the sum of its parts. Yet I find myself departing communities, and
departing an educational framework, where the idea of competing over who is
producing the "best writing" has begun to overshadow the production
of writing.
I've won a handful of minor awards for things I've written
in the past, which is always nice, but never struck me as a big deal. But after I won a "fiction writing"
award (the right people liked one of my stories at the right moment) I noticed
an odd reaction: people were upset with me.
They would ask me probing questions about my submission, fuming about
it, congratulate me then stomp off to glare at me from the other side of the
bar and, in some cases, cut off contact with me altogether. Likewise, the response people had to winning
minor awards sometimes skewed from appreciation towards affirmation of some
notion of greatness, transforming mediocre writers who had some good fortune or
received some sound encouragement into overloud pricks with a sense of
entitlement. The competition that drove
us as writers, and the collaboration that accompanied it, was corrupted, turned
into something that began to stymie or discourage creative work instead of
inspiring it.
I do my best to eschew this in my own work, sitting down
with friends, reading their writing, borrowing from it and experimenting with
notions within it freely to see what's happening that I enjoy and explore those
concepts in my own artistic space. But
sometimes, quite often, nearly always, it feels like I'm in the minority, like
the notions of competition, from the competition to get into MFA programs to
the competition for grants and funding to the competition for publication, are
actually dominating the creative space I find myself circling the outskirts of.
This is where I suddenly make this about video games.
You'll rarely hear game designers talk about their work in
these terms. I wouldn't say that you'd
never hear them say that, because never is a long time, and there are plenty of
assholes out there, but for the most part game designers seem to enjoy riffing
on one another and turning dominant paradigms of gameplay into new titles,
exploring new ground together. Trends
like inclusion of free-flowing parkour-like movement, open world development
and "block-core" games following the style and ethos of Minecraft, survival-horror's multiplayer
resurrection; these things all occupy a space simultaneously very close to
competition and collaboration, even when they involve no direct communication
or contact, and it really seems, at least to an external observer, that people
don't care that much about the existence of parallel conceptual engagements.
A bit of this might be attributable to the inherently
cooperative framework that surrounds game development. Developers are part of massive teams. Collaboration is part of their blood, and the
idea of ownership of a finished product is clouded, in large part, because of
the raw number of hands that the product has to pass through. A similar relationship exists in the world of
film, but the emergence of directors as notional auteur figures occludes this (albeit
fictively: directors exist as such only inasmuch as many of them employ the
same creative collaborators in many of their films, generating the impression
of a singular artistic vision where there is, in fact, only a continuity of
collaboration). Games are where it's at
if you want to look at massive collaborations that involve amicably treading on
one another's toes both inside the framework of a company, as people work on
elements of a game together, and in the world at large, where titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield propel each other towards ever-grander game design
concepts and action set-pieces as their competition for market share looks more
and more like a collaborative movement to make shooters based on action films
from the 1980s.
Some of it might also be attributable to the Barthean
actualization that video games frame.
Roland Barthes, a French literary critic active from the late 40s to his
death in 1980, kind of broke notions of artistic ownership when he popularized
the idea that literary works exist in a vacuum and are, in fact, empowered and
fully realized by the imposition of meaning or value upon them by a reader. While outlandish to some, the theory really
makes sense when you apply it certain forms of literature (particularly some of
the more avant garde poetry out there), and its conclusion feels somewhat
unavoidable when you apply Barthes' thought process to video games. See, video games really don't exist without a
player. There's no physical object you
can flip over and skip through. In order
to generate a narrative you really do have to sit down and play through the
game. This means the idea of authorial
"ownership," wherein outcomes can be dictated by the author as
appropriate or inappropriate (or correct or incorrect) is occluded by
structures of interpretive play. If I
want to imagine Army of 2 as a steamy
homoerotic international thriller, I can do so through my playthrough,
occasionally pausing with my murder-partner to gaze out at lovingly rendered
war-torn landscapes between gun-fights.
If I want to imagine Super Mario RPG as a game about wandering through a
blasted apocalyptic hellscape in the last days of life on earth, I can do that
too, by removing myself from the tiny bastions of civilization as much as
possible and sticking to the dungeons, where the action is, where the people
are not. In fact, I'm sort of encouraged
to engage in these kinds of behaviors when I play video games, particularly
open world games that allow players to approach objectives in whatever order
they choose. The fact that this trope of
reader-actualization (or maybe player-actualization) is built into games might
explain why notions of ownership and jealousy don't seem to manifest themselves
as frequently as notions of cooperation, inspiration, and influence.
Of course, I'm framing this discussion in a way that's meant
to lionize a particular kind of thought process. Some great work emerges from jealousy and
fear. Jealousy and fear of being ignored
can propel writers and artists into new frontiers, prompting them to explore
heretofore virgin territory in their quest to make something that truly stands
out. It can force us out of our comfort
zone as we seek to develop and differentiate ourselves as creative types. But when it begins to dominate our dialogues,
when we begin to frame our discourses in terms, not of inspiration, but of
occlusion or infuriation, we run the risk of styming our own creative moments
and isolating ourselves as individual artists.
When we cut ourselves off from other writers, we run the risk of
destroying our own capacity to create art.
The lesson from games here is perhaps to be less serious in all matters,
and to remember that once an object has been created, it is no longer ours to
claim ownership over or value within.
Games, writing, painting, film, particularly well crafted flans: all of
these things are ours until we hand them over to someone else to enjoy. At that point, all we can do is watch with
trepidation as we hope our audience finds something to like in the object we've
given them.
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