Backstory (was RE: [MUD-Dev] New poll)

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Zak Jarvis
> Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2000 2:20 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: Backstory (was RE: [MUD-Dev] New poll)
>
>
> > From: J C Lawrence [claw at cp.net]
> > Sent: Friday, June 09, 2000 5:00 PM
>
> -<Much snippage to get to what I wanted to comment on>-
>
> > We're dealing with stories here, which immediately rephrases part of
> > the question as to what scale of stories are we dealing with?
> > Hollywood movies are inherently a short story form.  They're
> > certainly not novels tho they keep pretending to be.  What is the
> > narrative scale of our games?  What is the narrative scale of our
> > player's participation in our games?  I see many mostly abortive
> > attempts to establish vignette and ultra-short-story contexts in
> > MUDs, all with the seeming assumption that by piling those on, by
> > bundling them endlessly into a player's growth curve and game
> > experience that we can eventually create a novel in some magical
> > happenstance fashion, and I don't buy it.
>
> It's worth noting here that as a medium, the Hollywood movie has had about
> 5,900 fewer years to evolve than the novel. It's quite likely that movies
> will ultimately take a more novel-like format, or at least some of them.
> The short story is the original narrative. Certainly quite a lot of early
> stories are epic in stature, but in execution they *are* short stories.

Technically, the novel is only a few centuries old. The earliest examples of
the form are epistolary novels, Cervantes, and so on.

The short story is definitely not the original narrative. That credit likely
belongs to epic poems, which took poetic form so that narratives could be
more easily remembered. Many of the epic poems have characteristics of the
novel, among them the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad (thoug hnot so much the
Odyssey).

Plays also predate the short story, and they definitely have more novelistic
characteristics (multiple main characters and plot threads, etc.

Technically speaking movies tend to have most in common structurally with
the novelette, a publishing category determined by word length, but which is
a proto-novelistic form.

-Raph




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