Groundhog Day is not in my reading list at the moment. Maybe it should be, and I could swap something out for it (so much for Foucault or Genette). Recently I started thinking about the qualities of playing and restarting in games, and some of the sorts of unusual player behavior that occasionally results. Groundhog day has been described as a sort of cyclic and layered narrative, but I think that the appeal lies in the phenomenon of the experience of repetition. To understand this, we need to look beyond the story itself to the world indicated by the story.

Groundhog Day features the protagonist, Phil Connors, reliving the same day, February 2nd over and over again. Initially, his reaction is shock and confusion,  then he begins to indulge hedonistically, and eventually becomes depressed and attempts suicide in a variety of ways. Finally, in an effort to win the heart of Rita, the love interest, he sets out on a course of self improvement. Phil uses the repetition of time to become a better person, learning to play the piano, and helping the lives of others. Finally he reaches a point where he can improve the world around him and win Rita’s affection.

The film reverberates with conventions of games, the struggle for improvement, perfection and mastery achieved through practice, repetition in the face of failure, and the intermediate freedom that lies between. Groundhog Day represents a simulated world, whose mechanics become more visible when seen in repetition, and are reinforced when perturbed by variation. Like Phil, the audience gains a sense of the depth of the world by viewing it while it is repeated with different perturbations. Murray says that the film “is as much like a videogame as a linear film can be.” (HoH p. 36) This is fairly accurate, but thinking of it like a game yields some interesting conclusions. Murray describes the pleasure of the viewer as savoring the variety of reactions experienced by Phil, but ultimately this is frustrated by thoughts of how the viewer would do things differently.

Players in videogames games often react very similarly to the way Phil reacts in Groundhog Day. When the player first is met with failure and doesn’t know why, they will try different approaches to succeed, and if they continue to be frustrated, will often test the game’s boundaries. Players come into playing games with many different sets of expectations. Some players might be ready to be immersed right away, but other players are less invested in considering the game world as a participatory illusion, preferring to experiment and play with it. These are two major types of activities that players engage in while playing games. I think that most players do some mix of both, but the latter category of activity is often problematic. The activity of experimenting with the world often involves attempting to break it, to find and identify where the boundaries of the world are, and how much change and control may be exerted over the world by the player.

In a game centered on storytelling, an experimenting player will eagerly go to the NPC who is to give the player the key to get to the next area, and punch or kill them. The experimenting player might try to climb on top of the highest building in the game to jump off it, just to see if they can. Playing Facade, the experimenting player will try to flirt with Grace and Trip in the second or third acts (if they can get that far). They will take every effort to perturb and upset the narrative direction of the game, just to see what will happen. Developers have mixed reactions to these sorts of players. On one hand, it is pleasing to have players so interested in a game world that they will experiment with it, but it also makes it very difficult for the developers to present a coherent story or experience.

It is generally thought that the use of cut-scenes in games was due to technical constraints (I don’t have a source for this, but this perspective seems reasonably sound). It is easier to have a cut sequence where a static narrative bit is presented to the player after some sequence of gameplay than to have some complex system of having the player interact with the narrative segments or be able to participate during them. Another way of looking at this is as a way of preserving the narrative structure from the interference of the players. After all, if the player is given freedom within these narrative sequences, the player will try to mess them up, and then the game will need to accomodate for that interference. Ultimately, it is not useful from a game design perspective to percieve player action as interference, but if games are to be used for traditional storytelling*, then the story needs to be protected to the player.

* Whether games should or should not be intended as a storytelling medium is not my point. Games are used for storytelling, as nearly every mainstream game title has a story which unfolds during the course of play. There are of course, many that do not, and those are not the subject of my citique here.

Often games protect the story from interference but limiting the player’s actions while a narrative segment is in progress, or in the case of cut scenes, by preventing input completely (save for maybe a skip button if the player is lucky). However, if a game does not do this, then the player will experiment and behave erratically, much like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. When he is given freedom without consequences, he begins to break implicit social rules, then explicit rules, becoming more and more erratic with each repetition. At his worst, Phil sees the rest of the characters as pawns or toys in a world which revolves around him, which is exactly the mindset of a player experimenting with a game, an exaggerated version of Phil’s already egotistical and jaded personality.

What is fascinating about Groundhog Day is the manner of its resolution. Much like a frustrated player, he eventually realizes that to progress and move forward, it is necessary to not only abide by the rules of the game, but also master them. At some point, he decides to treat the other characters as people and not pawns. Unlike the player of a game, Phil has no choice, and literally cannot continue until he figures out the rules of the world he is in.

What is at stake here is not a matter of figuring out how to stop or punish the player’s experimental behavior, the world must react to it of course, but it should not be seen as a problem or a thing to be insulated. Instead, it is necessary to figure out how to let the player earnestly want to progress and play by the rules of the game. Groundhog Day is interesting because Phil eventually decides to want to improve, to want believe in the world. It seems like it would be possible to put an experimenting player along a similar journey, to first see the world as a toy, and then as an expressive world which the player will want to participate in.

(Okay, I just put Groundhog Day on my reading list now. Now I need to find something to get rid of.)

One of the most daunting tasks in adapting fictional narratives into games is the treatment of narrative compression. This is the process by which certain events are extended or compressed as seen by the reader. There are two kinds of time in narrative, the time within the story and the time of the narration itself. Every narratologist under the sun talks about this at some point, but the primary scholar who explores on this in detail is Genette. The essence of narrative extension and compression are the means by which the story time, diegetic time, may be compressed by rendering it quickly in the narrative discourse. For example, the sentence, “five years passed,” indicates that a significant period has taken place in the diegetic time, but only was revealed quickly in the narrative itself. Similarly, narrative can dwell exceedingly on details and minutia which require considerable narrative time to read, but may describe a split-second in the story world.

Narrative compression is difficult to consider in adapting fiction to games because games treat time very differently than narrative media do. Film, theatre, and arguably all narrative media have conventions established for defining the relationship between the narrative time and the diegetic time. These relationships exist in games as well, but they are not as thoroughly developed. What conventions they do have are borrowed from other media (most notably film), as well as from other technologies (such as video playback). So for instance, a game might intersperse gameplay with cut scenes representing events happening across time, or the game might use a convention such as sepia tones to convey a flashback. Occasionally, a player might have the capacity to make choices within these periods of compression, but usually it is out of the player’s control. The other model that is frequently used, particularly in simulation games, is the ability to slow, pause, or speed up the passage of time in the world. This is most commonly used in simulation games where the player can configure something to happen and then watch as it does, where the processes in the game world are autonomous, and the passage of time is not tightly bound to the player. Very frequently, though, and this is especially the case in MMOGs, the time of the game world flows concurrently with the time in the world of the player. They might have different rates, but they flow consistently and the player has no power to control it.

Games certainly have systems of conventions for handling time, but something more is needed to be able to handle the sophisticated intertwined layers of player time versus world time required by the adaptation of fictional worlds. Pride and Prejudice has a great many convoluted sections where one paragraph will summarize what happens in the course of a morning, then the following several paragraphs will describe a conversation and some things that happen thereafter, and the next paragraph will indicate the passing of another day. Austen’s writing style has a particular quality of interjecting small observations, that a character might make in one moment, in a section indicating a longer passage of time, where the interjection is meant to be something that happens at some point within this period. Occasionally, some sections will be drawn out, where the characters might be waiting for some event to take place, or for some situation to become resolved.

The natural question to ask in all of this, is what is the relationship between the player and the passage of time? If the player controls a character, then that character is not logically in charge of the passage of time, the character is bound by circumstance, and is subject to the changes of time as described in the narrative. However, if the player is able to change the character’s actions, then the course of events might become very different. The player might want to say or do something more before the end of a scene, or the player might be done with a scene and simply be waiting for it to conclude. To prevent the player from being able to perform actions that the character could have arguably done is depriving of agency. While the character might need to sit through an awkward evening where nothing happens, it is not productive for the player to do so, either. So, it is necessary to extend, in some circumstances, control over time to the player. The logical questions are: what control is possible, and what circumstances should the player be able to exert that control?

One of the older conventions for time control in games is frequently found in RPGs, where the player is given freedom within a particular area of the game, but the diegetic time is effectively frozen until the player performs the next plot related event. This can be something simple such as leaving the house or hometown, or as dramatic as fighting the boss on the floating island that causes the world to end. This idea locks the player into a narrative moment until some special condition is met, which advances to the next moment, where the state of the world is different.

A way to extend this is to think of narrative moments as scenes or situations, where the scene itself has its particular temporal structure. For example, in a conversation, which is necessarily something that would take a reader a long time to read, and a player a long time to compose a response (using whatever conversation system is available), the time spent by the reader or player is considerably longer than the time that would be taking place in the story world, with respect to other events. Thus, time would be slowed down or paused within this situation. A broader situation, such as being bored and awkward at the end of a social event is something that would take a long time in the story world, but takes only a short time to explain or depict to the reader or player. At the end of a stage like this, the player must perform some sort of action to let the story advance, in order to have the time to do anything in case the player is not done yet. This moment of advancement is similar to both the trope in RPGs of needing to find some special action to trigger the next event, but it is also similar to the “next track” convention of a video or music player.

The player could thus have agency over time by having time slow down within more detailed situations, and being able to initiate those situations, and also by being able to skip past scenes when appropriate. Necessarily, it is not possible for skipping to occur in some places, for instance, if the player is being asked a question, or is expected to respond to something, or needs to do something important within the scene, then skipping forward is not allowable. A question emerges regarding how scenes are structured within the course of the game itself. If a scene is the general unit of a temporal block, then scenes must be composed together somehow. Does the player control what scenes he or she is going to participate in? Are scenes composed by the author of the game and the player must play out a fixed arrangement of them? It would be interesting and probably ideal if a player could fluidly tansition from one narrative moment to the next, but this is impossible within a structured system. Exactly what should take its place is not yet clear.

A final issue to consider, which may be the most difficult of them all, is the role of simulation within the play of temporal progression. If other characters are engaged in their own situations, then how does the course of the player’s activity affect their own passage of time? I do not know the answer to this either, but it is a useful constraint to consider.

I’m in the habit of writing up pages of notes that are often difficult to transcribe into pure text form. Usually I keep these around with me as references until my thinking or work on whatever project has matured enough that the notes aren’t relevant anymore. I have a bunch of pages like this in my notebook. Right now with the simulating fictional worlds project, I am trying to come up with a preliminary system of classes and work out what their relationships to each other will be programmatically. Also I want to know what the major processes , interactions, and flowcharts are going to look like. Posted here is an early step.

How a situation is composed

Situation cycle. It looks like we might need more general classification of frame that encompasses both situations and other social codes.

Conversation cycle and context

David Bordwell’s book Narration in the Fiction Film explores the narratology of film. He argues in the introduction that, at the time of publishing (1985), few scholars have examined the narrative theory of film. Bordwell is interested in understanding the relationship between narrative and film. This goal seems straightforward at first, but it is complicated by the questions of what narrative is, exactly, and how the content of film might be translated into narrative segments. A natural application of this is to examine how games might convey narrative segments, much like the way that films do. I think another more interesting use is to use the narrative approaches to film to examine how fiction is adapted into film, and how narrative devices might be translated into games.

Bordwell’s introduction outlines three different ways of looking at narratives: as representations of a world, as a structure, and as a point of view. This latter approach seems to be Bordwell’s favored one, but the three approaches often intersect. The approach of looking at a narrative as a model of a world I think combines the three of these. The model represents a world, and its representative layer contains mimetic elements, the model also defines a structure, and the model is also constructed with a specific point of view.

Mimetic Theories of Narrative

The mimetic theory of narrative is most strongly derived from Aristotle’s poetics, and his application of them to drama. Bordwell’s goal is to outline the diegetic and mimetic theories of narrative, which roughly translate to telling versus showing. The mimetic element of narrative is wrapped up in spectacle and witnessing the events. In context of showing, there is an implied viewer who is the witness to the shown events. The existence of a witness implies a relationship between the witness and the spectacle, introducing right away the issue of perspective and point of view. The Greek theatre addresses the question of perspective by creating a clear and idealized relationship between the audience and the action in the performance.

Perspective takes on a special meaning when applied to painting in the middle ages, especially in the 1400s to the 1600s when linear perspective was being introduced as a technology for representation. The use of perspective in painting is similar to Athenian stagecraft because it implies an idealized relationship between the scene and the viewer. There is an interesting cultural moment over whose perspective is taken, which is frequently the point of view of the king. In medieval painting, the paintings generally were highly iconographic, representing narratives, usually about the lives and tribulations of saints. Bordwell argues that the idealized perspective found in painting is at odds with the perspective of narrative, that the narrative dimension of mimesis is mental, not optical. This seems like a relatively trivial thing to say, but it is important in context of the argument as applies to film: that showing is bound in the mental life of the viewer, not just in the literal events taking place on the screen.

With realist literature, the mimetic perspecitve is taken to an extreme. The logical comparisons are made between the dense narrative depictions of James and Dickens, and are fit toward the portrayal of realist fiction as pictoral.

Applied to film, mimetic theories rely on a careful understanding of the role of the camera. Mimetic theories of cinema treat the viewer and the camera as an “invisible observer”, who watches and becomes close to the action. The position and movement of the camera are seen as reflective of the viewer’s engagement with the content of the narrative, indicating closeness or distance. Cutting is explained as similar to how the observer might shift its gaze to get a different view of the scene, or examine a particular detail. While it does account for cutting and the engagement of the camera, this approach does not account for the arrangement of scenes, or for camera positions which do not make sense as coming from a human observer. Bordwell introduces the scenography of Eisenstein as a narrative form, because the scene itself is wrapped up in expression. The role of the camera becomes subordinate to the scene in terms of communicating a narrative moment. Scenography makes sense when applied to games as well, with its focus on spatial and environmental storytelling.

Diegetic theories of Narration

Diegetic narration is about telling, and ultimately, communicating the world of the fiction, without the elment of the spectacle. Diegetic theory originates with Plato, but the modern theorists are Bakhtin, Barthes, and various Russian formalists. Diegetic theory considers narration to be primarily about telling, and is primarily linguistic. Bordwell makes an interesting paraphrase of Bakhtin which seems particularly relevant, “The novel, according to Bakhtin, is not a spectacle organized around Jamesian straight lines; it is a polyphony, even a cacophany, of different registers of speech and written language: a montage of voices.” (p. 17) Diegetic narration as applied to film is predominantly explored by Colin MacCabe and Emile Benveniste. Benveniste treats the language of film as a special kind of enunciation. This is a flawed approach, much like the theory of the invisible observer, because it privleges certain techniques and representation systems.

The Viewer’s Activity

Both mimetic and diegetic theories downplay the role of the viewer (with the arguable exception of Bakhtin, who would probably argue that the viewer is a participant in the dialogue). The viewer is normally assumed in these theories to be passive and credulous, absorbing the material presented and treating it noncritically. Bordwell’s theory is that the spectator executes operations corresponding to filmic devices. The viewer constructs the narrative, actively making inferences and comparing the portrayed events to other knowledge.

There are three factors in the constructivist theory: 1) The viewer percieves the film in a special way, reading it visually, as made of light, color, and darkness, and reading the screen in both a top-down and bottom-up manner. 2) The viewer brings to the film a large set of schemata derived from experiences with the real world, other media, and other films. The viewer recognizes the events of the film in terms of fitting them in with known schemata. 3) The narrative cinema contains a structure based on narrative conventions and expected viewer activities. These are story-constructing activities that have a history in narrative practices.

The construction theory involves a composition of many schemata, which are recognized and understood in context. When a viewer applies a schema to a film, then events in the film become relevant in context of that schema. For instance, if the viewer is expecting a love story, events will be read and matched to the format of the schema of the love story. Bordwell gives a revies for the recognition of schemata, in a format that resembles an algorithm.

What is interesting about this, as applies to the theory of narrative models, is that a schema is only part of the process. The viewer may recognize that a film is a love story, and identify the schema (or schemata) to which the narrative subscribes, but that is not the end of it. The film continues to contain meaning, even if the viewer knows what the format is. So one interesting question is why the viewer stays captivated. One element of this is that the viewer is interested in seeing the enactment, and even knowing the resolution, the performance of it is still important. I would argue that there is more to it, that schemata are not realized as static accounts, but rather a schema describes a formula for turning narrative events into meaningful ones. The story is not defined by the schemata, but it is parameterized by it. Thus, the composition of schemata form a system, which is insufficient to fully specify an artifact, but defines a range of possible ones. One film could concievably veer off course from its expected conclusion and still belong to the same equivalence class as the film that stays on course. This approach to the schema or model concept is loose and general, not as tightly constrained as, for instance, Polti’s dramatic situations.

Principles of Narration

Bordwell examines narration as broken into three systems: fabula, syuzhet (also spelled sjuzet), and style. The fabula is the story. In film, the fabula is not given to the audience, it is constructed based on what they see. The syuzhet is the plot, how the narrative events are depicted and arranged. What Bordwell calls syuzhet is similar to what Chatman calls discourse. The style is the use of cinematic techniques and devices in order to affect the discourse.

Bordwell gives a very useful definition for narrative in film: “In the fiction film, narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style itneract in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula.” (p. 53) It is important to note that the connotation of the narrative is not actually part of the narrative itself in this definition.

Subsequent chapters

The subsequent chapters examine several genres specifically in the context of narrative, and then the narrative dimensions of time and space. These are of less relevance, so I’ll leave them alone for now.

Several of Alan Ayckbourn‘s plays are trilogies, designed to be performed in Scarborough, which is a popular vacation spot in Yorkshire. The goal behind his writing of the plays is to fill a theatre house for a full weekend, three nights, but under several constraints. One of the constraints is that they were only able to afford six actors, so the actors would need to be shared between the plays. The second is that the plays must not be arranged in such a way that to appreciate any one all must be seen, and the plays must not be arranged into ordered parts, as either of these would drive away the interest of potential theatregoers. The resulting project is a set of plays that would be able to stand on their own, but would be arranged so that viewing one would pique one’s curiosity to see the others. Much of my analysis comes from the recorded BBC television performance in 1978.

The most interesting element in the plays is the relationship between plot and story. The individual plays are logical wholes, but together they make something more complete. The plays take place in different parts of the same house during the same weekend, featuring the same drama with the same characters. The plays have different pacing and focus on different pieces of the same plot.

The experience of watching one performance is of a comedy, a drama centered around the personalities of the characters. Events that occur in the other plays are alluded to, but the references to the other plays are sufficient enough to complete their relevance to the current action, without making them overtly mysterious. When put against the other plays, enough information is revealed to turn the plot into something which becomes more like a puzzle. References that were previously only background elements become central, and elements that were central to the drama in the other plays take on a passive role when viewing a new one.

What remains constant between the plays is an overall story arc, and the characters. In terms of digital adaptation, it logically makes sense for the trilogy to be treated as an encyclopedic text, and allow navigation between the different parts of the action. This is the subject of Hot Norman, a digital project put together by Janet Murray and Freedom Baird. This project enables the viewer to observe what is happening at the logical diegetic moments occurring in the different timelines. When one character leaves one set and goes to another, the user would be able to follow them. Additionally, Hot Norman enables the user to follow the references between the different plays, so when one event is referred to in one timeline, it is possible to look back at the source of that event.

This approach seems appropriate, due to the multiple nature of the narrative, but seems like it would be ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. Because the events are referential, and used as props for the dramatic flows of the story, it does not seem like a great deal stands to be gained from switching between the individual plays. Having viewed each play, it does not seem like there is much to be gained from navigating between them. Each play in the trilogy has the same plot, but offers different narrative perceptions of the plot. Weaving between the perceptions offers little more beyond being able to access them in the first place. I think the center of the viewer’s attention is not on the plot of the character’s lives, but on the characters responses and means of handling the plot that is taking place around them. The plot itself is not primarily about action that takes place within the plays, but it is about action that has already taken place or has failed to take place. The entire body of the trilogy is derived from the characters reactions to these events, both past and unrealized.

Being the contrarian, I think that the ideal way to explore the content of the play would be to expand it. Instead of being able to switch between the different views, it would be interesting to be able to command the characters, or arrange scenes with several of them present, and then see what happens. The dimensions of the underlying plot would not change, but new scenes would result.

Some time ago, I wrote a paper discussing this particular work of Freud’s, applying it to the simulation of fictional characters. The paper wasn’t very good, so I am not going to put it here, but it did have a few worthwhile ideas.

The crux of the matter is the treatment of the roles of pain and pleasure within a simulated world. Freud explains that these motivate human behavior according to the pleasure and reality principles, and these form a mechanic for accounting for human behavior. Freud is notable for borrowing terms from physics (forces and drives), and poses a somewhat kinematic model of how characters work. His approach to psychology is that of an engineer, studying and analyzing the pressures induced by these forces within the human psyche. Under this perspective, a careful reading of Freud would produce a fascinating model of behavior that could be simulated.

It is possible to imagine characters in a simulation game, such as The Sims, being controlled by the interplay of the pleasure and reality principles, and the conflicts between the ego, superego, and id. Instead of sliders that go down, representing the sims’ moods, the sliders would increase, indicating pent-up frustration. Such a simulation would involve the Sims struggling for happiness and pleasure, then suffering rebuke for their desires, then repressing them until the characters finally erupt in an orgy of sex and violence.

I do not think that this is the ideal approach to simulating characters, but it is a worthwhile perspective to examine. (more…)

Victor Turner is a notable figure in anthropology alongside Clifford Geertz and Erving Goffman. Turner’s focus is on ritual, and the role that ritual plays in life and culture. I also examined Turner in On Narrative, where he compared the ritual process of the Ndembu in Zambia to the Watergate crisis in America. Turner had an interesting role within American academia. He helped connect education to the social and political movements in the 1960s. His exploration of the rituals of other cultures manifested in a subversive way of looking at American culture. This is specifically applicable in this book, where, toward the end, he develops the ideas of structure and anti-structure, comparing the hippy movement to a spontaneous community which is analogous to liminal communities in other cultures.

Turner is very strongly influenced by Arnold von Gennep, who sees ritual as being composed of three parts: “separation from the everyday flow of activities, involving a passage through a threshold state or limen into a ritual world removed from everyday notions of time and space; a mimetic enactment of some dimension of the crisis that brought about the separation, in the course of which enactment the structures of everyday life are both elaborated and challenged (he called the co-occurrence of these motives “structure” and “anti-structure”); and a reentry into the everyday world.” (p. ix)

The idea of ritual as taking place in a special sort of zone, where activity takes on new meanings outside the realm of everyday life, reverberates with the idea of performance as described by Schechner, and with play, as described by Huizinga. All of these approaches are anthropological, and all of them seem to be describing the same sort of material. (more…)

This reviews some scholarly essays on Pride and Prejudice. Also included is a snippet from the Norton Critical Edition of Northanger Abbey. There is a wide range of Austen literary criticism, and this reflects just a small part. What is included here are essays that are particularly relevant for the process of adaptation, and looking into the mechanics of Austen’s world.

Susan Morgan: Perception in Pride and Prejudice

In a quick overview, this article is about Elizabeth’s development over the course of the novel. Like the character of Emma, Elizabeth’s understanding of the world and perception of others is frequently incorrect, for instance with Wickham, with Darcy’s intentions toward her in the second part of the book, and with her impression of Darcy’s thoughts when she reveals Lydia’s running off with Wickham. Morgan asks what is the moral lesson of all of this, and observes that there is a transition in the development of Elizabeth’s character.

Morgan argues that Austen’s works (her world, as it were) contain a sort of philosophical message, even if this message was not consciously put there by the author. The essence of this is about generalization and the relationship between the world of the mind and the physical world. Generalization is a means for characters to use social expectations and small observations to make broader predictions and expectations of behavior. The central generalization that is present is the one described by the opening line of the book.

Elizabeth’s greatest strength is that she strives to look at the world from many points of view, and respond to them accordingly. This is not perfect, in that she always has levels of partiality, but it distinguishes her, in that she always seems to be engaged in figuring out what others are thinking or doing. Her weakness in the earlier part of the novel is that she does not take life seriously, and does not significantly value social status or her family’s financial situation. This gives way to some of her early indirectness and lack of willingness to commit herself to things (as opposed to Jane, who is eager to commit herself on very short notice). This changes toward the end, as Elizabeth matures and acquires a directness that she did not possess early on.

The themes of perception and generalization lend credence to the perspective that characters understand the world in terms of models.

Claudia L. Johnson: Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness

This paper examines the the delicate interaction between pride and happiness. Happiness is clearly one of the central variables at stake for the characters in the novel. Happiness of course has many dimensions and flavors. The means of happiness also is accompanied by a moral dimension, where one’s tendency to be placable takes on moral dimensions. Darcy’s disdain and implacability (stemming from his pride) are negative traits, and they harm his moral reputation in the minds of other characters. Similarly, characters who are overeager to be agreeable are also considered to be morally flawed, for instance in the cases of Lydia and Sir William Lucas.

The different means by which characters find happiness indicates a system for modeling characters standards and preferences according to some set of parameters. Characters also feel that they have a right to happiness, which is a characteristic of their pride. Pride is a quality that has a mixed role within the novel, being both a subject of steadfastness as well as moral failure. Elizabeth uses her pride as a means for chiding Darcy’s. Even in Austen’s moral system which critiques the aristocratic moral system, pride has some important value. In contrast to pride is a dimension of magnanimity, which is the quality of someone’s attention to the happiness of others. This is a variable which highly valued in Austen’s moral system, and is something that Darcy lacks (or appears to lack) early on, and then seems to possess a great deal of later.

Sue Birtwhistle and Susie Conklin: A Conversation with Colin Firth

This is an interview with Colin Firth, who plays the part of Darcy in the BBC television miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The interview is important for several reasons. The first is that it gives a perspective into the process of an adaptation, and secondly it gives a perspective on Darcy’s inner thoughts as expressed by Colin Firth’s portrayal. One of the appeals of Darcy’s character is that he is inscrutable and it is very difficult to tell what he is thinking. Colin Firth thus came to this role and developed his own understanding of Darcy’s motivations which drove his restrained performance. From the perspective of simulation and adaptation, these insights are very useful because they indicate an internal state to reproduce, that would lead to the execution of the character’s behavior.

An example of Firth’s perspective on Darcy’s inner thoughts comes from his behavior at the Meryton assembly. Darcy’s distance and aloofness are explained as being driven from insecurity and shyness. This is amplified by Bingley’s ease in social situations, which puts Darcy in a more awkward state. Firth’s explanation here is important because it gives a valid sense of motivation, and it also does so by representing Darcy’s snobbishness as due to vulnerability, which is not a view that is ever conveyed in the novel. Firth describes Darcy’s attraction to Elizabeth as due, initially, to boredom, because he has never met a woman who has intrigued him before. It is this initial bit of being intrigued that leads him to follow her around, because he wishes to find out more about her.

The approach of Darcy’s first proposal is also very interesting, as Firth sought to find a way to look at how the proposal might be seen from Darcy’s point of view. In this view, his love for Elizabeth is strong enough to overcome the many reasons why such a marriage would be improper for him, and in this particular light it is very romantic.

Dr. John Gregory: A Father’s Letter to his Daughters (1774)

This particular essay comes from the Norton Critical Edition for Northanger Abbey. The excerpt is from a “conduct” book, which is aimed to educate young women on proper conduct in polite society. This particular section advises women against the use of wit, humor, good sense, and learning which are dangerous and unseemly. Wit is to be guarded because it can create enemies, and Dr. Gregory explains that wit can lead to intoxication with vanity. Humor is dangerous for the converse reasons, it will win friends, but if used liberally will threaten a lady’s respect. Good sense and learning are subjects which will embarrass others and make one’s company jealous. The intent of conversation is to make one’s company pleased with themselves. Dr. Gregory finally advises his daughters to act with great modesty and avoid indelicacy, even though the lady may be thought ridiculous, prudish, or reserved. The alternative is to be contemptible and disgusting.

This is especially interesting, as it gives a list of many of the rules broken by characters within Pride and Prejudice, but paints a landscape of the social expectations put upon women in society. Under this view, social conduct is a dangerous activity fraught with explosive hazards with lasting consequences.

This analysis will be brief, in comparison to the many others discussing Pride and Prejudice.

Quick summary: The plot of the book is about Emma, as young, wealthy, socially secure, and somewhat clueless character. She becomes very interested in managing other people’s happiness through match making. However, her impressions of what other characters are interested in, or what is best for them, are generally incorrect. This leads to an effectual comedy of errors, where Emma’s agendas are put to work against the agendas of the other characters. When Emma acts on her incorrect interpretations, she meddles in the affairs of other characters, which interferes with their happiness more than anything else. Unlike Austen’s other novels, in Emma, there is no financial issue threatening the protagonist, and she is thus doing what she is doing for the pure pleasure of it. Emma is secure in both her social status as well as her finances, so the intrigue and goals that she faces are self generated.

At this cursory level, there are some important differences between Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Both novels share a central element which is the interpretation of other characters. However, the world of Emma resembles more of a sandbox without overt goals and objectives, while Pride and Prejudice imposes a problem that must be faced at the outset. In Pride and Prejudice, the Bennett’s are in financial danger, because the house is entailed. Thus, the daughters of the family must marry otherwise suffer poverty. While this is a goal, it is not a rigid goal, and provides several routes to marriage, and suggests a balance of goals and motives. One can marry for happiness (love), wealth, or social status. Emma’s situation is different. The character of Emma sees her meddling as a way to improve the lives of others, and never has a pressing need to do what she does. Instead, like a player of The Sims, she encourages the other characters to be in certain situations, and then bears witness to the results. Unlike in The Sims, she herself is caught up in the events that she instigates. While it is Emma’s intention as a character to induce the happiness of others, a player in a game may not be so motivated, and would be able to cause some degree of mayhem.

That Emma has no financial or social incentive to meddle, she does stand to lose a great deal in terms of her social status or her happiness, and over the course of the novel does suffer in several cases as a result of her actions (being scorned by Knightley, and embarrassed by Frank Churchill). Emma’s meddling has effects which propagate through the underlying network of characters and turn back onto her, affecting her in ways that were not immediately evident by her actions alone. For instance, dissuading Harriet from marrying Mr. Martin leads her to be scolded by Knightley. Rejecting Elton leads him to marry Augusta, who becomes a significant source of irritation afterward. Like in Pride and Prejudice, each character has their own agenda. In Emma, these agendas are covert, and often include the protagonist in their machinations. In comparing Emma to The Sims, this is an interesting turn of involvement.

Some clear mechanics that leap out are elements of meddling and persuasion, which is manifested in matchmaking, and mentoring (in the case of Harriet). There is a dimension of predicting the actions, intentions, and desires of other characters, however this does not seem to be as much of a mechanic because the interesting results arise from Emma’s failures rather than her successes at prediction. The (1996 with Kate Beckinsale) film gives a few suggestions at how prediction might work, in that it uses flashes illustrating Emma’s imagination of her friends happy due to her matchmaking. There is a great deal of flirting, especially with Frank Churchill, though this is ultimately fruitless, the mechanics of flirting are intricate, in a similar way to the verbal repartee between Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Instead of status games involving lowering one another, Emma’s flirting seems to be much more about suggestions, deferences, and alluding to potential romantic states that may or may not be intended.

This is a summary of an article that Ted Friedman wrote for First Monday in 1999. The article is ostensibly about simulation and semiotics, but relates simulation to subjectivity and identification in an interesting way. His argument is that simulation becomes an extension of consciousness, and the player identifies with the simulation as a component of him or herself. This would have strong support in the space of cognitive science, especially in terms of cognitive extensions. It also provides a way of connecting a model-based view of the world to an embodied and experiential view of the world.

Friedman initially compares the experience of playing a game to the experience of reading a book. Books are non-reactive, though there is exchange between reader and book. Games are artifacts with reactive feedback loops, enabling a tighter sense of identification with the artifact’s contents. Reading gives a variety of interpretive freedoms, but simulation is not free from perspective of player. Any simulation is rooted in the assumptions of its model. Sim City has received criticism for its model and economic assumptions, but Friedman explains that these are not flaws but principles. “Computer programs, like all texts, will always be ideological constructions.”

It is frequently argued that simulation games have an aura of mystification, in that they appear to be realistic. Friedman argues to the contrary that the player succeeds by learning its model and understanding how the model works, which is a process of demystification. I would challenge this, though. The level of mystification is dependent on the self-consciousness of the player. Many players learn the system of a game but do not reflect on its values. Mastery and understanding are different things.

Simulation in Sim City is constant, it does not stop. It is easy to reach a trance-like state where the simulation is an organic extension of the player’s consciousness (referencing Haraway). The actual experience of playing puts the player in a variety of roles, according to what the player actually controls. The player is much more than just the mayor and urban designer (the ostensible roles given to the player). The player has control over details unavailable to those real life roles, and is able to manage and micromanage different parts of the game with relative fluidity. Thus, the player has shifting identifications. This seems like it ought to be jarring, but it is not. Friedman argues that experience is a form of identification, but with the simulation. Losing oneself in a game is identifying with its simulation.

From the perspective of a god-game (like Sim City, The Sims, etc), which gives the player significant controls over the entire system, or a major part of it, a simulation is engrossing. The entire simulation becomes an extension of the player’s cognitive processes, which are both visual and visceral. This suggests that the experience is in some sense embodied. I think it is possible to look back on this, though, and realize that most digital games have simulation elements, but restrict the freedom of the player within them, putting the player under constraint of not only the rules, but also giving the player a more limited part of the system. Civilization, for instance, places the player in control of only one civilization. It can be argued that the player still experiences extension and identification, but only with the substance that the player can control. So the player will identify with the entire city in Sim City, the household in The Sims, the civilization in Civilization, or the avatar in a platforming game.

Friedman concludes the essay suggesting that simulations are a kind of postmodern quasi-narrative: systems of interwoven strands of subjectivity.