(Instead of using the album cover a second time, here’s a picture of Castleton performing live)

The third track off the EP, “2038″, describes the narrator losing his job as a computer programmer for the second day in a row. Because of the severity of his drug problem, the narrator has forgotten that he was fired the day before and come back to work: “It must’ve seemed strange when I came into the office/on the next day, like as if nothing had changed.”

“2038″, like “2045″‘s description of a marriage, fits an entire career into a short song. We find out about the dynamic between the narrator and his boss (Victor is younger and learned everything about the job from the narrator), the atmosphere of the office, and why he’s being fired. The narrator has “never made much of an effort to get along,” so there’s tension between him and his co-workers. He’s that employee that doesn’t do much anymore, but has been around forever and is difficult to get rid of.

The chorus of the song is the most we get of another character’s direct speech on the EP:

Take a year off, maybe you can come back.
You’ve done some good work, it hasn’t always been bad.
You’ve written good code, taught me most of what I know,
but you’ve been distracted and we have to let you go.

The boss spins the narrator’s termination quite a bit. We find out the narrator “shoved this girl” when he found out the coffee wasn’t ready. He’s probably never going to be offered another job by the company if he physically assaulted a female co-worker, but the boss just wants him to go away, so he’s being falsely optimistic.

The other employees aren’t described, but the narrator is embarrassed when he realizes he’s already been fired because “even though the door was shut, he knew that they’d be staring.” Though Victor tries to keep the narrator calm, the seriousness of the situation is emphasized again when “Jim and Barry came along to escort [him] out.”

All of the details in the song, including the drug-slurred voice Castleton uses for the narrator’s lines, indicate the work environment the character is being gently coaxed out of. Memory loss and violence seem to be symptoms of his addiction, and we can see how this episode could lead to the narrator’s divorce and abandonment in a hotel room.

Tracks 4 & 5, “2031″ and “2020,” develop the narrator’s relationship with his children and explain the anxiety that leads him to drug addiction. In “2031,” Sarah, the narrator’s wife, buys their son, Chris, a guitar for his birthday. The narrator is upset that Sarah did this without consulting him, but the underlying reason for his anger is that he doesn’t want to be reminded his abandoned pursuit of music. So he breaks the guitar one night when Chris won’t listen to him:

Finally, for once ever, Chris looked scared.
He bolted out the door and downstairs.
Sarah came up to see what all the fuss was about.
When she saw the guitar she started freaking out,
telling me how I’m taking my own life out on my kids.
She was calm when she said,
“You won’t be happy until nobody is.”

He’s satisfied when he scares his son, so Sarah’s criticism seems reasonable, but the narrator remains sympathetic because no one tries to understand why he’s upset. Sarah asks him why he doesn’t get his keyboard down from the attic to play along with Chris instead of getting angry, but he plays it off: “I laughed too quick and told her I wasn’t about to encourage this assault on our senses, but the truth is I couldn’t play a song if my pension depended on it.”

His anxiety centers around a loss of control, which the song’s chorus describes:

In the attic/in the corner/under sheets
I found my keyboard/put my fingers/on the right keys
but couldn’t find/a single chord/and
if my hands can forget all the songs that they wrote and the parts that they played
in the albums they made/who’s to say that they won’t just forget everything
one day/can’t cook/can’t code/can’t feel
my job, my skills demand/my hands
all wrong/paycheck/all gone.

The reason he’s anxious and unhappy to begin with, as we learn in “2011,” is his decision to give up music and return to school; but if he can forget everything about the one passion in his life, what happens if he loses the other skills he relies on to live and making a living, or even the ability to feel anything at all. Because of the album’s structure, we know that the narrator’s anxiety is valid. He’s on a self-destructive downward spiral that will result in exactly what he fears.

In “2020,” he takes his kids, Chris and Zooey, to the park while Sarah cleans the house for a party. He’s begun to worry about his health:

Two nights this week I dreamed that my teeth crumbled when I tried to eat.
When I wake up my gums feel weak – I make the kids brush their teeth til their mouths bleed.
I feel ambushed by my body or at least a little misled,
as if the blood that moves my parts can’t keep up with commands coming from my head.

The narrator’s dreams are another aspect of his anxiety over losing control. While his kids are playing, he watches a girl running laps around the track: “I watch the muscles sing in her thighs.” The girl’s youth and health are things the narrator is afraid of losing. When he turns back a woman is helping his daughter off the playground equipment. She misinterprets his reasons for staring at the running girl, saying, “Maybe you should keep your eyes on your own child.” He gathers Chris and Zooey and goes to the pharmacy for his prescription, because he can “feel the panic starting.”

“2011″ reveals the mistake the narrator refers to in “2045,” the turning point in his life, through the end of a prior relationship. His girlfriend, Keta, cheats on him with a musician, and he can’t figure out what he’s done wrong:

She wanted more stability, she wanted more attention
and I just wanted to have less tension between us
I told her I could change my whole life if she’d be happy
when she said I’d never change, I called her a defeatist.

And then I did it – I put a knife in the thing I loved most
It was music that I burned at the stake,
as a toast to the girl and the world that I want to be a part of.
Maybe going back to school was when I started to lose.

“2011″ seems like a bit of a misstep in the narrative flow, since introducing a second relationship into a story this compressed feels disjointed. Continuing with Sarah would have added complexity to the entire narrative. If he caught Sarah cheating and confronted her, that information would influence the way both characters are viewed in previous songs on a second listen.

I’m also not completely sold on the narrator’s motivation for continuing to pursue his college degree after breaking up with Keta (italics mine): “I’m gonna prove to her world that I can always follow through.” Proving a point to the “adult world” by entering that world out of spite doesn’t seem reasonable, but it makes sense that he would stubbornly pursue his relationship with Sarah, even after finding out about her affair, because he’s already changed his whole life so “she’d” be happy.

Everyone’s got an opinion, as the saying goes, but this narrative blip doesn’t detract from my appreciation of the EP. I do wonder, however, if since the EP’s timeline is approaching the present of 2007, that maybe “2011″ is an extrapolation of a real life situation. In my own writing, I’ve often found it difficult to give up reality in order to tell the best story. Anyway, I could play guessing games until a new century rolls around if Castleton is right about the increased lifespan, but let’s continue.

The final track, “2007,” explains the narrator’s frustration with his musical career and his motivation for leaving it:

. . . when you have no luck to start with, you’ve nothing to part with,
and I’m not mad that I don’t have it,
I’m mad that luck should have anything to do with being an artist.

[. . .]

There was a time when I thought that I could change the country
with a few choice raps and some odd time beats,
but noise plus noise equals noise,
and the only way that noise can make silence is defeat.

The narrator has reached the point in an artist’s life where idealism hits reality. Dramatic irony drives the tension in this song. We know what happens when the narrator abandons music from the songs leading up to “2007,” but at this point he’s optimistic about giving up on his dreams:

This is not how I wanna spend the rest of my life
’cause I got it in my head that I had to stand for something?
Once you get pass that the future actually looks bright.

The lyrics do a wonderful job of depicting the sort of rationalization people go through when considering whether to stop expending the massive amounts of sweat and tears that go into pursuing a poorly paid dream. Giving up the pursuit of a dream can be an enormous weight off your shoulders, but it’s possible to lose more than just the strain. When the narrator gives up music, he also loses the only thing that anchors him and provides a sense of control in his life. Without a dream to follow, he has nothing to strive toward.

And in under 20 minutes, we’ve experienced most of a person’s life. Hopefully, we’re all inspired to continue pursuing our passions instead of hopelessly depressed about the inevitability of failure and death! A Bullet, A Lever, A Key tells an old story worth repeating, that people should pursue their own course through life instead of letting someone else choose for them. Telling the story in reverse allows Castleton to painfully layer the consequences before revealing their origin, which gives the character’s decision to abandon his dreams the entire suffocating weight of his failed life.

Now that you’ve read about Gavin Castleton’s potential future if he can’t make music viable as a career, I’ll point you once again to the place you can buy his stuff. I’m going to hold off on looking at his most recent album, Home, until the New Year, so you’ll have plenty of time to listen to it on his website, gavincastleton.com, and maybe even buy a copy so he’ll continue to make music instead of becoming a computer programmer with a drug addiction and a failed marriage. How’s that for a guilt trip?

This seven song EP tells the story of my life backwards – from my suicide in a New Jersey hotel room in 2054 to present day 2007, in the backroom of Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel after a show. The music is a cross-breed of progressive rock rhythms and hip hop instrumentation. Lyrically, each song travels eight or nine years back in time to depict a telling scene in my tragic timeline. Over the course of the record, various clues unveil the catalyst of my downfall: the decision to leave music for the seemingly greener pastures of corporate life. The album is a rendering of how my life could look if I stopped doing what makes me happy and started following a more adulty path.

- Gavin Castleton

A Bullet, A Lever, A Key is Gavin Castleton’s prog-hop mini-epic about a fictional alternate life where he gives up music to go to college and join the ranks of the cubicle-bound office world. Each of the EP’s seven tracks is named after a different year and the story is told in reverse chronology (“2054,” “2045,” “2038,” “2031,” “2020,” “2011,” & “2007″). The narrative begins with Castleton’s suicide at age 76, so tension is immediately established and most of what drives the story is finding out how the narrator reached such a desperate point in his life.

Since the EP begins in year 2054, the story also has some subtle science fictional elements: an extended lifespan (Castleton’s ex-boss hopes to live to 140 through the use of “enhancers, attachments, and stuff”) and holograms instead of photographs. Though these SF elements could have been distracting, there are only two, and the extended lifespan is particularly interesting because the narrator ends his life at 76, which would typically be near the end of our lifespans anyway. What effects would living through almost an entire extra life have on our society? An increase in the number of suicides seems likely.

On the opening track “2054″, Castleton immediately grounds the listener in the concrete:

For three days I’ve carried all my stuff down from the attic
and cut it up into two piles:
the things that hurt I threw into the bathtub and burned.
The things that made me smile, I cleaned them up,
and set them up in rows around my bed

The use of objects from the narrator’s past works well to establish an emotional connection between the listener and the character. We learn through a bound copy of a dissertation that the narrator was raised by a single mother with four kids, but she still “fought eight years” for a PhD. The mother’s struggle to complete something personally meaningful despite hardship foreshadows the narrator’s failure to continue pursuing his own passion.

The second object is the narrator’s son’s diploma:

Then I picked up Chris’ diploma from Brown University,
and I remember how he asked me not to attend the ceremony,
but I hid in the back when he walked up to get it,
and my heart screamed his name when they said it.

The narrator and Chris are estranged, which creates tension without an explanation, but that the character still cares for his son. He also finds a picture of himself as a young man that he had forgotten about. The photograph is the only thing he has from the period in his life when he was truly happy. It shows him backstage after a musical performance with a girl, and though he doesn’t seem to recognize the girl, he knows they’re in love.

The hopeful look on that face makes me wince.
I haven’t seen that look, haven’t seen that face since.
I take it into the bathroom – light it up and throw it in.

Since this is the only object in the song that the narrator describes burning, it gains additional narrative weight. Seeing an object from this period in the his life causes him pain, and gives the listener a clue to what initially started him on the path toward suicide.

Castleton uses the list of objects to establish a history for the narrator in a short amount of time. Starting any narrative with the narrator’s suicide is risky because it’s difficult to give death meaning without an established connection to the character, and in the even more constrictive confines of a song, the risk is greater.

I smelled Zooey’s baby clothes,
my first program code,
the leotards I wore when I was just four years old,
the first cartoon I drew,
Chris’ first pair of shoes . . .

Similar to Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” Castleton uses the list of objects to describe the character and develop an emotional connection to the character for the listener without having to spend a lot of time in development. Listeners understand how the narrator feels about each object because they have similar objects that are important to them. The quantity of objects with emotional significance to the narrator communicate the length of his life and what he’s giving up by ending that life.

Castleton doesn’t mention suicide directly in the song. Only the method is implied:

I empty out the medicine cabinet into my shaky hands.
My fingers look so new for a second I wonder who I am.
I quickly stow them away, back in my pants.

This indirect method of describing difficult subject matter works well, especially since the story is told through the character’s voice. There’s no way to artfully have a character say, “I’m going to commit suicide,” and since the narrator has already made his decision, it would be awkward to mention it directly. The narrator also suggests suicide at the end of the song:

Some people feel like the world wants them around, and that’s fine.
I decided 10 years ago that I don’t want all that time . . .
For me 76 is enough.
For me 76 was too much.

The extended lifespan of the character also adds emotional weight, since the suicide of a 76-year-old is different from a younger person’s. We can assume that the narrator has contemplated ending his life for quite a while, and that he truly may have little to live for. The way he plans his suicide is methodical. He burns everything that hurt him and then sets the few things that make him happy on display, as a memorial to the good things in his life.

The second track, “2045,” describes the end of the narrator’s marriage. His wife delivers divorce papers for him to sign at a hotel room where he’s staying. Since the story is told through the narrator’s voice, we only hear his side of the story regarding the cause of the divorce, but other problems are suggested in the chorus:

It’s pathetic, but everything came down to whether or not I was rich.
She tells me it wasn’t the money,
but I find it funny that losing my job is what toggled the switch.
She says it’s painful to be in the house with me,
but never complained when she had half my salary.
She says that I have a problem with pills;
the real problem is all the credit card bills.

A drug problem is referenced, but the narrator believes his wife, Sarah, only stayed with him previously because of his paycheck. The narrator explains the reasons he used the pills:

I took the pills because they were there,
and they evened me out . . . make me act right.

No, I took the pills because I don’t dare
to be thinking about the mistake of my life.

The “mistake” the narrator mentions creates tension for the listener, and suggests that a single decision he made led to his addiction, divorce, and suicide. Though the “pills” aren’t specifically named, they seem to be for anxiety.

Castleton is able to develop a complex relationship quickly by describing the dynamics within the marriage. Aside from the financial dynamic described in the chorus, the narrator asks Sarah, “How can they expect us to raise our own replacements? It’s insane!” suggesting that he doesn’t feel capable of raising children. Castleton doesn’t allow Sarah to appear completely blameless, however, which would cheapen the impact of the song:

She tells the kids that I ruined her life.
What kind of wife – what kind of human tells that to her children?
About their father!
Even if I did want to get better, why bother?

The narrator’s question about raising children as “replacements,” along with Sarah telling the children their father ruined her life, suggests a complex relationship between two complex characters, and all within a three and a half minute song. That kind of narrative compression is impressive, and makes Castleton’s music worthwhile to examine. Writing a complex, compelling short story is more difficult in some ways than writing a novel, and by word count, Castleton’s lyrics are flash fiction. This Blaise Pascal quote comes to mind, “I would have written a short letter, but I did not have the time.”

I’m sure that quote could also apply to this post, especially if I continued through to its conclusion, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to read about the rest of A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. I would like to encourage everyone who’s reading to purchase the EP so that they can listen along. The digital version is only 6 dollars, and you can listen to tracks “2038″ and “2007″ for free, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

]]> http://theautumnalcity.com/criticism/a-bullet-a-lever-a-key-one/feed/ 0 http://theautumnalcity.com/criticism/hospital-hymns/ http://theautumnalcity.com/criticism/hospital-hymns/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:21:34 +0000 Travis Megill http://theautumnalcity.com/?p=803

Hospital Hymns I wrote because I was working in a Hospital stockroom for a stint and there was this little closet-sized “chapel” that was just off of ICU. It was the only carpeted area besides an office in Women’s Care, and I thought it was strange to have this little haven for the religious in the midst of all this science and sterility. It seemed thoroughly disproportionate to the amount of emotional events that were filling up the halls everywhere else in the building. And there were heavy debates about spirituality and religion coursing through my family at the time, so I wanted to design a character that would polarize my listeners, and maybe have them assess where they lie on that spiritual graph, so to speak.

- Gavin Castleton

Hospital Hymns is narrated by a 76-year-old orderly at a hospital. The narrator describes his interactions with co-workers and patients as he goes about his work day, specifically focusing on the man’s religious beliefs. The EP is more of a character sketch than a story, since the listener’s perception of the narrator changes as he or she learns more about the character, but he doesn’t change significantly himself.

Sympathy for the narrator is developed in a number of ways. In the opening song, “Hymn 1: Maternity in G Major,” the hospital is described, and the man pauses for a moment to appreciate the sunlight, which he doesn’t see often during the course of his workday:

There,
reaching out
to touch my nose
and make me sneeze,
the Lord gave his sun to me.

This song introduces the setting and the narrator’s religious beliefs, and also develops sympathy for the narrator as he takes a moment during his workday to appreciate the warmth of sunlight on his face.

In “Women’s Care in E Flat Minor,” the second song, the elderly man’s personality is revealed through humor:

When I took the elevator down it was all by myself.
So I sang that Usher song,
but I got the words all wrong.
But I always say when you’re alone you can make up the words yourself.

And then by introducing the man’s forgiving nature and describing his religious beliefs:

Jessica snapped at me,
but I know the Lord tells us we should turn the other cheek,
and Lord knows that Jess has had an awful week,
so I dropped two crates and turned around to leave.

Jessica’s reaction to the narrator introduces conflict. She doesn’t appreciate him, and she’s not the only one who’s inconsiderate toward him. At the end of the song, a doctor the narrator shares the elevator with won’t speak to him, even after he says hello. In fact, the doctor “let[s] out a massive sigh/like he couldn’t breath from the same air as I did.” The narrator is unperturbed, however, and ends the song by saying, “I tried to love them all.”

The narrator’s mistreatment by his co-workers creates tension because no reason is given for his co-workers to be disgusted or frustrated with him. The doctor’s reaction, in particular, seems to be based on the gap between social status that exists between an orderly and a doctor. Though the listener learns more about the narrator, and may develop similar feelings about him for different reasons, there’s no indication that his co-workers know anything about him.

It’s interesting that the conflict revealed in “Women’s Care in E Flat Minor,” presumably based on the social hierarchy of the hospital, isn’t specifically explored as the album continues, but the tension created from that conflict is transferred to listeners as they begin to learn more about the narrator. The initial social tension lets listeners know that everything isn’t going to be sunbeams and Usher songs, so they aren’t jarred when the narrator behaves strangely.

The perception of the narrator changes dramatically when he tries to help two patients, forcing listeners to question their trust in the elderly man. The first is a sick, little boy with “a tube in each limb/I could see through his skin.” The boy’s parents are present, but he’s still scared, so the narrator tries to comfort him by saying, “God wants you back.” This may seem like a perfectly lovely thing to say from the narrator’s perspective, but a child with a serious illness probably doesn’t need to be reminded about the possibility of death by a stranger. The narrator’s implacable faith seems to disrupt his ability to see the effect his actions have on others.

When the narrator tries to help a second patient, the results are immediate and serious. In the last song, “Hymn 5: E.R. in E Flat Major,” the elderly man enters the emergency room after a “pile-up on 95.” A woman calls out to him in a hallway, asking for an end to her suffering:

“Please stop this pain.
We are all alone, just the three of us again.

and as I pulled the tube from her mouth,
she drifted off to sleep,
singing to the sky,
and scrunching up the sheets.

“Oh God
Oh Lord
I’m home.”

The woman asks for her pain to stop, and references “the three of us,” herself, the orderly, and God, also an allusion to the Trinity, so the narrator kills her. There’s no consideration of whether killing the woman is the right thing to do. He doesn’t even recognize that it’s not his responsibility to make a life or death decision for another person at all.

This scene, the narrative and musical climax of the EP, insists upon a reevaluation of the narrator. It’s interesting that Castleton’s intent is to polarize listeners, because after my first listen I admired the narrator’s unflinching adherence to his faith in the idea that life after death is a wonderful experience that everyone’s invited to. After thinking about it, and listening again, I find the narrator rather horrifying. The description of the emergency room from the elderly man’s perspective decided it for  me.

The narrator’s reaction to the victims of the car wreck that fill the E.R. shows a sort of inhumanity caused by his faith in God and the afterlife:

I’d never seen so much color in my life.

How can they be so afraid when the father’s so near?
Doesn’t everybody know that the arm of the Lord is severe?

He has no sympathy for the people around him, though they are in pain and possibly dying. His belief in God’s influence makes it illogical for him to feel anything except confusion about why everyone else is so upset. Since he is unable to empathize with other people’s pain, and cannot recognize perspectives other than his own, the narrator’s behavior seems more sociopathic than devoutly religious.

The conflict in Hospital Hymns is developed around a single viewpoint character. The narrator is sympathetic, though perhaps misguided throughout the first four hymns, but as listeners learn more about the effect the man’s faith has on others and the way he views the world in the fifth and final hymn, his unfailing “kindness” becomes a flaw. The character’s religion becomes delusion.

Castleton has obviously succeeded in polarizing me. I can’t seem to find a valid defense for the character, but I’d be interested in discussing the songs with someone from the other pole, as long as they remain a comfortably safe distance away from me.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. The character developed over the course of its narrative is more complex than the narrator from Hospital Hymns. Though the EP is less than twenty minutes long, ABALAK covers most of the narrator’s life by focusing on the specific and significant moments that define the character’s arc.

The older I get, the more tenuous my connection to music seems to grow. In high school and college, the music I listened to and performed were part of how I defined myself, but now I’ll go for weeks without sitting down to listen to an album, or even a single song. When I drive somewhere, more often than not, I’ll turn off the radio and just sit in silence.

Losing that connection, however, makes it that much more exciting to find an artist  that makes me want to listen to music as obsessively as I used to. Gavin Castleton, a musician from Providence, Rhode Island, has done just that. I’ve been a fan of his band, Gruvis Malt, for a few years, but his most recent solo material is what has grabbed me and won’t let go.

Castleton’s music is stylistically diverse, and his subject matter is varied: an EP of falsetto pop songs based on hymn structures, another of progressive hip hop describing his life in reverse from his suicide in 2054, and an album about a relationship told through the metaphor of a zombie apocalypse are just a few examples.

I don’t know enough about music to confidently describe why Castleton’s interests me. It’s consistently surprising and reveals itself through repeated listens, but the common thread that runs through “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home, the two EP’s and an album described above, is the use of narrative. All three tell stories with well-developed characters and conflict, and though they could have been written traditionally, they are enriched by their realization in a form not known for strong narrative.

So what does this have to do with video games? Nothing really; but examining how other forms of art incorporate narrative successfully without sacrificing quality is a worthwhile exercise for both writers and game designers.

I’ve learned a lot as a writer while listening to Castleton’s music by recognizing the methods of storytelling I know in a new context, such as establishing the speaker in dialogue through movement and voice instead of “he said, she said” tags, describing scenes and conflict using concrete details instead of abstractions, developing characters through word choice and sentence structure, and the list goes on.

In my next three posts, I plan to examine “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home separately and in detail, not only because I listen to them obsessively and want to share them with others, but also because I think there’s something to learn from my attachment to this specific music. Gavin Castleton tells stories effectively in his medium and I want to know how he does it.

For anyone interested in listening to the music before I pick it apart, a track or two from each of the EP’s are available for free on Integers Only, Castleton’s independent label, and buying both in digital format is only 10 bucks. The album, Home, is freely available in its entirety as a stream on Castleton’s website, but I recommend the physical disc because it comes with a lyrics booklet.

If you didn’t know where my blog’s name comes from before, you’ll know now. I wrote an “extended critical essay” for Spalding’s MFA program about Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. The novel’s opening lines are:

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

Over the years, I’ve coerced a number of people to actually read the massive thing, and managed to find a few fans in the gaming community, so I figured I’d post the whole essay. It’s only 23 pages long, so “extended” is a bit of a misnomer.

The essay is obviously going to “spoil” some things, but Dhalgren, like all literature, really isn’t something that can be ruined by revealing plot points. It’s not a mystery with a neat answer at the end, and it may even be helpful to have a little bit of context before reading it for the first time. I’ve read the book four times and I’m still finding new things and making new connections.

Just looking over the essay and writing this post makes me want to start reading it again. For me, it’s that book I’ll read every year for the rest of my life. It’s had a huge impact on my life and the way I view the world.

The Autumnal City: Symptoms of Schizophrenia in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren

Arkham Asylum is a hellish place–a collection of every stereotype that exists about treating the mentally ill. Electricity used as punishment, violent, inhuman patients, and a focus on captivity vs. treatment. Batman’s job is to make sure all of the villains contained in the Gothic structure stay there, where they can’t hurt anyone, even themselves. For a game released in 2009, it contains ideas that seem archaic, but no one seems to be bothered by them.

I made some statements on Twitter the other night about feeling uncomfortable while playing Arkham Asylum because of its depiction of mental illness. My friend Justin Keverne and I debated for a while, and then he suggested we write about it in a longer form. He wrote a post about the issue at his blog, Groping the Elephant, which I’ll be referencing. I’m not interested in comparing Arkham Asylum’s treatment of the mentally ill to Resident Evil 5. That doesn’t seem very productive, and my previous comment about Batman being “worse” than RE5 was based entirely on the fact that the enemies in that game are zombies, while Arkham Asylum doesn’t have that excuse. The only thing that makes Batman’s enemies inhuman is their mental illness.

Justin says that “the history of the treatment of the mentally ill has not been consistently just or humane, [but] it does not carry the same associated cultural cachet so played upon in those initial trailers for Resident Evil 5.” While I don’t want to make any comparisons between racism and how people with mental illness are treated, I think there is a significant “cultural cachet” associated with mental illness that is tragic because it isn’t recognized and brought up for discussion nearly as often as race, probably because those suffering from severe mental illness are in no position to defend themselves, and people with less severe forms of mental illness are ashamed of it and don’t want to talk about their experiences. There’s a tendency to associate mental illness with only its severe forms, while illnesses like depression and anxiety, which almost everyone deals with at one time or another, are ignored. Arkham Asylum does a very poor job of addressing the stigma of mental illness by contributing to the myth that people experiencing it are “other.”

Batman doesn’t kill, but he beats the patients of Arkham Asylum into submission so they can be returned to their cells. He’s a hero because he keeps the streets of Gotham City clear of “normal” criminals (though many of them are possibly suffering from mental illness) like the enemy types imported from Blackgate, Gotham City’s correctional facility, as well as those admitted to the asylum. The illnesses the villains have in the game are never identified, they’re just “crazy,” a term that stigmatizes mental illness. One of the enemy types is simply called, “lunatic.” Why doesn’t the game identify what these people are suffering from? Probably because it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying to repeatedly punch and kick an enemy type called, “John, a person suffering from bipolar disorder,” or “Jeff, a person suffering from schizophrenia.” This may seem ridiculous to bring up, after all, it’s “just a Batman game,” but the same kind of stigma is attached to people in the real world, and isolates people with these diseases.

My discomfort with the game would not be alleviated by giving Batman a stun dart to eliminate these enemies. The entire environment the game takes place in contributes to the stigma of mental illness, and lacks any sort of depth or commentary that the comics may or may not supply (I haven’t read them). I’m also not satisfied with the argument that Batman’s violence is simply self-defense. His attacks are not intended for self-defense, they’re intended to harm, whether the victim is listed as “unconscious” when he’s disabled or not. The action sequences would be much less entertaining if Batman only used approved methods of self-defense to subdue his opponents. I rarely let the enemy approach me and attack first, to make sure that he didn’t just want a hug. Instead, I threw a razor sharp Batarang at the patient to knock him to the floor, and then pounced on his back and slammed his head against the concrete floor. The distinction between patients from Arkham and the criminals brought in from Blackgate is meaningless because the player’s approach to neutralizing them is the same.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is not alone in its disturbing depiction of mental illness. In Condemned, Ethan Thomas brutually dispatches violent homeless people, many of them may have a mental illness. Even Psychonauts, one of my favorite games, has an area where Raz “cures” various characters of their mental illnesses by solving puzzles in their minds, a hopelessly naive method of treatment for someone suffering from a severe mental illness. The paranoia exhibited by Boyd, the security guard at the asylum, is logical and easily fixed. Other characters simply need help overcoming an issue in their past, and magically their problems disappear. But at least Psychonauts attempts to de-stigmatize the characters suffering from mental illness, and Raz is trying to help them instead of keep them within the asylum.

I’m not interested in making people feel guilty for playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, or stirring up some controversy to make people avoid playing it. The game simply presents an opportunity to bring up an issue that doesn’t get enough attention. I plan to continue enjoying the fantasy of inhabiting the character of Batman, and would recommend the game to others. I would suggest, however, that anyone interested in finding out more about the stigma of mental illness visit NAMI’s website for more information.

Bethesda’s Fallout 3 provides an experience different from many other role-playing games. It gives the player the ability to create their own path through its world without a pressing main quest.

In Borges’ short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the author describes a book that attempts to contain the infinite labyrinth of possible realities. The book, which the story is named for, is explained: “In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others . . . [but in this one] the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.” The ever forking potential paths through life suggest realities closely nestled beside our personal experience—the possibilities we’ve left behind are lost to us, but still exist. Fallout 3 attempts a simulacra of the labyrinth on a smaller, interactive scale, allowing players to experiment with these paths without the true fear of lost potential—in a world that doesn’t pressure a character down a pre-determined path with only the illusion of choice.

In games like Mass Effect and Bioshock, as well as traditional Japanese role-playing games, players are confronted with choices that appear to define their character, but the choices are an illusion. If the characters could look in a mirror, another of Borges’ favorite symbols, they would expect to see themselves altered by their choices, but they would not. Fallout 3 does not provide a revolutionary leap in the potential of role-playing, but the way the narrative is structured removes responsibility from the player regarding the central quest. This allows the player to pick a path for their character that truly forks, though each character’s story may not end with credits.

The central narrative thread in the game beings with the character’s abandonment by his or her father. Though this narrative expands fairly late in the story arc, the player is free to rebel against the father’s abandonment and explore their own self-created story.

Does Fallout 3 create truly developed choice? No, of course not. After all, even Borges’ fictional book mapping the labyrinth wasn’t able to capture the intricacies of infinite reality. The game does, however, succeed in creating a world where the player’s choices have an impact on the interactive space that confines the character’s development. Early in the game, or more appropriately, close to the player’s starting point, the player has an array of choices to make regarding the town of Megaton.

The town is built around an undetonated nuclear warhead that defines the town and also serves as a sort of metaphor about Fallout’s gameplay—the ever present threat of danger. The player, through the role he or she plays, can choose many paths: detonate the bomb, disarm the bomb, ignore the town completely, use the town for its potential and then destroy it. The impact of these choices results in the loss of playable space for the player, but also, the destruction of people in a world that has already seen so much loss. These choices may have been unbearable in real life, but the player does not destroy the potential of another choice for themselves, only for the character they play. And truthfully not even the character, since loading a saved game permits the character to make another.

The idea of choices in a role-playing game, their weight and their ability to fool the player into believing the loss of potential is interesting. The ability to experience all possible paths is the great strength and pleasure of role-playing games, but without the significance of choice, the genre would be meaningless.

Fallout 3 gives weight to player choice using loss and benefit. Choices will always gain the player something, whether experience points, wealth, or a more subtle in-game benefit (like finding a certain Stradivarius), but also a corresponding loss, if only the loss of another choice. Since the game doesn’t weight the choices from the start by placing the character on a world-saving quest, the player feels the freedom to truly explore the gameworld, making choices based on the role they want to play.

Instead of every wannabe game critic like myself having to scour the weblogs for information on this whole criticism thing, I thought I would start a Google Notebook and list the resources in a centralized location that anyone could access. That way we can add articles and blog posts and published books as they are created or found.

I need your help, though. Please send me an e-mail, a twitter, or just leave a comment below with suggestions for the notebook. If you think something that’s already listed is worthless or particularly useful, comment on it below and I’ll summarize the information in a comment on the notebook.

If anyone has any suggestions, or this is already being done somewhere else in a better format, please let me know. Also, please don’t hesitate to recommend one of your own blog posts or articles. I want to collect everything and then I’ll work on organizing it somehow.

[EDIT: Let's make this even more fun. Give me links to actual game criticism that you think it particularly well-done and tell me why. I'll have a second notebook for those examples with comments about how they succeed.]

Through my research on Samuel R. Delany for my MFA research paper, I stumbled across his opinions on the development of a language of criticism for Science Fiction. I think it applies in interesting ways to the development of a gaming language as well.

“Frequently this correspondence point generates a term; frequently this term is appropriated from the literary field to the [Science Fiction] field . . . But what this finally produces in the SF critical field is an array of terms that discuss only similarities. The field of critical terminology, because it is appropriated, suggests that similarities are much more pervasive than they actually are.”

We’ll assume in gaming language that “correspondence point” equals blog post. Over at SLRC, Ben was commenting on the merits of developing terms for gaming criticism (or lack thereof), and though this article doesn’t directly respond to his thoughts, it does argue for a completely new language to be developed over lifting critical terms from other forms of art. By taking these terms from other places in an effort to elevate game criticism to the level of art criticism, we’re focusing on similarities instead of highlighting what makes video games unique.

I know Corvus Elrod, Iroquois Pliskin, Michael Abbott (check out the comments sections for another great article), and I’m sure many others, including academics in the expanding arena of video game programs, are already thinking about the language of video games, but it’s interesting to see how other fairly new artforms have struggled with their own terminology. [EDIT: another interesting post by Pliskin that popped up just as I published this]

Delany also talks about how genres should be defined by the strategies used for reading them instead of specific characteristics of the subject matter: “A more fruitful way to characterize the distinction between genres is to view it as a set of distinctions between reading protocols, between ways of reading, between ways of responding to sentences, between ways of making various sentences and various texts make sense.”

At first, I thought this was interesting because it seems that game genres are already based on this convention. The genres are set up based on gameplay mechanics, not subject matter, and a gamer knows they might like a game because they know the conventions of the genre (i.e. Its control scheme). Delany argues that sub-genres are the place to differentiate based on subject matter, which the gaming industry also does.

I wonder, though, whether Delany would think gaming genres are labelled wrong. Does “platformer” really distinguish how Braid should be understood as a game? It correctly labels a set of gameplay mechanics, but Delany’s “reading protocol” is based around “making various sentences and various texts make sense.” Is understanding how to play Braid enough to characterize it as a platformer? Or should its genre definition be based on how to “understand” Braid? I guess that depends on whether the genre definitions are set up to aid shoppers or to aid game critics with how to critique a game.

(The pictures in this post are intended to break up my wall of text and also to illustrate an aesthetic conflict between my intended meaning and your experience reading this post)

The MDA framework is used as a lens to view the process of creating games, but I’m also interested in using it to view examine the process of creating writing, specifically revision. Since this post will consider a shared framework between games and writing, I’m considering it on-topic. This idea was inspired by Corvus Elrod’s post, “Mechanics are to Grammar as Dynamics are to…”, which I recommend.

The MDA framework breaks down games into three components: mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. I think the framework probably relates more easily to the later stages of revision, when a writer is trying to fine-tune the mechanics of a story so that the aesthetics of the piece are supporting the meaning or experience that’s intended, but I want to look at some interesting parallels with the beginning of the revision process. In a previous post, I talked about revision and included a link to my work-in-progress “Revision Procedure”.

After a draft is completed, it’s important for a writer to figure out what the intended meaning of the story actually is. The initial idea for a story and it’s meaning after a first draft is completed are rarely the same. (You can see this distortion taking place in many of my blog posts, where the initial idea for the post is lost in whatever new tangent I’ve discovered. It happens on other blogs too, I’m watching!) What is the writer trying to convey to the reader? The second draft is important because it allows the writer to experiment with drastic changes to the story in order to make that meaning more apparent. The dynamics of the story will change, sometimes significantly, in order to focus the story on the fleshed-out idea the writer comes up with in the first draft.

The MDA has an example of its framework in use: a series of “passes” regarding a Babysitting game. The example shows how the mechanics of a game and its intended audience can completely change the way it plays. The aesthetic goals for each “pass” change the Babysitting game in a fundamental way. As I mentioned above, the MDA framework doesn’t directly relate to the early stages of revision, but I’m interested in these fundamental changes.

Once a writer has a precise written summary of what he or she wants to accomplish, they can experiment with changing the elements of the story in order to align the aesthetics with the meaning or goal. For example, in a story I’m working on now, about a mother and son relationship, I intitially chose a psychiatric hospital as the setting. The story is about the complex emotions, guilt, frustration, etc. that this mother feels toward her schizophrenic son. I realized while looking at the completed first draft that the setting conflicted with the goals I had for the story. If I’m examining the relationship between a mother and son, a better setting would be the son’s apartment, where I can reference their past organically through objects in the room. I wasn’t writing a story about the effects of a psychiatric hospital on a patient, or a mother’s distress over her son’s treatment.

The change in setting had a dramatic effect on the writing as well as my understanding of the characters and their relationship. Other elements of the story need to be examined as well, such as perspective (would the story work better in a 1st/third/omniscient POV? should it be told from the son’s perspective?), narrative distance (up close to focus on the mother’s experience, or backed further away to encompass both mother and son?), time period (how old is this conflict? how long has it been developing? is this the first time the mother/son have encountered these emotions?), etc.

The MDA framework’s example shows three games with a common theme, but each of them is different because of their mechanics and the dynamics that are created. To understand the revision process, a writer has to understand how the mechanics of writing work to create dynamics that lead to an aesthetic experience for the reader, from which they extract the meaning of the story (does this make any sense or am I just dropping MDA words into a sentence? .

The framework helps me, as a writer, to understand that every choice I make in a story has a direct consequence on the final aesthetic experience, and unless I’ve thought about how I’m creating the dynamics in my story in regards to my final intended meaning, then I failed and probably created unintentional conflict between my intended meaning and the reader’s experience of the story.