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Replayability, Part One: Narrative Telling a Great Tale To appreciate great stories it isn't necessary that they be new. People go to the opera with a full knowledge of the plot, and indeed the plots of most operas are pretty thin. What they go for is the performance, the power and beauty of the human voice. Why did teenaged girls go back to see Titanic again and again and again? They already knew the plot. It was because of the way it made them feel, and that, too, is a function not only of the tale but the telling.
Some time
ago, I began wondering how to think about comic books - their stories
go on and on, and their heroes and villains never grow old and seldom
die. They suffer setbacks from time to time, but few of these changes
are permanent. The stories are presented as if they are part of a continuous
narrative, but of course that makes no sense; it means that Batman, a
normal human being, has been fighting crime continuously for nearly seventy
years. To what class of literature do comic books belong? Finally, I concluded
that they are not novels, not serials or soap operas, but legends. Legends
don't have to hang together to form a coherent whole. There can be an
infinite number of stories about Paul Bunyan, and he never grows old or
dies, because each tale is self-contained. The publishers
of comic books are afraid to kill a character, for fear that people will
expect him to remain dead forever. They invent origins for their characters,
and they have ongoing stories of their adventures, but they don't dare
tell how they die. They're still hung up on this idea that their books
are continuous narratives. At least, they were until 1986. In 1986,
Frank Miller wrote a graphic novel called The Dark Knight Returns. In
this book, he told the tale of Batman's final battle and his end. He recognized
that the readers of comic books are not necessarily small children; that
they are mature enough to be able to read the story of Batman's doom without
assuming that the publication of other Batman stories must therefore cease.
In his introduction to the book, Alan Moore wrote:
In providing
a capstone to Batman's career, Miller took nothing away and did nothing
to obstruct the creation of further legends. He simply gave it a fitting
end, one without which the legend was incomplete. Another
thing about legends is that it isn't necessary for them to be consistent.
We know they're fiction, not fact. There's no reason why one particular
version of Batman's fate must be definitive. In composing The Ring
of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner substantially re-wrote the Norse legends
for his own purposes, and while the results are not "true" to
his source material, his source material isn't "true" to anything
either. He was working from copies of the legends written down in medieval
times, by authors who themselves chose to record one particular version
of far more ancient oral tales. In a more modern example, the author John
Fowles was unable to decide on an ending for The French Lieutenant's
Woman, so he unapologetically created two different endings and told
them both. These, I think, are the keys to making a narrative game replayable. First, if the story is linear, to make it so good that it's worth hearing again and again, even if we know the plot. To do as Tolkien did, and write it well; to do as opera does, and perform it well; to do as Titanic did, and offer an emotional resonance that goes beyond the plot alone. To tell the tale as the Stone Age singer told it on a North Sea winter's night, so spellbindingly that your audience can hear it a hundred times without tiring of it. That's a tall order, but it can be done if we find the right talent and make the commitment to do so.
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