BIBLIPEDIA

Imagine a Brechtian Epic Videogame

People who like videogames, such as those of us who celebrate interactive media and the participatory web and the interactivity of computer culture, don't really like to be reminded of the reactionary critics of videogames who rail against the violence, and accuse violent games of encouraging and conditioning us into acceptance of extreme violent behaviour and ultimately leading the more vulnerable types into some kind of copy-cat action. Campus shootings, child pornography - all these are uncomfortable reminders that mediatised experiences often mask subterranean kinds of perversity.

Costikyan notes the violence in role-playing games (he isn't even specifically talking about videogames as such), and remarks that they are "unintellectual, even anti-intellectual, and tend to emphasise combat and violence at the expense of exploration of human issues."

In this context, Costikyan offers a imaginative case study of a role-playing game – Bestial Acts – in which he proposes a game in which the only ‘honest’ solution to intolerable moral dilemmas is to ‘act in vicious, brutal ways’. Instead of role-playing games as entertaining diversion, he proposes a role-playing game which is an emotionally harrowing ordeal. Imagine if your first person shooter, instead of rewarding you with progress every time you kill a non-player-character, instead stopped the gameplay and demanded to know why you had committed the awful act of murder against someone with a family? This, Costikyan suggests, is the Brechtian drama which is absent from the performances we engage in today.

As an immense fan of Brecht and of games, it is an arresting thought: what would Brecht do? What medium would he work in? Where are the Brechts of today?

Tags: alienation brecht epic game media-effects narrative narratives-3 narratives-4 verfremdungseffekt videogame violence

Note posted by: joe soap, the hopeless hobo on Fri 06 Feb 09

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Seminal and influential formalist work

Shklovsky's essay 'Art as Technique' is an important marker in the history of formalism. Shlovsky articulates som eof the key tenets of Russian formalist approaches to understanding art:

"The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged"

Here in a nutshell is the key to alientation, ostranenie, estrangement, defamiliarisation, dehabitualisation, deautomatisation, distantiation, Verfremdungseffekt. To 'lay bare the device' is to draw attention to the artifice of representation.

Tags: alienation art ideology narrative narratives-3 representation verfremdungseffekt

Note posted by: joe soap, the hopeless hobo on Thu 29 Jan 09

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Inevitability vs Alienation

This chapter gives a very clear outline of the kinds of effects Brecht wanted to achieve in his vision of an 'epic theatre', and in his development and use of techniques of alienation: Verfremdungseffekt.

“the audience must be discouraged from losing its critical detachment by identification with one or more of the characters: the opposite of identification is the maintenance of a separate existence by being kept apart, alien, strange…�

A key aspect of the kind of theatre that Aristotle described is the privileged position of the audience. Dramatic irony – when you know something a character in a narrative does not – depends on the audience’s ability to see all the action. The audience has the comfort of having a kind of omniscience – being informed of the disparate events that characters are not party to. Those events have causes and effects, which unfold as causes and effects do – and try as they might, the characters are unable to circumvent their fate: the outcome of the narrative is inevitable, inexorable – the way of the world or the will of the Gods.

So Brecht wanted his audience not to ‘immerse’ themselves in the diegesis of the story. Rather than avoiding ‘disturbance’ as Aristotle advised, Brecht wanted to encourage disturbance. He wanted his audience to retain their critical faculties, to retain their disbelief. This way, perhaps they might concentrate on why and how events unfolded before them, instead of blindly accepting them as the inevitable destinies of mankind. If destinies are not inevitable, then destinies can change; we need not look to the Gods or to fate to determine the future: we can act and make the future ourselves.

Tags: alienation aristotelian brecht epic narrative narratives-3 theatre verfremdungseffekt

Note posted by: joe soap, the hopeless hobo on Thu 29 Jan 09

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