Synchronicity and a Call for Papers - All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming

By Mr. VI

Synchronicity works in funny ways:

I came up with the idea of incorporating Dragon Age 2 into a post on interactivity, incorporation, identity and storytelling. I mentioned this to James and discovered he'd been thinking on ARG's and transmedia projects - you can read some of his thoughts here and listen to an intriguing podcast here on the subject published by the folks who are also publishing the forthcoming Immanence of Myth book.

So this morning, I was cruising through my livejournal friends-list when I came across this:

All Your History Are Belong to Us: The Middle Ages, Medievalism, and Digital Gaming (more details below after I've finished pontificating)

I know, I know. LJ is so very stone-age, so very Web 1.0 but I love it anyway, even though as writer Warren Ellis says: '[I]t's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands.'

And actually, Warren's a bit of a favourite around here. His epic Transmetropolitan cyberpunk comic series has a main character who seems to have mainlined the Gonzo journalism of the late, great Hunter S Thompson which in turn has inspired the Gonzomentary of the CLARK webseries.

Warren's also no stranger to games either; he wrote the script for the 2001 game Hostile Waters:Antaeus Rising and more recently worked on the storyline for the well known survival horror game Dead Space - which the Call for Papers below actually refers to in terms of 'templarization of history'.

Interestingly enough, I didn't originally intend the remark about LJ to be anything more than a throwaway one - I missed the original reference to Dead Space in the Call, and yet it's there; an acausal connection.

Because here's the thing, narrative doesn't have to flow one single way. As James has already said in his post on time, place and convention of literature:

[O]ur expectations of narrative structure are actually incredibly unnatural. Our cognitive experience is not linear. Someone says something to you. You are reminded of something a few years ago. You wonder about the future. All of these things can happen while you are also walking and other things are happening around you which themselves may have past, present, and future layers occurring simultaneously, again from the perspective of their perception.

Mythological Sandbox: Dragon Age 2, and Global Conversation

By Mr. VI

Storytelling is about manipulating the audience; about leading them where they want to go and showing them something different. The old stories are familiar, like worn paths tracked through a dark forest, all pitted and uneven, but they are not paved roads. Here and there, the environment erupts and diverts them; trees have fallen or thickets have sprung up, and because they are paths, those who journey simply route around them and carry on.

The best storytellers and the best explorers don't just avoid these interruptions, they incorporate them into the journey, make them part of the experience. A good story is both inexorable and yet also allows you to move, to indulge in multiple divergences; switchbacks, digressions, stories within stories.

That's how Sheherazade kept her head in the epic of A Thousand and One Nights – by drawing the king further and further in. It went beyond cliff-hangers. She lead him so far down the twisting pathways that he simply forgot the route back to the place where he was going to kill her – he became so enamoured of the journey that the origin and destination were unimportant.

As Shakespeare says through the mouth of Hamlet:

I'll have grounds
More relative than this—the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 603–605

Hamlet's play was designed to elicit visible proof from his audience. Proof that Claudius had killed his father, confirming what the ghost has to say. If that's not manipulation of your audience, I don't know what is.

As the saying goes: 'Give them enough rope to hang themselves.'

Again, there's the notion of space to move, space for things to 'play out'. And speaking of playing, those of us in Europe will soon be looking enviously at the US, because you get the eagerly anticipated Bioware epic, the fantasy RPG-sequel Dragon Age 2 three days earlier than us.

You bastards.

Still, I'm not that bitter. Come the 11th I shall be sitting down in front of my Xbox and entering a familiar world. I may not surface for a good long while, because frankly, I love the world they've created and want to see what happens next in it.



The arc of a character over from humble beginnings to world-shaking hero is a mythic theme which has been repeated over and over again, in various cultures. What's more, there are over a million downloads of the demo across all the platforms, because the publisher promised goodies if it happened.