How real is make-believe?

Which strikes you as more real: Bambi or The Deer Hunter?

When William Goldman talked about “comic book movies", he didn’t mean the MCU. This was back in 1983. He didn’t mean movies like Superman either – a movie he’d been invited to write, incidentally, being a Golden Age comics fan – or not only Superman, but also Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gunga Din, E.T., Star Wars. And The Deer Hunter. If you want to know why, and how Bambi doesn’t classify as “comic book” storytelling and The Deer Hunter does, read what Goldman has to say about all this in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician, raised a similar point on his blog recently:

“I was rereading Lord of the Rings […] and was struck by how real it felt. […] In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill […I]t doesn’t feel ‘real’, whatever that means.”

You may not have read Golden Hill. Not to worry, I read it for you. Prof Gelman is right, there is an artificiality to its picture of 18th century Manhattan that feels like a TV drama with machine-tailored suits and the wrong haircuts and makeup. This often seems to be the case with historical fiction. Compare The Essex Serpent, set in a late 1800s that never feels real, with The Odd Women, actually written in the late 1800s, which rings true throughout.

Prof Gelman seems to be focussing on prose style, which mainly has to do with whether the author is using a storytelling voice or not, but I’m more interested in stories that set out to describe a milieu that feels like our real universe rather than a “story universe”. Contrast the 1968 novel Pavane with almost any steampunk story (a genre of which it might well be the progenitor). Keith Roberts set out to tell us about something that could happen. Steampunk is usually predicated in let’s pretend – here is a fun universe for cosy adventure, even cosy misery, but you are never expected or intended to think of it as real.

For a very real story (David St. Hubbins might say “a bit too fucking real”) try George Gissing’s The Nether World. In the hands of Dickens we'd accompany a well-born character into the nether world of poverty in Clerkenwell the late 1880s. Dickens would give us their perspective of the monstrous characters and comic turns to be found there. And I like Dickens, but Gissing has an entirely different approach. We see the characters through their own eyes. We see how poverty brutalizes them. There's no sentiment, no avuncular author nudging the plot to satisfy the readers with warm life-lessons and unrealistic outcomes. Gissing's humour is sparing and far drier than Dickens's and he gives us an angry, despairing, unforgettable journey through this hell. Which is not to say it's a story without hope, only that the good is achieved at great effort and only sparingly. 

Once you start using this filter you see lots of examples. As SF, Children of Men is more real than Black Mirror which is more real than Babylon 5 which is more real than Star Wars. Breaking Bad is more real than Better Call Saul, less real than The Shield, but all three are far less real than true crime dramas like Rillington Place or The Staircase, because real life is messier and more surprising than the predictable twists and tropes of genre fiction.

Either can work, by the way. Goldman is careful to make that point. Gunga Din was his favourite movie of all time. Excalibur is one of mine, and there the characters screw and sit down to dinner in full plate armour. I used to enjoy the occasional game of Call of Cthulhu even though its 1920s is far less real than the entirely created world of Tekumel in Swords & Glory.

That reality – or authenticity, if you prefer – is what I’m aiming for with my current Jewelspider scenarios like “A Garland of Holly”. There’s still fantasy there, that’s not the issue. It’s that the society and the characters don’t feel like something set on a stage for you to watch and be entertained by. Instead you are there in the midst of them, the NPCs no less real than the player-characters. Events happen with the “ruthless poignancy” that C S Lewis admired in Homer. Like in life.

Why do roleplaying games need a genre?

“What I really aim at is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I understand it, is a new one; I don’t know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness. Zola writes deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. I want to deal with the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of that vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance. Dickens understood the possibility of such work, but his tendency to melodrama on the one hand, and his humour on the other, prevented him from thinking of it. An instance, now. As I came along by Regent’s Park half an hour ago a man and a girl were walking close in front of me, love-making; I passed them slowly and heard a good deal of their talk—it was part of the situation that they should pay no heed to a stranger’s proximity. Now, such a love-scene as that has absolutely never been written down; it was entirely decent, yet vulgar to the nth power. Dickens would have made it ludicrous—a gross injustice. Other men who deal with low-class life would perhaps have preferred idealising it—an absurdity. For my own part, I am going to reproduce it verbatim, without one single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest reporting.”

That’s Harold Biffen, one of the characters in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, expressing his ideal of a style of fiction that asymptotically approaches reality. This seems to echo the thoughts of a rather more successful real-life writer, namely William Wordsworth, who argued (almost a century before Gissing's book) that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants" and went on to deplore readers' "craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." And that was before Twitter.

H P Lovecraft, who endured a hardly easier existence than Harold Biffen’s, expressed a similar idea when he set out a manifesto defying the dominance of genre in science fiction:

“We must select only such characters […] as would naturally be involved in the events to be depicted, and they must behave exactly as real persons would behave if confronted with the given marvels. The tone of the whole thing must be realism, not romance.”

That right there is pretty much what I want my upcoming Jewelspider RPG to be: fantasy, but not of the fantasy genre. Nowadays roleplaying frequently embraces genre, and it’s fashionable for referees to talk about the game in terms of act breaks and inciting incidents. But I’m with Biffen and Lovecraft. Genre means incorporating familiar elements in familiar patterns, which is fine if you prefer fictional narratives to the kind that real life throws out. What I want my roleplaying games to do on the other hand is to evoke “real” settings. What happens there, even if the setting is fantasy, happens as it does in life, not fitting itself to tropes and story formulae, but simply as the result of colliding goals, characters’ actions and reactions, and a bit of pure chance.

This goal came into focus for me the other day while watching Chloé Zhao’s movie Nomadland. Most of the participants really are nomads. You can hear the difference from actors reading lines. When these people talk about their life experiences, their loves, and those they’ve lost, it rings true. As the review on RogerEbert.com put it:

"Filmmakers and artists in general have a tendency to judge their characters. Here’s the good guy, here’s the bad guy. Here’s the problem that needs to be solved for the leading man or lady to be happy by the end of the movie or damned because of their bad behaviour. There’s a much lesser version of the true story of Nomadland […] that does all of this, melodramatizing Fern’s story into one of redemption."

That was the point of a lot of classic early-‘70s movies, to throw away the nursery book of arcs and tropes to find a more truthful way of depicting human drama. For example, listen to this podcast in which Rebecca O’Brien explains what appeals to her about Coppola’s The Conversation and how the movie “sets itself up almost as if it is reality; the story is told without any adornment.”

This might just be one of those ideas whose time has come, because as I was writing this post the SF author and critic Damien Walter published a piece about the need for science fiction to escape genre.

I'm not going to tell you how to run your games. If you want to use Jewelspider for comedy or high fantasy or grimdark takes on Legend, or if you dig good vs evil romps and the panto ethics of alignment, go right ahead. But I have to settle on a tone for how I describe the world of Legend in the rulebook, and an ethic that will inform the scenarios I’m writing for it, and my Dogme 95 is to not to assume any genre or even a sense of a storyteller. The setting is the medieval world as people at the time imagined it to be. There is no agency that will intervene to ensure you have a satisfying arc. Stuff will happen, fair and unfair. In my gaming philosophy that’s how to get a really immersive experience. By stepping away from conscious storytelling and throwing off the shackles of genre, we'll have games that give us "the freedom and space to hear things".

Well-kept secrets

I’ve never seen the point of fashion. If a work of art is good it will stay good, regardless of whether or not it’s regarded as the in thing and everybody is talking about it.

Literature, for example. You’ll find a book that reviewers praise to the skies, and publishers adore. But give it ten years and they’re gawping at the next shiny bauble. You know the movie stars’ saying:

“First it’s: get me So-&-So. Then it’s: get me somebody like So-&-So. Finally it’s: who’s So-&-So?”

It even happened to Fitzgerald:

“In Pickwick Books on Hollywood Boulevard he asked for anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The clerk said they had none in stock. Fitzgerald asked whether there was any call for them. ‘Oh, once in a while, but not for some time now,’ he replied. He tried another store – with the same result. The proprietor of a third bookshop asked which titles he was interested in and, promising to track them down, requested a name and address. ‘I’m Mr Fitzgerald,’ he replied. The man was shocked; he had believed that F. Scott Fitzgerald must surely have died years ago along with his era.”

That was in 1940. Fifteen years earlier Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity, and Tender Is The Night had come out only six years previously. You want to know what was top of the bestseller charts that same month Fitzgerald couldn’t find a copy of his own masterpieces? Mrs bloody Miniver.

You get the point. Great writers fall into obscurity. It's not just an injustice, it's a tragedy because it means that readers may never get to hear about them, and therefore miss out on the pleasure they would get from their works. To name a few writers that I admire who nowadays are not as well known as they should be: George Gissing, Tanith Lee, Russell Hoban, Elizabeth Taylor, Michel Tournier.

Our own Oliver Johnson got a taste of this hemlock cup. Despite the success of his Lightbringers trilogy in the 1990s, when he returned to fiction recently with The Knight of the Fields – which I regard as one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read – he was told that it’s not in the current trend for the genre. So what are publishers releasing instead? Ten-volume fantasy potboilers that are all tricked up as wannabe Game of Thrones.

Luckily fashions change, and quality will out. Gissing had a bit of a comeback in the ‘60s and I’m confident he’ll be discovered again. Forsooth, even Shakespeare was out of style for a while. And, thanks to print-on-demand and ebooks, future generations ought to be able to find any work they want. Even a century from now somebody might come across Riddley Walker and recognize it for the classic it is.

The greatest living writer of English weird tales is John Whitbourn. It may be over two decades since he garnered rave reviews in the Sunday Times and won prizes from the BBC and Gollancz, but he remains a towering talent whose position in the field is right alongside M R James, Saki, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and (another overlooked genius, this) A J Alan. I am quite sure that in the future his name will be mentioned in the same breath as those other masters of the genre.

But the good news is you don't have to wait for fickle fortune to spin her wheel. Almost all of John Whitbourn’s books are available right now, and the Binscombe Tales in particular are a perfect Christmas present for any lover of weirdness and wonder. Fie upon fashion – talent is all that counts.

Reclaim the dame

Along with climate awareness, millennials like to imagine they invented gender equality. Truth is, we were talking about sexism and racism back in the 20th century (and earlier; see Gissing's novel, below) and we were just as committed to ending all prejudice. That’s what Star Trek was all about. Regardless of modern cynicism, “We come in peace for all mankind” wasn’t an ironic statement for most who heard Neil Armstrong say it.

Likewise in games. My own original campaign was set in Tsolyanu, the Empire of the Petal Throne, which overtly allows for sexual equality by a woman declaring herself aridani. At that point she ceases to be a ward of the clan, as most women remain throughout their lives, and becomes the equal of a man in rights and responsibilities. (More detail about that here if you scroll down.)

Other ‘70s roleplaying settings allowed for female adventurers, of course. EPT wasn’t unique in that respect. But Professor Barker actually thought about how societies organize, and what it would mean to have the cultural mechanism for women to declare themselves equal. In theory a female player-character could even choose to remain non-aridani, though I’m not sure how much fun that would be. The point is, it’s a real choice with an upside and a downside.

In the D&D games I occasionally looked in on back then, gender equality was dealt with by treating the world as a sort of huge cosplay arena, with most NPCs acting as if they were in the Middle Ages and PCs as the guests bringing 20th (or 21st) century mores into that.

In the heyday of gamebooks we knew that 90% of our readers were boys, but I was always mindful of the other 10% (if not, back then, much aware of the fuzzy area of overlap between the two) and made sure to keep descriptions gender-neutral. For instance, if you were running from the town militia, as often seemed to happen in gamebooks, and Jamie or Oliver or Mark had written passers-by yelling “Stop him!” I’d remind them to change it to “Stop that thief!” or “Grab the miscreant!”

In the land of Legend as described in Dragon Warriors there is no societal provision for becoming aridani. The world is supposed to be like our medieval times, that’s the whole point. Female player-characters in DW could be whatever they wanted to be, even knights, but the prodigy of a female knight would be remarked on by the people they met. In the same way, a Mungoda hunter strolling through the streets of Ongus should expect to attract attention – Melville talks in the opening paragraphs of Billy Budd about just such a (black) Handsome Sailor archetype attracting “the tribute of a pause and stare, and less frequently an exclamation”.

But race is another post (and in fact I have an interesting tale about that; remind me). I said there was no formal cultural mechanism for gender equality in the Middle Ages, but knights belong to the nobility, and with class comes a whole set of social passkeys. Celia Fiennes or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could carry themselves with swashbuckling disregard for the attitudes of their times and merely be regarded as eccentric. Agnes Hotot even reputedly tilted in the lists. (She was probably more Ronda Rousey than Keira Knightley, as I doubt if I could even move in tournament plate myself, much less climb onto a horse while carrying a lance.)

To be equal doesn’t have to mean being the same. In our world I doubt if we’ll ever see a lot of women firefighters or oil riggers. Female PCs in my Legend games usually opt to be sorcerer or assassin rather than an armour-clad beefcake, but if a female PC wants to be a knight, how should she style herself? There’s a trend these days to stamp out any gender difference in titles (actor/actress, dominator/dominatrix, etc) and there’s very good reason for that: we want to eliminate the preconceptions that may come with gender-specific titles. But a fantasy world should be colourful rather than politically correct, so I’m going to make a plea that players don’t opt for styling their female knights “Sir Agnes Hotot” or whatever. It’s a horrible, Gradgrindian intrusion of modern attitudes into the game world. What’s wrong with “Dame Agnes”? Dame is Middle English for a female ruler (cf the Dame of Sark) and derives from the Latin domina. By contrast, Sir comes from sire, which comes from the Latin word senior, in the sense of having higher status. And that ain't bad, but it's nothing like a dame.