Sunday Thoughts: Fiction

I will freely admit that I am an absolutely huge geek. An absolute, unrepentant geek who probably cares way too much about thing that are considered utterly trivial to other people. I guess that can seem pretty silly. I could focus on pouring my energy into something useful or practical. Instead of spending so much time worrying about games or being angry about decisions made by comics companies that, whilst seeming stupid to me, are probably transient and don’t really have any significant impact. Maybe I could be serious all the time and invest myself in more worthwhile ventures, like dropping this rather large belly that haunts me.

The thing is, and let’s be honest here, that really wouldn’t be all that interesting. There’s nothing wrong with being passionate about something, even if it is a fictional world that doesn’t matter at all to a large proportion of people. For most of us there’ll be at least one thing we do or care about that will be hugely boring or unimportant to vast swathes of the population. Whether it’s writing about games, reading comic books, making music or underwater basket weaving – it’s going to be unappealing to someone. So given that, is there anything wrong with being passionate about fictional worlds?

There’s an argument, perhaps, to be made that fiction doesn’t really matter. I can see how that kind of attitude comes to be. You look at a lot of modern entertainment and what passes for fiction and it quite clearly doesn’t matter all that much, it’s transient and unimportant. It’s hard to look at something like the Transformers films or Call of Duty or Halo and think “This really is an important work of art.” This type of entertainment, lightweight and fleeting, feels to us like it’s dominant at the moment but in all honesty it’s probably been the dominant form for the whole of history. We remember Shakespeare or The Beatles, but do you honestly think that that’s all there was at the time? Of course it wasn’t.

No, it seems obvious that there’s always been rubbish, stuff that in ten or twenty years people will only remember as a faint memory. “Oh yeah The Fast and the Furious? I vaguely remember watching that.” There are people who care about media like this, but to me it seems these loyalties will shift over time, moving from flavour of the month to flavour of the month, falling in love over and over with whatever’s the big thing at the time. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that but it’s hard to draw any real passion for the world that backs the film or game if you know you’re going to move on soon enough.

Some things, on the other hand, are worth the passion. Films that are backed by huge sprawling universes, games that actually make you think about the world you’re interacting with or books that actually send a message, pack a punch. This final category is the easiest to get behind, it’s hard to argue that the concepts laid out in the world of 1984 or Brave New World aren’t worth feeling passion for at some level. It’s not just novels, any fiction can carry a worthwhile message if the writer or writers are so inclined. I find it hard to think of any game that I’ve played recently that packs any real message, even titles with admittedly fantastic writing like Portal 2.

It could seem odd that the fiction in games hasn’t reached this level yet, but if you look at the lightweight message of early films or comics from the 1930s it’s clear that almost any medium can be trivialised when it’s in its infancy. However the purpose is to build and move forwards, and I think we’re starting to see this with the fiction of games as we have with other media that grew to prominence over the course of the 20th century. Look at films, it’s hard to argue that films like the Hurt Locker or Schindler’s List don’t actually make you think about the world, and even comics, considered to be fairly low on the importance scale by many, pack clear messages in Watchmen or even something as large as the X-Men franchise.

So why get passionate about fiction? Well fiction, done right can turn the world on its head and change the way we think, the way we live our lives. More importantly why not get passionate? What good is life without passion, how incredibly boring would it be if you never let yourself get worked up over something? It doesn’t matter if it’s pretend worlds, painting beautiful skylines or curing cancer, just so long as it makes you feel something.