Medievia as a Work of Fiction - Written by Almetis
I was recently fraught with the dubious task of trying to explain
Medievia to a friend of mine. At first I described it as a Multi-User
Dungeon (MUD), yet the image of a dungeon hardly seems accurate for a place
that has dozens of cities; separated by a vast wilderness that share a
vibrant economy. I tried to describe Medievia as a game, for certainly
it has many characteristics common in gaming such as a complex scoring
system, rules and repetitive actions. While Medievia is certainly a
game, the label fails to recognize that a player can happily exist in the
world without ever having to attain any goals or participate in any
activities that a game is predicated on.
Vryce, the owner and operator of Medievia.com, prefers to describe his
creation as a "virtual world", yet this implies that Medievia does not
exist. Certainly there is a distinction between what is real and what
is imaginary, but the boundary between these two worlds is permeable.
Every player that logs into Medievia begins to share a world-view.
They can describe different places, share common experiences or debate the
moral code reflected in the rules and actions of other characters. The
interaction between the "virtual world" and the "real world" is to such
a degree that players have been able to fall in love inside the
"fantasy" world; have the romance carry over to "reality", and even result in
marriage. If Medievia did not exist, none of these things would
happen. Ultimately, I described Medievia as a work of fiction, in which
every person who logs in becomes the hero and author of their own story.
The following pages will explore the literary and psychological process
through which a game can be transformed into a literary fiction.
Exploring Medievia as a work of fiction can best be achieved via a
literary model known as Possible Worlds Theory (PWT). The basic approach
of the theory is to regard the semantic content of any text as
constructing a unique domain or world. The term 'world' is used
primarily as a metaphor to represent the set of abstract conditions or state of
affairs proposed by a text. PWT requires a text to be seen as a discourse or
speech-act that asserts propositions. While the conditions proposed by
some texts may be exceedingly improbable or infeasible, and may even
contradict what are believed to be the laws of nature, they are all
nonetheless considered possible in that they are at least imaginable or
cognizable alternatives to the actual state of affairs within 'the real
world.'
The terms 'real world' or 'reality' are contentious and require some
clarification as to their usage here. To begin with, PWT assumes that
there is only one real world (sometimes called the 'actual world' or
'empirical world') and that it is the only world that is not the product of
a linguistic, textual or cognitive performance. It is therefore the
only world with an objective existence independent from any process of
describing or conceptualizing it. This is admittedly a vague definition
that does not specify the precise conditions or properties of reality.
I will refine this definition to address these concerns as I progress.
For now, however, it suffices to assume that the real world is the one
to which both authors and readers of fiction belong, but to which
fictional characters do not. In contrast, there are potentially an infinite
number of possible worlds that could be constructed through a
discursive or cognitive performance.
PWT developed its application to literary studies from the
consideration logicians and philosophers gave to the peculiar
ontological status of fictional characters, objects, places, and
events. This hazy ontological status, or mode of existing, becomes
apparent when (following the method of logicians) one considers the
truth-functional value of propositions made about fictional entities.
Consider the statement 'Batman lives in Gotham City.'
Anyone who has read a Batman comic would identify this proposition as
being true and would judge a contradictory one such as 'Batman lives in
Metropolis' to be false. There is not and never has been, however,
a real person (i.e. non-textual) named Batman who lived anywhere
at all. Since the subject to whom the two statements refer is
non-existent within the real world some logicians have claimed that neither
statement can be evaluated as being true. According to this approach, the
speciousness of the assertion that 'Batman lived' (or that he
'was,' 'said,' 'feels,' 'runs,' et cetera) disqualifies any such
proposition that refers to her or any fictional character from being
considered true, and renders them semantically false or, according to some
logicians, nonsensical. This line of reasoning is premised upon the
assumptions that it only possible to refer to and make truth-functional
propositions about things that exist, and that the only possible way to
exist is as part of the real world.
This simple ontological categorization between either existence in the
real world or else non-existence, however, proves grossly inadequate to
account for and differentiate between the many of the types of
discursive propositions we regularly make. In particular, it severely limits
our ability to sensibly discuss fiction, for it semantically treats both
propositions, that Batman lives in Gotham and that he lives in
Metropolis, as being equivalently untrue. In response to such failures, the
theory of multiple possible worlds was developed by philosophers and
logicians who assert that there are other modes of existence in addition
to existing in the real world. Fictional characters are prime examples
of such an alternate mode of existence. They do not exist within the
real world in the same way as real people, but as identified and
identifiable elements of alternate possible worlds that are generated by and
in the minds of real people.
Works of fiction are able to generate alternate possible worlds by
using literary markers (or phrases) such as 'imagine,' 'pretend' or
'suppose' to indicate a cognitive exercise of considering a deviation
from the status quo. Conventionally, these predicates are omitted in works of
fiction because the parties involved understand that the discourse
pertains to an imagined world, rather than a real world. This is often seen
in the way that children play make-believe. When one child says to
another "Let's pretend that we are spies and that we are on a secret
mission," the other child responds "okay, I will pretend to be James Bond,
and you can be Austin Powers." Having established these basic rules, the
children no longer find it necessary to explicitly acknowledge that
they are pretending. When one of the children later exclaims, "the enemy
soldiers are coming towards us!" his friend still understands that this
is part of the game of make-believe, not reality, without the first
child predicating his assertion with the phrase "let's pretend."
The notion of fictional discourse being implicitly predicated as
pretended assertions resolves the semantic problems that the narrow
ontological approach earlier philosophers and logicians stumbled upon. On its
own, any proposition must be judged according to the conditions of
reality. Predicated with 'let's pretend that,' however, the same proposition
can now alternatively be evaluated according to the rules and
conditions specified by the imaginative game or exercise. The predicate thus
identifies and isolates the semantic and ontological domain in which the
subsequent proposition is asserted to be true. If someone were to say
"I am flying to the ocean in a few minutes", the sentence would have
different connotations depending on the ontological domain in which the
statement was made. If made in reality, we would assume the person were
flying by airplane to go on a vacation, for work or perhaps some other
mundane task. If the statement were made on Medievia, we would assume
the person were flying on a dragon to run a zone, go trading or perhaps
to search for a dragon lair. By identifying the semantic and
ontological domain for which a fictional text makes assertions, one is
able to sensibly discuss fictional characters and events, without
running into semantic failures. In practice, this is as simple as
predicating any statement with a phrase such as "within the world of
Medievia."
The Gods are the primary authors of Medievia. This is done through
constructing zones, authoring the code and writing the rules that
determine the conditions of the world. Players are also given the opportunity
to author Medievia by creating clantowns. Once building is complete,
Gods and players cease being authors and become characters within the
fantasy world. The dialogue between the characters, along with the
choices the players make, determine the present story as well as future
plots. For example, a player can choose to attempt a trade run. During
such an attempt, two characters may decide to ally themselves together
to increase their chances of success. This alliance could result in the
start of a friendship, which in turn could lead to a romance and a
marriage. The choices the characters make have real consequences within
the fictional environment, which dictate in what way the story unfolds.
In this way, characters can be seen as actors improvising a script,
within the limits set out by the script.
Everything referred to by a fictional text must designate a part
of the alternate world it generates, the text itself determines the
properties, laws and limits that define that world, and that indicate how
similar or dissimilar it is from the real world and other possible
worlds. But how is it that a small text; perhaps the size of a room
description (a few sentences in length), can create an entire world? This
can be explained using a "theory of minimal departure" which states that
the world of the text is constituted by assuming that it corresponds to
the real world in all respects other than those about which the text
informs us otherwise. This principle reflects how readers fill in many
of the gaps of information that texts leave. Without the text of
Medievia, for instance, stipulating that the sky is blue, that all the
characters have two eyes, and that pigs cannot fly, readers assume that all
these things are true. In doing so, readers also account for the
historical time and setting in which the work is set and was written.
Players generally do not, for instance, imagine Lord Chepstow loading a
cellular phone in his griffon pack, nor wearing a pair of jeans from the
"Gap". Generic conventions can function as norms that a text may be
assumed to adopt if it does not stipulate its diversion or subversion from
them. For example, because the conventions of fairy tales dictate that
witches are ugly while princesses are beautiful, a reader may be led to
assume that these conventions hold true for a similar fairy tale type
world generated by a text in which these facts are neither explicitly
affirmed nor contradicted.
Many critics have pointed out, however, that there are some facts about
fictional worlds that are impossible to assume or determine since the
text provides insufficient information. For example, we shall never
know how many children Lady MacBeth bore because the play leaves this
question unanswerable. As a result, fictional worlds are necessarily
incomplete or unfinished. This is true of all fictions. We do not get to
see Oliver grow into a man at the end of the Dicken's novel or know what
happens to Frodo after his adventures with the ring in Tolkein's novel.
Medievia is a continuing work of fiction and as such the world is
expected to grow and change over time. New zones, new characters and new
environmental conditions are a necessary part of the literary
development. The incompleteness of textual worlds, however, does not
undermine the premise that the differences between a particular fictional
world, on the one hand, and the real world, on the other, must be explicitly
specified by the text. The properties and conditions that differentiate one
possible world from all the others a certain reader may be familiar
with are only those enunciated in the text. By having to stipulate the
unique or unconventional conditions of their worlds, works of fiction
foreground the disparity between the worlds they construct and all the
other possible worlds, including reality, that any given reader or
spectator has already encountered.
Strictly speaking, it is not fictional texts themselves that generate
alternate possible worlds, but rather the cognitive processes by which
authors produce and readers interpret those texts. The text acts as a
guide to allow the audience to envision the world an author conceives.
It is important to note that the author and the reader may not always
perceive the constructed world congruently. This is apparent to anyone
who has tried to pronounce a character's name in Medievia, only to find
out later that the player uses an alternate pronunciation. These
disparities arise out of differences in the cognitive process in
interpreting the text used to create the world. Creating an alternate
world is a mental process, and as such we must recognize that what someone
believes to be true dictates how that person distinguishes reality from
fiction. This is evident when considering the world created by a person who
is delusional or during the experiences of a dream. Pretending is
distinguished from other cognitive processes, however, because it requires
a deliberate and conscious construction of an alternate state of
affairs. In turn, fiction is differentiated from other types of discourse,
including lying, because both author and audience, like the children
playing make-believe, are aware and believe that the discourse is
comprised of pretended assertions. Consequently, both the speaker's
commitment and audience's expectations that fictional assertions accurately
describe reality are "deliberately suspended".
When we are engaged in a fictional work, we generally are
simultaneously aware that we are in bed reading a book, looking at the
computer monitor, or in a theatre watching a film or play. Some
theorists have used the notion of reader's or spectator's employing a dual
consciousness, one ego situated in reality and the other involved in the
fiction, to explain why, for example, we cry at the heroine's death but
do not jump on stage to try and save her. While most of the time we
can separate fiction from reality is not always so clear.
There is an inherent impulse within PWT to distinguish fiction from
reality clearly and conclusively. This approach would be an inaccurate
reflection of the fluid and unstable interaction between reality and
fiction that we actually experience. This is apparent in our ability
(especially through metaphor and allegory) to simultaneously refer to
multiple semantic and ontological domains. Indeed, we commonly understand
that, in addition to literal interpretations, fictional characters,
events, objects and stories can also be seen as figuratively representing or
exemplifying aspects of reality. Recently a God put an item "Medievia
for Dummies" on auction. This item was meant as a satirical comment on
reality rather than designed as a resource for characters to use. The
interaction between reality and fiction is particularly evident in
Medievia because of its duality in ontological modes. Much like how Alice,
while in Wonderland, was able to talk about and describe her home that
resembled Victorian London, so too are characters in Medievia able to
step outside the ontological domain of Medievia and discuss 'reality'.
This is as easy as prefacing the sentence with the words 'in real life'
or 'irl' for short. While genuine interaction in a fictional world is
physically impossible for the reader, it can be psychologically true.
Just as we are able to discuss the world of fiction in the real world, so
can we discuss the real world within a fictional environment.
Interaction between different worlds is common in literature. Arthurian
legends contrast and separate Arthur's Camelot (i.e. the Christian
domain) from a parallel fairy kingdom, yet fairies or monsters and
Christian knights frequently stumble into one another's domains. From a
strictly literary perspective, biblical stories in which mortals interact
with their God(s) are another example of the ability in literature to
cross magical thresholds and interact with another domain. This
interaction is a necessary part of a fictional discourse, as it allows
characters to comment and reflect upon the conditions of reality.
Generally, the more permeable the boundary between any two domains is,
the less those two domains are in fact distinct, and the more they will
share the same beliefs, laws, cultures and properties. This is because
the more a person is able to access and interact with a foreign realm,
the more the foreign world is incorporated into that person's
world-view and become just a part of the person's own world. Every
player that logs onto Medievia begins to share a world-view. They can
describe different places, share common experiences or debate the moral
code reflected in the rules and actions of other characters. While the
world of Medievia may appear very different from the mundane reality of
our every day lives, in terms of character ideals, values, humor,
perspective, decision-making skills, and personality, the two worlds are
similar. One example of shared values would be that of loyalty. In both
Medievia and real life, we as a society tend to value loyalty; to our
jobs, friends, clans or family.
These shared values are why so many relationships that begin in
Medievia are able to cross over into reality. This is a common
literary experience. Reality has always been acknowledged to not only shape
the development of art-work, but also how we perceive and interpret those
works. For instance, both the author and readers of 'A Tale of Two
Cities' naturally used their personal knowledge of the real London in
order to form their conceptions of the novel's fictional setting.
Likewise, though George Orwell's '1984', for example, is a fictional narrative,
it certainly has had an impact at times on the way people, individually
and institutionally, think and act in the real world. The basic
segregationist impulse within PWT to sharply distinguish fiction from reality
dismisses the tremendous interaction and interdependence of the two
ontological modes. This is especially true of Medievia, because the world
is designed to thrive off this interaction. Medievia is designed by
its players for its players. As such, the world that is created becomes
a reflection of the player's cumulative experiences in reality and in
the fantasy world. To compensate for this, theorists have developed
corollaries to the PWT that strive to explain the complex relationship
between reality and fiction.
There can be no doubt that reality has a significant influence in the
actions and development of Medievia as a world. As authors, players
invest themselves emotionally and psychologically in the characters they
create. What the characters say and the things they do are reflective
of the person authoring the dialogue. To a large degree, this honesty
and depth of character help distinguish Medievia's literary appeal. It
is important to note however, that the categories of non-fiction and
fiction do not directly correspond, respectively, with accurate and
inaccurate discourse about the real world. Fiction or non-fiction is a
status that is assigned to a text as a whole, and is not determined by the
accuracy with which the text's component propositions correspond to the
actual conditions of the real world. By definition, because Medievia
is considered a fantasy world by its members, all its component parts
must also be considered elements of the fiction. All the places,
objects, events and players become fictional entities within the world of
Medievia. I imagine some readers may find it disconcerting to be relegated
the same literary status as a "smurf" or a "pokemon", but perhaps those
readers could take comfort in also sharing some esteemed company.
Characters such as Shakespear's Julias Ceasar or representations of cities
such as London in a Dickens novel, must be considered fictional
entities because the text that they are part of are fictional discourses. A
more modern example would be the title character in the popular film
"Being John Malkovich". John Malkovich cannot be considered a real person,
involved with fictitious characters taking part in fictitious events
any more than Roger Rabbit could be considered a fictional character
taking part in "real" events.
We have already seen, however, that actual world material can enter
into a fictional world only if it assumes the ontological status of a
non-actual (i.e. unreal) possible alternate, and this can be used to
explain an author's or audience's relationship to fiction. PWT semantics
legitimizes the sovereignty of fictional worlds vis-à-vis the actual
world; at the same time, however, its notion of accessibility offers an
explanation of our contacts with fictional worlds. The access requires
crossing of world boundaries, transit from the realm of actual existence
into the realm of fictional possibilities. Obviously, it is through the
activities of reading and watching (as well as authoring or directing)
works of fiction that we come to have contact or access to fictional
worlds. In order to reconcile this with PWT's separation of reality and
fiction, critics have sought to explain how these activities involve
pretending.
Like children in a suburban basement pretending to be international
spies in some tropical forest, real world people likewise participate in
fictional worlds by assuming alternate egos, settings, and
circumstances. This is most clear in the case of actors, because they
clearly assume one specific characters' personas, surroundings, and actions,
yet also applies to authors, directors, readers and spectators of fiction, who
in course of a work must adopt a whole range of personae. In Medievia,
the room descriptions can be perceived as a narration. To the author,
the descriptions are merely a discourse of pretended assertions about
an imagined world. To the narrator, the assertions are sincere ones
about what to them is the real world, (even though the narrator is never
clearly identified by the text). Just like any real person or fictional
character, a narrator may lie or be mistaken about the conditions of
the world that they are nonetheless a part of, as is the case with
unreliable narrators such as Holden Caufield in the novel "The Catcher in the
Rye". Thus, an exit may be hidden in the land of Medievia not because
of some devious or magical form of construction utilized by the
builder, but rather because the narrator simply did not notice it.
Additionally, a fictional narrator or character may tell a fictional story,
thereby creating a fiction within a fiction. Examples of this in Medievia
are seen in the stories told through auto-quests. Within the course of a
work of fiction, the author need not exclusively adopt a single
narrating persona, but by writing from the perspective of other
characters, an author can thereby assume the alternate personae and
perspective of these other characters.
In the process of reading, the reader replaces and becomes the author
of the text. In terms of PWT, readers become the creators or generators
of fictional worlds. Readers are comparable to the more passive of the
two children playing make-believe, more or less following the game that
the other child has outlined and pretending whatever that more bossy
child tells him or her to pretend. In following a text, readers adopt
the same personae and positions within the fictional world that the
author did in creating the text. As a result of the reader's textual
positioning, the reader becomes the discursive "I" or consciousness, and
therefore assumes the voice, persona, circumstances and perceptions of the
narrator and occasionally of other characters. In this way, readers and
authors are like actors who play more than one part. In Medievia, each
player not only identifies with the role of their own character, but
also takes on the additional personification of narrator, and possibly of
other characters as well.
This relationship between the author, fictional persona, and reader can
perhaps be more clearly seen in terms of the medium of film. A film
director sits in the real world and selects a series of camera angles, or
points of view, with which to present an alternate possible world. In
effacing the reality of cameras, artificial lighting, microphones, film
crew, etc. within the film, the director adopts the pretense (i.e.
pretends) that these points of view originate not form where he or she
chooses to place a camera, but from somewhere inside the fictional world.
In some shots the point-of-view may be presented as originating from a
specific character's gaze, and in others it is often presented as
originating from a space within the fictional world that is not occupied by
any identified character. In this latter scenario, the film's point of
view is analogous to the discourse of a narrator who is unacknowledged
and unidentified by the literary text. In turn, when the spectator
watches the film, their perspective is positioned within the fictional
world via the director's choice of camera angle. Thus while reading a
text, or watching a film or a play, at some level we as audience members
are led by the text to imagine ourselves occupying specific personae and
spatial positions within an alternate world. From the perspective of
these adopted personae and positions we observe the fictional narrative
unfold as if it were reality. Fiction thus invites us to observe
through other eyes and participate through other personae in worlds other
than our own. In this way, reading or watching fiction allow us to gain
access to other worlds and other perspectives.
It is this experience of traveling from the mundane routine of every
day life into a different perspective that is the appeal of fiction.
Medievia can be categorized within a fantasy genre of literature, in
which the reader voyages to another realm, a magical kingdom or never-never
land, far removed from the ordinary hum-drum world of work and highway
traffic and fast-food. This fantasy world has variously landed in Oz,
Narnia, or any one of Disney's enchanted landscapes. At the heart of
all these fantasies is the imagination.
Fiction, at its most loosely based definition, can be described as
literary creation via the act of imagination. A game and a work of fiction
need not be mutually exclusive categorizations. There are a plethora
of games that revolve around literary creation such as "mad-libs" or
improvisational acting games. There are also numerous computer software
titles geared towards interactive storytelling. Most of these products
are geared towards children, to help them learn words, shapes and
numbers. As various technologies improve, I believe we will see the
formation of a greater number of interactive stories for adults, in which the
reader's choices will determine the outcome of the story. It is my
argument that Medievia, and other text-based games like it, have already
accomplished this feat, and it is only a matter of time before it is
recognized as such within the literary community.
The quality of any fiction is in its ability to engage and challenge
the reader. The interactive nature of Medievia's world allows characters
to have a depth that is impossible for a traditional medium to attain.
Personal history, memory, intellect and emotion guide the dialogue,
which make it both sincere and unpredictable. The interactive characters
provide feedback that act to provide a mirror to our own world and
allow an insight that might otherwise not be attained through traditional
methods. Ultimately, the characters and the world continue to challenge
the reader in new and innovative ways, which is the hallmark of any
successful fiction.
Copyright (c) 1992-2018 Medievia.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Mudslinger is a trademark (Tm) of Medievia.com, Inc. No portion of the MudSlinger may be reproduced without the express written consent of Medievia.com, Inc.
