7. Chapter Four

The Esoteric Origins of Interactive Storytelling

If we return to Tangherlini’s article on Legends, the writer makes a remarkably interesting comment relevant to us in the field of Narrative Design. He states that:

“During legend performance, the boundary of narrator and audience blurs, transmission taking place interactively. The conversational nature of legend, in turn, adds to the believability of the narrative and its function as a mechanism for reaffirming beliefs since the narrative is not set off by any distancing formula.”¹

Let’s stop for a moment and unpack this quote. The first thing to notice here is that the telling of a legend is defined by Tangherlini as a performance. It is not passive. It does not play out on a page or behind a tv screen, utterly disconnected from the audience. Rather, the storyteller is performing for the audience – they are engaging the audience with narrative and provoking the audience to follow them emotionally, to engage with the tale on an entirely different, active level to what they might do if the story were simply written down.

Tangherlini also states that legend has a conversational nature to it, which I would suggest implies a performative improvisation on behalf of the storyteller. The deal being made with the audience is this: Engage with my story actively, and in return, I will allow you agency in how it plays out. The boundary of narrator and audience blurs. This is an important aspect to note down. Understand that story does not take place in the mouth of the storyteller, nor does it take place in the ears of the listener. Rather, story takes place in what David Bowie would call “the grey space in the middle,” a place in which the intentions of the storyteller are given up freely and the audience are allowed to play with it, to shape it and define it as something relevant to themselves.

“…the idea that the piece of (art) work is not finished until the audience comes to it and adds their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be all about.”²

Lastly, let’s make a note that the “believability” of the narrative is strengthened by giving the audience a personal stake or agency in the telling of it. The narrative is not set off by any distancing formula. There is an equality to the telling that lends itself to not only interactivity but co-creation.

DIVINATION ENGINES

We’ve discussed the interactive nature of legends, myths and folktales already. And while there are similarities between them and the modern-day video game that allow them to be used to strengthen immersion for the player, the divide is still rather large. But there is a form of folkloric storytelling that has much more in common with the digital gaming of today. A form that reflects the non-linear nature of what we’ve come to expect from modern game narratives, and one in which we can potentially draw a great deal of ideas from in our own work. I’m talking about Divination Engines.

Divination Engines are artifacts which have traditionally been used by people throughout history to foretell the future. Tarot cards, Knucklebones, Runestones and the I Ching are just a few examples of these devices. You may be confused, but really, these artifacts actually have a lot in common with games. They all require human input to work, whether through throwing stones, flipping cards, or tossing sticks, and they all rely on subjective interpretation to tell a story. In fact, one could argue that artifacts of divination like a Tarot deck or the I Ching are at their core, random story-telling generators.

TAROT

In his article Tarot Guidebooks as a Literary Genre: Narratives of Destiny, Associate Professor of the Auckland University of Technology and Editor of The Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Dr Paul Mountfort writes, beginning with a quote from Tarot expert, Emily Auger, that Tarot can be seen “…as a kind of “low tech cyber simulation.”” He continues by suggesting that:

“…Users construct stories – their own narratives of destiny – from the cards even when the “softwares” that they plug into the “hardware” of the deck are not overtly literary. Readers thus shift from being consumers of texts to producers in a move that corresponds to literary and hypermedia idealizations of literature and “literary machines” proposed by many contemporary theoreticians. The resulting transmedia story-telling is a user mediated play of signifiers and signifieds across modes that extend both our understanding of what literature can be and the many uses of “the game of Tarot.””³

This is of great interest to us as Narrative Designers and developers because Mountfort suggests that by randomly drawing a spread of cards in an attempt to tell the future, players (for lack of a better term) are drawing from their own psyche to construct a simulated narrative from which they can derive meaning.

Tarot decks, find their beginning, not in ancient Egypt or with the Gypsies, like many city-mall witchcraft stores like to suggest, but in a stock-standard, non-mystical Italian card set known as Trionfi and was used to play the game tarocchini. The game, which was quite popular during the mid-15th century across much of Europe, did not see itself used for divination until the late 18th century. Part of the mystique of Tarot, and its ability to theoretically divine the future, is of course, the arcane imagery and suites of the cards themselves. In a 1956 essay, a New York librarian and Tarot expert, Gertrude Moakley, linked these esoteric elements to a celebrated medieval poem – II Trionfi by Petrarch.

In this wildly popular poem that was penned by Petrarch over several decades (c. 1340-74), a poet journeys through a visionary experience in which he witnesses a series of six “triumphs”, a procession of chariots, led by Love. The poet initially joins this procession as the captive of Love alongside various noble and religious figures. Upon arriving at the island of Cyprus (the birthplace of the goddess Venus), Love is defeated suddenly by Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade, whom Petrarch had an affinity for. Laura, alongside Honour, Prudence and Modesty as well as similarly “pure” heroines such as Lucretia, Penelope and Dido, overthrow Love, freeing his captives, binding him to a column and chastising him. Returning from battle, Laura and her companions encounter a furious woman in black – the personification of Death. Death shows the victorious host a countryside littered with corpses, dead from the plague, before pulling a hair from Laura’s head and killing her. Greatly saddened, the poet aims to elevate Laura’s fame, thus snatching victory from Death’s jaws. But Time kills all things, and the poet realizes that even Laura’s fame will one day disappear, his love will die a second death – the death of oblivion. Finally, Eternity becomes the poet’s only refuge. He longs for the day when he too will pass on and be reunited with his beloved. Petrarch’s poem is filled with the stock characters that appear in the first set of cards in the Charles VI order of the Tarot (see Figure 1).

In this list, we can see the through-line of the poem’s narrative:

The Fool (the poet), is cast into a divine vision (represented by the Magician card). There he sees Love, seated upon a Chariot, drawing a procession. Prisoners of the procession are various nobles and religious figures (The Popess, The Empress, The Emperor and The Pope). Upon being defeated by Laura (a representation of Chastity and depicted in the cards via the Cardinal Virtues – Temperance, Fortitude and Justice), Love is overthrown, tied up and punished (Represented by The Hermit/Old Man, Hunchback and The Hanged Man/The Traitor). Virtue, however, proves to be of no avail, for Fortune cruelly strikes out against Laura by sending Death to her. In this moment, the ascending and descending paths of the afterlife yawn before the poet (Represented by The Devil). In response to the tragedy of Laura’s death, the poet decides to elevate her fame to the very heavens (The Tower). But the Moon and Sun remind him of the mutability and mortality of all corporeal things; he must take solace in the Triumph of Eternity, that upon dying himself and leaving the World, he will face Judgement (The Angel) and be reunited with her in the afterlife.

This poem was at its height at the same time tarocchini was being widely played with the trionfi deck. The early versions of these decks, known as the Bembo decks (c. 1440-60), were commissioned by the grand ducal Visconti-Sforza family of Milan, who just so happened to be patrons of Petrarch. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that the cards acted as illustrations to his poem. But what is perhaps most fascinating, and helpful to our own studies in non-linear storytelling is the way in which these illustrations as the psychiatrist Carl Jung suggested, are psychological images and symbols that connect to our unconscious self. Jung stated that the cards “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind… (they) …are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.”⁴

In Italo Calvino’s 1973 novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, several travellers, struck mute by a magic forest take shelter together in a Castle. Unable to speak, they each tell their stories to one another through the use of several different decks of Tarot cards. Using the archetypes and symbols in the deck, their tales unfold via interpretation of the cards. The novel, which is an exploration on the part of the author around the ways in which meaning is created, is a dazzling example of how Tarot can work as a randomized non-linear storytelling engine.

THE I CHING

“Possibly the best-known example of cybertext in antiquity is the Chinese text of oracular wisdom, the I Ching (Wilhelm, 1989). Also known as the Book of Changes, the existing text is from around the time of the Western Chou dynasty (1122-770 B.C.) and was written by several authors. The I Ching system also inspired G. W. von Leibniz, who developed the binary mathematics used by today’s digital computers (Eber 1979). The I Ching is made up of sixty-four symbols, or hexagrams, which are the binary combinations of six whole or broken (“changing”) lines (64 = 26). A hexagram (such as 49, Ko/Revolution) contains a main text and six small ones, one for each line. By manipulating three coins or forty-nine yarrow stalks according to a randomizing principle, the texts of two hexagrams are combined, producing one out of 4,096 possible texts. This contains the answer to a question the user has written down in advance (e.g. “How much rice should I plant this year?”).”⁵

The I Ching is yet another powerful storytelling device that has traditionally been used as a divination tool. Invented in the Zhou dynasty (1100 – 400 BCE), the I Ching is essentially an oracular manual that provides predictions of the future. Seeking answers, the user inquires of the I Ching via tossing special coins or sticks while contemplating their question. From the tossed coins or sticks, the user can create what is called a “hexagram”, to which different chapters of the I Ching corresponds. Each hexagram is constructed via a series of six lines, broken or unbroken, reflecting the energy of the user’s current situation. Once the user has constructed their hexagram, they then consult the index of the I Ching to find which chapter holds the answer to their question.

Once again, what we have here, is a randomizer that points the attention of the user to certain narrative archetypes, allowing them to draw a conclusion via their interpretation of the chapter. The I Ching was first fully translated in 1882 by Scottish missionary, James Legge. It came to fame in the 1960s as hippie counterculture sought to explore aspects of eastern mysticism in search of enlightenment. But the I Ching has enjoyed more interesting success in the western world through the shaping of popular culture literature. In 1962, famed Science Fiction novelist, Philip K. Dick used the I Ching to plot and write his classic alternative history novel, The Man in the High Castle. Dick writes:

“I used [the I Ching] in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got.”⁶

The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo Award in 1962, and has since been adapted into an Amazon TV series tells of an alternative timeline in which Germany won world war two and America is now under the control of both the Nazi’s and the Japanese. 37 Dick, Philip K., and Paul Mountfort.

We’ve seen this plot riffed on recently in video games, through the reboot of the Wolfenstein Series, primarily in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in which the player must free America from a Nazi regime. Through using the I Ching to plot his book, Dick created a philosophically and (some might say) spiritually dense work of fiction, where the ending provides us, the reader, with some uncomfortable implications about the nature of reality. In the novel, a reoccurring motif is that of another alternate-reality novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy written by the eponymous man in the high castle. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy details a world in which the Allied Forces won world war two and in the final pages of the novel, is revealed to have also been written using the I Ching as a plotting device, suggesting that their dimension is just one of many, and that ours is too. In Figure 2, we can see an example of predictions made by the I Ching during the plotting of the novel.

BEHOLD, THE MULTIVERSE!

As a solution to certain problems in quantum mechanics, Hugh Everett proposed in 1957 the idea of the Many World Interpretation (MWI). Departing from the formerly dominant Copenhagen School of quantum physics, the MWI suggests that instead of “wave function collapse,” in which observation determines quantum states, there is a “universal wave function” (all possible states, and therefore worlds, exist.) Physicist Bryce De Witt describes the shocking philosophical implications of this theory:

“The idea of 10/100+ slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies, which ultimately become recognizable is not easy to reconcile with common sense. Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance.”⁷

This is a crazy thought when relating to (some) narrative design work that we might find ourselves doing. As John Gribbin, a science fiction writer and astrophysicist states:

“In Deutsch’s words, ‘all fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.’ So, all of Jane Austen’s stories count as real events in their parallel realities to our own; but The Lord of the Rings does not. And in an infinite number of universes there are writers busily producing what they regard as a fictional tale about a quantum physicist called David Deutsch who wrote a landmark paper about the concept of a universal quantum computer.”⁸

THE READERLY AND WRITERLY TEXTS

In 1970, the literary theorist Roland Barthes released his book S/Z in which he wrote almost prophetically about the future of story. He and others foresaw a day when literature would cross the border of the passive and move into the active. At the time – a time before the internet and digital gaming – he had no idea how this would look, but to map out the future, he wrote of two things: lisible texts (readerly) and scriptible texts (writerly). These two terms were a way to define both the “old” (passive) approach to storytelling and the “new” (active - which as we’ve just argued is actually quite an ancient tradition!) Barthes described Novels, Film and TV as being readerly texts. These are stories that present worlds filled with easy-to-understand characters and events. Stories that require only the passive act of reading or watching to understand. The Writerly text on the other hand was something quite different. With a Writerly text, the audience would, Barthes imagined, become active in their consumption. These were stories that were self-aware, stories that required mental or physical action from the audience to be able to be understood. Novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates all fit under this definition. The Unfortunates in particular experiments with elements of play and form in ways only the 1960s could produce. Although the first and last chapter of the novel were defined as such, everything else was presented to the reader unbound and randomized – the idea being that besides from the beginning and the end, everything else could be read in any order to create a unique story for every person who engaged with it.

A more modern example of the Writerly text is of course, Mark Z. Danielewski’s brilliant House of Leaves – a horror novel (of sorts) that uses font size, style and colour, along with strange formatting, blank space, hidden codes as well as multiple and conflicting experiences to tell the bizarre and terrifying story of a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Danielewski’s novel encourages readers to actively search for answers within the text themselves, often provoking emotional responses ranging from curiosity, excitement, and fear, all the way to feelings of claustrophobia, agoraphobia and bizarrely – both cosmic pessimism and hope. And yet, as we have just observed in the last few pages, Barthes wasn’t creating anything new. Legends, Myths, Folktales, Magic, and Divination Engines – these are all versions of the Writerly text. Regardless of whether you believe in their mystical powers or not, these texts hold the unique ability to capture audiences through the conscious and subconscious mind, as they shape their own stories based off archetypes and micro-narratives. And of modern gaming – both analog and digital, we are seeing writerly texts developed and explored by players and storytellers. Even the story bibles and game design documents we build in-house, behind the scenes, fit into this category. You’d be hard pressed to argue that the way we move around such documents is not a non-linear, interactive experience that mirrors Barthes ideas on this ergodic form of literature. And when that design document is interpreted like an architect’s blueprints, something truly special is created. When a player travels the paths which we have built, they are experiencing a Writerly text, and narrative design in action.

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

Merely years after Barthes proposed to us the idea of Readerly Texts and Writerly Texts, we begin to see his prediction take shape in the form of a small tabletop roleplaying game named Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) first published in 1974. D&D finds its ludological origins in war games like War Chess (1811), Kriegspiel (1824), and H.G. Wells’ Little Wars (1913).

“In addition to being fascinated with medieval war gaming, co-creator of D&D Dave Arneson was fascinated by the fantasy worlds created in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (Mackay, 2001, p.15). …By incorporating the fantasy of Tolkien into these gaming worlds, Arneson also made significant changes in the relationship between gaming and literature. TRPGs became, in many ways, a response to literature and a way of interacting with literary worlds…”

Writes Jennifer Grouling Cover in her book, The Creation of Narrative In Tabletop Role-Playing Games,

“…Thus, players were given a way to interact with fantasy worlds by playing their own heroes in those worlds. Soon after incorporating these elements of fantasy into his war gaming, Arneson teamed up with fellow war-gamer and fantasy buff Gary Gygax. In 1974 they published the first copy of the Dungeons and Dragons rule book.”⁹

Interestingly, and perhaps obviously, D&D was heavily inspired by the fantasy works of JRR Tolkien. It has long been held among scholars that Tolkien, in his lamentations that England’s body of folklore was lost to history, wrote The Book of Lost Tales, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to reconstruct what that body of folklore might be. While it is in recent times debatable whether this is exactly, one hundred percent true, Tolkien himself did write of his work that:

“This stuff began with me… I mean, I do not remember a time when I was not building it. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped… …But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite. I was an undergraduate before thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests – opposite poles of science and romance – but integrally related… Also I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved county: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil).”¹⁰

From his passion for languages and his desire for folktales “bound up with its (England’s) tongue and soil” Tolkien went on to create his fantasy epics, and while his purpose may not have been, in the end, to totally reconstruct an English body of myth, he was definitely influenced by the few scraps of ancient story that had been found in England at the time, as well as the surrounding northern countries. In fact, in the same letter, Tolkien writes:

“Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe…) … The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.”¹¹

Tolkien considered his intention to do the above as having failed, but the point remains – he drew from folkloric traditions and motifs to build his universe, a universe from which the creators of D&D were inspired by in their own development process.

Though they may not have realized it, the creators of D&D were drawing on the ancient lineage of interactive storytelling that we’ve been exploring in this chapter. The playing of D&D as a “response to literature and a way of interacting with literary worlds”¹² is simply just another example of folkloric storytelling opening up to that “grey space in the middle,” to become prosumers instead of consumers, and co-creators instead of passive audiences.

Footnotes

1. Tangherlini, Timothy. "It happened Not Too Far From Here…”: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization." Western Folklore 49, no. 4 (October 1990), 371-390.

2. "BowieNet: How David Bowie's ISP Foresaw the Future of the Internet." The Guardian. Last modified February 21, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bowie-bowienet-isp-internet.

3. Mountfort, Paul. "Tarot Guidebooks as a Literary Genre: Narratives of Destiny." In Tarot in Culture, 183-230. Valleyhome Books, 2014. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328039634_Mountfort_2014_Tarot_Guides_as_a_Literary_Genre.

4. Jung, Carl. "Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Future." Open Culture. Last modified August 31, 2017. https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/carl-jung-tarot-cards-provide-doorways-to-the-unconscious-and-even-a-way-to-predict-the-future.html.

5. 36 Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1997.

6. "The I Ching and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle." Science Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (July 2016), 287-309. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.43.2.0287.

7. Barrett, Jeffrey A. "Everett’s pure wave mechanics and the notion of worlds." European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1, no. 2 (2011), 277-302. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-011-0023-9. 39 Gribbin, John.

8. "Deutsch and the Multiverse." In Computing with Quantum Cats: From Colossus to Qubits, 200. New York: Random House, 2015.

9. Cover, Jennifer G. The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. 41 Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: HarperCollins UK, 2011.

10. "Letter to Milton Waldman." Tolkien Estate. Accessed January 13, 2022. https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/letters/letter-milton-waldman.html.

11. Ibid.

12. Cover, Jennifer G. The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.