This post builds on ideas that I developed in my recent article on communication technology and narrative. One of the underlying theories behind this piece was that the location where a story is set is not the mere backdrop to events, but quite fundamentally determines the events that can occur or the way they are plotted. Here, I apply these concepts to the recent film and book, The Martian.

Asking a question like 'Does The Martian have to be set on Mars?' seems very daft. There would be a lot of disgruntled cinemagoers were it to turn out that The Martian is, in fact, a film about a man stranded in a multi-storey car park in Walsall. Of course The Martian has to be located on Mars: the clue is in the title.

As it always has done throughout its mythological history, Mars holds an appeal as a place that seems at once very near and very distant. When H.G. Wells opens The War of the Worlds by imagining Martians peering at us through telescopes just as man peers at bacteria through a microscope, Mars seems uncomfortably close to home. Of course, in an astronomical sense it is anything but close, and the sense of tantalising distance is one reason why Mars provides such a focal point for the scientific and literary imagination. Like our closest neighbour, the moon, it is one place that anyone on earth can see, but that (most likely) nobody living on the planet will visit. The same sensibility pervades The Martian; in terms of an audience's cognitive experience, Mars matters.

Nevertheless, many reviews (here; here; here) have unwittingly downplayed the importance of the place itself to the plot. Notably, and entirely understandably, many have made comparison between The Martian and that ur-story of lone survival, Robinson Crusoe. It's not hard to see why The Martian might be cast as Crusoe-in-Space. While Crusoe is shipwrecked, Mark Watney's crewmates have to evacuate in a spaceship; both Crusoe and Watney are left isolated and can use only those tools that they can salvage or craft; both individuals survive on the basis of their wits and intellect in a powerful (capitalistic) vision of the self-made man; both men perceive themselves as first colonists of an uncharted and unclaimed territory; midway through Defoe's novel Crusoe takes on Man Friday for company and aid, while Watney eventually establishes contact and companionship with NASA.

Both the desert island and Mars - and one could add to this list equivalently isolated places as well, such as the Arctic wastes, the jungle, or a boat in the ocean - offer similar opportunities for storytelling and for tracking the basic attributes of the survivor story: the search for shelter, food and water, communication with the outside world, and ultimate rescue. Mars may be significant in terms of the place it holds in our imaginations, but similar events - and the audience's primary anxieties about isolation that result from them - could be evoked by equivalent places on earth. On this structural interpretation, place is mainly a backdrop where plot events occur; it is events, not places, that most motivate a narrative, and readers or viewers.

This, however, is too simplistic. Far from being backdrops, places are what Mike Baynham has termed 'semiotic resources.' Different settings have within them different resources, geographical configurations, social features etc. and they make these available for the purposes of plotting. Depending on their placement, characters have different objects and technologies to hand, and these influence their decisions and actions that constitute a plot. Extending from this, the way in which that plot is conveyed to us - its discourse with the reader or audience - is also affected by its spatial context.

Because of the emphasis it places on literal resources, and because of the way the story about a distant astronaut is conveyed to those on earth (both the earth-based characters in the story, and the real audience of the story) The Martian encompasses the semiotic theory of place in a clear way. There are perhaps two main categories of resource that are unique to Mars as a place: geography, and communicative delay.

Geography

This places-as-resources model can be applied in a very literal sense to The Martian. The soil and atmosphere of the planet provide Watney with a combination of resources or threats to those resources that could not be found in equivalently isolated places elsewhere.

The wider narrative arc of The Martian involves the problem of food. Watney has immediate supplies, but not enough to last the four years it will take for a rescue mission to arrive. Watney's growing of food (potatoes) to survive is pretty similar to Crusoe's successes with wheat. And of course in a novel and film that pitches for scientific credibility, it is made possible by the fact that, unlike other planets, Mars really does have soil. However, while Crusoe is an experimental agriculturalist, Watney is a botantist only in name; his main capacity is as an electrical engineer: paramount to Watney's survival is his ability to use and reconfigure solar power. Harnessing the sun's energy allows Watney to preserve limited physical resources such as oxygen and water by recycling them through electricity, and it is these in turn which allow him to grow food, eat and above all to breathe.

It's hard to imagine a similar place on earth where this fundamental relationship could be represented, with electricity being abundant as the source of power and allowing a person to meet his needs of water, food and oxygen but not (as I shall come to shortly) communication with the wider world. Unlike Crusoe, who is also a gatherer of food and water already in the environment, Watney is a maker of these things from scratch, crafting life from electricity like a spacesuited Frankenstein. In no earthly surface environment would this be quite the case. Even the most dystopian setting (such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road) would offer some form of food and/or water, and electricity would play less or no role in making these things that can be already scavenged.

Perhaps the contemporary setting most like that inhabited by Watney might be a nuclear submarine, where such resources would also be produced from scratch through abundant electrical power, in a similar life-supporting bubble. Yet even then the fact that Watney uses solar rather than nuclear power - afforded amply by the Martian day-night cycle - is significant. While a nuclear submarine would offer a hermetic support vessel, solar power harnessed at the planet's surface allows Watney to move outside rather than always to be contained. The plot of The Martian entails Watney figuring a way to pack and transport his life support systems from the habitation module onto a rover so he can make his way to the escape craft. In a present-day setting no other power source would be so mobile across a surface. (Of course, one could change both the setting and period - period being an aspect of setting itself - and imagine a futuristic science fiction universe where a small transportable power source is available. However, for the purposes of argument I'm keeping the temporal variable the same, and just thinking through different spatial possibilities.)

The fact that this takes place in a non-earth environment also lends this a metaphorical quality. In a powerful scene in the movie, the planet offers Watney the gift of light, and correspondingly life, as he makes his journey. Light or the sun has a divine status.


Conversely, the permanent threat is air (or the lack of it), and Watney's need to generate his own to survive. A Martian wind is what causes the crew to evacuate and injures Watney. Air explodes from the habitation module when it is breached. Air escapes from Watney's spacesuit, is always on the brink of running out, and needs continually to be replenished by harnessing the power of the sun to recycle carbon dioxide.

The Martian could be seen as a battle between two elemental forces, the air and the sun. At which point, we're returned to where this post began: place is more than just about plot, and setting evokes holistic meanings. But whether looked at from the perspective of setting-and-plot or setting-as-metaphor, it is only on another planet than our own that air (or its lack) would become so paramount. And the quest to maintain air, and the problem solving as a character figures out how to maintain it on a journey, is unique to a narrative set in space and empowered by the sun.

At which point, one could suggest that any number of science fiction films, set on any number of other worlds (real or imaginary), or on a spacecraft, might pose a similar problem. Last year's Gravity treats air with a similar reverence, for instance. However, there is a second feature of choosing Mars as the locale that constitutes the plot in a way unlike that of other zones of the solar system, near or far.

Communicative Delay

There is a notable turn in the plot of The Martian once Watney establishes two-way contact with NASA, at first painfully slowly via the Pioneer rover and then via a rudimentary email system. Just as no man (Watney included) is an island, so no place is ever defined alone, but by its relations with other places removed from it. In most stories, characters move from one place to another, or communicate remotely with different places, and the speed and efficiency of the network influences the way plot unfolds.

To give one example, my article touched on the functional importance of post to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In this novel, post goes missing or takes several days to arrive and be replied to from different houses, which allows Austen to create a considerable sense of drama or plot twists, without these appearing to be contrived. They occur as a natural consequence of the delay inherent to post as a communicative system between distributed places.

A similar type of delay occurs in contact between Mars and Earth. Especially when just using the Pioneer rover's camera to type out arduously in hexadecimal, there's a real sense of frustration that communication is slow - and a corresponding degree of tension as Watney is still forced to take decisions on his own. However, unlike the post, and unlike pretty much any communicative system one could imagine in an Earthbound marooned story, the delay on Mars is specific and relatively small: 12 minutes. Significantly, as when Apollo 8 orbited the dark side the moon, so when Watney finally blasts off from Mars the hundreds of scientists on earth are left in radio silence, unable to prevent or influence a course of events that will have, by the time they hear about it 12 minutes later, already have happened. Despite the emphasis placed on teamwork in the second half of the film, at this climax Watney is very much still alone.

Of course, the audience - unlike NASA - do track what Watney and the astronauts on the orbiting rescue craft are doing in the moment of its happening. Without having timed it, I'd guess that these events take place more or less in a realtime of 12 minutes. The audience thus receives a cathartic effect both from the actual rescue of Watney that we witness live as it were, and the way our emotions are correlatively projected on screen by the cheering crowds who learn of it at the very end.

This dramatic irony is a direct product of the distance between Earth and Mars - that is to say, the specific setting of the latter. On our next closest neighbour, the Moon, there would be virtually no delay. On Jupiter, the fifty minute gap would prevent the synchronicity of narrative time and film time that we have in The Martian. Venus is a similar distance from Earth as Mars, but on a semi-molten world the whole premise of the film would be impossible in the first place. In terms of plotting tension, Mars inhabits the Goldilocks zone.

Conclusion

As an astute reader will have observed from that last paragraph, and elsewhere in this discussion, an argument about setting and narrative depends quite heavily upon the construction of counterfactuals: it has to be here because if it were there it would be different. Reductio ad absurdum. At the opposite end it also implies a restrictive view of the powers of the author: it has to be here because storytellers can't possibly find workarounds when setting elsewhere. Reductio onerum auctor.

Both of these are valid points. It's always possible to find alternative examples where a different setting could produce very similar incidents in the plot, via some imaginative authorial workarounds. Nevertheless, thinking through the possibilities afforded by place is valuable. When authors choose a particular setting (Mars), and a particular genre (as close to scientific realism as possible), this dictates that certain events and emphases will happen in that narrative that would not happen otherwise. The value of solar power, the lack of oxygen, a distance from earth that results in communicative delay are all features of the Martian environment. While no one of these is unique to this particular place, they combine uniquely to produce a particular situation for Watney, and a set of puzzles to "science the shit" out of. The placement of The Martian reveals these resources - physically at the disposal of the astronaut, semiotically at the disposal of the narrative - in a particularly prominent way.

Yet on this note we must return to where we began. The fascination of the story, and one might argue of science fiction or fictions-about-science in general, comes from the way the narrative invites us to assess the unknown aspect of the fictional setting (another world, a technological novum) against our own reality, to ponder about the differences and similarities, and the degree to which the human qualities with which we are familiar could apply or work in a new world setting or a different, futuristic time period. Again, one could argue in this vein that Mars does not really matter - that another world in a galaxy far far away would do just as well to invoke this speculation. Except The Martian has been released precisely at a time when, with the commercialisation of space flight and the landing of rovers such as Curiosity, the place that is the Red Planet seems imaginatively and physically closer than ever before.

Labels: narrative, narratology, place, plot, science fiction, setting, storytelling, structuralism, The Martian

I have spent much of this summer trying to hammer out a journal article on how different communication technologies – from letters to instant messaging to mobile phones – influence the way in which literary fiction is plotted, since more powerful communications can transcend time and space, and thus change the tempo with which events and interpersonal relationships are conducted.

With this in mind, I was interested to catch an episode of the Secret Life of Students, in which mobile phones and social media play a prominent role in representing the characters’ social interactions, personal feelings, and work-life crises. The representation of text messages, Facebook posts and the like in bubbles above a character’s head is not new. Hollyoaks and the BBC Sherlock are just two examples where this feature is used prominently. However, it is perhaps more unusual to find this in a documentary.



In narrative terms, the function of these devices is similar to that I’ve examined in my paper. Increasingly sophisticated mobile communications serve to dissolve space, so that characters who are physically separate can nevertheless interact with each other in an intimate way, as if in the same room at the same time. Secret Life makes extensive use of jump cuts, so that we see one character with the text message they have written, and then switch to another character sending a response to that message. The constraint that the characters were physically apart, and indeed that the reply may not have been instantaneous, is dissolved. Indeed, one of the programme’s stated aims is to examine how students cope with the separation from friends and family, a separation that is perhaps paradoxically more acute when every message sent from afar reminds them of it. The implicit counterpoint to this is the intimate pressure cooker of the student hall in which personal space and distance are hard to find; as if to stress this, many of the characters still converse with each other via texts and chat boxes even though they are next door, so that privacy is not an option when electronic media can penetrate the walls.

Social media thus serves as a kind of accelerator, giving a sense of events playing out rapidly, in real-time, without the mediation of geography. The students are never alone, but are networked citizens, and the ‘plot’ of the documentary is essentially constructed around how these interactions with others serve to change the students’ behaviours and view of themselves. (On this note, it is interesting that the blurb for Secret Life of Students suggests that it seeks to examine “how social media correlates with their real life experiences” – a problematic question, which falsely implies that somehow social media experiences are not part of real life, when in fact as the programme so readily shows they are woven into the fabric of our networked daily existence.)

Beyond the effect of compressing the distance between the characters, the second feature of social media is that it lends a sense of authenticity to the picture we get of the students. They do not always directly tell us how they are feeling in the traditional piece to camera, but rather tell their friends about how they are feeling via social media, which we can then eavesdrop upon; conversely, the external narrator or voiceover does not have to guide our empathy for the characters, as instead the variously sympathetic, condemnatory, motivational messages that are sent by their friends puts us in a position whereby we are encouraged to feel for them as their friends do. Following the mantra of creative writing tutors, the media stream shows us the characters, rather than telling us about them.

In playing this role, social media is in some senses not entirely new. A rapid-fire conversation via text messages can be seen as the equivalent to an in-person dialogue, the implications of which we have to work out for ourselves. However, whilst performing a similar function of ‘showing’, social media are different from dialogue in that they are passed off as an archival record. Presented on screen, in a form that resembles the look of the original medium, they seem to be authentic. Whereas we know a face-to-face conversation will have been edited – or indeed set up by the producers specifically to expose each characters’ mutual feelings – the representation of popup texts and posts appears (and I stress appears)to be unedited. Because of how often they populate the screen (something not, I think, achievable with earlier communicative media such as letters), and because such messages are usually short and thus not necessarily cut as a conversation must be, they seem like an unmediated testimony about the self.

This impression is, of course, deceptive. Although individual messages might be presented whole, social media works not by self-contained statements but as an ongoing stream of data. The volume of messages shown on screen is probably just a tiny proportion of the posts and commentary with which digital communication showers them on a daily basis, but has been selected to be most revealing. In this way, the programme’s representation of social media ironically replicates the way in which we use social media in our own lives. On social media we craft a persona for ourselves as we would like to be seen by others, not as we actually are; as many have pointed out, we pitch ourselves in violent extremes of happiness or seeking sympathy. So too in the programme what we are actually seeing is not a complete electronic archive of the self on which we can make our own judgement, but a persona crafted as the programme makers want us to see it. Thus the editorial manipulations are concealed behind the presumption that the social media is a true report, just as when we use social media ourselves we assume that it represents our feelings or those of others in an authentic way.

Through the process of editing, the characters duly fall into neat archetypes: the studious and thus slightly alienated aspiring doctor; the young mum studying to achieve a better future for her family; the woman who seems to be a party animal, but whose sociability is actually a symptom of an underlying lack of intellectual self-confidence. That the participants in the documentary have no control over the way their lives are fashioned into these neat narrative categories is not a new problem. However, there is a new ethical question that arises from the way this narrative is fashioned out of their digital detritus. Who owns the messages that we are presented with? Clearly the participants in the programme have permitted the programme makers to comb their mobiles and social media feeds and to propagate them on screen. Yet what about those anonymised ‘friends’ whose messages to the characters we also see? Did everyone who sent them a text message or tweet also sign a disclaimer allowing their correspondence to be used on TV? Even if they did, the scattering of social media throughout the programme serves to indicate problematic, unwritten presumptions about the ownership and privacy of social data. Rather than that correspondence being owned by the one doing the sending, the writer, we assume on receipt of a message to our personal mobile phones that it is now ours, to do with as we please. The economy of retweeting, reposting, reblogging on social media exacerbates this: once you have sent a message, you no longer control the ways it is disseminated. This is, I think, quite different to the way in which we would treat a letter: its manner of personal address and concealment within an envelope materially signifies that it is a private document, to be shared only with care and thought. By contrast, social media commentary seems to be ours to re-present as we please. This is something we do unthinkingly in our lives, and that has been done again – albeit no doubt with a little more reflection – by the makers of the programme. What makes this programme interesting, then, is not just that it pries into the secret life of students, but that it showcases the less than secret lives that we all of us lead, where our digital correspondence with others is ripe for public spectacle.

Labels: documentary, narratology, Secret Life of Students, social media

In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray speculates about the importance of agency in digital games. It is agency, the participation of the player in the shaping of the narrative, that differentiates video games from literary texts. Agency, she writes, "is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices." The key term in this definition is "meaningful." Action alone is not agency. As Murray points out, in a game of chance, for example, a player may perform lots of actions: rolling dice, moving pieces, spinning tops. However, a player has no agency since these actions are not meaningful in the sense of shaping the course of events, which are instead determined by luck. In a game of chess, a player may make fewer actions, but each action is more meaningful since it alone, and not luck, potentially affects the outcome of the game. In a game like poker, there is a degree of chance, but a skillful player has high agency because by strategising effectively he or she can mitigate the influence of the precise cards they are drawn.

Determining the degree of agency in these examples is pretty straightforward, and ought in principle to be quantifiable. However, to what extent can we quantify the degree of agency a player has in different video games?

In some, such as Candy Crush, one can envisage the degree of agency being quite low. Whilst there is some degree of strategy, the game is weighted most by luck - which is why it can be so infuriating to play, and so entices players to purchase bonuses which will increase their chances, such as by adding more moves. The emphasis is on repetitive action, that is eventually rewarded.

In a game like Skyrim, on the other hand, the potential for agency seems enormous. In a massive environment, we seem to have complete freedom of movement and choice. As Murray suggests, "The desire for agency in digital environments makes us impatient when our options are...limited. We want an open road with wide latitude to explore and more than one way to get somewhere." Exploration is the name of this particular game.

Somewhere between these poles might be on rails shooters or platformers. We have some degree of freedom, but are largely driven down prescribed paths. The trick of game design is all about giving us the illusion of choice.

Yet this is where agency becomes a highly problematic means of measuring the openness either of a game world or of a game's narrative. Take something like the recent Tomb Raider. This is a very cleverly designed game world, presenting itself as a vast explorable island, when in fact the player is funneled down particular pathways. Compared to Skyrim, our agency would seem to be limited - though still of course very substantial, far more so than a game like Candy Crush. However, at times the game interactions narrow to a binary state with set-piece interactions - for example, a wolf attacks us at a scripted position in the game world, and we must follow the on screen prompts to press the appropriate two or three keys. The outcome is binary, either we live or die. What, then, is the degree of agency here? On Murray's measure of agency as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices," this would seem to be a moment of high agency - perhaps even higher than the explorable game world despite being less open. These actions are intensely meaningful: they determine whether we will live or die, unlike our normal actions which allow us a degree of failure (lost health) before dying. This is why they come across as intensely satisfying, dramatic experiences in which we seem genuinely to have protected a fragile heroine. In the more open exploration, by contrast, Lara seems to be able to take an unrealistic amount of damage and in some ways is less in need of our protection.

Whilst the narrative of Tomb Raider perhaps channels the highest degree of agency through the narrowest of funnels, in Skyrim whilst we may well take pleasure from the freedom of exploration, the degree to which our explorations serve to affect the course of the narrative in any meaningful way is questionable. A game that seems to be of high agency may not actually be so. Certainly, the more we explore the game world the more likely we are to enhance the skills and equipment needed to advance the quest more easily. However, except in very limited ways (such as the civil war questline) our choices do not affect the ultimate narrative that we pursue.

What these problems suggest, I think, is that agency as it pertains to traditional games is a very different measure to agency in video games. The difference is that in the former, the degree of agency is dependent upon the amount of chance inbuilt into the game system. In a game that depends entirely on chance, such as the role of the dice, there will be no agency. By contrast, no video game that I can think of depends wholly on chance. As such, agency itself is immeasurable. Neither does agency correspond to the open-worldness of a game. Tomb Raider may have moments of higher agency when the world is actually more closed down, whilst Skyrim may seem a high agency world when in fact our actions are not necessarily meaningful in relation to the narrative. In a way, because the world is so open it gives us the chance to pursue actions that are meaningless, at least from the perspective of the game itself (from the point of view of the player, of course, even non-narrative advancing actions like crafting or taking a wander through the woods can still be meaningful, enjoyable experiences).

Agency, then, seems to offer a very limited means of measuring video game construction. Certainly, the reason we take pleasure in video games is that we perceive ourselves to be shaping the narrative and affecting the outcome of as-yet undetermined events - in this sense it is unlike the process of reading a novel. However, the extent of this shaping is always limited, not as in traditional games, by chance, but rather by the designed nature of the game world.

Labels: agency, narratology, video games