The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  At the opposite end of the reality show spectrum is ABC’s SuperNanny. Each episode begins with the plucky British nanny (Jo Frost) arriving at a home in chaos. The parents are ineffectual. The kids are little monsters. The nanny spends a day or two observing how incredibly screwed up the family is, shaking her head and rolling her eyes for the camera. And then she lays down the law. From the chaos of the household, the nanny forges order—a clean house, wise and loving parents, respectful and well-mannered children. Then she drives off in her frumpy British nanny car, leaving the little family to live happily ever after.

  What a fantasy! Few programs match SuperNanny for the brazen way it dresses fiction in the robes of “reality.” Shows like SuperNanny are much less truthful than the average work of fiction. Good fiction tells intensely truthful lies. SuperNanny is full of lies, but not truthful ones.

  The Ultimate Fighter and SuperNanny illustrate that reality shows are not nonfiction. They are just a new kind of fiction, in which the lies and distortions happen mainly in the editing room, not the writing room.

  These are undeniably nervous times for people who make a living through story. The publishing, film, and television businesses are going through a period of painful change. But the essence of story is not changing. The technology of storytelling has evolved from oral tales, to clay tablets, to hand-lettered manuscripts, to printed books, to movies, televisions, Kindles, and iPhones. This wreaks havoc on business models, but it doesn’t fundamentally change story. Fiction is as it was and ever will be:

  Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication

  Futurology is a fool’s game, but I think the worry that story is being squeezed out of human life is exactly the wrong one. The future will see an intensification, even a perfection, of what draws us to fiction in the first place. The gravitational pull of story is going to increase manyfold. We will be marooned in cyber-Neverlands, and we will like it that way. As one online gamer put it, “The future looks bleak for reality.”

  BACK TO NEVERLAND

  It was a sunny fall day. Ethan and his friends were running through the woods of Indian Springs State Park in Flovilla, Georgia. They dodged between campsites and into the forest, ignoring stares from park rangers and fellow campers. They were hunting monsters, and monsters were hunting them. When they slashed down pretend orcs, they cried, “Die, foul beast!”

  In quieter moments, they stayed in character. The hotheaded Magnus Tigersblood apologized to Sir Talon: “I am not wise. I know how to fight and how to draw a few runes.” Sir Talon was magnanimous: “Sir, your words are from your heart.” All of the heroes hailed from exotic home worlds: the Enchanted Glade, the Empire of Perfect Unity, the Rock of Storms, Goblin City.

  Ethan achieved a medieval look by wearing women’s clothes purchased at a thrift store—a puffy white blouse and black tights. A fairy named Erin was wearing a satiny dress, ballet shoes, and wings held on by elastic bands. Their weapons were wood or foam wrapped in duct tape. It didn’t matter that the costumes were crude or that the blue tarp hanging between trees looked nothing like the entrance to a dungeon. In the players’ imaginations, a foam pool toy became a terrifying club, a smudge of dirt transformed a human face into that of a night-stalking goblin, and a cheap piece of costume jewelry became as precious as the grail.

  That weekend Ethan and his comrades—Wolf, Aerie, Heinrich Irongear, Dusk Whisper, and all the rest—fought and fled for their lives. They slew terror beaks. They fought “rat-wolf things” in a “cave of extreme foulness.” They solved riddles. They cast spells. They fought among themselves and made up.

  And in the end, they finally found the Mandrakes, lurking just off a forest path. Mandrakes are half-human, half-vegetable, and all evil. Many a brave warrior and beautiful maiden has stumbled into a thicket of Mandrakes, only to be devoured in seconds.

  Here is what it sounded like when Ethan, wielding his foam mace, waded into the Mandrakes, with his fellow heroes battling at his sides:

  Power strike!

  Bam!

  Parry!

  Get in there! Flank him!

  Two more mandrakes!

  Fwaaapppp!

  Power strike 2!

  Dodge!

  Fffff-bapppp-pah-pah-pah!

  Mortal blow!

  Arrrrrgggghhhh!

  After making the forest safe for everything good and pure, the heroes returned to their cabins. They called one another by their real names and talked about their spouses and children. And then they climbed into their cars and drove home not to Goblin City or the Rock of Storms, but to the suburbs of Atlanta. Ethan Gilsdorf, fortysomething, said goodbye to his new friends and boarded a plane for Boston, where he was working on a book about the fantasy gaming subculture.

  Gilsdorf had just experienced the LARP (live action role playing game) called Forest of Doors. In LARP, grownups let their inner children out. They create fantasy scenarios ranging from typical sword and sorcery stuff to sci-fi and secret-agent games. They each develop a rich character, complete with backstory—a heartbroken sorcerer, a prim fairy with a mean streak, a femme fatale with a secret—and then the larpers pretend, sometimes staying in character for days at a time.

  The Russian LARP Stalker is set in the radioactive exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor after a second fictional disaster. The larpers (shown here) must band together to fight off mutant creatures and other dangers.

  LARP is not really a game. It is improv theater without an audience. LARP is grown-up make-believe.

  LARP evolved in the 1980s out of tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons and Dragons, which brought friends together for bouts of cooperative storytelling. RPGs invite us to enter richly conceived fictional worlds not as passive imaginers (as in traditional fiction), but as active characters. RPGs are crossbreeds of games and stories. But to me, the story aspect dominates. “Game” is the name we give to our interactive relationship with the story world.

  The stereotypical Dungeons and Dragons player is a pimply, introverted boy who isn’t cool and can’t play sports or attract girls. From my years of playing Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, and of hanging out with guys who kept playing into adulthood, this stereotype strikes me as pretty accurate. But larpers are another breed altogether. They are the kind of committed übernerds that even Dungeons and Dragons nerds get to snigger at. But no one should be sniggering. Why is acting out Tolkienesque stories considered dorky, when most of us love to sit like lumps in a theater watching actors do the same? Why is LARP considered pathetic, when we practically worship movie stars who prance around in Neverland, hollering and smooching and stabbing and emoting? Larpers are just an extreme example of the Peter Pan principle: humans are the species that won’t grow up. We may leave our nurseries behind, but not Neverland.

  And there’s another reason we shouldn’t mock these gamers. RPGs such as Forest of Doors and Dungeons and Dragons point the way to the future of story.

  O BRAVE NEW WORLD!

  I don’t think traditional fiction is dying, and I don’t think the universal grammar will ever change. But I do think storytelling will evolve in new directions over the next fifty years. Interactive fiction, in the form of RPGs, will move from the geek fringe to the mainstream. More and more of us will be running around like larpers in la-la land, dreaming up characters and acting them out. But we will be doing so in cyberspace, not in the real world.

  Two of the most compelling sci-fi visions of story’s future come from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994). In Huxley’s dystopian novel, fiction is essentially dead. People flock instead to the “feelies.” Feelies are, superficially, a lot like movies, but there are two big differences. First, in a feely you actually feel what the characters do. When two people have sex on a bearskin rug, you sense every hair on the rug, your lips mashing with the kisses. Second, a feely isn’t really a story-delivery technology. It is a sensation-delivery technology. Feelies do not
explore the human plight. They have zero intellectual content. They are just thrill and shiver. Feelies let people watch their porn and feel it, too.

  If the feelies are ever invented, people will, of course, throng to them. But I don’t think this would spell the end of story. I think people would want feelies and stories. The citizens of Huxley’s dystopia are satisfied with feelies, but they are different from us. They have been genetically engineered and culturally conditioned to the point that they are no longer fully human. Story will not go away until we really do cross over into a brave new world—a world in which human nature and nurture are fundamentally changed. Huxley himself seemed to understand this. His novel features only one fully authentic human, John the Savage, who is a deviant partly because he prefers Shakespeare to feelies.

  I think the future of fiction will be closer to Star Trek’s holodeck than Huxley’s feelies. In the fictional universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the holodeck is capable of authentically simulating just about anything. A holonovel is a fictional work that you enter into, as a character, on the holodeck; it is a technologically sophisticated version of LARP. Like a feely, a holonovel tricks the mind into thinking the story is actually happening. But unlike a feely, the holonovel gives you all the thrill and shiver without stripping away the story.

  On the holodeck, Captain Kathryn Janeway enjoys Jane Austen–like holonovels, where she plays the role of a smart, spunky, and much-desired heroine. By contrast, Captain Jean-Luc Picard enjoys solving mysteries as a Raymond Chandler–esque detective named Dixon Hill. Star Trek’s holonovel perfects much of what draws us to fiction in the first place: a sense of identification with characters that is complete because we are the characters, and a perfect illusion of transportation into an alternate universe.

  We may never achieve the technological sophistication that we see in Star Trek. But I believe that we are moving in that direction with a specific type of video game called a MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role-playing game. (Most people pronounce this acronym “Mor-Peg.”) In MMORPGs, players become characters in an unfolding story. They move through a physically vast and culturally rich virtual world that they share with thousands of other players. The virtual worlds have their own laws and customs. They have their own linguistic dialects, with vocabularies that can be very difficult for the uninitiated (called “noobs”) to master. (Some verbs: to gank, to grief, to nerf, to buff, to debuff, to twink, to gimp, to pwn.) They have warring tribes and thriving economies, with trade amounting to hundreds of millions of real-world dollars per year. Authentic cultures spontaneously develop in MMORPG worlds, and anthropologists write ethnographies about them.

  When you enter a MMORPG, you not only enter a distinct physical and cultural space; you also enter a story space. In fact, many MMORPGs are based on popular stories, such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Star Wars. MMORPGs invite us to become characters in classic hero stories. As one player put it, playing a MMORPG is like living “inside a novel as it is being written.” Another said, “I’m living inside a medieval saga. I’m one of the characters in the novel, and, at the same time, I’m one of the authors.”

  Take, for example, Blizzard Entertainment’s MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW). It is hard to describe WoW in this compact space, for the same reason it would be difficult to sum up the physical and cultural concept of Nicaragua or Norway in a few paragraphs. The ambition of WoW is startling. Its developers aren’t game makers; they are world makers. (They tellingly refer to their creation not as a role-playing game, but as a role-playing experience.) WoW’s designers are geek gods carving a virtual world out of the void.

  WoW is an online universe made up of many separate planets, races, factions, cultures, religions, and mutually incomprehensible languages. Twelve million real people adventure there (meaning that the population of WoW world exceeds Nicaragua’s and Norway’s put together). The sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, who spent two years in WoW world doing participant-observer research, isn’t exaggerating when he writes that the WoW experience is based on a “tapestry of myths as complex as any in the ancient sagas.” There are books lying around WoW world, such as The New Horde and Civil War in the Plaguelands, which your character can read to learn the lore of the realm. There is a series of novels (stretching to fifteen at this writing) that flesh out WoW’s backstory, develop the major characters, and constrain the continuous evolution of the online experience. When you enter WoW world, you become a character in an evolving epic that stretches back to the beginning of time—the first gods, the birth of worlds, and ten thousand years of history charting the rise and fall of races and civilizations.

  Screenshot from World of Warcraft showing a female blood elf.

  WoW achieves what it does because it bundles the creativity of many hundreds of collaborators: programmers, writers, social scientists, historians, visual artists, musicians, and others. Most great art is created by individuals, but WoW is the product of hundreds of creative people weaving the power of story art together with visual and sound art. WoW is an art bonanza, and these are still its early days. What will universes such as WoW be like in twenty years? In fifty?

  EXODUS

  In his book Exodus to the Virtual World, economist Edward Castronova argues that we have begun the greatest mass migration in the history of humanity. People are moving en masse from the real to the virtual world. Bodies will always be marooned here on earth, but human attention is gradually “draining” into the virtual world. Tens of millions of MMORPG devotees already spend an average of twenty to thirty hours per week absorbed in online adventures. According to a survey of thirty thousand MMORPG players, about half of all serious players form their most satisfying friendships in-game, and 20 percent consider MMORPG land to be their “true home,” while Earth is “merely a place they visit from time to time.” The pace of the exodus will increase as technological advances make virtual worlds more and more appealing.

  According to Castronova, the exodus will be fueled not only by the attractive force of new virtual worlds—by the strong suction of interactive story—but by the repellent force of real life. Castronova asks us to imagine an average guy named Bob. Bob works in retail—shelving product, sweeping floors, manning the register. He drives through a bleak concrete landscape of big-box stores and fast-food joints. When he bowls, he bowls alone. He is not involved in civic life. He is in no real sense a member of a community, and his life is meaningless. His job asks so little of him, and he produces nothing of lasting value.

  But after work, Bob goes online and finds everything that is missing from his life. In MMORPG land, Bob has friends; he may even have a wife. He doesn’t live to sell and consume trash; he lives to crusade against evil. In MMORPG land, Bob has big muscles, big weapons, and dangerous magic. He is an essential and respected member of a tight-knit community.

  Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.

  Above all, MMORPG worlds are profoundly meaningful. As game designer David Rickey put it, people enter MMORPGs to take a daily vacation from the pointlessness of their actual lives. A MMORPG is an intensely meaning-rich environment—a world that seems, in many ways, more worthy of our lives and our deaths. MMORPGs accomplish this, above all, by resurrecting myths. In the virtual world, the myths retain all their power, and the gods are alive and potent. Here is how Warhammer Online describes the sinister warlord Tchar’zanek: “In the lands of the far north, where tribes of savage barbarians worship the abhorrent gods of Chaos, a new champion has risen. His name is heard on the howling of the icy winds and the shrill cries of ravens. It is proclaimed in peals of thunder and whispered in
the nightmares of men. He is Tchar’zanek, Chosen of Tzeentch [a god of Chaos], and he will shake the very foundations of the Old World.”

  So people will increasingly enter MMORPG worlds not only for their positive virtues but also to escape the bleakness of modern life—the feeling that, as game designer Jane McGonigal puts it in the title of her recent book, reality is broken. You might say, “Yeah, but those role-playing geeks all have one thing in common: they are pathetic losers. I’m not. The world of dorks and orcs has nothing to do with me.”

  True, MMORPGs are not for everybody. But they are still in their infancy. In the decades to come, computing capacity will grow exponentially, and we will move closer and closer to the holonovel. When this happens, story land will outstrip real life in many ways. Many people—especially people like Bob—have already decided that it is nicer to be a king in MMORPG land than a peasant in this one. But someday will it be nicer to be a king in MMORPG land than a king in real life?

  Of course, people will always have to unplug from their stories to visit the bathroom and the refrigerator. But interactive fictions may become so appealing that we will be loath to leave them behind. This is something that the relentlessly optimistic Star Trek series never quite got right. The holodeck is, like the hydrogen bomb, a technology with hideous destructive potential. If you had a walk-in closet where you always got to do the thing you most wanted to do—from saving the world to mastering your harem—why would you ever come out? Why would you ever want to stop being god?