10.- THE THEATER ON THIS
The comic creator Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, …) made in an interview some time ago some derogatory comments about the search for respectability by some sectors of the comic world wanting to present this as a Graphic Novel, a term that has been mainly accepted. Again that ghost of the indigenous reservation that they want to drag to the desert of civilization.
When we get brainy we move the weight towards the brain but at the cost of taking it off the heart. Even at the risk of this happening, I will say that opposite to the approach of the Graphic Novel, with Gent Stickman I humbly propose a way of approaching comics as “Graphic Theater”, in this case in its more or less silent pantomime version (and also interactive).
I sincerely believe that I am not the one to assess the solidity with which certain concepts have been linked in my head during the creation and subsequent analysis of the game, but thinking about that I find both the chain and the result curious: Interactive fiction > substitution of text for silent drawings > replacement of narration by staging as a comic > inclusion of the “puppet” element of my hand that behaves like this in the real world > and finally see how all that puppetry leads us to the concept of theater.
Continuing with statements by Alan Moore (source of the quote (Spanish)):
“Today I think that the strongest means of communication is prose. Only with language can you describe everything, what you see and what you feel. A writer can transport your consciousness anywhere. It’s like virtual reality.” .- Alan Moore
An example of how even geniuses can’t always be right : D
Mr. Moore forgets things here, and the most important I think is poetry.
I’m not talking about poetry expressed in words, which I love. I love words. I even love verbiage sometimes.
When I was a child I discovered The Marx Brothers’s films on public television, which for a time were broadcast periodically. In my house we didn’t have a VCR with which to record them, so I would bring a radio cassette close to the television and record them on some tape that I found around the house, crushing the fashionable music that one of my older sisters had recorded before the radio, to her dismay.
Then I listened to them over and over again, and I laughed a lot, amazed at the wit and verbiage of Groucho and Chico, making me a great fan of theirs, to the point that at some point I was gifted for a birthday with a book containing the dialogues that this pair had on a radio show in the 1930s.
Impossible without words.
Yet there was another Marx Brother. There were more, but you know which one I mean, because in front of these three, the “handsome” one had nothing to do. The great Marx brother I’m talking about is precisely the one who wasn’t talking, Harpo, the perfect counterpoint to the other two.
He spoke by sounding the horn that he always carried (and that in his biography he said he had stolen from a taxi), he also played the harp that gave him his stage name, or with his look that was a mixture of crazy and childish, or with his mime of raised fists and grimace, always ready for a brawl.
All that silent magic was not reflected in my recordings of his films, nor was it possible to include it in the radio program of his other brothers. Maybe that’s why it took me longer to understand its greatness, or maybe because it was more subtle.
Impossible with words. Impossible without poetry.
I hope I don’t seem pretentious, but I see a bit of this Harpo in Gent Stickman, sometimes quarrelsome, communicating without words, a worthy man, a good man, who endures the pull as best he can in the face of misfortunes that rain down on him. Just a child after all.
Beyond Shakespeare
From the title itself and the concept of its story and characters, I think there is an effect of estrangement.
Bertolt Brecht sought a distancing effect in the theater, trying to prevent the public from identifying with the performance, preferring them rather to be aware of the fiction all the time.
This breaks with the usually sought after concepts of suspension of disbelief, of not breaking the fourth wall.
Shklovski argued that everyday life caused us to “lose the freshness of our perception of objects”, making everything automated and, this is my addition, less poetic and magical.
That led me back to the graphical elements in the game. There is a fact about cartoon drawings, stick figures: They have different properties from the most elaborate and realistic representations:
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They are more general/universal and therefore are able to represent more people.
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They make one identify more easily with the character, as opposed to the distance from “the other” more realistically drawn, or in some cases from the backgrounds, as in the Tintin comics (Hergé).
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They are more subjective than photorealistic objectivity, leaving more room for interpretation.
This is not my opinion about them, but the clever insights on the topic written by other authors and scholars of the subject.
According to McCloud, the simpler and more direct the text, the closer it is to “drawings”, they are grasped faster, requiring less perception and more reception.
Now here comes my opinion about which classic adventures with less elaborate and more functional language would be closer to Gent Stickman than other, more literary ones.
And without going into personal preferences or trying to pontificate, I would say that the old dichotomy between more elaborate and serious language (very suitable for leisurely and mature lovers of literature) and more functional and less literary language (very suitable for the video game genre and a younger audience that wants to interact at all costs) is a matter of the player’s taste, but also a matter of what is intended to be achieved with the game. In any case, both approaches are totally essential to achieve the author’s goal and, always in my opinion, without one being objectively more desirable than the other. Of course, you are perfectly allowed to love one and hate the other : )
What I try to show with this is that graphical communication instead of text is also a designing choice, as it is using stick figures instead of more cool photorealistic graphics, and as it is using digital same-with strokes instead of more dynamic indian ink hand drawn strokes over traditional paper.