Multiplayer Lit/Multiplayer Crit

When scholars in the humanities try to imagine new scholarly practices — new forms of collaboration, new metrics of evaluation, and new modes of knowledge production — we are quick to gesture toward "the sciences," as if the STEM fields have a model to which we might aspire. Of course, research in the sciences is often more collaborative than work done in literature departments — most publications result from research performed by a team, co-written articles are the norm, and time to publication is much faster. During the past decade, we've seen efforts in some parts of the literary studies world to implement more STEM-type methods. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman have written about the smattering of humanities centers and labs, mostly within the frame of digital humanities (DH), that have adopted alternative models for research and pedagogy that "emphasize collaborative team projects, integration across multiple stakeholders in academic research, and individual contributions within larger frameworks of ongoing research."1 And in The Lab Book, Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler trace a longer history of the media labs that predate DH endeavors.2 Tara McPherson's Feminist in a Software Lab narrates a different genealogy for digital humanities, one that begins with experimental performance art in the mid-1990s and winds its way through the development of the journal Vectors and its use of the publishing platform Scalar. But what practices extend beyond the usual suspects of computational methods and the labs that use them?

The model of collaboration from the sciences still relies on conventional articles, on a team composed of individuals who get billing according to the importance of their contributions. The "first author" still reigns, even as we celebrate the addition of second, third, and fourth. Leah Price reminds us, though, that the cross-disciplinary gaze is not one-directional; the sciences have their own fantasies about literature. These fantasies of literature rapidly training readers to be better empaths or more moral individuals suggest that every discipline looks to others for the puzzles it cannot easily solve. Perhaps this imperfect cross-pollination can inspire us to search beyond other scholarly disciplines for a new model of knowledge production that has the potential for more speed, more transparency, and maybe even more unhierarchical sharing in the way that knowledge is found, built, written, and disseminated. We might, for instance, look to participatory culture. Participatory online culture helps us imagine a world that doesn't just entail scholars writing about amateur readers or scholars examining the literary spaces of social media and self-publishing, but opens up the possibility that our own writing might assume a different form altogether.3 Participatory culture gives us examples of how literary criticism can move, change, and expand in order to make sense of new sites of reading and writing that include makers and consumers, fans and remediators.

Scholars in English departments have, for some time, been confronted with the fact that we inhabit a fragmented field where film and media studies coexist with cultural studies, literature organized by nation, period-delimited work and DH. It is — or should be — strange to rely on conventional forms of scholarship now that our canon, as Priya Joshi points out, is no longer conventional. Whitney Trettien has recently argued that "it isn't new ways of reading that are restructuring our field from within, but a new kind of writing, a new awareness of scholarship's mediation and of the event of publishing as itself a kind of staged drama."4 Her call to reflect on how we publish — how we use media to make public the stories that we spin about texts and their past lives — is one I want to take up here, however briefly and provisionally.

What would literary criticism look like if it were to turn, not to the sciences, but to web 2.0 strategies for inspiration? Models are located even closer than in neighboring disciplines, right there in our objects of study. As information technology changes contemporary fiction, specialist readers must reimagine themselves as end users of that fiction, rather than the stewards of works of art. Even as "end user" suggests that critics receive a finished product, use implies a more interactive, hands-on relationship to literature. To draw upon Lawrence Lessig's terms, it may be time that scholars stop imagining that they encounter "read-only" (RO) fiction and then produce RO criticism. There are many reasons to understand literary criticsm as a read/write (RW) enterprise.5 We can still do deconstructive or feminist readings of new fictions, new texts, but we can also, as I'll argue in the context of the multiplayer lit named in my title, seek out critical methods that respond in kind to contemporary novels' engagement with digital, interactive culture.

There is, by now, a sizeable cohort of scholars who have pioneered experimental critical modes that reflect the interactive, dynamic capacities of the internet. In addition to Lessig's prescient Remix (2009), a number of collaborations have been instantiated between scholars interested in the collaborative spirit of online forums and digital texts. From 2001 to 2005, MIT Press's Mediaworks pamphlets paired authors with graphic designers to produce short works that "take up the themes of art, design, technology, and market economies."6 The Vectors Journal's Scalar-based essays likewise pair writers and designers to create multimedia treatments of "the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence."7 These forays into digital and collaborative criticism have offered a starting point for rethinking literary criticism, although they also address media, socio-political issues, or even sensory experience. Two notable endeavors have reminded readers that fiction and poetry inhabit the digital realm as potently as the analog one of ink on paper. Katherine Hayles's entry in the Mediaworks series, Writing Machines (2002), and Reading Project (2015), a collaborative book by Jessica Pressman, Mark Marino, and Jeremy Douglass, use electronic and digital media to explore post-print literature: electronic poetry, technotexts, and the onscreen aesthetics that constitute them.

But even when literature reaches us in the shape of a conventional book, bound between two covers, it often absorbs and relays elements of the digital world. I am interested in one striking instance of such absorption, and what it might have to teach us about our critical output. Contemporary literature has begun to register the affordances of multiplayer videogames — the way that streaming and digital technology makes possible connectivity and collaboration in real time across distance and culture. Can literary criticism do the same? I'll try to answer this question by considering how multiplayer gaming appears in two recent novels: Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem and Richard Powers's The Overstory. I want to make the case for something that we might call "literary criticism 2.0," an emerging body of scholarship that responds to this turn in fiction and is defined by collaboration, informal networks, viral circulation, and a blurring of institutional hierarchies in ways that might take us beyond the lab model or the multi-authored scientific article.

In a multiplayer video game, more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time. Multiplayer games allow players to interact with each other in partnership, competition, or rivalry. In such games, players can compete against one or more human contestants, supervise other players' activity, or co-op, which is short for cooperative gameplay, a mode in which players work together as teammates, usually against one or more AI opponents. Multiplayer games allow players to compete, but they also provide countless opportunities for cooperation: players pass weapons to one another, provide cover in a firefight, and perform collaborative maneuvers like boosting teammates up and over obstacles. Multifocal and multiplot novels have begun to embed these elements of multiplayer games in their diegetic folds. These novels exceed the well-worn novel-as-game analogy and instead point toward new participatory practices.

In 2018, two novels that depict multiplayer games directly enjoyed commercial and critical success. Richard Powers's novel The Overstory follows nine Americans whose formative experience with trees bring them together to fight the destruction of one of the last virgin stands of California redwoods. One character, Neelay Mehta, is paralyzed when he falls out of a tree as a child. He goes on to become a programming whiz, creating games that, as the narrator tells us "propagate on hosts across the planet."8 His masterpiece is, fittingly, called "Mastery," a game that allows for "easy and endless shape-shifting, in a kingdom forever growing." When Neelay is asked in an interview why the game is such a global success, he responds: "It has simple rules. The world responds to you. Things happen faster than in life. You can watch your empire grow" (227). Within the world of the game, we encounter the world of The Overstory itself: a group of characters who cooperate and compete in pursuit of a single goal.

The other novel is The Three-Body Problem, the first installment of a science-fiction trilogy by Cixin Liu, published in Chinese in 2008 and translated into English belatedly in 2014, only after its success in China was unparalleled and science-fiction author Ken Liu agreed to do the translation. Central to the novel's complicated plot is a virtual-reality video game called "Three Body." The game is a hybrid of multiplayer and virtual reality. It is unclear to the players whether the other avatars they meet in-game are AIs or humans. It turns out that the game is a recruitment tool for a society working to create an alliance between earth and an alien society. At a meet-up, the highest-scoring players discuss the game: "I find it strange, terrible, but also beautiful. So much information is hidden beneath a simple representation." "Yes," another agrees, "I like the literary elements of Three Body. The rises and falls of two hundred and three civilizations evoke the qualities of epics in a new form."9

"Epics in a new form": Mastery and Three Body are metaphors for the novels themselves — the games are fictions-within-fictions that interweave characters and plotlines. They are also metaphors for our reading of these novels: the way that we enter into quests with and through the fictional avatars that the writers create for our entertainment and edification. This is all, to some degree, recognizable: we know about multi-perspectival plots like Powers's from writers like George Eliot and Zadie Smith, we know about embedded games inside fictions by Borges or Nabokov. We could also say that scenes of multiplayer games simply offer realist detail for readers in 2018, adding contemporary texture to a novel in the same way that Theodore Dreiser's descriptions of a department store, or Thomas Hardy's of the penny post did 130 years ago. I'd argue that these scenes do more than track trends or reinvent tropes; I'd propose that they exceed what Patrick Jagoda has termed "network aesthetics."10 Literary depictions of multiplayer games don't just represent new technologies but also model forms of reading and collective readership. The experience of playing the games — immersive but social, escapist but informed by real-world politics and crises, and evocative of multiple timescales — is also the experience of reading that Powers and Liu hope their readers will have. The novels can be called "multiplayer lit" insofar as their focus on the new technology of gaming stages group readership and shared construction of meaning. As multiplayer games infiltrate the techniques of contemporary fiction, we should translate this thematic trend into a critical one, imagining multiplayer criticism as a potential, near-future response at the level of methodology. Can the new image of reading that these novels offer also point toward a more radically decentralized path for the academy and for lay publics too? This near-future response might take some of its cues from the past, from the online Bulletin Boards of the 1990s and early 2000s that facilitated collaborative and rigorous conversations about literature. The appearance of multiplayer games as fictional content and scholarly method urges us to rethink the importance of earlier platforms and communities, from the House of Leaves Bulletin Board devoted to Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 novel to countless Thomas Pynchon wikis that crowdsource to index and explain the thousands of references in his fiction.

Recently we have seen scholarly efforts that attempt to employ something like a conversation model instead of a laboratory one. One example is the Multigraph Collective, a group of 22 scholars whose collaborative book, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, was published in 2018.11 Another possibility is Manifold, the nascent online platform by University of Minnesota Press that has begun to publish networked, interactive monographs on the web, including Whitney Trettien's book, Cut/Copy/Paste. It's striking that the first wave of Multiplayer Crit might rightfully be called Multiplayer Book History. People studying book history and conducting material analyses of their objects seem mimetically tuned to the way that books enter history as multiplayer objects, and they have sought new forms of scholarship to address this fact.

We have begun to see criticism that attempts to break the conventional timeframe of scholarship — the slow process of research, peer review, and publication. For one, the changing landscape of scholarly publication that includes more online venues and more short-form writing has shrunk the time between writing and reading. Scholars of contemporary fiction in particular, tasked with being "first responders" to new fiction, television, film, and other media, are increasingly called upon to publish work quickly. Another version of "fast scholarship" comes on social media, and especially on academic Twitter, where the format forces users to condense their expertise into a few pithy sentences. Kinohi Nishikawa has written elsewhere on Post45 about this speeding up of criticism, in a discussion of his "article-adjacent tweets," the distilled, quick-fire version of scholarship he's spent years baking.

Criticism 2.0, then, like gaming, is neither simply fast nor slow. Instead it asks the critic to recognize when the protracted process of conventional scholarship might be productively wedded with the faster speeds of digital media. The games in The Overstory and The Three-Body Problem, like the novels themselves, invite readers to reflect on alternate and competing timescales: the long durée of planetary time — of forests and alien civilizations — versus the short circadian rhythms of human society, the time of playing or reading. This makes intuitive sense: multiplayer games always operate within at least two timeframes: there is the time of the game, where days may take only a matter of minutes or where night never comes at all, and the time of the game-players, whose co-presence can be interrupted by any number of needs, obligations, or technological hiccups. If dual, or multiple time, is a particular hallmark of multiplayer games and of the literature that seeks to represent them, it is important to ask whether this could influence the way we write about that literature.

To get at something like the experience of gamers playing together in real time, the closest analog we have at present, perhaps, are the casual conversations and quadrilogues published in Post45. Instead of delivering a finished but opaque product, these conversations highlight elements of process. Take "Slow Burn," one forum that tries to present scholarship as a conversation that unfolds as scholars read. "Friendship and reading take time," Sarah Chihaya says to open the forum on Ferrante, implying — as does the "Slow" in "Slow Burn," that this exchange of essays on Ferrante's Neopolitan novels will require some patience on the readers' part.12 But the rate at which these peer-exchanged essays appeared is faster than the pace we expect for peer-reviewed literary criticism. What's more, the site, with its serialized publication format, encourages reflection on the time of reading and of writing. Merve Emre begins an entry later in the series with this: "7 hours, 32 minutes, and 50 seconds: this is how long it took me to read The Story of the Lost Child."13 7 and a half hours! Are we burning slow or burning fast? Does this exchange and the affordance of an online journal give us something like the multiple timelines and the co-presence of multiplayer games?

I'm not entirely sure, but I sense something in the air or the ether or the binary code of literary criticism that is starting to feel not only different in degree but in kind. I'm less interested in asking whether this means the death of slow scholarship — of peer-reviewed articles and scholarly monographs — because I'm confident there's still room for those even as new forms spring up. But I am curious about how far we can get in imagining criticism that looks more like...well...Fortnite. Less dancing perhaps, but just as much genuine collaboration and public-facing exploration. Multiplayer criticism, if it exists, is not only about how we disseminate our findings — how we talk about books in public or how we publish about them — but about how we figure things out together, in real time.

Multiplayer lit reminds us that novels can depict rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention and that games have always traded on the immersive narrative forms that are the hallmark of novels. Games then, and the novels that depict them, cultivate the quick and collaborative spirit of what criticism might become. If there are scholars poised to go beyond the model of teamwork from the sciences, I am confident it's the scholars whose objects themselves — Overstories and Third Bodies, if you will — have begun to narrate over the boundary of the book and past the reader-writer dyad into third literary spaces. They've begun to show us what it might mean to orchestrate in multiplayer, participatory world-building, or at least to read and write as if those were the rules of the game.

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Sarah Wasserman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Her first monograph, The Death of Things: Ephemera in America, is forthcoming with The University of Minnesota Press in 2020. She is the co-editor of Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (2015) and co-curator of the "Thing Theory and Literary Studies" colloquy on the Stanford Arcade website.

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Keywords: Participation/participatory culture; collaboration; interdisciplinarity/science/STEM; popular culture; gaming.

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