the obsolescence of the novel?

An interesting Black Gate post about storytelling in games.

And a related post about the “Death Spiral” (possibly alleged, possibly not) of the publishing industry.

It occurs to me that the printed novel may become obsolete as a method of storytelling. And I don’t meant that in a “those danged kids need to stop doing the Google on their iPads and READ A BOOK” kind of way, but in the way that epic poetry is obsolete as a method of storytelling. Epic poetry was written for an audience that was primarily illiterate and used to hearing stories via the spoken word – the rise of literacy, paper, and the printing press rendered oral storytelling largely obsolete, which the exception of stand-up comedy. I suspect we may see the same thing happening today. The underlying technological medium of storytelling is undergoing a profound change that will naturally result in different kinds of stories.

If you think about it, the printed novel as we know it is an artifact of technology, and only became popular because of that technology. Specifically, paper, the printing press, a standardized alphabet, and a high percentage of literacy. Nobody read or wrote novels in Hammurabi’s Bablyon or Old Kingdom Egypt, simply because the technology to do so did not exist. Try writing the “Lord of the Rings” on papyrus scrolls in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or reading “Pride and Prejudice” on thousands of Babylonian cuneiform tablets. It’s logistically impossible.

I’m not quite sure how to define the new medium of storytelling now developing, this hybird of the Internet and the computer. It’s interactive, for one, and definitely based upon multiple forms of multimedia. I think games like “Dragon Age Origins” or “Starcraft 2” are excellent examples of this new form of storytelling; computer games that are closer to being interactive, participatory epics than simple point-and-click slaughterfests.

Interactivity is the most important part, I suspect. I recently did a two-month long “Choose Your Own Adventure” on my Livejournal blog, where people could vote to see what the main character would do next. I suspected people would have lost interest a third of the way through – but every single episode got votes. Now, if I had decided I wanted to write a novella about a thief in a standard fantasy setting and post it in serial form, no one would have cared, but the interactivity engaged people in a way that straightforward prose did not, and in a way that was technologically impossible fifteen years ago.

Does this mean novels will go away? Not at all , but I think eBooks, as read upon Kindles and iPads and future devices, will supersede the printed novel. We are now only just beginning to see the start of that change. Novels will not go away, but they will become an increasingly less popular choice in the face of interactive multimedia storytelling, much in the same way that printed novels are less popular than television right now.

-JM