Arkham Epic: Batman Video Games as Totalizing Texts
A public lecture given in August 2015.
A revised version was published in Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games in 2016.
A revised version was published in Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games in 2016.
Despite this renewed popular awareness, the epic as it has been conventionally understood has often been considered a dead, or hopelessly antiquated, genre. This has been a tradition in literary scholarship going back as far as the Poetics, in which Aristotle argued that the seriousness of Homer’s poetry had already, by the fifth century BC, been supplanted in Greek culture by tragic drama. But even here the epic refuses to be banished. Not only have there been notable revivals of the classical epic poem in the hands of such authors as Virgil or Milton, but other literary forms, such as the novel, and even other media, such as film, have vied to be the inheritors of epic storytelling. What makes all of these disparate works somehow, almost intuitively, “epic”? Is there some critical need that narratives of great scope fulfill across cultures? What does the epic look like in the twenty-first century, and what are the implications of its contemporary forms?
Today I will briefly outline a theory of the epic that I have developed to apply equally to the traditional epic and to narrative works in new media, ranging from film and television to comic books and video games. This theory defines the epic in a way that allows us to consider it on four separate levels of analysis, ranging from the textual to the socio-historical. In the remainder of the talk I will deploy this definition to show how a particular video game series, Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios, 2009) and its sequels, can be critiqued as a cohesive epic. The Arkham series reveals processes of intertextuality and paratextuality that are particular to video games, and the complexities of adapting narrative material both to and from video games and films, novels, and comics. I will conclude that the Arkham games reveal the role of large-scale video games within contemporary, transnational capital, and that the games can be a compelling way of modeling postmodern notions of space. |
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A Theory of Genre Across Media Genres are not stable. Pierre Bourdieu has noted how they are in a constant state of flux within what he calls the “field of cultural production”; the status of particular works or authors, according to him, is determined partly by their “position-takings” within that field in relation to the other works and authors. These positions influence the positions taken by works and authors that will follow. More recently, critics have noted similar shifts in video game genres (Arsenault, 2009), and even entire media forms jockey for cultural supremacy within a dialectical logic of remediation. (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) Therefore, before dealing specifically with the epic, let me make a few general observations about genre: how genres can evolve over time, and how a genre that develops within a particular socio-historical context can be extrapolated into other, sometimes vastly different, cultural contexts. This can also help account for how generic categories are transferred across different media. Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis offers a model for understanding genre along these trans-media lines. He considers genres as types of discourse within social contexts, and this complements more traditional approaches from literary criticism that see genre as a type of speech act. Fairclough divides genres into three levels of increasing abstraction: first, the situated genre; second, the disembedded genre; and third, the pre-genre. |
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This slide illustrates these levels using “epic” as an example. According to Fairclough, a situated genre is specific to a discoursal context, and this is often where a particular genre finds its origin. In the case of the epic, this is the long, heroic poem that arises from an oral culture, with the paradigmatic example being the Iliad or the Odyssey. Although the literary tradition looks back to the works of Homer, it is easy to see this arising independently in similar contexts, as in the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh or the later Beowulf. This very specific type of epic can then become “disembedded” from its origin to encompass a different type of practice. One example is an “epic narrative,” which would still be discoursal, but would include, in addition to heroic poetry, prose works such as novels, and even new media such as films, comic books, and video games. This process of dis-embedding and re-embedding accounts for the fact that, for instance, nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels were felt by many critics to have taken up the representational work of the classical epic. Finally, at the level of pre-genre, we can consider the concept as an abstract idea that includes even predominantly non-discoursal activities and events. This explains the current popular use of the term “epic” as anything that is generally big, important, or otherwise impressive: the epic battle, the epic football game, the “epic fail.”
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A Theory of Epic and Its Symbolic Content If this is how genres move between cultures and media, from being situated in one context to becoming re-embedded in a new one, what features of the epic, in its original social context, have moved from ancient oral cultures into globalized, postmodern digital media? Although literary critics since Aristotle have disagreed about the forms and uses of the epic, a number of similar ideas about what makes up the epic have recurred whenever the matter is debated: for instance, the epic is often noted for its “seriousness,” high formal quality, and broad range of action; it has greater meaning for a certain community; it struggles for dominance over other, competing works; and it concerns itself with the deeds of exceptional, but still mortal actors. A synthesis of these commonalities provides a working definition of the epic, namely: the epic is a disembedded, totalizing genre of narrative text; it aspires to a qualitatively elevated style, and in its themes it looks beyond individual concerns to the concerns of a community. Although commonly fictive, an epic narrative must draw upon and allude to a greater body of symbolic material, which might be variously mythic, fictive, or historical. The epic strives to include as much of this material as possible – but, inevitably, it never quite can. This last point accounts for the encyclopedic tendency of epic noted by critics. Epics aspire to be the definitive expression of their subject. Therefore, they must try to represent or to create a totality, to encapsulate an entire culture or subculture within their narrative scope. Because of the epic’s ambitious range, it is useful to examine it at four distinct levels of analysis, from the narrowest to the broadest: these might be called the epos, the mythos, the ethos, and the cosmos. This slide outlines these levels, using groups of Batman texts and their relationships to each other as examples, since I’ll be talking about them in greater detail later. |
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First, there is the epos. This is the epic work itself as it is generally understood. It is a narrative text, of whatever medium, and it is constructed so that it fulfills certain formal criteria. It is highly complex and cohesive when compared to similar works in the same medium. It is thought to be “high quality,” and formal criteria determining that quality are specific to the affordances of the work’s particular medium and production context. The “bigger” and “better” a work is, relative to its peers, the more “epic” it generally is. For example, the Dark Knight film trilogy – consisting of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises – is far longer than previous Batman films, and its story continues across its installments more so than the 1990s Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher films. Likewise, the Arkham video games are far more narratively ambitious and technically accomplished than earlier Batman games. Even Batman: The Movie of 1966 aspires to a higher technical and budgetary standard than the campy TV series it was spun off from.
Next, there is the mythos. This includes the other narrative works from which the epos draws, or with which it must otherwise contend. Where the epos is primarily formal and textual, the level of the mythos is historical and paratextual. Crucially, once an epos is published or otherwise circulates, it then becomes part of the mythos for all works that follow. If it is successful, it becomes a definitive version with which subsequent works must come to terms. For example, Tim Burton’s Batman successfully redefined the character away from the previous campy versions; it then became part of the mythos that the Nolan films either had to incorporate or reject. Similarly, the Dark Knight trilogy in turn was both influential upon, but also differentiated from, the Arkham games. The third level of symbolic content is the ethos. This is the range of possible representations, both within the world of narrative fiction(s) and within the given society of the epos. As the level that lies between the literalism of media texts and the external reality to which they refer, the ethos also plots the gap between the world and our understanding of it, and is as such ideological. The ethos is therefore the space within which the very definition of what constitutes a “legitimate” narrative or medium within a particular social context is contested. For instance, the ethos of Batman includes certain notions of justice that are shared amongst all versions (e.g., Batman does not kill). But not every version can encompass all possible types of representation. Compare the camp sensibilities of the 1960s Batman or Schumacher’s Batman and Robin with the earnest, hyper-masculine Batman of the Dark Knight films or Arkham games. Finally, the broadest level of analysis is the cosmos. This is the “totality” which the epos represents (or is believed to represent). It is the level of culture as that term is broadly understood. An epic can be an epic of an entire civilization, or of a small subset of a particular society. The former is, for obvious reasons, much harder to create successfully, especially considering the much greater scope and larger population of the contemporary world when compared to ancient societies. It is therefore possible to conceive of various different scales of totality as required, defined by a particular time and place. The greater this totality, the more “epic” the work is. In the case of the Dark Knight trilogy or the Arkham series, the cosmos is early-twenty-first century America, with Gotham City as a fictionalized stand-in for the contemporary urban environment. Although the fan base for Batman films and games is necessarily less than the population as a whole, sales figures for tickets and discs of each entry number in the tens of millions. When one considers that it is possible that more people went to see The Dark Knight Rises in movie theatres than the entire population of the Roman Empire at its height, it is clear that even today’s “niche” audiences can be significantly large. The challenges raised by studying large-scale, long-running popular media franchises have been well noted. For example, in a discussion of the various Star Trek series, Daniel Bernardi has described that franchise as a “mega-text,” namely, “a relatively coherent and seemingly unending enterprise of televisual, filmic, auditory, and written texts.” It is an example of what Henry Jenkins would later call “transmedia storytelling,” the process of telling related narratives across diverse media, ideally without redundancies and with each medium playing to its supposed strengths. However, the longevity and sheer number of Batman comics alone – other media notwithstanding – have long since made this process of complex storytelling cumbersome, even when it is planned and executed well. The recent spate of remakes, reboots, and resets of entire fictional universes in many media franchises speaks to the challenges of constantly producing more and more new stories. However, this narrative turnover also provides more opportunities for new epics to appear and to challenge the definitive status of earlier works. For this reason, the rest of this talk will focus on the Arkham video game series as only the latest attempt to corral the Batman “megatext” into a cohesive shape, showing how it achieves a kind of epic status, according the model outlined above, and what some of the implications that has for issues of representation and industry practice. |
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The Arkham Series as a Video-Game Epos The Arkham series consists of four main games: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Batman: Arkham Knight, each released for PC and most major video game consoles between 2009 and 2015. In the Arkham games, players control Batman across his career, from his first clash with his arch-nemesis the Joker in Arkham Origins, to the Joker’s apparent death and its aftermath in Arkham City and Arkham Knight. The history of Arkham Asylum, which houses many of Batman’s criminally insane adversaries, plays an important role throughout the series. It is the setting for the first game, and the theme of the madhouse as a metonym for Gotham City runs throughout the series. The idea is even made literal in Arkham City, in which part of Gotham is walled off to become a super-prison of that name run by private security. Each game in the series progressively has greater ambitions in its depiction of the storyworld and space of Gotham: Arkham Asylum is limited to the Asylum itself and its surrounding grounds, but Origins and Knight allow players to roam freely over an open-world version of much of Gotham City proper. This stands in marked contrast from previous Batman video games, which were mostly platformer adaptations of Batman movies and TV series. |
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In terms of gameplay and interface, the Arkham series also vastly outclasses its predecessors. Play is balanced between various modes: a complex hand-to-hand combat system that is easy to progress along but difficult to master, stealth encounters in which Batman stalks and evades his enemies, and free-roaming that requires spatial exploration and puzzle-solving. In all these gameplay modes, players are encouraged to use the full range of Batman’s trademark gadgetry, from Batarangs to grappling guns; Arkham Knight even adds combat with the Batmobile. Moreover, the Arkham games, like contemporary series such as Mass Effect or Assassin’s Creed, deploy a blend of cinematics, gameplay, and pseudo-historical codices to tell its story fully. In this way it represents an effective attempt at merging what Lev Manovich considers the “natural enemies” of narrative and database in one medium, the video game. Indeed, the Arkham games fulfill some of the specific conditions under which Marie-Laure Ryan has argued that database and narrative can be reconciled; these include revisiting familiar storylines, using modular narratives, foregrounding the setting of the story, and employing transparent design. Thus the Arkham series, in encompassing not only the largest story of any Batman game to date, but doing so with the greatest technical ambitions, can be considered an epos of the Batman megatext.
The Arkham games have, on the whole, been recognized as succeeding at these ambitions of scope and quality. Arkham Asylum was highly praised, and many in the gaming press called it the greatest Batman game and even the best game based on any comic book; Arkham City was lauded even more, with many reviewers ranking it not only among the best games of the year, but of all time. Arkham Origins, made by a different developer, received mixed reviews on account of some technical issues and the fact that some felt it was more of a re-tread of the previous entries. However, despite being “an incremental installment, not a transformative one,” (Narcisse, 2013) it was still considered a worthy entry in the series, with sales comparable to Arkham Asylum, but less than Arkham City. (Martin, 2013) Initial reactions to Arkham Knight, meanwhile, described the final game in the series as a return to form in both scale and technical achievement, despite a few critics’ reservations about the storyline and the militarization of the Batmobile. (Maiberg, 2015) |
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The Complex Mythos of the Arkham Games The Arkham games could not hope to encompass all the preceding Batman stories in comics and other media. But what they do include, and how successful they are in doing so, speaks to the series’ epic status. The first game expands on the premise of Grant Morrison and David McKean’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989). In this story, the Joker takes over Arkham Asylum (on April Fool’s day, no less), forcing Batman to traverse the grounds and interact with many of his classic adversaries. Via a wealth of literary allusions and postmodern psychology, Batman’s journey is presented as an extended metaphor of his own psychological problems. Although Morrison and McKean do not get an in-game credit, Batman: Arkham Asylum’s writer, Paul Dini, has acknowledged that their work, along with that of other seminal Batman artists Neal Adams and Frank Miller, was an influence on the game. More generally, the Arkham series also includes much narrative material from current DC Comics continuity, such as characters, like Bane, who have been introduced relatively recently, or revamped versions of long-established villains, like the Penguin. |
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Paul Dini’s work scripting the first two Arkham games is also significant because Dini first made his name as one of the main writers on Batman: The Animated Series, the 1990s TV show which itself was a landmark in the Batman franchise and set a new standard for superhero cartoons. But it is not just Dini’s presence that lends added credibility to the Arkham games: actors Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill reprised their Animated Series roles as Batman and the Joker, respectively; even though they were replaced by younger-sounding voice actors in Arkham Origins, their now-iconic interpretations were closely imitated. Conroy returned for Arkham Knight, and so did Hamill, in a surprise reprise despite the Joker’s apparent death in Arkham City.
Other elements of the Arkham games aim to incorporate a wide range of material into a new, definitive synthesis. The series’ music, for example, recalls previous Batman film scores and other incidental pieces to good effect. Nick Arundel and Ron Fish’s music for the first two games blends stylistic features from both the Nolan and Burton films: the use of rhythmic, string-based ostinatos recalls Hans Zimmer’s music, while the motifs are reminiscent of the alternatingly brooding and triumphant choral melodies of Danny Elfman’s scores. Arundel’s title theme for Arkham City is perhaps the clearest example of this: it begins with a brass phrase expanded from the two-note motif for Batman from the Dark Knight trilogy, and crescendos with a phrase similar to the ascending major chord which begins Batman’s theme in the 1989 film. Christopher Drake’s music for Arkham Origins, which Rolling Stone praised as an “epic score” that “rivals anything from the films” (Brukman, 2013), continued in that tradition. It also expanded the Batman soundscape with allusions to classics like “The Carol of the Bells” and “The Thieving Magpie” in a fight scene recalling Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. |
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The games have also spawned tie-in comics and spin-off games that flesh out the backstory surrounding the main installments of the Arkham series. The motivations in this case are primarily promotional and commercial. Each game has had at least one comic book prequel story published in the lead-up to its release; Arkham City, in particular, has had three separate miniseries, and there has even been a direct-to-video animated film, Batman: Assault on Arkham, set between the events of Arkham Origins and Arkham Asylum. A number of Arkham-branded mobile games have been released, as well as Arkham Origins Blackgate, which was made for handheld consoles like the Nintendo DS and Playstation Portable. What is interesting here is how all these new texts support the “main” Arkham games: they are supplementary works not only because they are meant to stoke interest in the AAA releases, but because they do not aspire to the scope or qualitative standard of epics in their own right, regardless of what their medium of origin is. The comics are often digital-only releases, by less well-known writers and artists, while the games are not as technically advanced as the main Arkham games, featuring simplified gameplay and more rudimentary storylines.
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The Arkham Ethos and Its Limits The corpus of narrative texts that inform the Arkham series, and which are in turn generated by it, still has its limits. This is the ethos of the Arkham games, or the range of their representational possibilities. The concept is useful for anticipating innovations and original content that might appear outside of the established mythos, as well as explaining why certain older material is either left out or actively suppressed. Many stories about superheroes have a similar ethos, and lend themselves easily to works of epic scale, because of how the relationship between the hero and his or her world must be represented. Northrop Frye’s theory of modes defines this relationship rather well, and it can help explain why modern comic-book superheroes have supplanted the figures of ancient mythology in terms of their cultural resonance. Frye outlines how fictions can be classified by “the hero’s power of action,” and this is the third of his five classifications of that power: If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind [in the Poetics]. (2000, p. 33-34) Clearly, Batman himself fits this description, and his pre-eminence as a superhero without any “superpowers” as such makes him perhaps the most famous example of this paradigm in mainstream comics and film. Moreover, in the medium of the video game, this relationship is easily replicated, and even mirrored by the player-avatar’s parallel relationship to the algorithmic logic of the game. In action-adventure games like the Arkham series, the player’s skill increases with each challenge that is overcome. Then, the possibility of more complex and virtuosic play increases as more bat-gadgets and combat moves are unlocked. Ideally, this happens in a smooth progression, maintaining a state of “flow”, as the avatar never outclasses his on-screen enemies to a degree that would make the game too easy. The player only exerts total control over the avatar’s environment once all tasks and side-missions are exhausted, once every villain is defeated. The end of the game’s narrative thereby coincides with the player’s complete freedom to maneuver throughout the designed gamespace. This is in marked contrast with games that facilitate a contest between players or teams of players, as in Super Smash Bros. or League of Legends, or with simulation games that give the player godlike powers over the gamespace, such as The Sims. The player’s range of action within the world of a narrative-based video game makes the medium particularly fertile ground for the telling of large-scale stories with heroic protagonists, and why even popularizing critics at some level recognize the “epic” potential of video games.
In a more narrow sense, the ethos of the Arkham games overlaps in many ways with the Dark Knight film trilogy. For instance, in the Arkham games there is a heavy emphasis on technology, which, though not always “realistic” as such, is at least plausible or logically extrapolated from currently-available technology. Forensic DNA analysis, computer hacking, and infrared tracking are all parts of the series’ gameplay. The storyworlds of both the games and the films also highlight issues of wealth inequality in the distribution of transnational capital and the prosecution and incarceration of domestic terrorists. On the other hand, the Arkham series – in keeping with its comic-book progenitors – includes within its representational possibilities elements of Gothic revival architecture, something more in keeping with the Burton films than the more recent Nolan trilogy. Because of this, side-missions such as solving the “murder” of Cyrus Pinkney, the nineteenth-century architectural wunderkind responsible for the look of the Arkham series’ Gotham, do not feel out of place, despite being an original contribution to the overall Batman mythos.
And yet Arkham’s ethos rejects other representations. Will Brooker has noted that Batman texts have for decades fluctuated between the “dark,” gritty representations of the character and the “rainbow,” camp versions, and Arkham falls squarely into the former category. This is evident throughout the games, but it is particularly notable when the available character “skins” are considered. For the first playthrough of each game, the Batsuit hews closely to the look of the “darker” comics and films. In Origins and Knight Batman more closely resembles the armored version of the Dark Knight trilogy, while in Arkham Asylum, his suit has longer “ears” in keeping with the more Gothic-inflected comics. However, in each game, various alternate Batsuits from a variety of eras and media can be unlocked, either as in-game rewards or purchase incentives, and these are therefore presented as “good” objects within the Arkham ethos. Thus players can dress their avatar in such “classic” outfits as the 1970s Neal Adams Batman or the 1980s Frank Miller Batman; even cartoon skins are available, as they still seem, despite their vastly different graphic style, to be in keeping with the representational possibilities of the Arkham world. Missing, however, are the “camp” Batsuits: there is no opportunity to play as Batman from the Joel Schumacher films, wearing the sculpted-rubber Batsuits notorious for their conspicuous nipples and codpieces. But, as Brooker notes (2012, p. 216), the repressed elements of the broader Batman megatext still resurface, and this is the case even here: relegated only to a Playstation-exclusive add-on pack, the 1960s Adam West Batsuit was recently made available as a skin for Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight. But it is important to note that Batman still appears as much more “realistic” and muscular than West did, and the skin’s face does not use the actor’s likeness. Thus even at the representational fringes of the Arkahm series, its ethos cannot quite break free of certain limitations. Arkham and Mapping the Postmodern Cosmos There is of course much else that exists beyond the representational world of the Arkham series, but like any epic, the games provide resonance within their social context and reflect broader hermeneutic trends. In particular, the Arkham games exhibit many features common to postmodern texts, both in ways particular to the games themselves and also in ways that are shared by other video games that aim to represent the totality of contemporary, global life. Postmodernism as a concept has had a long and contradictory history, meaning different things in various academic and artistic contexts. Most useful for the present purpose is the work of those critics who view postmodernism as a particular “condition” (Harvey, 1990) or dominant cultural logic (Jameson, 1991); according to this view, postmodernism describes the tendency among cultural productions across a wide range of media, starting around the 1960s and 1970s, to model a new experience of space and time as the result of the spread of transnational capital and information flows. Postmodern texts tend, among other things, to create pastiches of historical material, to encourage endless plays of signification, and to appeal to fragmented, dispersed, and hybrid audiences. Such works place greater emphasis on conceptual space to the detriment of coherent, historical time. The Arkham series serves as an exemplary model of how this construction of space works, but it also serves as a model for players to interpret the world outside the game. As such, it becomes one way of cognitively mapping postmodernity for its players. The “cognitive map” was originally a psychological concept (Tolman, 1948), but it has been adapted by other disciplines over the last several decades. It appears to have come into particular vogue in the 1980s, most notably in Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991), which builds on the work of urban geographer Kevin Lynch. Not coincidentally, cognitive mapping has even been deployed in various forms specifically to critique Batman texts over the past twenty-five years. Thus the cognitive map seems to fulfill a function that conventional representation has recently appeared less and less capable of doing. For Jameson, cognitive mapping is the key to any possible “political art” in postmodernism, because such mapping can, at least in principle, begin to make sense of the enormous complexity of contemporary culture and social organization. It serves as a way to give coherent meaning to increasingly fragmented and disjointed experiences. All the Arkham games require their players to engage in a kind of cognitive mapping in order to progress. First, mapping in the literal sense takes place: as the player explores Arkham Island or the districts of Gotham, the in-game map expands, aiding navigation and automatically marking locations and goals. (SLIDE) This auto-mapping feature is common in most contemporary games and can be traced back to early 1990s landmarks such as Doom (id Software, 1993) and Super Metroid (Nintendo R&D1 & Intelligent Systems, 1994). In addition to this, though, the Arkham series also requires that players examine their environment through two contrasting kinds of third-person view: Batman’s regular vision, and “detective mode,” a kind of combination x-ray vision, infrared, and heads-up display. (SLIDE) Thus no single way of looking at Batman’s surroundings is sufficient, whether it is for finding hidden entryways, or for tracking and disabling multiple enemies. Moreover, the blending of these playing modes seems far less contrived than in other games, not least because the logic behind Batman’s premise (a hero in the high mimetic mode, both physically and technologically) is so congruent with such a treatment of space and the hero/avatar’s movement within it. When the various viewing modes are considered in addition to the repeated referral to maps, it becomes clear that something akin to Jameson’s cognitive mapping is at work. It is the representation of a totality, intelligible only in discrete, incomplete, and yet complementary semiotic systems, which are then deployed as a kind of postmodern triangulation. The conquest of conceptual space is the ultimate goal – the game is only complete when the player has visited, scanned, and mastered every available environment.
It is not a coincidence that in Batman media since the 1990s, Gotham City has been depicted as a series of islands – that is to say, physically fragmented and isolated spaces. Likewise, Arkham Asylum began, from its introduction in the 1970s comics through to the mid-1990s, as a country estate on the outskirts of Gotham, but it has regularly been depicted in recent years as located on its own island adjacent to the city: this happens in, for example, Batman Begins, and it continues through to the current TV series Gotham. Thus Arkham, long since a microcosm of the ills of Gotham, also serves as a spatial metonym for the city. Moreover, each game in the series features an increasingly larger, yet still insular, gamespace that serves as a figurative madhouse. In Arkham City, the eponymous super-prison is on another of Gotham’s islands. In Arkham Origins, two islands of Gotham are again presented as the playground of super-criminals, and still more islands are added in Arkham Knight. The construction of video game worlds as islands, often necessary given the technological limitations of open-world games, has long been noted, and it is most spectacularly evident in Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos and Blaine County. But this feature of current large-scale games can have a deeper meaning and reveal some possibilities for different ways of understanding the wider world.
When fictional narratives are considered as a kind of representational experiment, connected and subject to multiple articulations even as they are isolated from the totality of lived experience, the “space” of Gotham becomes newly illuminating. The Arkham games become one possible layer on a cognitive map of our world. Fredric Jameson’s work is instructive again in this context, specifically his writings on the idea of Utopia in science fiction and its connection to imagining political projects. It is no coincidence that the growth of science fiction as a literary genre roughly parallels the social disruption of industrialization and post-industrial organization, nor is it coincidental that Batman narratives have for decades flirted with science-fiction elements. For Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), any new global Utopia must still be represented in some way, since “representability, or the possibility of mapping, is a very significant matter for practical politics” (p. 221). Jameson describes how certain utopian visions require absolute mobility between non-communicating communities. The best way to imagine this in spatial terms is as a chain of islands:
a Utopian archipelago, islands in the net, a constellation of discontinuous centers, themselves internally decentered. At once this metaphorical perspective begins to suggest a range of possible analogies, which combine the properties of isolation with those of relationship. (221) Gotham-as-archipelago seems to work as a small-scale, representational version of this same utopian principle: a way to imagine and map possible social arrangements. In Jameson’s discussion of the utopian archipelago, communities must be related, insofar as people must have the ability to move between them as they like. But the communities must be isolated too, so that they can evolve into distinctly different possibilities. Likewise, if the “visions” of Gotham are to have utility as maps of urban possibilities, they must strike this balance between closure and porousness. So, to mention just one possibility, the Arkham series allows specific artistic reflection about the roles of incarceration, mental health, and surveillance that other Batman epics might downplay or ignore. The use of the insane asylum, or city-as-asylum, as one cognitive map of the postmodern world fits squarely into a contemporary tradition of other video game “islands” that critique and parody models of social organization; these range from the failed Objectivist utopia of Rapture in Bioshock (2K Boston, 2007), to the multinational corporate ruin of Sevastopol Station in Alien: Isolation (The Creative Assembly, 2014).
Utility of the Theory Considering the Arkham series as an epic is useful for more practical reasons as well. First, deploying and testing a more flexible and nuanced definition of the epic genre helps give added theoretical credibility to claims that certain popular, mass-produced works should be considered as legitimate narrative epics. Such a definition can also can also help critique dubious cases and eliminate outliers; it might explain, to cite one example, why Jane McGonigal’s (2011) claim that games such as Halo 3 are “epic” in large part because of the scale of their online leaderboards is not a terribly convincing argument. Indeed, the gratuitous inclusion of online and multiplayer elements to traditionally single-player games has become quite common in recent years, and it is no guarantee of favorable reception – Arkham Origins, the least-successful of the Arkham games, was the first in the series to offer an online multiplayer option. Scale is a necessary, but not sufficient, criterion for lasting success. The second reason that this framework of epic is useful is that it pays close attention to the intertexts and paratexts of particular large-scale works. For an epos like the Arkham series to be seen as a success, it must draw upon and generate a rich mythos of narratives in a variety of media. It is also important, however, that those who seek to create works on an epic scale understand the competencies of their audience: the Arkham series appears to do this quite well, drawing upon the larger Batman megatext but at the same time offering some fresh interpretations without becoming too bogged down in lore. This is especially important when considering the spin-off paratexts that the Arkham series has generated. Knowledge of the derivative works is not essential to understand or enjoy the main series, unlike, for instance, the works released in conjunction with the Matrix films (see Jenkins, 2006), which some fans suspected of being more of a cynical marketing ploy than a legitimate expansion of an established narrative universe. Although outright pandering to fan expectations can stifle the originality necessary to create successful new works, historical precedents and long-term audience reception of narrative epics should not be overlooked. They too are important conditions for lasting artistic and commercial acclaim. Conclusion I began today’s talk by considering the renewed appearance of “epic” as a generic term in reference to large-scale narrative texts in a variety of new media. By looking at how genres change over time, and how some of the historical continuities between epic texts appear to be constant, we can use a more nuanced definition better suited for identifying (and discarding) possible epic narratives. Even though many new “epics” qualify along the lines bemoaned by Dictionary.com, it is clear that there has been a profusion of new narrative works that we can call epic in a more meaningful sense. I have focused on one such new epic, the Batman: Arkham video game series, because it aspires to high quality on a large narrative scale, even as it takes from and gives back to a rich and varied Batman mythos. The Arkham series’ representational limits and possibilities provide insight about how players interpret postmodern spaces, and it serves as both a model and a test case for other transmedia franchises to imitate as they adapt their complex narratives to and from video games. |
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