Thursday, March 1, 2012

Prompt #1

Shannon Gilligan’s “Cup of Death” is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style novel where the reader makes decisions about which path to take every time the storyline comes to a crossroads. The core of the story revolves around finding who took a valuable tea bowl from a Japanese tea ceremony. What is peculiar about the story is that it has multiple outcomes that exist in the same universe, yet are stout contradictions with the other branches of the timeline. For instance, if the reader chooses to investigate Hiro Narita, a Japanese congressman and guest at the tea ceremony, the resolution of the story is that a maid by the name of Akiko Tanaka took the bowl and has multiple motivations for the act based on your actions, the most innocent being she wanted her ill grandfather to have a nice bowl for likely his last New Years’ tea ceremony. However, if the reader chooses to investigate Shoji Hata, an official from the ministry of the arts, or Noriko Oda, a gem dealer, you learn that they are in cahoots to steal the valuable bowl to sell on the black market. With this line of reality, many more nefarious outcomes become available, such as the reader being drowned in the trunk of a car or being shot while hiding in a closet.

Since the different outcomes cannot even agree on the basic principles of the story, such as having the same criminal, it’s tempting to dismiss the book as nonsensical. However, our perceptions are skewed by the omnipotence that we as readers are granted by rereading the story multiple times to discover the contradictory outcomes. If one were to just read one outcome and only that outcome, the reader would leave satisfied as the story provided, while short, is logical based on the information given. It’s only by viewing the timeline of the book as a tree of decisions instead of linearly, as we would experience it in real life, that the book starts to lose its cohesiveness.

But is it not the same as real life? Our lives are filled with what-ifs and hypothetical scenarios that we can only play out in our minds. What if this book presents a “butterfly effect” type of thinking in reference to time and that the effects are extreme? For instance, perhaps Akiko borrowing the bowl drives something in the reader to choose to investigate Hiro Narita rather than Hata or Oda. Our actions have not caused Akita to take the bowl, but instead her actions have affected our choice. Instead of only seeing the viewpoint that our decisions create the outcomes, maybe the other characters decisions have affected our timeline so that we choose to investigate different suspects accordingly. This leads into a debate of the existence of fate as a predetermined linear timeline that cannot be altered once certain decisions have been made, but that is a topic for a much longer paper.

A beautiful tie in for both the idea of seemingly contradictory timelines and the futuristic dystopian theme this course often takes is the game series Fallout. The game is played from the viewpoint of “the Chosen One,” the person who will come from a vault to restore humanity to a nuclear wasteland across America. The game is very in depth with the factions of people with which one can interact and the outcomes are heavily affected by the missions completed and the “karma” of the character based on their crimes against humanity, such as theft, murder or cannibalism. The combination of your actions and the actions of the factions can change your outcome from purifying a water source in Washington D.C. to save the city to becoming a ruthless wanderer who enslaves innocent people for profit. In both Fallout and “Cup of Death,” all possible outcomes are equal and rational, but the choices that we and the other characters make can completely change the story to the point of being nearly unrelated.

1 comment:

Adam said...

One interesting thing to note about the more "nefarious" set of options - they are created (if we call it that) by the choice to involve the police - the reader thinks in terms of crime, so there's a crime. It's interesting because it's more self-conscious, I think, than in many similar books, which might seem more random.

The contradictions you note are interesting and, of course, another characteristic of the genre. Beyond just noting them, though, what do you want to do with them?

Your discussion of the butterfly effect is interesting. I like it, in part, because of the point I made that the CYOA concept is very recent, although there's no technological reason for it to be so - possibly we find the contradictions inherent in the genre less bothersome than readers (pre chaos theory, quantum mechanics, etc.) would have found it? That being said, while I like the approach, even the third paragraph reads more like an introduction to the topic than a serious exploration of it in relationship to this particular text.

What is Fallout doing here? Is it that Cup of Death can teach us something of how to "read" fallout, or something about its origins? In other words, what does the concept of choice in both mean to you, when taken together?

Conceptually, I found all of this interesting, but very underdeveloped. You generalize, and you move slowly, insuring that interesting ideas are never fleshed out or demonstrated.

I suspect that refocusing it around Fallout - with Cup of Death being used as one angle from which to understand how choice words in the game - is the most direct route to an interesting revision.