How Not to Make a World

I was reading yesterday about the new Grand Theft Auto game that's coming out at the end of this month, and it got me thinking about the difficult balance inherent in creating accessible mythologies. Even if it's not really your thing I'd recommend checking out their website, because they've basically manufactured an entire culture to support their game about running people over. They've been taking this tact from the beginning, but in this round they've kicked it up a couple notches, adding a scale model of the internet just for in-game use, and consistent global news that progresses throughout the game, accessible via multiple media outlets reflecting various ideological biases. Even if it's especially not your thing, at least look briefly at this, the Starbucks equivalent within their culture, complete with its own unique advertising scheme, mascot, interactive drinks menu and visual back story. The point for me is that they've made a business out of creating a mythology, manufacturing an entire world for people to get lost in.

Now, granted, this isn't really the same thing as the mythologizing that I'm talking about. Their world is basically just a Mad Magazine-level spoof of ours, ensuring that everything presented is an immediately recognizable generalization of those institutions which crest the peaks of our own popular culture. Sprite's called Sprunk, Verizon is Whizz mobile - I'm impressed with the level of detail that they've brought to this exercise, but it's still just a mirror world with more cars and looser moral guidelines.

The point is, there is a potentially lucrative business model for creating mythologies. A show like Lost provides a better example of a somewhat-unrecognizable world with a burgeoning mythology that millions of people are completely obsessed with (myself included). In this case, a person has to immerse themselves in the world one step at a time or it won't make any sense (not that it necessarily makes any sense anyway), and it's wrought with an intriguing mash of themes and places and concepts that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with each other in real life.

But see, that's the thing, and maybe the heart of my problem: I don't think I really have a good sense of where to draw the line between accessible, interesting world and self-indulgent fantasy- land.

From an objective-viewer position, I think I can tell when I'm looking at one or the other, and maybe even explain why something works or doesn't. The guy who made Donnie Darko recently came out with another movie called Southland Tales, which he's been working on incessantly for the last six years. The movie was hugely expensive, and its internal world is bolstered by a series of graphic novels, leaving the film itself as something like chapters eight through ten of a twelve chapter story. But apparently it's just a mess. When he first showed it, people didn't even know how to react, and the studios demanded that he go back and refilm half of it so that something coherent might be cobbled together. After this process the movie experienced an invisible theatrical release and went straight to video. Now here is an example of a horrible mythology with no traction. For every Star Wars, I bet there are two-dozen Southland Tales that no one's ever heard of.

When I look at Grand Theft Auto's miniature culture, my first thought is: man, I wish I could have my hand at that job. I assume that the simple spoofy world they created is successful purely because of the detail put into it, and that they would have conceived something more original and thought-provoking if they'd had a more aggressive imagination behind its creation. But I think I'm wrong when I think that. I think their world is successful because it's stupid and obvious, and to add more nuance to it would be taking away from its accessibility to the target demographic of Grand Theft Auto IV. Even Lost isn't really that original, and its success is probably due much more to its episodic story arcs (what will happen next week?!) than to the depth of its mythology. Because the characters and immediate story are compelling (read: the obvious bits), people are willing to divest more time in the hints of bizarreness (what's up with the smoke monster, seriously?).

I think about all of this, and dream of possessing the resources and time to manifest my mythology in some form in the world. And when I think about it, I know full well that left to my own devices I'd be much more likely to come up with a Southland Tales than a Star Wars. So maybe I'm just doomed to an obsession with an untenable world.

But what about this, internet TV producers reading some random guy's blog? It's The Office meets Lost. We see the world from the point of view of lots of interesting characters, coming from a wide range of relatable-to backgrounds and ethnic resonance. And every one of them works for the same large corporation, but none of them know how large the corporation really is, or what its plans are. And it kind of takes place in the future, but you don't know how far in the future. So it's like The Office meets Lost meets 1984. Every episode starts with a cultural montage of some aspect of society that will be the focus of that episode. And all of this is leading up to the revelation that this society exists after time, in the cultural morass of post-time, where all the options and advances of culture have reached their necessary end-points, and so time itself is not really advancing anymore, so all that's left are the individual choices people make and the relationships they form. This also makes lots of things okay, like time travel, because there are no causality issues if time is no longer actually progressing, you see? And then there's this guy who's actually an archetype, and at the end the quiet systems analyst descends to the center of the Earth where he finds the controls to the planet...

Crap, I lost it. Oh well, it was worth a shot.