Author's Notes on: The Transcendence of Medium
In relation to fanfiction, Minecraft, and Dungeons and Dragons
A story’s medium refers to the method used to deliver the story, the same way medium in art refers to something like “watercolor”, or “digital”. Some examples of storytelling medium can be written, oral, or visual, or any mix of the three. You can even make further distinctions within those categories — for example, fanfiction is a medium, so are video games, and so are tabletop RPGs.
Medium is your delivery vehicle for the story. It will influence how you tell your story, as well as how your audience receives and interacts with your story. Your medium will provide you with a variety of tools that make certain narratives easier to tell than others. For example, where books are great at presenting a pre-set narrative, video games and tabletops can provide access to malleable stories influenced by your choices, allowing you to interact very directly with the story.
What I want to talk about today though is something that I think is overlooked in the discussion of medium — the fact that medium is not an ultimate determinant of how good or bad a story is.
Let’s talk about fanfiction first.
Fanfiction is a medium that is widely enjoyed and yet simultaneously looked down upon by a lot of people on the internet. It’s seen as a lower form of creation, cringy, or sometimes disrespectful to the original creator of the fiction the fan is writing for.
There’s no doubt some questionable fan works out there, but the fact that something is fanfiction doesn’t mean that it’s inherently bad, or isn’t worth enjoying and appreciating. The fact that fanfiction is built around a pre-existing canon (whether that canon is subverted or not) doesn’t mean that it is inherently worth less than other stories.
People use fanfiction to explore a wide range of themes and topics in relation to the original work. Some expand or theorize on relationship dynamics between characters in the original work, or provide alternate tellings of the story that end better, worse, or just plain different.
It’s no secret that popular tropes have found a home in fanfiction and various writer’s visions of existing works. People write stories where their favorite characters survive, and can go back to living a normal life. People expand on the backstories of characters that they fell in love with and wanted to see given more attention. People write about characters undergoing stories that resonated with them, and a lot of other people too — sometimes even using “self-inserts” to put themselves in the same story as the characters.
People write interpretations of existing canon that go on to influence popular perception of even the Bible.
If you’re confused about that last point, that’s because I’m talking about The Divine Comedy, particularly Dante’s Inferno, which is, by definition, fanfiction of the Catholic doctrine.
I’m far from a religious scholar, but from what I understand, the Bible is fairly vague on the subject, suggesting that Heaven is connection with God, and Hell is disconnection from the Divine, and anything past that is speculation.
Now, there’s also the concept of the nine circles of Hell — a hierarchy of layers of Hell where sinners go depending on the type and gravity of their sin, with the worst sinners being all the way in the ninth circle of Hell. It’s an incredibly evocative and iconic representation of Hell that has been seen and explored for hundreds of years.
…except that’s not in the Bible at all.
The idea of there being nine circles of Hell comes directly from Dante’s Inferno. From fanfiction. Fanfiction so important that there are official Catholic depictions of the nine circles.
Also, if you cringed at the mention of self-inserts in fanfiction earlier, Dante’s Inferno, is written by Dante Aligieri. The story follows himself being guided through Hell and the people he meets therein. Dante’s Inferno is self-insert fanfiction that redefined popular understanding of the afterlife.
The fact that it is fanfiction doesn’t make it worse, it just means that the medium is different, and it says a lot about the writer’s views, their society at the time, and their understanding of the original work how their story reflects on the original.
Fanfiction is not only important, it is a staple of how humans have interacted with stories for as long as stories have existed. It has an extremely broad range of themes and narratives that can be explored through familiar concepts and characters, or by twisting those concepts in new ways.
Okay, so what about video games?
As mentioned previously, video games are an interesting storytelling medium because they rely on player input to progress the story. Some have branching narrative paths while others don’t, but all of them require some level of participation from the player to proceed.
This makes them an incredible medium for engaging storytelling because your “reader” has a variable amount of agency over the story, and that can foster a deep connection with the characters they play as and with.
Something that will be reiterated in a moment when we talk about tabletop RPGs is that your brain does not make a heavy distinction between emotions related to things that are real and things that you are experiencing vicariously. That’s why horror games and movies exist and work so well — even knowing that you are not in any real danger, you can still feel the tension and fear of being in the situation your character is in.
One of the games that went through a recent boom in popularity as a storytelling medium has been Minecraft. Some of you are already cringing but bear with me.
Minecraft is an open world block game. You can go anywhere you want, build just about anything you want, and you can play it with friends if you want to. It’s been used as a storytelling medium for many years, but the game’s resurgence and subsequent boom in content variety in recent years cannot be understated.
Some of this content was people wanting to tell stories, some of these stories got wildly popular, and a fascinating thing happened: creativity begot creativity. The dynamics of the characters portrayed by the players, the setting, the emotional fallout of certain player actions — all of it spawned countless fanfiction, art, music, and animation, through which several creators have since found success and popularity as well.
It didn’t matter that Minecraft is a block game. The stories resonated with people enough that it affected a huge group of people, not to mention the creators themselves.
What about Tabletop RPGs?
As an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons, I cannot attest enough to how effective tabletop RPGs can be at telling stories.
Tabletop allows for safe but also harrowing exploration of lives you may have no experience with yourself. It fully allows for you to make a character that’s nothing like you and yet you emotionally bond with over the course of their journey.
The scenarios are not real. The characters are people you and your friends (or strangers) made up, and oftentimes so is the setting and every other person in it. It’s all fake. You may not be interacting with anything physical at all if you’re playing online. Even offline, you’ll be rolling dice and maybe moving a character token around a battle map. For the most part, it’s really just you, your party, and the collective imagination of everyone at the table. …but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. In fact, that’s part of what makes it so impactful.
Even if the character you’re playing isn’t you, you are still the one playing them. You are uniquely positioned inside the head of a character you created and a story you made and are actively making as you play. Often times, your voice is their voice, or at the very least, you are speaking through them.
Once again, your brain makes little distinction between real life and fiction. The scenarios may not be real, but the emotions they provoke are every bit as real as you are.
My triumph is real as Captain Beja Bloodmoon, ascending to pirate queendom after months of being beneath the thumb of a tyrant king. Just as real as my tears are as Bellamy Ashcrowne, realizing that her beloved little sister had survived a mutiny that could have easily taken her entire family from her.
Neither of those characters are me wholesale. They’ve lived vastly different lives and seen and done things I will never do. And yet their stories resonate, both with me and with the other players at the table. Everyone at the table brings something unique to the story, and you all go through the epic highs and tragic lows of everyone’s stories together.
The emotional investment of everyone at the table not only in their own character, but everyone else’s character, the story, the setting, etc. cannot be understated in a good game.
Not every game is going to be perfect, or surpass the level of fantasy fiction available for a reader’s perusal, but it does offer a story medium that directly concerns your agency, that you created, that you shaped with the help of your party — it’s tailored, and even if it isn’t perfect, it’s yours. By the end, you’re liable to have experienced the whole range of human emotions. The campaign will be littered with inside jokes and things you will never forget.
It will not be real. But that will never make the story unimportant, or not worth the time spent telling it.
These are far from the only mediums I’ve seen be scrutinized or looked down on, but the principle holds the same throughout. A good story transcends medium, and mediums that people often discount as worth engaging in are far more impactful than one might think from an outsider’s perspective.
It’s also worth noting that the stories told through their respective mediums aren’t good despite their mediums — in fact they are at times enhanced by them. The point is that medium is not an immediate indicator for how good or bad a story is.
And, if someone’s ever insisted that “it’s not real” and thus “it doesn’t matter”, they’ve fundamentally missed the point of stories in the first place.
Think about all the stories in the world, or even all the stories that have ever existed in the world. I would reckon that the grand majority of them would be fictional rather than nonfictional — or at the very least, are not things that happened directly to you.
Does that mean they don’t matter? That there isn’t a moral to be learned or an understanding of the self or world to be analyzed? Does that mean that there isn’t something worth experiencing, even vicariously, through them?
I, at least, am a firm no.