Quixote Conference Paper

Butts 1 Jimmy Butts Conference Paper: SWTX: PCA 2009 Quijote’s Ludic Hero-Quest as a Precursor to G4M3R S7UDI3S “Time to get immersed in Reality.” —Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash Game studies and ludology, or the study of play, have begun to find new connections in the field of literary criticism because games as a media form can offer similar forms of escapism, narrative, and artistic play as fiction can. Consider Francois Laramee’s statement about media and immersion, which posits, “All forms of entertainment strive to create suspension of disbelief, a state in which the player’s mind forgets that it is being subjected to entertainment and instead accepts what it perceives as reality” (qtd. in Salen & Zimmerman 450). The romance genre in particular offers its readers an escape from reality that is founded upon various expected memes such as action, love, and adventure. The romance genre shares so much with the escapism of games, in fact, that in many ways these two media have informed one another and shaped one another by offering one another deeply meaningful characters, forms, and tropes from our social psyche. In many ways, the performance of the “romantic” aspects of plot reveals the contrived nature of romances as a genre, just as gameplay is contrived in its own sense. Viewing a very old narrative through the lens of some very new forms of narrative, namely immersive games, will reveal significant aspects in readings of both forms. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, first published in 1605, is a particularly complex romance narrative that uniquely speaks to the contemporary world of games, game theory, and immersive entertainment, largely because of how engrossing the ludic quest becomes for the central character—the Knight with the Sad Face, Don Quijote. According to one game studies

Butts 2 critic, Gary Fine, “A key concept is the engrossment of players in the game. For the game to work as an aesthetic experience players must be willing to “bracket” their “natural” selves and enact a fantasy self. They must lose themselves to the game” (4). Game theorists are now writing about the nature of narrative play, the structure of stories, and the slippery approaches toward meaning that Cervantes himself begins to play with in Don Quijote. To be sure, Quijote is engrossed in his fantasy world and remains influential largely because of how Cervantes confronted the difficult intersection between fiction and reality. One such critic, Johan Huizinga writes in his seminal text, Homo Ludens, with its perfectly Latinized title for “man playing” explains, “Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly” (Huizinga 13). Like established forms of play, Don Quijote’s entranced worldview, as outside of ordinary life, and his willingness to act out of that view makes his character intrinsically relevant to the current world of gaming as a new form of narrative structure. Additionally, viewing Quijote as a gamer allows us as readers to read him as sane and socialized. One form, however, that this paper does not explore is Quijote’s game-world as related to abstract games such as chess, although I believe that chess and Quijote have cross-sections of their own as far as gaming and play are concerned. Instead, narrative-based, immersive games, which lie towards the outskirts of socially-acceptable interactions, much like the character of Quijote find a more striking relevance to Cervantes’s book. For example, modern role-playing games, or RPGs, in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons, a game invented by Gary Gygax, who recently passed away in March 2008, share an intrinsic worldview to Cervantes’s work. According to Fine, who has studied Dungeons and Dragons at length:

Butts 3 Fantasy gamers create cultural systems as their avocation—worlds of imagination formed by the participants, given the constraints of their own knowledge and the structure provided by the rules. Analyzing these fantasy games provides insight into the creation of group cultures, and the way in which these group cultures transform more extensive cultural systems. Each gaming group interprets, defines, and transforms cultural elements in its sphere of knowledge into the cultural framework of an imagined society. (Fine 2) In the same way, Quijote creates and presents a new cultural worldview to the people he comes into contact with. In fact, the first people he comes into contact with in on his heroic quest into the real world are two prostitutes, whom he calls “noble virgins” (19), performing a revision of their very reality. The world of immersive gaming, where individuals create new names for themselves and others, where lengthy books are followed to the letter, and where new worlds are imagined by obsessively invested players is fundamentally tied to what Cervantes effects in his book, written almost four hundred years before the first Dungeons and Dragons game was ever played in 1974. A newer game genre, which embraces narrative storytelling in a similar way to Dungeons and Dragons, now recognized as an influential media form has started being known as the “Alternate Reality Game,” or ARG. There are several differing definitions for what an ARG actually is, but one definition relevant to my work is one published on the website of an ARG called World Without Oil. This game involved thousands of players who created an imagined game-world that explored the possibility of what the title suggests. Their definition is the following:

Butts 4 An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. ARGs are typified by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to participants' responses, and with characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers. ARGs generally rely on the Internet as the central binding medium. (World Without Oil FAQ) Hence, the ARG is in effect a new narrative form that blurs reality with an imagined world. The ARG is an immersive form of gameplay, where characters might dressup and meet in public places to conduct a mission. In a game called “The Beast,” a marketing promotion for the film A.I., players met in public spaces to conduct anti-robot rallies. In another ARG called “I love bees,” which promoted the release of the game Halo 2, players woke up in the middle of the night to receive story-based phone calls on public payphones. Essentially, these games can be played in many forms and locations (not just the coffee table), and they invade the real world. According to Dave Szulborski, who explores this genre in several books, “In an alternate reality game, the goal is not to immerse the play in the artificial world of the game; instead, a successful game immerses the world of the game into the everyday existence and life of the player…In a strange but very real way, the ARG creator is trying, not to create an alternate reality, but to change the player’s existing world into the alternate reality” (Szulborski 31). Similarly, Quijote changes the real world by pushing his imaginary play into it, and it becomes dangerously immersive. This immersive form is also known as chaotic fiction, or ubiquitous play—a strikingly relevant label since Quijote’s game-world is constantly all around him. By stretching

Butts 5 the use of these labels, one might begin to explicate Quijote’s romantic quests in an entirely different light. Don Quijote’s character in the Romantic mode of the narrative functions in the same way as a character in an immersive gaming environment might. There is a persistent rejection of the “real world” and a complete acceptance of the “pretend world.” In other words, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is intensely heightened, and even encouraged by Quixtoe’s persistent adrenaline-fueled imagination. In fact, Quijote’s real name is Alonzo Quijano, but he has given himself a new identity and a new name, a player name, often called a handle or an avatar in the gaming world. Hence, the narrative gains a layer of meaning when Quijote, not Alonzo Quijano, is viewed as a gamer, for the gaming mindset, as well as the mind that has been inundated with romance literature, necessarily eschews the rules of the real world, finding his own new forms of sanity and community. The infamous windmill scene can exemplify the illusionary nature of the world created by Quijote’s game. He rides up, and the narrative reads, “Just then, they came upon thirty or forty windmills” (43), but Quijote, ever willing to see the world around him as more fantastic, more adventuresome, and more romantic, exclaims, “Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants” (43). Essentially, Quijote is acting out play that has become so real for him that he begins to see it all around him—in his own real world. His game has become completely immersive, and Sancho realizes that Quijote is creating a world of make-believe, saying, “Now look your grace… what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seem to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind” (43). Sancho, at this point in the narrative at

Butts 6 least, is grounded in reality, and is unable to join in Quijote’s play, until he himself is able to be convinced of the reality of the game. Quijote and Sancho aren’t the only ones who immerse themselves in game play. The priest, who is translated as curator in John Ormsby’s classic translation, is another unique character who initially balks at Quijote’s game-world, but later joins it, and even becomes what the ARG community would call a “puppetmaster” (essentially, a game designer) within it. At first, he blames Quijote for treating “the strange and wild goings on of these foolish books as if they were really true” (338). “Foolish books,” or romance narratives, become the rulebooks for Quijote’s immersive gameplay, who—whether mad or more sane than most— begins to treat his entire life in the mode of gameplay. Later, the priest says, “My dear sir, is it possible that such pointless, bitter reading as tales of chivalry could have so possessed you and upset your mind that you’ve actually come to believe in this business of being enchanted, and all the rest of such stuff, all of it just as far from reality as a lie is from the truth?” (335). Truth, indeed, is exactly what True, Quijote has accepted a different set of rules than society has traditionally prescribed, yet Quijote’s enchanted perspective might be read positively—especially because of Quijote’s chivalric charm. At another point the priest offers the following insight into the connection between games and romance stories: The purpose of all this is to amuse our lazy minds, and in the same way wellframed governments allow people to play chess, and ball games, and billiards, in order to provide entertainment…so too they let such books be printed, believing…that no one could be so stupid as to take any of these books for the literal truth. (213)

Butts 7 In the story, the priest is wholly aware of the boundary between fiction and reality which is present in books and games, but still comes up with the serious game of attempting to save Quijote from his “madness.” The priest functions as the puppetmaster of Quijote’s game. It is here where the translation of curator works so well for this study, as the priest literally becomes the “caretaker” of the game by stepping in and manipulating Quijote’s world to present an illusion of an alternate reality. According to Fine, “The structure of the game focuses on one individual—the referee—whom players expect to create a scenario for their characters to react to and build upon” (Fine 72). The priest becomes that individual, whereas Quijote had been the source of the game-world before. Cervantes’s text explains the rules and the objective of the game that the priest has imagined. It reads: The priest thought of an approach well-tuned to Don Quijote’s tastes and to their own interests, which was this: he’d dress himself up like a wandering maiden… and then they’d go to Don Quijote and pretend this was a damsel in distress and in need, with a boon to beg of him, which as a brave knight errant he couldn’t help but grant. And the boon for which he planned to beg would be for Don Quijote to journey with the damsel, to a certain place where she would lead him… so they’d be able to rescue him from the mountains and bring him back home, where they could try to find some cure for his strange madness. (165-166) The game is basically a live action role-playing game where characters dress up and pretend to be characters in Quijote’s constructed medieval-world; the goal of the game is to get Quijote back home alive.

Butts 8 Along the way, the players pick up new characters, but none as unique in our game metaphor as the lady Dorotea. Dorotea is brought into the game that the priest has created for saving Quijote at the following point in the narrative: Then [the priest] explained to Cardenio and Dorotea how they had planned to help the knight, at least as far as getting him back to his own house. To which Dorotea said that she could certainly play the damsel’s role better than the barber, and indeed had with her the proper attire to make it thoroughly convincing. They could trust her to know exactly what to say, and to get him to do as they wanted, for she had read many tales of chivalry and knew precisely how damsels were supposed to be boons of knights errant. (189-190) Dorotea has read the romances; she knows the rules of the game; and she is willing to play along. She even dresses up to make the fictional reality seem more real to Quijote. Immediately she becomes a powerful female character of agency in this story-game, functioning as a uniquely immersive character by dressing up and playing in Quijote’s fantasy world “along with the boys.” Dorotea even takes on her own fictional avatar name, the Princess Micomicona, which would also be known as a “clan name” in some gaming circles. However, Micomicona’s understanding of the game is as a fiction, and, while she is wholly immersed in the gameplay of Quijote’s fantasy world, she maintains a rational and separate view of the “real world.” Meanwhile, the other significant female character in this game world, Dulcinea Del Toboso, Quijote’s idealized love in the story, has essentially a very minimal role in the narrative— particularly in the first volume of Cervantes’s work. According to critic Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Quixote’s way of linking the playful diversion of the Duchess, the world of play, dreams, and lies as all part of an imaginary experience. They are hints that the boundary line between truth

Butts 9 and falsehood is a faint trace” (Mazzotta 87). In this liminal world of play, Dulcinea differs from Dorotea by functioning in the same way that “the princess” figure does in other games, such as early Super Mario Bros. games, bearing little character import except for existing as the hero’s object to save and possess. Conversely, the lady Dorotea has an intrinsic role to play in the salvation of the hero, Quijote. In this way, she almost functions as the revolutionary girl gamer—a woman of agency who is also willing to step outside of the bounds of cultural lines. According to one critic, “the ubiquitous blurring of opposites becomes more sophisticated in the coalescing of Ludic/serious in the Dorotea-Micomicona permutation. Dorotea's role is in reality the playful role she assumes, that of damsel in distress” (Jehenson 212). She goes on to state that “The ultimate incorporation and assimilation of the ludic and the serious is to be found in Dorotea's public avowal to Don Quijote that by his participation in her make-believe world he has actually rectified the real world” (Jehenson 212). Dorotea participates in Quijote's make-believe, aware of its fiction, yet engaged by its reification of fantastic ideals—by its superiority to the mundane. As Dorotea begins to immerse herself, the narrator is aware of her involvement in the new game, as in lines such as, “So Dorotea gave him her hands and promised to make him a noble lord of her kingdom, as soon as Heaven should see fit to return it to her” (199). She knowingly decides to play the game alongside Quijote, though it is questionable whether Quijote knows he is playing or not. In the end, Dorotea gains an idealized experience by playing in Quijote’s imaginative world, and at one point Don Fernando even exclaims, “You have won, my lovely Dorotea, you have won” (251). She wins because playing leads her to be reunited to her love in the real world, allowing the romantic ideal to be upheld within the confines of reality.

Butts 10 A certain “this is not a game” philosophy runs underneath the stream of this fictive narrative as well as in contemporary gameplay, particularly in the “Alternate Reality Game” genre. According to the seminal game studies theorist, Jane McGonigal, “This genre, known most frequently as "immersive gaming," but also dubbed by its players as "unfiction" … is best known by its reliance on cooperative game play and its constant insistence: ‘This is not a game.’” (“This Is Not” 2). According to Cervantes’s text, the romance is not just a game. As a matter of fact, by the end of Cervantes’s second volume of Don Quijote, Quijote is dead. After all, all good games must come to an end. According to one gamer who was a moderator for The Beast, the first major alternate reality game, Andrea Phillips, a 26-year-old software designer from New York: You find yourself at the end of the game, waking up as if from a long sleep. Your marriage or relationship may be in tatters. Your job may be on the brink of the void, or gone completely. You may have lost a scholarship, or lost or gained too many pounds. You slowly wake up to discover that you have missed the early spring unfolding into late summer.… yet now here we are, every one of us excited at blurring the lines between story and reality. The game promises to become not just entertainment, but our lives. (qtd. in McGonigal, “This Is Not” 5) Here, this gamer laments the end of the game and her re-immersion back into reality, despite what she has sacrificed in the real world for partaking in a fantasy one. This same sentiment is nearly expressed by Sancho Panza when he philosophizes, “I’ve heard life compared to a chess game: before the game’s completed, each piece has its own role to play, but once it’s over all the pieces are dropped into the same bag and jumbled together, which is just the way life comes to its end in the grave” (417). Here, we see how games can be viewed not only as real but also as

Butts 11 intensely serious, and that they require an end to the immersion. On a similar note, the ARG World Without Oil was touted as a “serious game” by its creators and ended its traipse into an alternate reality after 30 weeks of play; meanwhile, it addressed serious, real-world issues, further blurring the line between fiction and reality. Gamer culture in many ways can seem as crazy as Quijote’s fantastic world. Quijote, performing a role of knight himself, is so immersed in his role-playing that he verges upon madness. Madness, compulsion, and obsession, at least to some degree, have become essential components of modern immersive gameplay. One current psychological study conducted by John Hughes, entitled “Therapy is Fantasy: Roleplaying, Healing and the Construction of Symbolic Order,” argues that some reasons for roleplaying are that this type of game “provides an escape from social pressure,” “aids to increasing one’s sense of personal control and efficacy,” and “aids in increasing social skills” (Hughes).  In many ways, Quijote’s “mad” persona, viewed  in the light of a gamer might be expressing willed therapeutic acts.  According to McGonigal the  same is true for ARGs, as seen in the following comment:  “One of my colleagues, after hearing me out on the subject for several hours, dubbed immersive games “schizophrenia machines,” ostensibly designed in their sprawling and all encompassing format for the sole purpose of turning previously sane players into paranoid, obsessive maniacs” (“A Real Little Game” 2). Like many gamers, Quijote seems aware that he has lost touch with reality, or plays as though he has by fulfilling the roles prescribed by his fictive rulebooks. He says, “Is it possible that, having traveled with me as much as you have, you’ve still not understood that all the things knights errant have to deal with seem to be mere chimera—foolishness—stupidity, while in fact they’re exactly the opposite?” (152) and later, “let me assure you that nothing I’m doing is a joke, but very real” (154). Essentially, Quijote knows that he is playing a part, and since

Butts 12 typically mad people are unaware that they are mad, it stands to reason that Quijote is immersing himself in his own game-world as a willing participant. He even says to Sancho, “It would seem…that you’re no saner than I am” (159). According to two critics, Salen and Zimmerman, Quijote might be read in terms of the immersive fallacy, which “is the idea that the pleasure of a media experience lies in its ability to sensually transport the participant into an illusory, simulated reality. According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world” (Salen & Zimmerman 450-451). If we are viewing Quijote as a player, then one has to consider how immersed he is in his game-world. If the immersive fallacy is true, then it is impossible for Quijote to be sane and completely immersed in his game world. It seems though that he is aware of his immersive game, just as most gamers are, and, it would seem, no more insane than a man immersed in a game of golf, chess, or Tetris. Not only does viewing Quijote in this lens of game studies allow us to remove his label of insanity, it also allows the reader to view Quijote as a well-socialized individual—for oftentimes games are by necessity social interactions. Indeed, romance audiences can become audiences of alterity in the same way that gamers learn extensive codes and memes that isolate them from mainstream culture. Don Quijote certainly found his way to the outskirts of culture by exploring other ways to live. Whether the narrator, or the reader, is or should be laughing at Quijote and the other characters is at times difficult to determine; however, Quijote ultimately displays his own power of agency by living out his own fantasy. Yet, McGonigal argues that immersive gameplay is not “primarily escapist,” but in fact a socializing medium that allows players to connect through collaborative interactions (“This Is Not” 2). According to Huizinga, “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes

Butts 13 human society” (1), and Fine similarly argues, “Fantasy gaming is a social world” (72). In some ways, then, Quijote is not as much of an outcast as he might seem at first glance. He does, after all, gather a small band of people willing to play his game. There are two reasons for Quijote, or anyone for that matter, to become completely immersed in play, either he is insane or the world around him is unbearable. He is named, The Knight with the Sad Face; indeed, his appearance is unfortunate, but his life seems to be so as well. Hence, this argument leans toward the latter interpretation of Cervantes’s book. It is only when Quijote is slaying giants and fulfilling his role as knight errant that he finds a kind of transcendence from the real world. The fact that Don Quijote is one of, if not the, bestselling books of fiction of all time reveals something about people’s inherent spiritual need for escapist play. Indeed, Quijote still meets the audience’s expectations for a willing suspension of disbelief; however, do not call him insane or anti-social for creating a fantasy world, for he is not those two things. This short initial exploration into the intersections between game studies and Don Quijote only scratches the surface of what is possible. Further investigations may show Dorotea to be an important feminist gamer, and may be formulated by cross-referencing Judith Butler’s work on the performative nature of gender. Additionally, other scenes should be examined for other examples, or types, of Quijote’s immersive play. Furthermore, other texts and games still need to be compared. In any event, this exploration opens new possibilities for studying the play between narratives and games; Cervantes wrote during the Renaissance and there is now a new birth of new forms of media that need exploring. Jane McGonigal’s dedication to ubiquitous gamers from her dissertation seems relevant here, which reads, “Through their collective and playful performances, they have embodied and embraced a more intimate relationship between gameplay and everyday life” (McGonigal “This Might Be” 5).

Butts 14 Likewise, Quijote, though a fiction himself, in his own playful performance as a ubiquitous and immersive gamer, has certainly found the invaluable intersection between gameplay and life.

Works Cited Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quijote. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Norton, 1999. Fine, Gary Allen. Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1983. 30 April 2008 < http://books.google.com>. Path: Shared Fantasy. Hughes, John. “Therapy is Fantasy: Roleplaying, Healing and the Construction of Symbolic Order.” 1988. RPGstudies.net. 30 April 2008 Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. 30 April 2008 < http://books.google.com>. Path: Homo Ludens. Jehensen, Myriam Yvonne. “The Dorotea-Fernando/Luscinda-Cardenio Episode in Don Quixote: A Postmodernist Play.” MLN 107.2 (Mar 1992): 205-219. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 2001. 30 April 2008 < http://books.google.com>. Path: Cosmopoiesis. McGonigal, J. “A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play” 2003. Avantgame. 30 April 2008

Butts 15 . ---. “This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play.” 2003. Avantgame. 30 April 2008 . ---. “This Might Be A Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” 1999. Avantgame. 30 April 2008 . Salen, Katie., and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play. Game Design Fundamentals. Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2004. Szulborski, Dave. This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming. New Fiction Publishing 2005. 30 April 2008 < http://books.google.com>. Path: This is not a game. World Without Oil. 2007. 29 April 2008. .