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rachelbracewriting-blog · 6 years

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Young Adult Fiction and the Reader

The debate over the merits of young adult fiction centers around its tropes, plot complexity, and general ease of reading. However, it is rare that anyone looks at the opinions of the readers themselves and how they choose books from the entire scope of the genre. Within every genre of literature there are a range of books from those that are well written to those whose literary status is questionable at best. Critics of young adult fiction seem to look only at the most popular books from the genre, usually those that have movie adaptions. There is no consideration of how polarizing these books tend to be with readers of the genre, or that the phenomena of popular books often stem from the effort publishers put into marketing a book. Critics of young adult literature analyze a few novels as a representation of the genre as a whole, without choosing their sample based on the reading patterns and preferences of those who regularly read within young adult literature.

Janice Radway investigated a similar instance of reader and critic dissonance within the romance novel genre. She found that the major failing in analyzing why women read romance novels was that “they ignore romance readers’ own book choice and theories about why they read”1 and instead “produce their explanation merely by positing a desire in the reading audience for the specific meaning they have unearthed”2. This occurs within many articles written about the negative aspects of young adult fiction. Most articles mention at least one of the following popular books: Divergent, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and The Fault in Our Stars. Ruth Graham, in her article “Against YA” says “Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one defends as serious literature… These are the books, likeThe Fault in Our Stars, that are about real teens doing real things, and that rise and fall not only on the strength of their stories but, theoretically, on the quality of their writing”3. She goes on to claim that “these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying”4. Of all the novels commonly cited, only Twilight has a truly neat and tidy ending. Katniss and Peeta battle PTSD for the rest of their lives, Tris dies almost arbitrarily, and Hazel buries her boyfriend while coping with the fact that she will die soon and leave emotional wreckage in her wake. This reading of young adult fiction ignores both the endings of the books she herself uses as examples, as well as the reasons people may read these books.

Critics present reasons behind the consumption of young adult literature which ignore why readers themselves claim to read the genre. The book choices themselves are clearly from those that were made into movies and had a large initial surge in popularity that made them sensational. Many within the reading community, however, do not feel that these are a reasonable sampling. On Goodreads, a social media site that is described as Facebook for book lovers, these books are polarizing. For Divergent, many reviewers take issue with a lack of world building they see evident in the novel.5 Reviewers of Twilight who rated the book less than three out of five stars all cite either poor writing or badly developed plot.6 Graham and other critics ignore readers’ method for choosing books in citing the reasons for the popularity of young adult literature as “escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia”, the nostalgia being only applicable to adult readers of this genre.7 Readers themselves, however, cite very different reasons for why a young adult book is worth reading or not. The most popular young adult fiction book of 2016 on Goodreads was Salt to the Sea, and nearly all the reviewers who loved the book list the beautiful writing as one of their top reasons that the book blew them away.8 The most popular young adult fantasy book on Goodreads was A Court of Mist and Fury, and readers most often discuss the beautiful storytelling and character arcs as a reason the book was their favorite.9 None of the reasons listed by Graham are found in the reviews on Goodreads, showing a lack of connection with the actual people who read young adult fiction. Considering the scope of young adult fiction, it is telling that the same titles reoccur again and again in articles that bemoan the genre as a whole; analysts of young adult literature are ignoring how readers themselves choose books and why.

A common criticism of young adult fiction is that the heroines are poor role models for young girls, Mary Sues who exhibit no personality and whose existence is reliant on two boys, neither of which she can choose between. This once again shows that critics do not take reader preferences into account when looking at young adult literature. Most consumers of young adult literature are put off by books that fit this exact description, and they prefer books with nuanced and diverse characters and heroines. Tara Burton, from her time as a ghost writer of young adult fiction, claims that “The typical ‘character pack’ provided with my outline tells me that Mary is ‘nice, smart,’ and other vague adjectives; she rarely gets narrative space to prove it”.10 However, reviews taken from Goodreads show that heroine personality matters when picking books. For Dark Triumph, one five-star reviewer said “Sybella took me some time to adjust to. She’s darker, moodier, more pained, and sometimes verges on crazy, though one can’t blame her. However, as I got used to her and came to know more about why she is the way she is, I became even more bonded to Sybella, and even more desirous for her to overcome the horrors of her life”11. This character description clashes with Burton’s insistence on the young adult Mary Sue heroine. In the first ten reviews for Dark Triumph, all mentioned the characterization of the main character and discussed why they did or did not like her. One explanation for this difference in experience with young adult novels could feasibly be that Tara Burton, as a ghost writer, only interacted with the portion of novels that are written quickly by publishers in order to tap into a trend. These novels are focused on quantity over quality. This demonstrates what Radway claims is necessary for critical analysis of a genre, a consideration “first whether she is a member of a different interpretive community than the readers who are her ostensible subjects”12. The majority of critics of young adult fiction are adults, oftentimes ones who do not consume any young adult books at all. A belief that all young adult heroines exhibit ‘Mary Sue’ characteristics clashes with readers’ own preferences for books with complex heroines.

Critics continually dismiss young adult fiction as lesser literature, however their analysis of the genre hinges on a few highly sensationalized books. These books, which often are poor examples of novels favored by young adult readers, are chosen partially based on popularity. Readers’ own opinions of what makes a good young adult novel are not factored into the analysis of why individuals read these kinds of fiction. The readers’ preferences are not examined or considered when deciding which books are representative of the genre, leading to the dissonance between critical opinion and reader thinking.

Janice A. Radway, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” in Feminist Studies Vol 9 No. 1, (Feminist Studies, Inc, 1983), 54.

Radway, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” 54.

Ruth Graham, “Against YA,” The Slate Book Review, (June 5, 2014): http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.html.

Graham, “Against YA,” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.html.

“Divergent,” Goodreads, accessed February 17, 2017, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13335037-divergent?from_search=true.

“Twilight,” Goodreads, accessed February 17, 2017, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41865.Twilight?from_search=true.

Graham, “Against YA,” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.html.

“Salt to the Sea,” Goodreads, accessed February 17, 2017, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25614492-salt-to-the-sea?from_choice=true.

A Court of Mist and Fury,” Goodreads, accessed February 17, 2017, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26073150-a-court-of-mist-and-fury?from_choice=true.

Tara Burton, “‘Ghost Stories’: The ubiquitous anti-feminism of young adult romances,” New Statesman, (February 24, 2013): http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/02/ghost-stories-ubiquitous-anti-feminism-young-adult-romances.

Christina (A Reader of Fictions), May 10, 2012, comment on “Dark Triumph,” Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9943270-dark-triumph?ac=1&from_search=true.

Radway, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” 55.

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Harmony and the Kludge in Game Design Lewis Pulsipher

Harmony and its opposite, the kludge, are fundamental to good game design. Games that lack harmony or have in-harmonious aspects have a handicap, though some succeed. Fortunately, most of the in-harmonious games are never published, or only self published. Players don't always recognize the in-harmony but its existence still affects the game. Designers may not recognize in-harmony if they think of the game as “My Baby.” But designers need to recognize it and get it out of the game.

So what is harmony? This is hard to pin down. It's like harmony in music, something you can hear and can recognize when harmony is not present. Here is a long quote from a 1997 lecture where this concept of harmony comes from:

Brian Moriarty: http://ift.tt/2q6Z9Pk “It’s something you feel. How do you achieve this feeling that everything works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff? Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t come from design committees. It doesn’t come from focus groups or market surveys. It doesn’t come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from a fundamental note of clear intention.”

I think Moriarty moves into the touchy-feely as he goes on, but you can look it up and see what he has to say. I'm using a simpler definition: “everything in the game feels as though it belongs there and contributes to the purpose and feeling of the game as a whole.” That's harmony. It's important because games are not just collections of mechanics. Not just data. Not just metrics. Games make intellectual and emotional impressions on players, and lack of harmony is noticeable, sometimes clearly, sometimes in subtle ways. The effect is not good for the intellectual and emotional impression.

Harmony is not the same thing as “elegance,” in fact I hesitate to use the word elegance because it's used by fans of certain kinds of tabletop games as a bludgeon to attack fans of other kinds tabletop games, who in turn react very negatively to the word. ”Elegant” is often used in much the same sense as “clever.” It's usually used in relation to abstract games or practically abstract games, games that are not models of some reality.

Harmony isn't cleverness, it’s something that affects the game as a whole. It's about appropriate fit. Now what's appropriate fit depends on what standards people are using, and those standards have changed and very much loosened over the years. Think about movies and TV shows over the years. What makes sense? The screen has always required a heavy “suspension of disbelief”, but those entertainments have consistently become less believable. People will accept all kinds of foolishness and huge plot-holes because the program is otherwise entertaining. and we’re getting the same thing in games.

I love Star Wars for the adventure, but when I first watched the original Star Wars I came out of the theater and said “this is dumb” and “that is a big plot-hole” but I (in the long run) accepted it because “it’s a movie.”

I still have SOME standards even for movies. The Starship Troopers movie (monsters in outer space) had us travel 80,000 light years and then forget that we can use tanks or helicopters! Monsters farted unguided missiles, yet the human fleet stayed tightly packed together in space to make itself a good target! It's just ludicrous. Yet it was a popular movie that begetted a couple sequels.

The same kind of loosening of standards of disbelief has happened in game design. People often treat games more as time killers or something mildly engaging to do while they socialize, than as actual entertainment or something worth *focusing* on. So they let things go by that would not have been accepted many years ago.

All right. What's the opposite of harmony? The Kludge. I borrow this term from software (“kludgy” is the adjective that's used.) A kludge is a tacked-on solution to a particular problem, or a solution that works but isn’t consistent with the rest of the program. In software though not in games it's also hard to understand and modify.

The Kludge is hard to define in game design because one man's kludge is another man's “nothing wrong with that.” How do you notice the kludges if the game is a model of something? The kludge will usually be inconsistent with the rest of the model, and may have nothing at all to do with what's being modeled. It may be there to fix some design flaw. When I play games I sometimes ask, why am I doing this particular thing? If the only answer I can find is “because it fixes a design flaw,” or “because the designer liked it,” or “I have no clue why it's here,” then it is probably a kludge.

What about kludges in abstract games? A kludge is less obvious because the game doesn’t represent anything (other than “a game”). Abstracts are collections of mechanics, different from a model where the context should help people play the game, and the mechanics are expected to represent something that happens in a real world. Nonetheless, in abstracts you can have a mechanic that doesn't fit with the rest, that doesn't mix well or doesn't seem to have a useful function, or clearly should've been replaced with something else, or simply should have been removed from the game.

Where do kludges come from? Often they are added to games to solve a problem that appeared in testing. Or perhaps the designer realized it would be a problem, and added it before the testing. Most of the time it's added to fix a demonstrated flaw, but at other times, it's in the game because the designer liked it, even though it doesn't fit with what he ended up with. (Remember, games often end up some “distance” from where the designer originally intended.) He or she isn't willing to take it out, isn't willing to “shoot their baby”. It could be the original idea itself, yet the game has developed in another direction. At that point, the designer should shoot the original, get it out of there, but it's emotionally hard for a designer to do.

Now some examples. These are from well-known, successful games, so that you’ll be able to relate to what I’m explaining. Games can succeed despite kludges; but the more you have, the less likely that the game will be good.

Catan, which used to be known as Settlers of Catan: both the robber and the monopoly cards. Keep in mind there’s not a lot of interaction in Catan between the players except for the trading, and there's little you can do to actually hinder another player after the initial setup.

I think the designer saw the difficulty of hindrance, and decided to add the Robber, which has *nothing* to do with the rest of the game. It doesn't fit at all in any way, shape, or form, but was added to provide a way for a player to hinder another player or at least have the potential to hinder other players. It has nothing to do with the settling model. If it represented mere bandits, a player’s soldiers would be able to do something about it, nor do bandits affect a budding newly-settled region the way they can an old, over-populated region.

Catan is supposed to be a game about trading, but I've seen many players who don't trade much. The monopoly card takes all of a particular resource from all the other players and puts them into the hand of the player who played the monopoly card. Then others are forced to trade if they want to get that resource, or wait a long time for more of that resource to be produced. Perhaps someone can come up with an explanation (not excuse) of how this would happen in the real world, I cannot. I think the designer added that card to make people trade, thinking of the groups where there's otherwise not much trading.

Catan is very popular and is a decent design that was in the right place at the right time, although technically speaking it has these kludges.

How about Risk, the US pre-2008 version, not the newer version based on missions? Some of those earlier versions had mission cards, but they didn't work well. In 2008 Risk was revised with missions to make it quite a different game. In old Risk, the territory cards are kludges in two senses. First, they were an artificial method, and by artificial I mean there's no correspondence with reality, of encouraging players to attack. You have to a conquer a territory to get a card; it was something to try to discourage turtling, which is nonetheless quite common in Risk.

Second, you turn in the cards for armies. That's there to bring the game to a conclusion, because you have an increasing number of armies that can get very large. The game is pretty long as is, but it's very long without increasing numbers of armies, which I have played a number of times. Instead of going up to 50 armies and more I used 4-6-8-4-6-8-4-6-8, but that makes it a very long game.

Two kludges to solve (or at least mitigate) a fundamental problem in the game: the game didn't naturally come to a conclusion. The game didn't naturally encourage people to attack. So the cards were added for those purposes.

Let’s consider the online video games World of Tanks and World of Warships. In big video games like these both harmony and the kludge become obscured. We could probably say that it's easier to make a harmonious game that's relatively small and focused rather than one quite big.

In World of Tanks the entire idea of 15 versus 15 randomly assigned teams is a kludge, in the sense that it has nothing to do with real warfare, but it's necessary to make the online game practical for a very large audience. In World of Warships the overall kludge is to play in a small area, usually amongst lots of islands, places where real world battleships and aircraft carriers virtually never went. In both games we have the bizarre mix of nationalities of equipment: German and French and English and Russian tanks or ships on the same side, and possibly 15 different tanks or 12 different ships on a team. It's also a necessary kludge but has nothing to do with reality. So both games break down as models of reality, and the kludges are obvious.

But in video games there are many conventions, normal modes of design, that are ridiculous kludges but necessary to make a game of it. (Consider the ammo and medpacks sitting all over the place in shooters, or even respawning itself - awful kludges.) When is a kludge no longer a kludge? When almost everyone accepts it as necessary, I guess.

Let's take a tabletop game such as Eclipse, which is ostensibly a Euro-fied 4X space game. It's almost a wargame, almost an exploration game, almost this, almost that, but ultimately unsatisfactory (for me). The major kludge in the game is that players are awarded hidden-value victory points for fighting, and fighting early on tends to give you higher value points because you draw a number of VP pieces and throw some back into the supply. You’re encouraged to fight repeatedly as you can draw again whenever you fight. I think this was added when the rest of the game resulted in little fighting, because people didn't gain enough from fighting. What they were likely to lose in assets was more than they were willing to risk for the possible gain. So the victory points were added well.

Rewards for fighting make no sense in the 4X model, or any reasonable model. Your surviving units gain experience when you fight, yes, but you lose a lot of ships and people, and that experience in the overall context should not be worth a lot (if any) of victory points. Military forces are a means to an end, not an end in itself. In a game I watched, about half of the overall points for five of the six players came from fighting, which is ridiculous. They were roughly equal to the points for holding the solar systems that had been discovered. In the long run what do you think is more important? Wars are economic, after all.

There are other flaws in the game. For example, the results of exploration are that space is mostly impassable. I think that's deliberate, to avoid and out-and-out wargame, but it doesn't fit one's idea of space as wide-open territory. That makes the extermination part of 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) ineffective even with the fighting points.

Again, how do you recognize a kludge? I’d say it's easier to find things you think are kludges in a game you don't like than ones you do like. Also we have the limitation that some designers of puzzle-like games, whether they’re single player video games or solo tabletop games or cooperative games, tend to add things to make the puzzle solution more difficult. I come in heavily on the side of this motto: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I think that’s an alternative definition of harmony. Given that motto, I see many of those puzzle-maker additions as kludges.

This is not something you can rigidly define or easily pin down, it requires self-critical thinking. It doesn’t matter what specific mechanics you use, whether already very popular or brand new (the latter very rare). What matters is how they work together as a whole. Designers need to recognize the in-harmonious, and excise it!

My Patreon is at: http://ift.tt/2gShTQU My thanks for the generous support from Rossan 78.

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