Dramatic Foundations - Computers as Theatre - page 74

Plot: The Whole Action
Representations are normally thought of as having objects, even though
those objects need not be things that can or do exist in the real world. Like-
wise, plays are often said to represent their characters; that is, Hamlet is a
representation of the Prince of Denmark, and so on. In the Aristotelean view,
the object of a dramatic representation is not character , but action ; Hamlet
represents the action of a man attempting to discover and punish his fa-
ther's murderer. The characters are there because they are required in order
to represent the action, and not the other way around. An action is made
up of incidents that are causally and structurally related to one another. The
individual incidents that make up the play of Hamlet —Hamlet fi ghts with
Laertes, for instance—are only meaningful insofar as they are woven into
the action of the mimetic whole. The form of a play is manifest in the pat-
tern created by the arrangement of incidents within the whole action.
Another defi nitional property of plot is that the whole action must have
a beginning, middle, and end. The value of beginnings and endings is most
clearly demonstrated by the lack of them. The feeling produced by walk-
ing into the middle of a play or movie or being forced to leave the theatre
before the end is generally unpleasant. Viewers are rarely happy when, at
the end of a particularly suspenseful television program, “to be continued”
appears on the screen. My favorite computer example is an error message
that I sometimes encounter: “[your application] has unexpectedly quit.”
“Well,” I typically reply, “the capricious little bastard!” Creating graceful
beginnings and endings for human-computer activities is most often a non-
trivial problem—how to introduce the premise for a game, for example, or
how to end a session of video editing. Two rules of thumb for good begin-
nings is that the potential for action in that particular universe is effectively
laid out, and that the fi rst incidents in the action set up promising lines of
probability for future actions. A good ending provides not only completion
of the action being represented, but also the kind of emotional closure that
is implied by the notion of catharsis , as discussed in the next chapter.
A fi nal criterion that Aristotle applied to plot is the notion of magnitude:
. . . to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts,
but also be of a certain defi nite magnitude. Beauty is a matter of size and
order. . . . Just in the same way, then, as a beautiful whole made up of
parts, or a beautiful living creature, must be of some size, but a size to be
taken in by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of some length, but of a
length to be taken in by the memory ( Poetics 1450b, 34-40).