Moving Between World(views) with Database Narratives
/Great transmedia storytelling shows me that a single piece of media is just one limited window on a larger world. It invites me to imagine a universe that extends far beyond what I can see on screen or understand directly through the text. Telling multiple stories in the same universe, across different media formats, demonstrates that each character, place, or point in history presents just one out of many possible perspectives. To develop our own perspective, we take on board these different points of view and imagine what might exist out there that connects it all, a kind of “blind men and the elephant” exercise
In my chapter in Imagining Transmedia, “Cis Penance: Transmedia Database Narratives,” I discuss my own interactive documentary work about transgender people (specifically, a piece called Cis Penance: Trans Lives in Wait), in terms of concepts that come from Japanese media studies scholarship: database narratives and sekaikan (worldview). These can be considered alongside related concepts such as “storyworld” and “cinematic universe”.
Database narratives (or “database consumption”) is a concept introduced by Hiroki Azuma in the 2001 book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals to describe a way of relating to media products that had become very prominent in Japanese otaku culture by the late 1990s. To take a well-known example, each Pokémon game, anime, movie, and other media extension contributes to a larger picture of the storyworld, establishing an overarching fictional reality through the narrative device of the Pokédex—though database consumption does not require this kind of in-world database. Database narratives or database consumption can also be observed in Star Trek, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Hellaverse of Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, and many more.
Rather than pointing to a singular, overarching “grand narrative” associated with modernism, in database consumption each person creates their own internal database of associations with a storyworld. Although “database” does not refer to a media object in itself—Azuma’s database is a metaphor for an imagined cognitive rendering of a storyworld inside a fan’s head—fan wikis are interesting texts to refer to when making sense of a database narrative, and represent an effort to negotiate a shared metatextual reality with other fans. Azuma’s argument is that otaku do not just consume the text of a particular piece of media, but more broadly consume the world that it portrays: its “sekaikan”.
I am generally grumpy about the introduction of loan words from Japanese into English, because their acquired meaning in English will inevitably come to differ significantly from their associations in Japanese. Part of this is due to the same inevitable semantic drift that plagues all language, but it may also be exacerbated by a strong tendency to exoticise “the Far East”. From “ikigai” to “katsu curry”, we just don’t seem to be able to resist making Japanese words into something they are not.
With that said, I find sekaikan legitimately useful, because it does point to something that is not quite captured by its English and German equivalents (worldview and Weltanschauung, respectively). Sekaikan is not just a set of beliefs about a world, but also how a world is portrayed in a piece of media. In English, we think of worldview as a philosophical position that “underlies” a work, a prior cause from which our narratives emerge. Sekaikan can mean this, but it can also refer to the outcome of a set of creative decisions. Rather than betraying the auteur’s underlying values, the creative process can itself produce a sekaikan, as part of its aesthetic effect. A worldview is something I have, but a sekaikan is something I try to create.
It might also be worth noting that when translating from Japanese to English, you often have to infer from context whether a noun is singular or plural, and whether to apply “the” or “a”. When we talk about worldview, we assume that the “world” in question is the consensual reality that we share with every other living being—there is only one “real world” with reference to which our worldviews are formed. Sekaikan is more freely used to describe how a fictional world is portrayed, independent of any beliefs the authors may have about the real world. Is the sekai of sekaikan “the world”, “a world”, or (many) “worlds”?
Another linguistic pleasure I get from “sekaikan” is that the character that translates to “view” is homophonous with another common suffix that translates to “feeling” or “sense of” (e.g. 疎外感 sogaikan, (feeling of) alienation; or 親近感shinkinkan, (sense of) affinity). Sekaikan does not mean “world feeling”, but it almost feels like it could (perhaps in another world?). Of course, here I’m doing the very thing that frustrates me about loan words—I’m making the word into something it is not, simply because it supports my own sensibilities and interests.
Just as we can construct database narratives about fictional worlds, I think we do the same about our own societies. I came to understand what it means to be a genderqueer person and a transgender man because I encountered the stories of other transgender people, through meeting people in LGBTQ+ community spaces, watching documentaries made by other trans people such as Fox Fisher’s My Genderation project, exploring trans people’s blogs and video-blogs, and playing indie games in the early years of the queer games movement. Each individual story contributes to a larger reality—a world in which gender identity exists independently of sex assigned at birth, gender dysphoria causes significant distress that one might only recognise after unlearning lifelong dissociative habits, and gender euphoria can be experienced by trans and cis people alike. Each testimony adds to my own internal database of things it is possible to feel, be, see and do.
This construction of a sekaikan in which trans lives are possible was part of the purpose of my own work creating interactive documentaries based on oral-history interviews with transgender people. My first such work was created in 2018, when I was an artist in residence in Tokyo with a programme supported by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. I interviewed transgender people in the Kansai and Kanto areas, and turned each transcript into an interaction with an on-screen character. All the text attributed to that character came verbatim from one of the interviews, but to keep the interaction loop short I invented questions that the user could choose from, employing an interaction pattern seen in many role-playing games.
credit: Zoyander Street
Since 2019, I have been working on a piece much larger in scale, based on 45 interviews with transgender people across the UK. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with trans artists whom I have admired for many years: for example, the character designs are by June Hornby (a.k.a. Critterdust), who previously created a game called Earthtongue that has you manage an alien terrarium; and the music is by Liz Ryerson (a.k.a. Ellaguro), who has heavily influenced my own worldview on digital art through her vast body of work across indie game development, music, criticism, visual arts, and podcasting.
credit: Zoyander Street
My hope is that Cis Penance initially overwhelms the player with the sheer number of characters, who are arranged as though they are all waiting in line for something. My starting point was thinking about one of the differences between my own worldview and my mother’s: while I’m a leftist of a fairly radical bent, my mother is staunchly opposed to communism and socialism alike, because of her own experiences as the child of Ukrainian immigrants who came to the UK after World War II. I remember the image of the breadlines of eastern Europe as a key example of the failures of socialism in my mother’s worldview. For me, the breadline is not a quality of left- or right-wing economic policy, but of systemic failure more generally.
While the breadline is something that can be observed and portrayed clearly on-screen, other policy failures produce queues that are hidden in bureaucratic systems. National Health Service (NHS) waiting lists are a key example of this in the UK, caused not by socialism but by neoliberal austerity. I and almost every British trans person I know have experienced excruciating waiting times, putting our lives on hold in many ways as we wait for essential medical care to alleviate our gender dysphoria. Very few people will ever see an NHS waiting list on a screen, but if you speak to enough trans people, you start to feel its weight, like an invisible force pressing in on our community. This is just one example of the waiting that characterises our experience—there is also the slow progress of hormonal transition itself, and the socially imposed waiting that pressures us to delay our transition until some arbitrary point in the future (“You’re too young to know, what if you regret it?” or, “Can you at least wait until your children are grown up, this will traumatise them!”)
credit: Zoyander Street
credit: Zoyander Street
However, as I spent more time with other trans people, I also noticed that there is another side to trans people’s altered relationship with time. We have experienced first-hand that the linear life path that cisheteronormativity assumes everyone will follow is arbitrary. Many of us experience transition as a second adolescence; at the same time, we may feel old before our time, as rapid cultural changes and a lack of LGBTQ+ elders push us into the position of being the wise older trans person. A lot of trans people are neurodivergent, which may include neurological differences in our experience of time itself (for example, ADHD can involve impaired perception of time, and dissociative conditions can cause us to lose time). Trans experiences of spirituality can also alter our understanding of time, space, and consciousness. Talking to many trans people can hint at a sekaikan in which time is more fluid. This connects with concepts from queer theory, such as “chrononormativity”, “heterotemporality”, and “queer time” (and “crip time”, from disability studies and crip theory).
By presenting a large number of characters for the player/user to interact with, I hope to contribute to a database narrative about transgender ways of being and seeing, and give people (cis and trans alike, because not all trans people have access to a larger trans community) a window into an expansive sekaikan, and perhaps an expansive worldview. Transmediating oral testimonies into videogame characters invites people into a context where they accept that they do not know everything about how this world functions—in videogames, you build up a database narrative about the storyworld in a bottom-up manner, rather than imposing top-down assumptions. Perhaps if we could learn to more readily do this in our own consensual reality, we might give people more space to define themselves for themselves.
credit: Zoyander Street
More recently, I have shifted my practice from interactive documentary to interactive online theatre performance. Part of this is because my own relationship to time has shifted following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. It’s not that I was so bold as to think that I wouldn’t develop a chronic illness—somehow, every queer person I know has ended up chronically ill by their mid-thirties, and I am exactly the kind of person who would burn themself out so much that their immune system ends up attacking their own brain. I knew something like this would hit me, but somehow I still thought that I had time to build my art practice incrementally, until eventually I could reach my larger goal: creating interactive ethnographies about aliens sent to Earth to study the reality that humans have socially constructed. Now that I’m operating on “crip time” (working more slowly, but also having less time to reach my larger goals), I have had to find a way to skip ahead directly to the weird stuff.
Whereas Cis Penance is transmedia in the sense that it transmediates oral testimony into videogame characters, and into a live experience for users, my new project Intrapology connects more directly to the kind of transmedia storytelling that has become familiar through expanded universes, particularly multiverses in which characters move between parallel worlds. In Intrapology, I take social constructivism literally, to the point of absurdism—each world exists directly and only as a result of social consensus. When a fundamental difference in worldviews occurs, this causes a physical rift in reality itself, and what was once a shared world splits into two smaller, separate worlds.
One of the distressing things about our present historical moment is the pervasive sense that we do not all occupy the same world. Some people describe our times as “divided”, but I find that language too neutral, suggesting that the issue is our failure to all “just get along”. The concept of “epistemic injustice” is more instructive. I experience this as a transgender person: every time I am misgendered, I am reminded that I do not exist in other peoples’ worldviews the same way I exist in my own and those of the people who care about me. My own testimony about my life and experience is worth very little to someone who simply believes that their view on the world is correct, and mine is deluded.
Through transmedia database narratives, I can hold onto a little hope that we can do something to make the world more bearable for one another. In a situation where modernist grand narratives can no longer be relied upon to shape social consensus, and we are all constructing our own worldviews in a bottom-up manner, it is easy to feel hopeless and lost. But I think that by learning how to communicate a sekaikan, we can develop the capacity to contribute to epistemic justice, by inviting others into the worlds we have had the joy and privilege to explore.
Biography
Zoyander Street is a freelance artist-researcher with a PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University. They work on a variety of projects spanning disciplinary boundaries, including theatre with game-like interactions and games for gallery spaces. Their work has been shown around the world, including London, Berlin, Tokyo, Chicago, Vancouver, and Arizona.
