Not content with my annual shedding of cricket subscribers by posting about Australian Survivor, or my post-season exodus of Survivor fans as a result of all the cricket coverage, here’s yet another Venn diagram piece, designed specifically to satisfy nobody. Stay subscribed after this, if you dare!
Drama, most scientists agree, is the shit. From ancient times right up to the Star Wars prequels and beyond, storytellers have held audiences in thrall, whispering tales of fantastic feats, of outstanding courage and of trade negotiations with borderline racist caricature aliens.
And while some storytellers are content to tell their tales without further introspection or analysis, others have studied the reactions of their audiences and developed patterns in which to frame their narratives to maximise their audiences’ enjoyment.
The three-act structure. Joseph Campbell’s myths. Dan Harmon’s story circle. These are all different frameworks through which storytellers have attempted to weave the most compelling tale possible.
But one can drill even deeper than those various narrative frameworks. Down to the one fundamental factor present in all good tales.
That fundamental factor is, of course, Jar Jar Binks.
No, not Jar Jar Binks. The other one.
Conflict.
Yep, conflict. Conflict is what drives all stories. That conflict can take a variety of forms. Physical, mental. Internal, external. Jedi, Sith. Any kind of conflict can power a tale. But without it, there simply is no story – or, at least, no story worth telling.
Which brings us to sport.
Sport is a unique medium for drama.
Other media - your poetry, your theatre shows, your operas, your television shows, your radio plays, your films, your novels, your computer games, your comic books, etc - all have an author of some kind.
Sport, on the other hand, does not.
There is nobody looking over the game being played, instructing players on what to do next to maximise spectators’ enjoyment. Or, at least, anti-corruption units do their best to ensure not.
Instead, sport takes the fundamental essence of storytelling - conflict - and uses that and the agreed-upon rules of the game to attempt to spontaneously create drama.
In physics, this would be called a ‘bottom-up’ approach to producing drama. Small conflicts between players at a game level are combined in an uncontrolled fashion in the hope that, at a higher level, a story worth telling will emerge.
It contrasts with the ‘top-down’ approach used everywhere else, where the teller of the story simply imposes his story upon the characters involved, with the knowledge that the telling of the story takes precedence over all else.
The difference between a ‘bottom-up’ approach and a ‘top-down’ approach can be seen in other fields. It’s the difference between evolution (where simple organisms grow more complicated through interactions with one another) and creationism (where a god creates complicated organisms from holy scratch).
It’s the difference between capitalism (where businesses, workers and consumers negotiate with one another at an individual level to form a nation-wide economy) and communism (where a national government dictates an economy to its citizens).
And, of course, it’s the difference between the cobbled together blended Naboo-Gungan army and the remote-controlled battle droids of the Trade Federation.
Each approach has its benefits. The top-down approach is more goal-oriented. Instructions are (implicitly or explicitly) passed down to lower-level participants with the sole purpose of achieving the top-level goal, be it the establishment of a stable ecosystem, the creation of a fair economy or victory in The Battle of Naboo. Or, indeed, the creation of a compelling story.
The bottom-up approach requires no such overseer. Each participant simply looks out for themselves (within an appropriate set of rules) and, under the right conditions, the higher level result (stable ecosystem, fair economy, Battle of Naboo triumph, compelling story) emerges, seemingly by magic.
Of course, one does need the right conditions. When it comes to sport, not every tale that emerges is one worth telling. Sometimes the conflict is not strong enough for the story to be worthwhile. Sometimes the story that emerges is predictable and dull. Sometimes England spend sixteen years stumbling over themselves at every turn while an all-powerful Australia cruise to Ashes win after Ashes win.
But there are times and places when everything falls into place. When the conflict between the players is perfectly matched. On those days, the semi-magical nature of the story that emerges gives the drama-lover in all of us a thrill that cannot be matched anywhere else, as Michael Vaughan’s England side regain the Ashes and receive OBEs regardless of how bit a part they played in that tale of triumph.
Sports fans accept these wildly varying outcomes. It is the risk one takes. An emergent, bottom-up, story-telling medium like sport can never guarantee that every tale told will be a winner.
But what if they could? What if there was some kind of hybrid position between the bottom-up storytelling of sport, and the top-down storytelling of more authorial media?
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you Survivor.
TO BE CONTINUED!
