My research so far seems to have asked a couple of retrospective questions: Why do fables have such resonance across cultures/ages, and why do they have such longevity? I think a key component in the answer to these questions is audience.
As a games designer, I don't want to make a game solely for children. However, the avenues of research I've been down in the past week or so have a single similarity - when looking at Aesop's fables I noticed the simplicity of the story design as to be understood by children, when looking at children's books I looked at the practical application of fables to a young audience, and when looking at parables I discovered that their morals are less universal due to having a specific adult audience. Children's involvement in the creation of fables is key to the lasting resonance of fables throughout time, and I want to know why.
Compounding Understanding
As a foreword to Donna Eder's Life Lessons through Storytelling: Children's Exploration of Ethics, Gregory Cajete explores the idea of traditional oral storytelling as a form of teaching, which used the environment around it to reflect the dynamic relationships of those being taught. Nature and the events that occur within nature can be used as a vehicle for the transmission of culture, passed down from adults to children.
Eder herself talks about the difference between how children interpret stories and how they are written to be interpreted. She relays a story about how two groups of children were told the fable of The Eagle and the Scarab Beetle in which the beetle tries to exact revenge on the eagle for her rudeness by jeopardising the safety of the eagle's eggs. The children, rather than relating to the beetle or the eagle, were concerned about the safety of the eggs, or the injustice of how the eggs got broken despite not doing anything to warrant the action. In the Library of Congress' version of this story, the moral is "Even the weakest may find means to avenge a wrong". Interestingly, the "weakest" in this situation is indeed the egg.
Whilst trying to interpret this fable myself, I found my opinion unreliable in that it had already been skewed by reading Eder's study. However, I asked a few other people to read the story and react. They seemed to interpret that the beetle was wrong, but did not see the eggs as characters themselves. Perhaps the age difference effects how the two audiences relate to the story - the adults relate to the eagle because the eagle is an adult character, whereas the children relate to the eggs as the eggs are the children of this story. This shows how differently children compound their emotional understanding of something based on the scope of their understanding - relation to older, more sophisticated concepts is harder when you yourself are young and inexperienced.
I think this shows how children are able to think about their emotions and experiences in an indirect way when reading fables. By hearing the stories of the characters in the fables, they are relating without even realising it, but this relation is simplistic and basic, not presenting sub-themes and sub-plots, but simply delivering a tale with one focus that they can understand clearly. It's us, as adults, who then pull things apart and read further into them.
Lasting Messages
The thing about fables that interested me most to start with was this idea of short and compact children's stories having an effect on adults. In the previous section I explored how relatability help's children to understand fables, and while a good fable can be measured by how successful it is at establishing relatability and understanding in its audience, there must be more than just that when it comes to creating stories that stay with us for decades afterwards, and have transcended centuries.
In Anita Silvey's book, Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Children's Book, she discusses the lasting impact that children's books had on her. Whilst not a fable, her guest essayist Katherine Paterson's examination of Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden uncovers an interesting point about how this particular story changed her perspective on nature. It focuses on the beauty of nature not through the lens of fantasy, but through the lens of reality. I believe that fables have a similar impact, using the real, the relatable, and personifying it in a way that we can appreciate the beauty of it as children. By applying our own experiences to the sequence of events in fables, it allows us to unlock an appreciation of it that we might otherwise miss.
In this same compendium of essays, Steve Forbes remarks upon the lasting lesson he learned from a story I've previously looked at: The Parable of the Good Samaritan. He discusses how he's carried with him the idea of helping someone, even if there's no apparent advantage to doing so. Which is interesting, considering my reading of the parable related to the idea of a Jew being helped by a Samaritan, something unprecedented that proves Jesus' point that everyone is your neighbour, regardless of where they come from. This feels connected to the previous section about children interpreting the morals of stories differently to adults based on the perspective from which we read them. Often times adults can get so bogged down in the greater context of things that they miss the core point to stories, but fables, and children's books generally, manage to relay these messages successfully to people in a way that stays with them for decades afterwards.
Eder again explores the idea of the lasting impact fables can have on us when discussing the idea of ethical exploration that children undertake when interacting with these stories. She also argues that the form of storytelling matters too, and the fact that we as children are exposed to oral storytelling more often has an impact on how we interpret the stories. As adults we spend less time being read to, if any, and Eder suggests that telling stories orally allows children to "participate in the storytelling event". Perhaps this too is something I need to explore more when it comes to crafting a game from this research that I've done - will an interactive experience engage players more and let a message be understood across generations? Is it also important to make sure that whatever story I tell is understood and responded to by children, to give me a different perspective on the message I'm trying to relay?