Transmedia Story Creation

Narrative and Video Games, Part 2

 

Module 8

 

By Matt Henry and Alpesh Makwana

 

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Module Outline

 

• Associated Readings
• Background
• Analysis
• Additional Resources
• References

 

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Associated Readings

 

 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Harrigan, Pat. “Part IV- Game Theories,” First Person: New Media As Story, Performance, and Game, MIT Press, 2004.

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Background

 

 

“Introduction to Game Time,” - Jesper Juul

 

Juul (2004) looks at the role of time in the playing experience and the interactions time performs between player and game in the environment.  Additionally, he looks at the reciprocal influences of time and manipulation of it within the gaming environment.

 

Play time: The time a player takes to play. 

 

Event time: The time taken in the game environment. 

 

Game time: The relationship between play time and event time.

 

Game state: Interaction time between player and the game itself.

 

Action games tend to rely more heavily on play time, as the environment often has a moment-per-moment correlation between real time and the environment’s time. 

 

Strategy and turn-based games tend to rely more upon event time—either sped up or slowed down. Play time and event time could be seen as what Juul calls “mapping”: projecting the player’s time and actions into the game world—essentially allowing the player to have control over the variables of time.

 

Juul cites various interferences with time in the game:

 

Lack of sync in game time:  Action continues in the game even when the player stops playing.  He cites episodes of background music and sounds continuing to play—even after the player has paused the environment.

Save points in games:  Juul purports that save points again interfere with time in the game, as the player must stop the environment in order to secure prior progress.  However, save points also represent a unique means of manipulating time within the game—for example, allowing less scrupulous players to attempt a task, fail, and return to the save point to reattempt the task with no penalties associated with the previous failure.

Cut scenes:  Author also suggests that cut scenes add to the time of the gaming environment—disconnecting play time from event time.  Ironically enough, many games give the user the ability to skip these scenes.

Dead time:  Time in the game spent on unchallenging activities with a higher goal.

 

“Towards a Game Theory of Game,” Celia Pearce

 

Pearce (2004) opens with the suggestion that game designers are more concerned about the play experience rather than the story experience, in what she calls a “play-centric” approach.  In looking at the narrative construction of games, she cites six important concepts:

 

Experiental: Narrative experienced by the actual players, the “conflict” between players.

Performative: The narrative seen by spectators watching or interpreting the game.

Augmentary: Background information and contextual framing for the other narrative operators.

Descriptive: The culture that emerges from the retelling of such events to third parties.

Metastory: A narrative “overlay” that creates a context or framework for the game conflict.

Story System: A rule-based system or “kit” of generic narrative parts that allows players to create their own narrative content.

They may be independent, or they may exist as part of a larger metastory.

 

Thus, in order for a game to be truly play-centric, it must address all six aspects.

Like Juul, Pearce also addresses the role of cut scenes in the gaming experience.  She notes that many players see cut scenes as little more than a distraction to the gaming environment, and often skip them—dismissing them as little more than cinema at best.

 

Juul spends most of the essay detailing two genres of games as various forms of storytelling:

 

Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG):

 

The MMORPG features the six characteristics of a play-centric gaming environment, in what Juul calls “social storytelling or collaborative fiction.”  Players make choices that enhance the storytelling experience both mechanically and socially/narratively in constructing their online presence.  Thus, the narrative of the game evolves over time, as players and rules interact accordingly.

 

Storytelling Simulation Games:

 

Juul looks at The Sims as another play-centric narrative that features an open-ended metastory.  Player interactions with their environment allows the player to manipulate characters in the game and construct a story around the events that happen as characters in the game interact.  The open-ended framework allows players to control characters’ appearances, and the environments in which they live—opening the possibility to recreate people and events. 

 

 "Two Selections by Brenda Laurel"- Brenda Laurel

In addressing human-computer interaction, Laurel (1991) redefines Aristotle’s qualitative elements of structure as such:

 

Action: Collaboratively shaped by system and user, varying in each session.

Character: Predispositions and traits, inferred from patterns, from both computer and human origin.

Thought: Inferred internal processes leading to choices—cognition, emotion, and reason—again, from both computer and human origin.

Language: Selection and arrangement of signs, including verbal, visual, auditory, and other nonverbal cues.

Melody: A pleasurable perception of pattern in sensory phenomena.

Spectacle:  The sensory dimensions of the action being represented: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, and others.

 

Pattern, Language, Thought, and Agents

 

Pattern refers to the idea of patterns in the sensory phenomena of the enactment.  Aristotle noted that all patterns were pleasurable in nature, and that patterns could be extended to the human-computer environment—sounds, visual images, and other sources of sensory input.  Likewise with language, the concept of “language” is expanded out to other signs as well, such as symbols, images, animations, and the arrangement of them to create a system of communication to the reader. 

 

 

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Analysis 

 

 A well-known MIT professor, Jenkins (2004), follows the strategy of comparative media studies, building a middle ground between ludologists and narratologists and also stressing on dynamics of space. He believes in computer games as a story telling medium and states that:

 

• Not all games tell stories

• Most of the games have narrative aspirations

• Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive

• Experience of playing games cannot be reduce to the experience of a story

• If some games tell stories, they are implausible to tell them in the identical ways that other media tell stories.

 

He also notes that Ludologists reduce the narrative to overly simplistic models and introduces an important term “Spatiality” thinking game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects. Through a series of essays, Jenkins, discuss in what ways the structuring of game space helps various types of narrative experience.

 

EVOCATIVE SPACES

 

Amusement parks such as Disney and Universal Studios produce a compelling attraction built upon stories already familiar to visitors, thereby letting the visitors to enter into physical spaces they have visited enough in their fantasies. These amusement parks create the environment in fairly broad outlines and let their visitors do the rest. Spatial design enhances the sense of immersion within a familiar world and communicates fresh perspective on the story by altering the existing details.

 

ENACTING STORIES

 

While playing the games, narrative events could enter on two levels – in terms of broadly defined goals/conflicts and on the level of localized events. According to Costikyan (2000), “a story is a controlled experience; the author consciously crafts it, choosing certain events precisely, in a certain order, to create a story with maximum impact.”

Adams (1999) writes, “a good story hangs together the way a good jigsaw puzzle hangs together. When you pick it up, every piece is locked tightly in place next to its neighbors.”

 

However, spatial stories are often referred as episodic in which interactivity can become compelling by itself without contributing to the plot development. Spatial stories are connected by widely defined goals and conflicts and driven forward by the character’s actions across the game map. Therefore, it necessitates designing the environment of the imaginary worlds, so that obstacles prohibit and affordances facilitate the player’s forward movement towards the resolution.

 

EMBEDDED NARRATIVE

 

Bordwell (1989) states that narrative comprehension is a dynamic process by which spectators accumulate and make their hypotheses about the probable narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual clues and cues. While watching a movie, the audiences check and redevelop their mental plot of the narrative action and the story space. While playing the game, players are often strained to act upon the mental plots to test them with the game world itself. The game space becomes a reminiscence palace and their contents must be decoded as the player tries to restructure the plot. For example, in first person shooter game, a wrong step may result in getting blown away or end/restart of the game.

 

There is a large amount of interest in the intersection of games and stories.  Various Journals, Conferences, Books, Courses talk about computer-based story telling and digital interactivity creating flourished gaming culture. Designers, Artists, Technologists, Academics approach differently to the question of “Games and Stories.”  Zimmerman discusses this terminological join of the “game-story” by meddling apart and recombining the two concepts into four: narrative, interactivity, play, and games. All these four concepts overlap and intersect each other in unique and complex ways. However, it serves as clusters of concepts, frames and schemas, dynamic conceptual tools and network of ideas flowing in and out of each other.

 

NARRATIVE

 

Zimmerman refers to Hillis (1995), and paraphrases “Narrative” as follows:

“A narrative has an initial stage, a change in that state, and insight brought about that change. You might call this process the “Events” of a narrative.”

 

“A narrative is not merely a series of events, but a personification of events through a medium such as language. This component of the definition references the representational aspect of narrative.”

 

“This representation is constituted by “patterning and repetition”. This is true for every level of narrative, whether it is the material form of the narrative itself or its conceptual thematics.”

 

According to these criteria, a game of chess could be considered as a narrative. Before starting the game, the setup represents the initial state. As the game proceeds, the state gets changed (gameplay) followed by resulting insight (outcome).  This game also constitutes patterning and repetition by timely turns on the checkerboard grid. This representation has stylized war with a cast of colorful characters.

 

INTERACTIVITY

 

The term interactive means “reciprocally active; acting upon or influencing each other; allowing a two way flow of information between a device and a user, responding to the user’s input.”

Zimmerman subdivides “interactivity” in different ways which can be paired together with a narrative experience. The four modes of narrative interactivity are:

 

Mode 1: Cognitive Interactivity; or Interpretive Participation with a Text.

When we reread a book after several years we may find this book completely different than the book we remembered. This is due to psychological, emotional, hermeneutic, semiotic reader-response.

 

Mode 2: Functional Interactivity; or Utilitarian Participation with a Text.

This is structural interactions with material textual apparatus such as table of contents, index, graphical design of a page, weight and thickness of a book.

 

Mode 3: Explicit Interactivity; or Participation with Designed Choices and Procedures in a Text.

Example of this interactivity is clicking the nonlinear links of a hypertext novel.

 

Mode 4: Meta-interactivity; or Cultural Participation with a Text

Example:  In fan culture readers deconstruct, reconstruct, appropriate linear media, participating and propagating large communal.

 

Majority of the interactive activities include some (reading a newspaper) of the four modes or all (playing games) of them simultaneously.

 

PLAY

 

Play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure. Play exists both because of an also despite the more rigid structures of a system.

The play phenomena can be categorized in three general categories:

Category 1: Game play, or the formal play of the games.

Game played by more than one player.

Category 2: Ludic Activities, or Informal Play

This is a non game behavior, such as, tossing a Frisbee back.

Category 3: Being Playful, or being in a Play State of Mind.

It is injecting a spirit of play into some other action.

 

GAMES

 

“A game is voluntary interactive activity, in which one or more players follow rules that constrain their behavior, enacting an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome.” The primary elements of game are Voluntary, Interactive, Behavior Constraining Rules, Artificiality, Conflict and Quantifiable Outcome.

 

By mixing and matching Narrative, Interactivity, Play it is possible to frame games as narrative systems, interactive systems or systems of play.

 

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Additional Resources

 

 

Figure 1: World of Warcraft, Blizzard/Vivendi Entertainment, 2004.

Video from Youtube.com.  Tauren introduction.  An example of metastoryin action.  Each race within the game

has a unique opening clip, giving players contextual information about their chosen race’s role in the

game world.

 

  

  Figure 2: World of Warcraft, Blizzard/Vivendi Entertainment, 2004.

Video from Youtube.com.  Gnome introduction.  A parallel example of metastory, taken from another

race’s perspective.

 

 

 

Figure 3: World of Warcraft, Blizzard/Vivendi Entertainment, 2004.

 

Video from Youtube.com.  Orc introduction.  Another parallel example ofmetastory, taken

from yet another race’s perspective.

 

 Figure 4: World of Warcraft, Blizzard/Vivendi Entertainment, 2004.

 

Avenue Q soundtrack, , 2004.  Video from Youtube.com.  Pearce’s idea ofa story system.  In this video,

players have taken clips of staged characters in the World of Warcraft environment, filmed them using

pre-programmed emotes (such as the waving, dancing, and “Princeton” theTauren blushing and dragging his

hoof behind him), and then edited themto sync with a song from the musical, Avenue Q.  Players ended up using

the game environment to create (or at least reframe) a story.

 

Figure 5: Phantasy Star 2, SEGA of America, 1989.

 

Video from Youtube.com.  Event time versus play time.  This is the final battle between the player’s

party, and the lead villain, Mother Brain.  In this RPG, players have the option to attack with characters’

defaults moves(the FGHT box) or declare moves and attacks for individuals (the STGY box).  As this is the

final battle, the third choice, fleeing, is not possible.  While players make their decisions, the fight

is essentially halted.  Mother Brain cannot harm or attack the players.  Once the player finishes his or

her choices, the attacks then play out in turn-based playtime, before returning to the player for the next

sequence of event time.

 

Figure 6: World of Warcraft, Blizzard/Vivendi Entertainment, 2004.

 

Video from Youtube.com.  Play time versus event time.  In this game,play time and event time happen

in a proportional manner—real time.There are no pausing mechanisms in combat—only the qualities of

speed associated with characters’ respective attributes. 

 

Figure 7: Mark Meadows: artificial intelligence, design and psychology, 2006

 

Video from Youtube.com.  Mark Meadows, the author of the book “Pause and Effect, 2002” describes the

emerging trends and contemplates the most likely future for the game and AI industries.

 

 

 

 

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References

 

Adams (1999). Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers. Retrieved July 5^th, 2007 from

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/designers_notebook/19991299.htm

 

Bordwell, D., Janet, S., and Kristen, T. (1985). The Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press

 

Costikyan, G. (2000). Where Stories End and Games Begin. Retrieved July 3^rd, 2007 from http://www.costik.com/gamnstry.html

 

Hillis, M., J. (1995). Narrative. In Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Thomas McLaughlin and Frank Lentriccia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Jenkins, H. (2004). Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Pat, H. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

 

Juul, J. (2004). Introduction to Game Time. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Pat, H.  First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

 

Laurel, B. (1991). Two Selections.  In Computers as theatre, Boston, MA, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.,

 

Pearce, C. (2004). Towards a Game Theory of Game. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Pat, H. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

 

Zimmerman, E. (2004). Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline. In Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Pat, H.  First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

 

Wardrip-Fruin, N., and Pat, H. “Part IV- Game Theories,” First Person: New Media As Story, Performance, and Game, MIT Press, 2004.

 

 

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