LCC 63174720 Interactive Narrative Lecture 4

1
LCC 6317/4720 Interactive NarrativeLecture 4

• January 25, 2005

2
The pleasures

• Immersion the pleasurable experience of being
  transported to a represented space
• Agency the pleasurable experience of taking
  meaningful action in the world
• Transformation the pleasurable experience of
  being transformed into someone else
• Affordances of the medium vs. player experience

3
Immersion maintaining the liminal trance
representation
reality

• Must keep virtual space real by keeping it not
  there
• Narrative art forms maintain liminal trance
  by prohibiting participation

4
Structuring participation as a visit

• Control participation by limiting it via the
  visit metaphor
• E.g. amusement park ride

In short, there is almost nothing to distract
you in Myst from the densely textured visual and
aural environment, but this intense immersion in
visiting the place comes at the cost of
diminished immersion in the unfolding story.

• Participatory immersion makes us want to do more
  than travel through a world

5
Active creation of belief

• Borrow the reality of cognitive, social, and
  cultural templates
• In interactive worlds, provide manipulable
  objects
• They become real through use
• This is a moving target magical objects become
  naturalized over time

6
Structuring participation with a mask or role

• The expressive resources of an avatar provide
  affordances for action
• The avatar (mask) may explicitly code a social
  role
• I see role as a kind of mask with an emphasis on
  mutual belief creation

7
Presentation mechanics regulating arousal

• Arousal must not become excessive, or we collapse
  into the real
• Presentation mechanics creates a necessary
  distance
• Examples LARP mechanics, actions in MUDs

8
Agency

• Agency is not mere interactivity
• Murray
• Actions are autonomous
• Selected from a wide range of options
• Wholly determine course
• Interpretive intentional affordance
• Agency most commonly experienced in games

9
The pleasure of navigation

• Navigating in space is intrinsically pleasurable
• The maze story adventure games
• The rhizome hypertext
• The labyrinth halfway house

10
The maze story

• Zork-like adventure games
• Physical navigation

However, there is a drawback to the maze
orientation it moves the interactor towards a
single solution, towards a single way out
11
Rhizome

• The hypertext novel
• Navigation through text (lexia)

In trying to create texts that do not
privilege any one order of reading or
interpretive framework, the postmodernists are
privileging confusion itself.
12
Labyrinth

• Also adventure games (IF) and hypertext?
• Halfway house between the maze and the rhizome

13
The journey story

• Whats the difference between this and the maze
  story?
• Is the maze story a special case of the journey
  story?
• Possible distinction Journey stories emphasize
  problem solving
• But most maze stories have puzzles?

14
Games into stories

• Some properties of games
• Mastery of skill
• Goal-based
• Distinct winning/losing configurations
• Games are the canonical representational form
  offering agency
• What could story-games look like? How can we
  resolve the tensions?

15
Games as symbolic dramas

• Some plots of games
• I encounter a confusing world and figure it out
• I encounter a challenging skill or strategy and
  succeed at it
• I encounter a difficult antagonist and triumph
  over him
• The contest story e.g. Pacman, Pong, Doom
• Does this expand narrative to the point of
  vacuity

16
The infamous Tetris example
The game is a perfect enactment of the
overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s of
the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our
attention and that we must somehow fit into our
overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in
order to make room for the next onslaught.
17
Constructivism

• Increase agency by building objects
• MUDs point to a richer repertoire
  representation of action

18
The interactor as author - NOT

• Agency is not authorship
• The author still has a privileged role
• The ultimate participatory new-media work

19
Transformation

• The pleasure of becoming someone else
• Transformation as masquerade player transforms
  herself into someone else
• Transformation as variety a multitude of
  variations on a theme
• Personal transformation the experience takes
  the player on a journey of personal transformation

20
Kaleidoscopic narratives

• Multiple intersecting plot lines
• What does this have to do with transformation?

21
Transformation through variety

• The morphing story environment
• Constructivist framework providing story pieces
• The Bronte siblings
• Television serials
• Exhaust the formulaic possibilities, and thus
  move beyond them

22
Personal transformation through enactment

• Digital environments provide a space in which to
  safely enact roles
• Virtual reality therapy but is this narrative?
• Not effective when not real enough or too real
• Hypothesis constructivist environments offer
  more possibilities for moving beyond destructive
  patterns but narrative?

23
Refused closure

• Digital story environments often lack a clear,
  definitive closure
• Electronic closure involves understanding
  structure rather than plot
• Suicide examples of electronic closure
• What does this have to do with transformation?

24
Simulation narratives

• Procedural medium is fundamentally about process

Whereas novels allow us to explore character and
drama allows us to explore action, simulation
narrative can allow us to explore process.