Video Games and Literary Narrative

1
Video Games and Literary Narrative

• Tony Wilson
• Spring 2005

2
Literature Defined

• 1. literature -- (creative writing of recognized
  artistic value)
• 2. literature, lit -- (the humanistic study of a
  body of literature "he took a course in Russian
  lit")
• 3. literature -- (published writings in a
  particular style on a particular subject "the
  technical literature" "one aspect of Waterloo
  has not yet been treated in the literature")
• 4. literature -- (the profession or art of a
  writer "her place in literature is secure")
• http//www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stag
  e1wordliterature

3
Narrative Defined

• Includes productions with a primary objective
  to entertain through fiction or drama.
  Productions such as soap operas and situation
  comedies may be entered in this category.
• beaweb.org/festival/definitions.html
• Telling a story. Ballads, epics, and lays are
  different kinds of narrative poems.
• www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903237.html
• The story told by a scene. Scenes should have a
  clear beginning, middle and end.
• www.improvcomedy.org/glossary.html
• A choreographic form which follows a storyline
  and conveys specific meaning through that story.
• www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/dance810/apf.htm
• Narrative tells the story by giving us the
  events in a logical or an orderly way
• www.northern.edu/benkertl/short_fiction_dictionary
  .html
• (n.) a story writing in which details are
  presented in the order in which they happened
  (adj.) having the qualities of a story
• highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072480033/student_
  view0/glossary.html
• The telling of a story in class, also the
  organization of that telling, or how the narrator
  structures the plot.
• www.viterbo.edu/personalpages/faculty/jwood/vocabu
  lary20page.htm

4
Narrative Defined (2)

• Narrative is that which deals with the
  vicissitudes of intention. -- Bruner
• Intention is immediately and intuitively
  recognizable...
• Narratives... are about connectedness, sequence,
  and order
• qualities inextricably linked to the way we view
  the world around us.
• Human perception is biased...toward seeing
  causality and intention even where these
  qualities may not exist.
• Perception works by erasing noise ... enabling
  us to hear only want we perceive as meaningful
  and to ignore anything extraneous which
  intrudes.
• Douglas, J.Y. Gaps Maps and Perception

5
Narrative and Hypertext

• A single, inevitable sequence is no longer
  determined by the author.
• Linkage replaces sequence
• Even the most realistic print narratives have
  gapsnot everything can be explained or
  delineated in a finite time.
• In hypertext, the gaps may threaten to engulf
  any glimmerings of coherence.
• Douglas

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Narrative and Hypertext (2)

• Two Kinds of Reading and Readers
• Inner-Directed
• Redefine their reading role by
• New ways of navigating narrative space
• Or, revising their concept of closure
• Other-Directed
• Stay with established reading practices
• See hypertext and similar literature as
  frustrating failures
• Douglas

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Narrative and Hypertext (3)

• With their lack of conventional closure, their
  indeterminacies, ambiguities, and representations
  of mutually exclusive occurrences, interactive
  narratives will...do little more than befuddle
  other-directed readers.
• Douglas

8
Narrative and Hypertext (4)

• These new and alien narratives seem to require
  readers to both immerse themselves in the
  narrative webs of possibility and to extricate
  themselves from it, in order to grasp at a sense
  of the narrative as a totality, as a structure of
  possible structures.
• Douglas

9
Narrative and Hypertext (5)

• Hypertexted literature demands that we become
  readers who move beyond simply realizing an
  author's virtual text and resist authorial
  prescription to arrive at reading of our own.
• Douglas

10
William Kittredge Taking Care Thoughts on
Storytelling and Belief

• I took a class in short story writing taught by
  Bernard Malamud who wanted us to write stories
  that turned on recognitions, moments of
  enlightenment...
• I thought the notion was utterly false.
• ...Malamud said stories were about change.
• What I wanted to write about were moments when
  nothing changed.

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William Kittredge Taking Care Thoughts on
Storytelling and Belief (2)

• We live in stories.

12
William Kittredge Taking Care Thoughts on
Storytelling and Belief (3)

• What we are is stories.

13
William Kittredge Taking Care Thoughts on
Storytelling and Belief (4)

• We do things because of what we call character,
  and our character is formed by the stories we
  learn to live in.
• Late in the night we listen to our own breathing
  in the dark and rework our stories.
• We do it again the next morning, and all day
  long, before the looking glass of ourselves,
• Reinventing reasons for our lives.
• Other than such storytelling there is no reason
  to things.

14
David Kaplan The Story of Technology

• ...a circle exists between human experience and
  narration experience has a pre-narrative quality
  that is meaningfully and and coherently organized
  into a story by means of a plot.

15
David Kaplan The Story of Technology (2)

• Time becomes human time to the extent that it is
  organized after the manner of a narrative
  narrative , in turn, is meaningful to the extent
  that it portrays the features of temporal
  existence.

16
David Kaplan The Story of Technology (3)

• A plot is the glue that holds the story together.
  It picks out, orders, and assigns significance to
  otherwise random and disparate elements by
  arranging them into an intelligible whole.
• The most thorough way to understand an action or
  event is to link it with other actions and events
  by means of a plot.
• This structuring activity is what gives a story
  its meaning and what makes its point.

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Marc Saporta Composition No. 1

• A box with 150 loose leaves including a title
  page.
• To be shuffled and read in random order.
• Whether the story ends well or badly depends on
  the concatenation of circumstances.
• Each page is a self contained element...
• Everything occurs in the present tense. There is
  no past or future, just continuous disjointed
  present, ... all those voices speaking at once...
• Often cited as a precursor to hypertext fiction.

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Marc Saporta Composition No. 1
19
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths

• Then I reflected that everything that happens to
  a man happens to a man precisely, precisely now.
• Centuries of centuries and only in the present do
  things happen countless men in the air, on the
  face of the earth and the sea, and all that is
  happening is happening to me...

20
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (2)

• The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to
  imagine that he has already accomplished it,
  ought to impose on himself a future as
  irrevocable as the past.

21
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (3)

• Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?
• The house is a long way from here but you won't
  get lost if you take this road to the left and at
  every crossroads turn again to your left.

22
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (4)

• The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road
  descended and forked among the now confused
  meadows.
• A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached
  and receded in the shifting of the wind, dimmed
  by leaves and distance.

23
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (5)

• I thought that a man can be an enemy of other
  men, of the moments of other men, but not of a
  country not of fireflies, woods, gardens,
  streams of water, sunsets.

24
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (6)

• In all fictional works, each time a man is
  confronted with several alternatives, he chooses
  one and eliminates the others in the fiction of
  Ts'ui he choosessimultaneously--all of them.
• He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse
  times which themselves also proliferate and fork.

25
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (7)

• Fang, let us say, has a secret a stranger calls
  at his door Fang resolves to kill him.
• Naturally there are several possible outcomes
• Fang can kill the intruder,
• The intruder can kill fang,
• They can both escape,
• They can both die,
• And so forth.

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Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (8)

• In the work of Ts'ui Pen, all possible outcomes
  occur each one is the point of departure for
  other forkings.

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Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (9)

• Sometimes the paths of this labyrinth converge
• For example, you arrive at this house, but in one
  of the possible paths
• You are my enemy,
• In another,
• My friend.

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Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (10)

• He read with slow precision two versions of the
  same epic chapter.

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Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (11)

• In the first, an army marches to battle across a
  lonely mountain the horror of the rocks and
  shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and
  they gain an easy victory.

30
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (12)

• In the second, the same army traverses a palace
  where a great festival is taking place the
  resplendent battle seems to them a continuation
  of the celebration and they win the victory.

31
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (13)

• I remember the last words, repeated in each
  version like a secret commandment
• Thus fought the heroes, tranquil in their
  admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned
  to kill and to die.

32
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (14)

• Time forks perpetually toward innumerable
  futures.
• In one of them I am your enemy.

33
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology

• Places games in the tradition of narrative
  literature
• Addresses three problem areas
• Dichotomy of text and code
• Interactivity
• Narrative

34
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (2)

• Games as literature should be studied from the
  perspective of the interface, not by dissecting
  the underlying code.

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Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (3)

• Rather than telling a good story, the player is
  given a liberty to explore and understand the
  structure of the unreal game world...
• Focus shifts from the temporal sequence of
  individual events to the spacial organization of
  the game.
• This has given rise to analysis concentrating
  on...the production of a sense of place.
• Possible world theory is the most promising
  approach to comparing games and literature.

36
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (4)

• Since the player does not view the code it is
  outside of the game experience
• The player learns how to interact without seeing
  the rules.
• This adaptation is best examined from the
  perspective of radical constructivism or second
  order cybernetics.
• The player constructs viable rules to play the
  game which may have little relation the
  underlying code

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Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (5)

• The blind man who walks through a forest every
  day will construct a mental map that eventually
  becomes viable because it works
• It may have little relation to an actual forest
  and may not even represent trees.

38
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (6)

• In the construcivist model of perception there
  is no objective representation of the world, only
  a constant process of meaning-making.

39
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (7)

• This means that narrative is not an inherent
  feature of games but something merely implemented
  in the game virtually, i.e. as a possibility.
• The actual construction of the narrative is
  always done by the player by taking the signs on
  the interface and interpreting them further.
• Narrative is something that unfolds because of
  the player's attempt to make sense of the game.

40
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (8)

• The player's avatar ...is a component of the
  interface that allows players to identify with
  the events unfolding before their eyes.
• This component resembles Umberto Eco's model
  reader--
• A reader who is ideally suited to actualize a
  given text according to the author's intention.

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Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (9)

• The game must resist the player's attempts to
  solve it.
• The model player is not one who can master the
  game at the first attempt, but a player whose
  abilities expand in the process of playing.
• It is the resistance that allows the player to
  identify with the avatar, to make progress in the
  game, and perceive that progress as narrative
  development.

42
Julian Kucklich Perspecitves of Computer Game
Philology (10)

• The field of game studies is itself a playing
  field, and like all other playing fields, it is
  contested territory.

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Ergotic Literature

• Not relating to grain smut and psychedelics but
  to rooms (dungeons) and sets of rooms with
  one-way doors.
• Once room B has been entered, further choices are
  limited to rooms B, D, and D for example.
• Also Ergodic instead of a narrative constituted
  of a story or plot we get ... ergodic discourse.

44
Jorgen Kirksaether The Structure of Video Game
Narration

• A story is to be told
• You are invited to interact
• It isn't over
• If it was over, there'd be no game
• Without interaction it would be a film
• The start of the story is the bait

45
Jorgen Kirksaether The Structure of Video Game
Narration (2)

• Playing a game involves manipulating a graphic
  interface between the player and the game logic.

46
Jorgen Kirksaether The Structure of Video Game
Narration (3)

• The appeal of games isn't mastering a complicated
  set of controls, but rather submitting to a set
  of rules and trying to accomplish something under
  these rules' restrictions.
• Cyborgs when we play a game are we not
  man-machine hybrids?

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Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer Games

• Literary studies...now include not only
  literature in all its forms and varieties, but
  also films, hypertexts, and forms that explore
  the possibilities of computer and video
  technology.
• But have been dominated by the paradigm of the
  printed text.

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Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (2)

• even in a purely graphical interactive fiction
  the interactor must do some internal reading as
  he or she pieces together the narrative from the
  images displayed.

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Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (3)

• ...many computer games are based on a literary
  genre such as the spy novel.
• ...more important is the fact that there is a
  plot to many computer games a narrative element
  that most traditional games lack.

50
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (4)

• ...within a computer game it becomes almost
  impossible to differentiate between manipulations
  of the objective text and its subjective
  actualization, i.e. between text and reading.

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Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (5)

• Game studies increasing
• Computerspielmuseum in Berlin
• LauraCroftism (event) in Munich
• Computer Games and Digital Textualities
  conference in Copenhagen

52
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (6)

• Game genres
• Action games
• Adventure games
• Role-playing games
• Strategy games
• Differentiated by
• Narrativity
• Openness
• Interactivity

53
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (7)

• Narrativity
• Seems to involve the unfolding of a plot via a
  sequencing of events
• Meets the Aristotelean criteria of
• Beginning
• Middle
• End

54
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (8)

• Openness
• The range of different interactions offered by
  the game

55
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (9)

• Interactivity
• The frequency of the player's interaction with
  this world

56
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (10)
Narrativity
?Role playing games
?Adventure games
?Strategy ?Simulation
?Action
Interactivity
Openness
57
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (11)

• Cites Janet Murray on the three key pleasures
  uniquely intensified by electronic media
• Agency
• Rapture
• Immersion

58
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (11)

• Cites Janet Murray on the three key pleasures
  uniquely intensified by electronic media
• Agency
• Rapture
• Immersion

59
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (12)

• Agency
• Player's sense of control, being able to act
• Involves both narrativity and openness
• Immersion
• Sense of being transported to another reality
• Rapture
• Entranced attachment to objects in that reality
• Delight in having an effect on the electronic
  world possible as a free agent who can make
  choices

60
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (13)

• Agency
• From a combination of
• Interactivity and
• Openness
• Rapture
• From a combination of
• Narrativity and
• Openness
• Immersion
• From a combination of
• Interactivity and
• Narrativity

61
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (14)
Rapture
Immersion
Agency
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Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (15)

• Perspective/Point of view
• Who sees?
• Who speaks?
• Zork You are standing in an open field west of
  a white house...
• Sim City player may identify with the city as a
  whole.

63
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (16)
Database
Simulation Engine
Analysis
Users
World rules
Characters
Other Objects
Representation Engine
Synthesis
World Map
64
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (17)

• The preceding diagram shows dialogicinteraction
  in the Bakhtin sense (not monologic).
• An internal normative system is built into the
  code so that good behavior is reinforced and bad
  behavior is punished.
• But due to the dialogic structure of the
  communication process, it is up to the player if
  he subscribes to those values or not.

65
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (18)

• A drastic example for such denial of a game's
  internal values are those players of Ultima
  Online who no longer strive for wealth,
  adventure, or social status, but rather spend
  their time killing other player's characters.
• Contrarily, many Quake-clans subscribe to even
  stricter rules than those supplied by the game's
  code. Thus, ambushing an opponent from a secluded
  spot ... is regarded as dishonorable, even though
  the game's code reinforces such behavior.

66
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (19)

• Playing a computer game is a process of
  demystification...one succeeds by discovering how
  the software is put together.

67
Julian Kucklich Literary Theory and Computer
Games (20)

• Only in becoming aware of the full extent of his
  possibilities can the player master the
  gamesimultaneously breaking the spell of the
  game through the sacrifice of its immersive
  power.

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Citations

• Saporta
• ttp//www.madinkbeard.com/mt/archives/000062.html
• Kittredge, William Taking Care. --Milkweed, 1999
• Borges, Jorge Garden of Forking Paths
  ttp//www.english.swt.edu/cohen_p/avant-garde
  /Literature/Borges/Garden.html
• Kucklich, Julian Perspectives of Computer Game
  Philology
• ttp//www.gamestudies.org/0301/kucklich
• Kucklich, Julian Literary Theory and Computer
  Games. uecklich_at_gmx.de
• Douglas, J. Yellowlees Gaps, Maps, and
  Perception What Hypertext Readers (Don't) Do.
• Kaplan, David The Story of Technology
• http//pages.drexel.edu/pa34/KAPLAN.htm