[October 20th, 2009]
Aarseth/ Harrell/ Murray - games and narrative
Posted by Michael
It is a very academic minefield: the discussion whether games tell stories or not. As I am right now sitting in a reprise of the 1999 debate at DAC between Aarseth and Murray it dawned to me that a Machinima producer probably merely shakes her head hearing a discussion like that. This will be only a short live (not sure this stream will work later) summary of the event at Tech and not a full recap. But one should know that in Game Studies, this discussion has been a reliable and somewhat repetitive draw for years. See this 2001 match up:
For somebody who lived somehow parallel to this “match”, it is exciting to hear Aarseth referencing narratology, characters, movies (!), and narrative spaces. Definitely a change of vocabulary, although he himself argues that it is not necessarily a change in his position but a “deepening.” A long version of his current position can be found here. In his short talk here at Tech he seems to focus on characterization. Another element that becomes clear is that the hot air of the old fight has evaporated and we are on much less confrontational grounds now.
Aarseth stays true to his trade: talking about structures and narratology as a matrix we can use to analyze. Fox Harrell offers a more associative idea of “phantasmata” where some part of the image remains withdrawn and mysterious. And he looks at that through the looking glass of cognitive science. The results are less linear, inspired e.g. by Calvino and Jazz music, and pointing to oral traditions instead of literary ones. They might look like this:
Janet Murray talks about “dramatic expectation-setting” and creating suspense in games. She argues that we have to “synchronize” and make sense of events to provide for a valuable story in a game. She distinguishes between “multisequential” structures that have multiple paths and limit the player to experience only one - thus always having other options of the individual moment available in the system. And “multiform” scenarios that live off the variation of a single situation - e.g. Groundhog Day. She counts Mateas’/Stern’s Facade in this second form. Both forms have their own structural elements and key factors but they both rely on dramatic compression. Like Aarseth, she basically closes with a point to future and developing richness and growing media that will show us the way in games and narrative.
Ian Bogost starts the discussion and one discussion point is that “story” might have become a topic itself that needs to be revisited in the cross media/ video game world we live in. Maybe it is not a stable reference point anymore? There are still different perspectives but all seem to embrace the narrative. The debate got a bit more heated over Wittgenstein - which indicates where the whole discussion is situated: deep in academic waters. Thinking about it, with Janet leaning on the understanding and drama and Fox concentrating on cognition, Espen somehow remains as the closest to the traditional idea of “story” as classic narratology describes it. Maybe less surprising than is sounds.
After all, my own musings about narrative in games (like this one or that one) is somewhere inbetween as I think that narrative is basically a form of understanding and we can use game worlds to shape the experience that is understood. With that I am still “parallel” to all three of them.
Posted: October 20th, 2009 under site News.
Comments: 5
[Comments]
Comment from bllius
Time: October 20, 2009, 10:36 pm
What’s the definition of “narrative” with respect to these discussions?
And when you say “whether games tell stories”, what exactly do you mean.
From Wikipedia: “It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means “to recount” and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning “knowing” or “skilled”. (Ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European root gnō-, “to know”.”
Is the game telling the story, or does the gamer experience the story? Does the gamemaker make the story? or does the gamemaker tell the story? or does the gamemaker merely set the dominoes in motion?
Comment from tracy harwood
Time: October 21, 2009, 4:55 pm
I’m no media theorist but I tend to think Bilius is on to something - I tend to think the story is co-created and co-produced by the gamer and the player in an ‘experience environment’? this can also include multiple players when its an MMO or VL. and what of emotion - cognition alone is an unsophisticated concept within this context isn’t it? Fox seems to be implying a deeper emotional response with this ‘fantasy’ comment, despite the apparent ‘lense’? Enjoy DAC Michael!
Comment from Michael
Time: October 21, 2009, 8:09 pm
All good questions - and there is a back and forth between different positions and answers regarding them. One view can be called formalist. Here, the idea is that a narrative consists of a certain amount of relatively defined elements and we can trace the “narrative-ness” in these elements. For example Vladimir Propp identified key elements in Russian fairy tales and was able to re-trace them in these tales again and again until he actually came up with a formula for these elements. Others, like Gerard Genette, work on a higher level but still break down narratives (e.g. in the event/ fabula, the telling of this event, and the resulting story).
On the other hand, the idea of narrative as a form of understanding (and communication) is also out there, e.g. Jerome Bruner is somewhere in that corner.
There is not a single “true” answer to that debate but various different attempts. Some models - like Joseph Campbell’s monomyth - are a bit more prevalent then other; some narrative basics - like Aristotle’s call for closure - are less relevant in modern narratives (like soap operas that keep always parts open as cliffhangers).
My own view is that game designer design experiences. These experiences are all kinds of things (visceral, dramatic, poetic …) and one of the these things is narrative. I do agree that narrative is an important element of sense-making and that the game designer has to foster for that. And I think this can be done relatively elegant through spatial design.
But the discussion on games and narrative has been spread so long and thin that few scholars really want to go back there. Machinima, for me, is a very good example for narrative realization of the design of a game. Players re-tell their experiences or stage new ones in the game worlds and both are signs for a narrative understanding and contextualization of the game world. But there you go …
Oh, and no DAC for me this year - I should be at the ICIDS, though (how fitting: the International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling).
Comment from bllius
Time: October 24, 2009, 9:29 am
Curious to how the brain encodes temporal information. Does the brain tell itself a story to make sense of neural inputs?
Comment from Michael
Time: October 25, 2009, 7:53 pm
I would not go this far. How our neurons actually operate and most definitions of “story” seem to be pretty different things. There is a lot of work on the way that words and descriptions help us to structure and develop thoughts. See Turner’s The Literary Mind, for example.
Write a comment: