- GAME DESIGN
AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
By Henry Jenkins
The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question
among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic
Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to
erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the
focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists,
who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling
media.(1) Consider some
recent statements made on this issue:
"Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative
flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends
on the player for motive power" --Ernest Adams (2)
"There is a direct, immediate conflict between the demands
of a story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's
path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting
a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying
game." --Greg Costikyan (3)
"Computer games are not narratives....Rather the narrative
tends to be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness
of the game." --Jesper Juul (4)
"Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making
distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball
at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling
stories."
--Markku Eskelinen (5)
I find myself responding to this perspective with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, I understand what these writers are arguing against
- various attempts to map traditional narrative structures ("hypertext,"
"Interactive Cinema," "nonlinear narrative") onto
games at the expense of an attention to their specificity as an emerging
mode of entertainment. You say narrative to the average gamer and
what they are apt to imagine is something on the order of a choose-your-own
adventure book, a form noted for its lifelessness and mechanical exposition
rather than enthralling entertainment, thematic sophistication, or
character complexity. And game industry executives are perhaps justly
skeptical that they have much to learn from the resolutely unpopular
(and often overtly antipopular) aesthetics promoted by hypertext theorists.
The application of film theory to games can seem heavy-handed and
literal minded, often failing to recognize the profound differences
between the two media. Yet, at the same time, there is a tremendous
amount that game designers and critics could learn through making
meaningful comparisons with other storytelling media. One gets rid
of narrative as a framework for thinking about games only at one's
own risk. In this short piece, I hope to offer a middle ground position
between the ludologists and the narratologists, one that respects
the particularity of this emerging medium - examining games less as
stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility.
Let's start at some points where we might all agree:
-
1) Not all games tell stories. Games may be an abstract, expressive,
and experiential form, closer to music or modern dance than to cinema.
Some ballets (The Nutcracker for example) tell stories, but
storytelling isn't an intrinsic or defining feature of dance. Similarly,
many of my own favorite games - Tetris, Blix, Snood - are simple
graphic games that do not lend themselves very well to narrative exposition.(6)
To understand such games, we need other terms and concepts beyond
narrative, including interface design and expressive movement for
starters. The last thing we want to do is to reign in the creative
experimentation that needs to occur in the earlier years of a medium's
development.
-
2)Many games do have narrative aspirations. Minimally, they
want to tap the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences.
Often, they depend on our familiarity with the roles and goals of
genre entertainment to orientate us to the action, and in many cases,
game designers want to create a series of narrative experiences for
the player. Given those narrative aspirations, it seems reasonable
to suggest that some understanding of how games relate to narrative
is necessary before we understand the aesthetics of game design or
the nature of contemporary game culture.
-
3) Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive, even if some narratologist
- Janet Murray is the most oft cited example - do seem to be advocating
for games to pursue particular narrative forms. There is not one future
of games. The goal should be to foster diversification of genres,
aesthetics, and audiences, to open gamers to the broadest possible
range of experiences. The past few years has been one of enormous
creative experimentation and innovation within the games industry,
as might be represented by a list of some of the groundbreaking titles.
The Sims, Black and White, Majestic, Shenmue;
each represents profoundly different concepts of what makes for compelling
game play. A discussion of the narrative potentials of games need
not imply a privileging of storytelling over all the other possible
things games can do, even if we might suggest that if game designers
are going to tell stories, they should tell them well. In order to
do that, game designers, who are most often schooled in computer science
or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary of
narrative theory.
-
4) The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to
the experience of a story. Many other factors which have little or
nothing to do with storytelling per se contribute to the development
of a great games and we need to significantly broaden our critical
vocabulary for talking about games to deal more fully with those other
topics. Here, the ludologist's insistence that game scholars focus
more attention on the mechanics of game play seems totally in order.
5) If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in
the same ways that other media tell stories. Stories are not empty
content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another. One
would be hard-pressed, for example, to translate the internal dialogue
of Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past into a compelling
cinematic experience and the tight control over viewer experience
which Hitchcock achieves in his suspense films would be directly antithetical
to the aesthetics of good game design. We must, therefore, be attentive
to the particularity of games as a medium, specifically what distinguishes
them from other narrative traditions. Yet, in order to do so requires
precise comparisons - not the mapping of old models onto games but
a testing of those models against existing games to determine what
features they share with other media and how they differ.
Much of the writing in the ludologist tradition is unduly polemical:
they are so busy trying to pull game designers out of their "cinema
envy" or define a field where no hypertext theorist dare to venture
that they are prematurely dismissing the use value of narrative for understanding
their desired object of study. For my money, a series of conceptual blind
spots prevent them from developing a full understanding of the interplay
between narrative and games. First, the discussion operates with too narrow
a model of narrative, one preoccupied with the rules and conventions of
classical linear storytelling at the expense of consideration of other
kinds of narratives, not only the modernist and postmodernist experimentation
that inspired the hypertext theorists, but also popular traditions which
emphasize spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to
balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle.(7)
Second, the discussion operates with too limited an understanding of narration,
focusing more on the activities and aspirations of the storyteller and
too little on the process of narrative comprehension.(8)
Third, the discussion deals only with the question of whether whole games
tell stories and not whether narrative elements might enter games at a
more localized level. Finally, the discussion assumes that narratives
must be self-contained rather than understanding games as serving some
specific functions within a new transmedia storytelling environment. Rethinking
each of these issues might lead us to a new understanding of the relationship
between games and stories. Specifically, I want to introduce an important
third term into this discussion - spatiality - and argue for an understanding
of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.
SPATIAL STORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL
STORYTELLING
Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt
spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have
historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting
or character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games might
take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games, both preoccupied
with the design of spaces, even where they also provided some narrative
context. Monopoly, for example, may tell a narrative about how
fortunes are won and lost; the individual Chance cards may provide some
story pretext for our gaining or losing a certain number of places; but
ultimately, what we remember is the experience of moving around the board
and landing on someone's real estate. Performance theorists have described
RPGs as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master's
activities start with designing the space - the dungeon - where the players'
quest will take place. Even many of the early text-based games, such as
Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of
stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling
spaces: "You are facing the north side of a white house. There is
no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow
path winds through the trees." The early Nintendo games have simple
narrative hooks - rescue Princess Toadstool - but what gamers found astonishing
when they first played them were their complex and imaginative graphic
realms, which were so much more sophisticated than the simple grids that
Pong or Pac-Man had offered us a decade earlier. When we
refer to such influential early works as Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario
Bros. as "scroll games," we situate them alongside a much
older tradition of spatial storytelling: many Japanese scroll paintings
map, for example, the passing of the seasons onto an unfolding space.
When you adopt a film into a game, the process typically involves translating
events in the film into environments within the game. When gamer magazines
want to describe the experience of gameplay, they are more likely to reproduce
maps of the game world than to recount their narratives.(9)
Before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about
game spaces. Across a series of essays, I have made the case that game
consoles should be regarded as machines for generating compelling spaces,
that their virtual playspaces have helped to compensate for the declining
place of the traditional backyard in contemporary boy culture, and that
the core narratives behind many games center around the struggle to explore,
map, and master contested spaces.(10)
Communications in Cyberspace (New York: Sage, 1994); Henry Jenkins,
"'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Playspace,"
in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Ed.) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat:
Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Here, I want
to broaden that discussion further to consider in what ways the structuring
of game space facilitates different kinds of narrative experiences.
As such, games fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which
have often taken the form of hero's odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives.(11)
The best works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Homer, L. Frank Baum, or
Jack London fall loosely within this tradition, as does, for example,
the sequence in War and Peace which describes Pierre's aimless
wanderings across the battlefield at Borodino. Often, such works exist
on the outer borders of literature. They are much loved by readers, to
be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely
figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has
science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making
at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers
seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished
in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards
defined around classically-constructed novels. In many cases, the characters
- our guides through these richly-developed worlds - are stripped down
to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment
into a series of episodes and encounters. When game designers draw story
elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap
those genres - fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war - which
are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling. Games, in
turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a
much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds.
Anyone who doubts that Tolstoy might have achieved his true calling as
a game designer should reread the final segment of War and Peace
where he works through how a series of alternative choices might have
reversed the outcome of Napoleon's Russian campaign. The passage is dead
weight in the context of a novel, yet it outlines ideas which could be
easily communicated in a god game like Civilization.
Don Carson, who worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering,
has argued that game designers can learn a great deal by studying techniques
of "environmental storytelling" which Disney employs in designing
amusement park attractions. Carson explains, "The story element is
infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is
the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the
designers are trying to tell....Armed only with their own knowledge of
the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience
is ripe to be dropped into your adventure. The trick is to play on those
memories and expectations to heighten the thrill of venturing into your
created universe."(12)
The amusement park attraction doesn't so much reproduce the story of a
literary work, such as The Wind in the Willows, as it evokes its
atmosphere; the original story provides "a set of rules that will
guide the design and project team to a common goal" and which will
help give structure and meaning to the visitor's experience. If, for example,
the attraction centers around pirates, Carson writes, "every texture
you use, every sound you play, every turn in the road should reinforce
the concept of pirates," while any contradictory element may shatter
the sense of immersion into this narrative universe. The same might be
said for a game like Sea Dogs which, no less than The Pirates
of the Caribbean, depends on its ability to map our pre-existing pirate
fantasies. The most significant difference is that amusement park designers
count on visitors keeping their hands and arms in the car at all times
and thus have a greater control in shaping our total experience, whereas
game designers have to develop worlds where we can touch, grab, and fling
things about at will.
Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive
narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can
evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging
ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information
within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.
EVOCATIVE SPACES
The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or genre
traditions already well known to visitors, allowing them to enter physically
into spaces they have visited many times before in their fantasies. These
attractions may either remediate a pre-existing story (Back to the
Future) or draw upon a broadly shared genre tradition (Disney's Haunted
Mansion). Such works do not so much tell self-contained stories as draw
upon our previously existing narrative competencies. They can paint their
worlds in fairly broad outlines and count on the visitor/player to do
the rest. Something similar might be said of many games. For example,
American McGee's Alice is an original interpretation of Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland. Alice has been pushed into madness after years
of living with uncertainty about whether her Wonderland experiences were
real or hallucinations; now, she's come back into this world and is looking
for blood. McGee's wonderland is not a whimsical dreamscape but a dark
nightmare realm. McGee can safely assume that players start the game with
a pretty well-developed mental map of the spaces, characters, and situations
associated with Carroll's fictional universe and that they will read his
distorted and often monstrous images against the background of mental
images formed from previous encounters with storybook illustrations and
Disney movies. McGee rewrites Alice's story, in large part, by redesigning
Alice's spaces.
Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests, "you clearly
can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game,"
where-as a film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines
of the plot.(13) This is
a pretty old fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly,
we inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less
on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing
to a larger narrative economy. The Star Wars game may not simply
retell the story of Star Wars, but it doesn't have to in order
to enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga. We already
know the story before we even buy the game and would be frustrated if
all it offered us was a regurgitation of the original film experience.
Rather, the Star Wars game exists in dialogue with the films, conveying
new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation of environmental
details. One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative
system with story information communicated through books, film, television,
comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each relatively
autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world
coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels.
In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around
their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of
the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through
and interact with.
ENACTING STORIES
Most often, when we discuss games as stories, we are referring to games
that either enable players to perform or witness narrative events - for
example, to grab a lightsabre and dispatch Darth Maul in the case of a
Star Wars game. Narrative enters such games on two levels - in
terms of broadly defined goals or conflicts and on the level of localized
incidents.
Many game critics assume that all stories must be classically constructed
with each element tightly integrated into the overall plot trajectory.
Costikyan writes, for example, that "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."(14)
Adams claims, "a good story hangs together the way a good jigsaw
puzzle hangs together. When you pick it up, every piece locked tightly
in place next to its neighbors."(15)
Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic -
that is, each episode (or set piece) can become compelling on its own
terms without contributing significantly to the plot development and often,
the episodes could have been reordered without significantly impacting
our experience as a whole. There may be broad movements or series of stages
within the story, as Troy Dunniway suggests when he draws parallels between
the stages in the Hero's journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell and the
levels of a classic adventure game, but within each stage, the sequencing
of actions may be quite loose.(16)
Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories
which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial
exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by
broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's
movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player's
reaching their final destination, though, as Mary Fuller notes, not all
travel narratives end successfully or resolve the narrative enigmas which
set them into motion.(17)
Once again, we are back to principles of "environmental storytelling."
The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography
of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate
the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution. Over the past several
decades, game designers have become more and more adept at setting and
varying the rhythm of game play through features of the game space.
Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident, or
what I am calling micronarratives. We might understand how micronarratives
work by thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's
Battleship Potempkin. First, recognize that, whatever its serious
moral tone, the scene basically deals with the same kind of material as
most games - the steps are a contested space with one group (the peasants)
trying to advance up and another (the Cossacks) moving down. Eisenstein
intensifies our emotional engagement with this large scale conflict through
a series of short narrative units. The woman with the baby carriage is
perhaps the best-known of those micronarratives. Each of these units builds
upon stock characters or situations drawn from the repertoire of melodrama.
None of them last more than a few seconds, though Eisenstein prolongs
them (and intensifies their emotional impact) through crosscutting between
multiple incidents. Eisenstein used the term, "attraction,"
to describe such emotionally-packed elements in his work; contemporary
game designers might call them "memorable moments." Just as
some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed
in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding
game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions,
broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound
emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicate
across and through these discrete elements. Even games which do not create
large-scale plot trajectories may well depend on these micronarratives
to shape the player's emotional experience. Micronarratives may be cut
scenes, but they don't have to be. One can imagine a simple sequence of
preprogrammed actions through which an opposing player responds to your
successful touchdown in a football game as a micronarrative.
Game critics often note that the player's participation poses a potential
threat to the narrative construction, where-as the hard rails of the plotting
can overly constrain the "freedom, power, self-expression" associated
with interactivity.(18)
The tension between performance (or game play) and exposition (or story)
is far from unique to games. The pleasures of popular culture often center
around spectacular performance numbers and self-contained set pieces.
It makes no sense to describe musical numbers or gag sequences or action
scenes as disruptions of the film's plots: the reason we go to see a kung
fu movie is to see Jackie Chan show his stuff.(19)
Yet, few films consist simply of such moments, typically falling back
on some broad narrative exposition to create a framework within which
localized actions become meaningful.(20)
We might describe musicals, action films or slapstick comedies as having
accordion-like structures. Certain plot points are fixed where-as other
moments can be expanded or contracted in response to audience feedback
without serious consequences to the overall plot. The introduction needs
to establish the character's goals or explain the basic conflict; the
conclusion needs to show the successful completion of those goals or the
final defeat of the antagonist. In commedia del arte, for example, the
masks define the relationships between the characters and give us some
sense of their goals and desires.(21)
The masks set limits on the action, even though the performance as a whole
is created through improvisation. The actors have mastered the possible
moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has
mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain
character actions. No author prescribes what the actors do once they get
on the stage, but the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary
of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical
tradition. Some of the lassi can contribute to the plot development, but
many of them are simple restagings of the basic oppositions (the knave
tricks the master or gets beaten). These performance or spectacle-centered
genres often display a pleasure in process - in the experiences along
the road - that can overwhelm any strong sense of goal or resolution,
while exposition can be experienced as an unwelcome interruption to the
pleasure of performance. Game designers struggle with this same balancing
act - trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework
and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally
derailing the larger narrative trajectory. As inexperienced storytellers,
they often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes,
much as early film makers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles
rather than learning the skills of visual storytelling. Yet, as with any
other aesthetic tradition, game designers are apt to develop craft through
a process of experimentation and refinement of basic narrative devices,
becoming better at shaping narrative experiences without unduly constraining
the space for improvisation within the game.
EMBEDDED NARRATIVES
Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or Syuzhet)
which refers to, in Kristen Thompson's terms, "the structured set
of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself,"
and story (or fabula), which refers to the viewer's mental construction
of the chronology of those events.(22)
Few films or novels are absolutely linear; most make use of some forms
of back story which is revealed gradually as we move through the narrative
action. The detective story is the classic illustration of this principle,
telling two stories - one more or less chronological ( the story of the
investigation itself) and the other told radically out of sequence (the
events motivating and leading up to the murder). According to this model,
narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble
and make hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of
information drawn from textual cues and clues.(23)
As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental
maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are
forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the
game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind
the next door, you will find out soon enough - perhaps by being blown
away and having to start the game over. The heavy-handed exposition that
opens many games serves a useful function in orienting spectators to the
core premises so that they are less likely to make stupid and costly errors
as they first enter into the game world. Some games create a space for
rehearsal, as well, so that we can make sure we understand our character's
potential moves before we come up against the challenges of navigating
narrational space.
Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of
information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control
over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer
can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information
across the game space. Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative
structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly
presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one can not assume
the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any
given element. Game designers have developed a variety of kludges which
allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively salient
spaces. Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built
into a television soap opera, where the assumption is that a certain number
of viewers are apt to miss any given episode, or even in classical Hollywood
narrative, where the law of three suggests that any essential plot point
needs to be communicated in at least three ways.
To continue with the detective example, then, one can imagine the game
designer as developing two kinds of narratives - one relatively unstructured
and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock
its secrets; the other pre-structured but embedded within the mise-en-scene
awaiting discovery. The game world becomes a kind of information space,
a memory palace. Myst is a highly successful example of this kind
of embedded narrative, but embedded narrative does not necessarily require
an emptying of the space of contemporary narrative activities, as a game
like Half Life might suggest. Embedded narrative can and often
does occur within contested spaces. We may have to battle our way past
antagonists, navigate through mazes, or figure out how to pick locks in
order to move through the narratively-impregnated mise-en-scene. Such
a mixture of enacted and embedded narrative elements can allow for a balance
between the flexibility of interactivity and the coherence of a pre-authored
narrative.
Using Quake as an example, Jesper Juuls argues that flashbacks
are impossible within games, because the game play always occurs in real
time.(24) Yet, this is
to confuse story and plot. Games are no more locked into an eternal present
than films are always linear. Many games contain moments of revelation
or artifacts that shed light on past actions. Carson suggests that part
of the art of game design comes in finding artful ways of embedding narrative
information into the environment without destroying its immersiveness
and without giving the player a sensation of being drug around by the
neck: "Staged areas...[can] lead the game player to come to their
own conclusions about a previous event or to suggest a potential danger
just ahead. Some examples include...doors that have been broken open,
traces of a recent explosion, a crashed vehicle, a piano dropped from
a great height, charred remains of a fire."(25)
Players, he argues, can return to a familiar space later in the game and
discover it has been transformed by subsequent (off-screen) events. Clive
Barker's The Undying, for example, creates a powerful sense of back
story in precisely this manner. It is a story of sibling rivalry which
has taken on supernatural dimensions. As we visit each character's space,
we have a sense of the human they once were and the demon they have become.
In Peter Muleneux's Black and White, the player's ethical choices
within the game leave traces on the landscape or reconfigure the physical
appearances of their characters. Here, we might read narrative consequences
off mise-en-scene the same way we read Dorian Grey's debauchery off of
his portrait. Carson describes such narrative devices as "following
Saknussemm," referring to the ways that the protagonists of Jules
Verne's Journey to The Center of the Earth, keep stumbling across
clues and artifacts left behind by a sixteenth Century Icelandic scientist/explorer
Arne Saknussemm, and readers become fascinated to see what they can learn
about his ultimate fate as the travelers come closer to reaching their
intended destination.
Game designers might study melodrama for a better understanding of how
artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant
narrative information. Melodrama depends on the external projection of
internal states, often through costume design, art direction, or lighting
choices. As we enter spaces, we may become overwhelmed with powerful feelings
of loss or nostalgia, especially in those instances where the space has
been transformed by narrative events. Consider, for example, the moment
in Doctor Zhivago when the characters return to the mansion, now
completely deserted and encased in ice, or when Scarlet O'Hara travels
across the scorched remains of her family estate in Gone With the Wind
following the burning of Atlanta. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca,
the title character never appears, but she exerts a powerful influence
over the other characters - especially the second Mrs. DeWinter who must
inhabit a space where every artifact recalls her predecessor. Hitchcock
creates a number of scenes of his protagonist wandering through Rebecca's
space, passing through locked doors, staring at her overwhelming portrait
on the wall, touching her things in drawers, or feeling the texture of
fabrics and curtains. No matter where she goes in the house, she can not
escape Rebecca's memory.
A game like Neil Young's Majestic pushes this notion of embedded
narrative to its logical extreme. Here, the embedded narrative is no longer
contained within the console but rather flows across multiple information
channels. The player's activity consists of sorting through documents,
deciphering codes, making sense of garbled transmissions, moving step
by step towards a fuller understanding of the conspiracy which is the
game's primary narrative focus. We follow links between websites; we get
information through webcasts, faxes, e-mails, and phonecalls. Such an
embedded narrative doesn't require a branching story structure but rather
depends on scrambling the pieces of a linear story and allowing us to
reconstruct the plot through our acts of detection, speculation, exploration,
and decryption. Not surprisingly, most embedded narratives, at present,
take the form of detective or conspiracy stories, since these genres help
to motivate the player's active examination of clues and exploration of
spaces and provide a rationale for our efforts to reconstruct the narrative
of past events. Yet, as my examples above suggest, melodrama provides
another - and as yet largely unexplored - model for how an embedded story
might work, as we read letters and diaries, snoop around in bedroom drawers
and closets, in search of secrets which might shed light on the relationships
between characters.
EMERGENT NARRATIVES
The Sims represents a fourth model of how narrative possibilities
might get mapped onto game space. Emergent narratives are not pre-structured
or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not
as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself. Game worlds,
ultimately, are not real worlds, even those as densely developed as Shenmue
or as geographically expansive as Everquest. Will Wright frequently
describes The Sims as a sandbox or dollhouse game, suggesting that
it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which
players can define their own goals and write their own stories. Yet, unlike
Microsoft Word, the game doesn't open on a blank screen. Most players
come away from spending time with The Sims with some degree of
narrative satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative
possibilities, where each design decision has been made with an eye towards
increasing the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict. The ability
to design our own "skins" encourages players to create characters
who are emotionally significant to them, to rehearse their own relationships
with friends, family or coworkers or to map characters from other fictional
universes onto The Sims. A quick look at the various scrapbooks
players have posted on the web suggests that they have been quick to take
advantage of its relatively open-ended structure. Yet, let's not underestimate
the designers' contributions. The characters have a will of their own,
not always submitting easily to the player's control, as when a depressed
protagonist refuses to seek employment, preferring to spend hour upon
hour soaking in their bath or moping on the front porch. Characters are
given desires, urges, and needs, which can come into conflict with each
other, and thus produce dramatically compelling encounters. Characters
respond emotionally to events in their environment, as when characters
mourn the loss of a loved one. Our choices have consequences, as when
we spend all of our money and have nothing left to buy them food. The
gibberish language and flashing symbols allow us to map our own meanings
onto the conversations, yet the tone of voice and body language can powerfully
express specific emotional states, which encourage us to understand those
interactions within familiar plot situations. The designers have made
choices about what kinds of actions are and are not possible in this world,
such as allowing for same sex kisses, but limiting the degree of explicit
sexual activity that can occur. (Good programers may be able to get around
such restrictions, but most players probably work within the limitations
of the program.)
Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck might describe some of what
Wright accomplishes here as procedural authorship.(26)
Yet, I would argue that his choices go deeper than this, working not simply
through the programming, but also through the design of the game space.
For example, just as a doll house offers a streamlined representation
which cuts out much of the clutter of an actual domestic space, The Sims'
houses are stripped down to only a small number of artifacts, each of
which perform specific kinds of narrative functions. Newspapers, for example,
communicate job information. Characters sleep in beds. Bookcases can make
your smarter. Bottles are for spinning and thus motivating lots of kissing.
Such choices result in a highly legible narrative space. In his classic
study, The Image of The City, Kevin Lynch made the case that urban
designers needed to be more sensitive to the narrative potentials of city
spaces, describing city planning as "the deliberate manipulation
of the world for sensuous ends."(27)
Urban designers exert even less control than game designers over how people
use the spaces they create or what kinds of scenes they stage there. Yet,
some kinds of space lend themselves more readily to narratively memorable
or emotionally meaningful experiences than others. Lynch suggested that
urban planners should not attempt to totally predetermine the uses and
meanings of the spaces they create:"a landscape whose every rock
tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories"(28)
Rather, he proposes an aesthetic of urban design which endows each space
with "poetic and symbolic" potential: "Such a sense of
place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages
the deposit of a memory trace."(29)
Game designers would do well to study Lynch's book, especially as they
move into the production of game platforms which support player-generated
narratives.
In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of
game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of evoked narratives,
spatial design can either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar
world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering
of established details. In the case of enacted narratives, the story itself
may be structured around the character's movement through space and the
features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory.
In the case of embedded narratives, the game space becomes a memory palace
whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the
plot and in the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed
to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity
of players. In each case, it makes sense to think of game designers less
as storytellers than as narrative architects.
(1) The term, Ludology, was coined by Espen Aardseth,
who advocates the emergence of a new field of study, specifically focused
on the study of games and game play, rather than framed through the concerns
of pre-existing disciplines or other media.
(2) Ernest Adams, "Three Problems For Interactive
Storytellers," Gamasutra,
(3) Greg Costikyan, "Where Stories End and Games
Begin," Game Developer, September 2000, pp. 44-53.
(4) Jesper Juul, "A Clash Between Games and Narrative,"
paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Bergen, November
1998, http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DA%20Paper%201998.html. For a more
recent formulation of this same argument, see Jesper Juul, "Games
Telling Stories?", Game Studies, http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/juul-gts
(5) Markku Eskelinen, "The Gaming Situation,"
Game Studies, htttp:cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen
(6) Eskelinen, op cit., takes Janet Murray, Hamlet on
the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997) to task for her narrative analysis of Tetris as "a perfect
enactment of the over tasked 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." Eskelinen is correct
to note that the abstraction of Tetris would seem to defy narrative interpretation,
but that is not the same thing as insisting that no meaningful analysis
can be made of the game and its fit within contemporary culture. Tetris
might well express something of the frenzied pace of modern life, just
as modern dances might, without being a story.
(7) "A story is a collection of facts in a time sequenced
order that suggests a cause and effect relationship." Chris Crawford,
The Art of Computer Game Design, chapter one, http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.html
. "The story is the antithesis of game. The best way to tell a story
is in linear form. The best way to create a game is to provide a structure
within which the player has freedom of action." Costikyan, op cit.
(8) "In its richest form, storytelling - narrative
- means the reader's surrender to the author. The author takes the reader
by the hand and leads him into the world of his imagination. The reader
has a role to play, but it's a fairly passive role: to pay attention,
to understand, perhaps to think...but not to act." Adams, op. cit.
(9) As I have noted elsewhere, these maps take a distinctive
form - not objective or abstract top-down views but composites of screenshots
which represent the game world as we will encounter it in our travels
through its space. Game space never exists in abstract, but always experientially.
(10) Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller, "Nintendo and
New World Narrative," in Steve Jones (ed.)
(11) My concept of spatial stories is strongly influenced
by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988) and Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space
(London: Blackwell, 1991).
(12) Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating
Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned From the Theme Park Industry,"
Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm
(13) Juul, op. cit.
(14) Costikyan, . For a fuller discussion of the norms
of classically constructed narrative, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger,
and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
(15) Adams, op. cit.
(16) Troy Dunniway, "Using the Hero's Journey in
Games," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001127/dunniway_pfv.htm.
(17) Fuller and Jenkins, op. cit.
(18) Adams, op. cit.
(19) For useful discussion of this issue in film theory,
see Donald Crafton, "Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative
in Slapstick Comedy," in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins
(Eds.) Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge/American Film Institute,
1995); Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and
The Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);
Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999); Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film,
Its Spectator and the Avant Gare" in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker
(Eds.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute,
1990); Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and 'The Frenzy of the
Visible' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
(20) "Games that just have nonstop action are fun
for a while but often get boring. This is because of the lack of intrigue,
suspense, and drama. How many action movies have you seen where the hero
of the story shoots his gun every few seconds and is always on the run?
People loose interest watching this kind of movie. Playing a game is a
bit different, but the fact is the brain becomes over stimulated after
too much nonstop action." Dunniway, op. cit.
(21) See, for example, John Rudlin, Commedia Dell'Arte:
An Actor's Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1994) for a detailed inventory
of the masks and lassi of this tradition.
(22) Kristen Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist
Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp.39-40.
(23) See, for example, David Bordwell, Narration in the
Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989) and Edward Branigan,
Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992).
(24) Juul, op cit.
(25) Carson, op. cit.
(26) "..." Murray, p. .
(27) Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1960), p 116.
(28) Ibid, p. 6.
(29) Ibid, p 119.
|
