What is Narrative?

1
What is Narrative?

• Janet Murray, Fox Harrell, Espen Aarseth and Ian
  Bogost

2
Narratology v. Ludology

• Narratology - the study of narrative
• Ludology- study of games
• Do games have a narrative structure or are they
  just rulesets play
• Play is directed, but not structured

3
Espen Aarseth

• Is actually a narratologist. His argument was
  always with narrativists
• People who think everything is a story
• Computer games are not games. They are software
  containing games. We say they are games as a
  metonym
• Games and stories have common underlying elements

4
Common elements

• Objects, events (plot), characters, and spaces
• All of these can be static or dynamic within a
  game (always static in a text)
• Variability in plot of the game has been explored
  exhaustively but has failed to generate good game
  stories
• Should focus instead on character development
• Interactivity is too vague a term

5
Interactivity

• Four kinds
• Explorative moving through a space in a
  player-driven order
• Configurative player causes meaningful change in
  the game world/objects
• Social player converses or plays with other
  people or AI-driven NPCs
• Creative player uses the game as a tool to
  create a meta-narrative (such as machinima), new
  game objects (such as virtual property), or even
  new games (user-generated content, game mods)

6
Fox Harrell

• Phantasmal or deep-structural media
• Interested in cognitive, creative computing and
  cultural specificity
• Focus on the author as creating subjective
  meaning through code, visuals, and text
• From the players perspective, an emphasis on
  allowing them some creativity while also
  procedurally generating content for them to
  confront and analyze

7
Generativity Improvisation

• Comparison to numerous forms of jazz composition
  - formal play and variation
• Emphasis on content different cultures have
  different values, which provide meaningful
  difference independent of form
• Chimerical identity - game avatars that change
  based on player action (without them explicitly
  wanting to change) in order to alter context

8
Janet Murray

• Famous for arguing that Tetris tells the story of
  the contemporary middle-class labor condition
• Considers the ludology/narratology debate dead.
• More interested in understanding what makes a
  good or dramatic game story
• Procedurality participation agency
• Agency story arc dramatic interactive
  narrative
• Does not consider story and game (complex rules
  or models) to exist at an antagonistic inverse

9
Multisequential stories

• Branching narratives such as choose-your-own-adven
  ture novels or Oulipo
• Drama comes from discerning the overall pattern
  plus intersecting nodes (as in RG Are Dead)
• Agency requires clear cues for when to act and
  how that act has affected the game/story world
  (Aarseths configurative interactivty)

10
Multiform stories

• The Rashomon effect or meaningful difference
  through variation replay
• Groundhog Day the ideal legacy example
• Provides clear references (or static events) that
  anchor all variations (the puddle)
• Façade by Mateas and Stern allows this through
  dramatic arc, text parser, artificial
  intelligence, secrets withheld from the player
  but gleaned through multiple playthroughs
• Unfortunately no direct agency for given action

11
Ian Bogost (moderator)

• Are games stories? is a lark
• Games are rulesets context
• Like Aarseth, more interested in objects, events,
  characters, and world (speculative
  realism--slutty or object-oriented ontology)
• Procedural authorship or rhetoric is the
  expression of argument or feeling through code
  alone
• In fact, stories and narratives have rules
  meaning it is more likely that stories are static
  games than games are dynamic stories
• Cognitively and evolutionarily, play, action, and
  context precede literary thought processing
  (George Lakoff)