A Clash between Game And Narrative > 자유게시판

There's a battle between interactivity and storytelling: Most people think about there's a spectrum between conventional written stories on one side and complete interactivity on the other. But I imagine that what you actually have are two safe havens separated by a pit of hell that may absorb countless amounts of time, skill, and sources.

-Walter Freitag, sport designer. ... the fundamental qualities that make a very good recreation have remained unchanged and elusive. Consumers still flock to buy authentic, addictive, and fun games, leaving many flashy products with million-greenback budgets languishing within the $9.Ninety nine bin. These pricey failures exhibit that the patron doesn't want a cinematic experience, however slightly a quality gaming experience.

-Sid Meier, recreation designer.

To briefly introduce myself: My name is Jesper Juul, I'm at present finishing my masters dissertation in Danish literature as regards to interactive fiction, which is by the way additionally the subject of this presentation. I've also designed and programmed a number of computer games, some on CD-ROM, together with one "interactive fiction", some on the internet, Ive executed chat, and that i've worked with computer-based mostly artwork.

In this paper presentation I'll be making a simple point. That computer video games and narratives are very different phenomena and, as a consequence, any mixture of the two, like in "interactive fiction", or "interactive storytelling" faces monumental problems.

I'm not the primary individual to make that point. The benefit of this presentation is hopefully the element with which this level is made. But it's slightly strange to be saying this. On one hand, plainly the idea of an "interactive narrative" died commercially round 1993-94. On the other hand, a lot work and energy is being put into claims that sport and narrative will be mixed- witness Janet Murray. And the dominant theoretical means of coping with computer games still seems to be claiming that they're in some way narratives.

But pc games will not be narratives. Obviously many pc video games do embody narration or narrative elements in some type. But first of all, the narrative half isn't what makes them laptop games, fairly the narrative tends be remoted from and even work towards the pc-recreation-ness of the game. I'll briefly attempt to isolate that gameness, and to sketch a means of claiming one thing significant about a computer recreation.

The primary point of this paper does clash with a number of to be offered tomorrow. Since combating over words tends to be unfruitful, I'll primarily be pointing to characteristics of the normal narrative media and examine them to the computer sport. But I do suppose that the time period narrative doesn't match the computer game very nicely.

This occurs in four components.

1. A brief examination of the rhetoric of interactive fiction.2. A theoretical dialogue of the variations between computer games and narratives.3. A dialogue of the narrative frames that almost all pc games do have.4. Conclusions.

1. The rhetoric of interactive fiction

IF as a concept will not be very properly defined. In Cybertext, Espen Aarseth has plainly rejected the IF term for its unclearness, however then again it is being used to convey some particular connotations.

It is a phrase that belongs to the advertising and marketing people. But it's has its drawback, the primary problem being the second phrase: fiction. In English this is often taken to mean novels, as within the bookstore. Or a magazine like Modern Fiction Studies. IF is basically understood as interactive "narrative" or "story".

"Interactive fiction" is then an try at combining video games and narratives. This mixture sounds extremely engaging, and it's usually described because the best of both worlds, the place the reader/participant deeply concentrated can take part in a story that unfolds in new and ever more fascinating patterns. To exemplify this, we are able to have a look at a 1983-advert from the company Infocom:

You're "contained in the story". But the key a part of IF rhetoric always appears to very a lot be a revolt against things, IF doesnt want to be.

1. For one factor, IF doesnt need to be an action recreation with all its violence, facile themes and deal with fast responses and joystick mastery:

Myst is real. And like real life, you do not die each 5 minutes. In reality you probably won't die at all. [...] The key to Myst is to lose yourself on this unbelievable virtual exploration and act and react as if you had been really there. (Myst guide, Cyan 1993.)

2. The subculture of textual IF doesnt need to be primarily based on graphics:

We unleash the world's most powerful graphics technology. You'll never see Infocom's graphics on any computer display screen. [...] We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination - a technology so powerful, it makes any picture that's ever come out of a display seem like graffiti by comparison. [...] Through our prose, your imagination makes you part of our stories, in charge of what you do and where you go - but unable to foretell or management the course of events. (Infocom 1984.) This clearly tries to attraction to the intellectual user who prefers novels over films, worships the imagination and so on.

Later events, nonetheless, led to the decline of the IF genre. As the academic stage of the typical laptop user decreased and the options and capabilities of the typical computer increased, the pattern in computer games went to 'arcade' video games as a substitute of text. (rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ) This is the nostalgic view of IF - the golden age weve lost.

3. Graphical IF doesnt need to be textual, as a result of that's simply too nerdy.4. IF doesnt wish to be based on puzzles, relatively IF need to be about character and human relationships.

All of this has been constant almost for all the duration of the style. Most "interactive fictions" will declare to match a number of of the above points. Interactive fiction is then in reality largely the rhetoric for a Utopia, a promise of a brand new and more mental/cultural kind of computer game. One that is principally greater tradition than the low-culture action computer game.

But if has its issues.

2. Game vs. narrative

Sequence

The most popular comment on computer games is to say that they are non-linear / multicursal, that means that they differ from narratives as a result of they are often different sequences. Nevertheless it does seem affordable to claim that narratives are sequences evoking a sense of future, of events which have to lead to one another. Roland Barthes says that narrative is the language of future. "the mainspring of narrative is ... what comes after being learn in narrative as what is caused by."

I feel that is a very exact statement. Sequence matters in narratives, and the famed translatability of narratives between completely different media does presuppose mounted sequences. While you'll be able to acknowledge, say Sherlock Holmes or Knut Hamsun's Hunger between novels and films, you clearly can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the sport.

Unlike the fastened sequence of the narrative, Games appear to be based upon the relative freedom of the participant, on the gamers' risk of influencing the course of action.

Time

A few of you would possibly recognise this quote, as it has been quoted by Gunnar Liestøl in Hyper/textual content/idea. It tells us something interesting about the narrative - it presupposes two totally different times, interacting. In the standard view of the narrative, you divide between the fabula and the sjuzet, or if you'll, the story and the discourse. Reading a novel, you construct a storyline from the discourse presented to you, mostly in non-chronological order. A part of the traditional novel-format is a narrator recounting previously occurred events. So we get time of the narrated, time of the narration and time of the studying.

But when we play a recreation like Doom, these temporal distances are clearly not present. You possibly can press the management key, a gun will likely be fired, and this may have an effect on what's occurring on the display screen. What you see on the display can't be previous or future, however should be present, since we are able to affect it. So the three times, the time of the narrated, time of the narration and time of the reading implode in a game, and each time you've gotten interactivity.

Equivalently, and as a consequence of the interactivity, games don't use the temporal possibilities of the story/discourse pair. You do not get flashbacks or flash forwards whereas taking part in Doom, as a result of such variations would preclude the interactivity: In a recreation, you are not in a position to first play a scene in the current, after which soar to an earlier point on the time line and have interactivity there. Because the primary scene would then be decided by whatever the player does earlier on the time line. This can be to a classic time travel paradox.

The story/discourse pair is in other phrases meaningless in the pc game. The pc game merely doesn't have an active dualism like that.

If we go back to the Christian Metz quote, it seems quite clear that the pc recreation would not "invent one time scheme" from another time scheme. Which may indicate that it is not really narrative.

3. Narrative frames

However, most pc games do characteristic some form of narrative framing. Take Space Invaders.

When we are urged to "play Space Invaders", it does suggest a minimal story. The idea of invasion presupposes a time earlier than the invasion, and from the 1950's science fiction it draws upon, we simply know that these aliens are evil and ought to be disposed off. So there's a story, and from the title display screen we know all of it: Earth attacked, Earth freed from the alien menace. This is the essential mode of the classical action game: A clicheed story with a well known ending, and a sport that really by no means reaches that ending, it just will get harder and harder.

I wrote two simple computer games lately. The first is known as Puls in Space and was made for a youth-oriented Danish tv program referred to as Puls. It's the sort of thing where you've a variety of various hosts and numerous younger persons are very actively engaged in evaluating them. On this sport you naturally control a spaceship and get attacked by the heads of the hosts.

Another game I did is named Euro-Space. This was executed for a Danish EU-sceptic organisation, and also you clearly battle varied symbols of the Danish EU-debate.

The program and the gameplay is equivalent for the two video games. It's just the graphics which can be totally different. It could be equally easy to do a professional-EU recreation, simply replace the symbols.

As you may see, the symbolical or metaphorical that means of the sport isn't connected to the program or the gameplay. The relationship is, in a word, arbitrary.

This means that the narrative frame, especially within the action game, has at all times been thought-about unimportant. It's something used for selling the games, for having a solution to confer with them.

Myst

How does this then work in a supposedly storytelling recreation like Myst? Because of the varied differences between video games and narratives, there isn't any simple approach to do an interactive narrative, and Myst works round this downside quite cleverly. Apart from the very finish of Myst, you're not really interacting with a narrative. You're definitely not the major character either, just a minor one who's occurred to pop by lengthy after the event. The best way Myst works is that you pick up numerous artifacts: A diary, you see a video clip you can't interact with. A narrative is advised by these artifacts within the actual-time of the sport, but it's a narrative of something that occurred before you entered the world of Myst. Myst is then actually not an interactive narrative, but it surely reveals a reasonably great way of including narrative material to a recreation with out killing the game. It's the detective-format, the place the detective works to uncover earlier events from traces he/she finds.

Doom, Quake

Two of the preferred games in recent years, Doom and Quake are justly well-known for their lack of storylines. Legend has it that ID Software only consult with the idea "story" as "the s-phrase". In a latest interview, ID head John Carmack says of the upcoming Quake III that it can have "The very best graphics, one of the best networking, one of the best gameplay - however no plot."

While it is completely possible to find finest-sellers that try to include narrative parts - Myst is one instance - it is also perfectly clear that essentially the most performed games are low on plot however high on gameplay. Within the Pc Cafes or in the competitions, they are not enjoying Myst, they're playing Quake, Unreal, Starcraft. Real-time games with little or no storyline to talk of.

Repeatability

Another question is the query of repeatability. In literature there is an concept of the limitless work, of books you possibly can learn and browse, and by no means tire of. This could both be a religious work like the bible, or a modernist work like Ulysses or The Wasteland. Contrast this with the time period trash novel, implying that a e book is disposable once read. It does appear that repeatability is perceived as related with excessive culture, the reverse with low culture. The shocking half is that the notoriously "low" pc recreation lives as much as this much greater than novels are inclined to. The dominant mode of receptions of narratives is one-shot, however video games are inherently something you play again, something you can get better at.

It then appears that making an attempt so as to add a big story to a pc game invariably reduces the number of times you are likely to play the sport. Literary qualities, often associated with depth and contemplation, truly makes computer video games less repeatable, and extra "trashy" in the sense that you will not play Myst again once you've got completed it. There's no point.

This does not imply that Tetris is an endless work that may always be reread and always sheds new gentle on the world - for we usually don't see laptop video games as statements about one thing else. Nevertheless it appears paradoxical that introducing a narrative reduces the variety of occasions you play the game.

On closer examination this is not that stunning. Numerous the explanation for studying a novel, or having fun with a narrative is the want to know the ending. Peter Brooks has described this fairly properly.

But the reasons for enjoying are fully totally different. The frame tales that the majority laptop video games have are ridiculously shallow and clicheed. It does mean that there is commonly no form of narrative want to reach the ending of the game (and it can't even be reached in lots of action video games - they simply go on and on). The pc game is reasonably based on two various kinds of desire. The first is the want for a structural understanding of the sport; to grasp how the sport works. In Doom this could be realizing how the monsters transfer, which buttons to push to open a door. The second is the need for having the performative abilities wanted to actualize this knowledge.

In an action sport, the desire for understanding the sport world and for the abilities to actualise this information is one thing unbiased of whatever narrative frame there is likely to be.

4. A model of the pc sport

I'm mainly proposing that pc video games should be viewed as a dualism of two layers. This system and the material.

These two layers belong to distinctly completely different traditions. The material; the graphics, sound, narrative frame belongs to the standard media. This is what the aesthetic faculties of universities know find out how to handle. The opposite level is this system, which is the new factor in this context. This system is perfectly formal, it works on a purely electrical stage.

To current such a dualism between an underlying formal layer and its unintentional look is probably tragically unhip nowadays. Present-day literary principle would love to spend power making an attempt to point out that, say, the supposed underlying formal layer is definitely one thing constructed from the interpretative layer. While I believe such an objection is completely true for literature, for narratives, the pc sport differs radically in that the two layers could be taken apart.

I think that the program/material relationship is the most attention-grabbing factor to review in a pc recreation. If we have a look at Myst, there's a really clear incompatibility between the claims of the packaging and the graphics vs. what the participant truly can do. In accordance with the packaging, you may have been sucked right into a e book, you are in a new world which you are free to discover. The graphics suggest that you are able to work together with all the things.

For some reason, you'll be able to manipulate the change, but you can't touch the small ship. Why? Well, the program will not be able to doing everything the fabric suggests is feasible.

Simple video games like Space Invaders are characterized by that the material would not promise something this system cannot keep, the same goes for an motion game like Doom.

The fabric can then kind of efficiently match the program. Myst partly fails on this concern - you cannot do what the material guarantees.

Conclusions and perspectives

The most generally accepted games are clearly those exhibiting essentially the most conventional aesthetics. Additionally they are usually thought of precise tradition and be reviewed by traditional-media reviewers. And a game like Myst has the quality of being representable in a conventional medium just like the newspaper. You can see the photographs, the narrative body can be summarized. The accepted games are clearly these carrying the most luggage from traditional media and aesthetics. But they're normally the worst games.

A recreation like Tetris, alternatively, is a extremely popular sport. It absolutely is one of the carried out video games ever. There are numerous variations of it everywhere. On every laptop and in mobile phones and digital watches. But Tetris looks dull within the paper, it has no story. And imagine a narrative as abstract as Tetris. This could be out of the query. Stories need human or anthropomorphic characters. Games do not.

To sum the theoretical part, an Interactive fiction, resembling a Choose Your individual Adventure guide, an interactive movie like Urban Runner or Wing Commander III, or any kind of "interactive story" works by switching between two temporal modes, the narrative mode and sport mode.

Anyone who's played a number of trendy "cinematic" interactive fictions will testify that they are actually awful games and tales. You might be trapped by unmotivated shifts between the narrative mode and the game mode, the story will get destroyed by the interactivity, the interactivity will get destroyed by the story.

This leads us to a final comparability of the relationship between narratives and pc games:

Narratives Computer games Fixed sequence Flexible sequence Variable speed (often compressed) Fixed speed Story/discourse Program/material Past Present Needs human or anthropomorphic actors Will be summary Narrative need Desire for understanding and efficiency Consume as soon as Play many instances

- Narratives are mounted sequences, video games are versatile sequences.- Narratives differ in the pace with which they are instructed; uninteresting intervals of time are skipped; the film forty eight hours does not final 48 hours. Computer video games, especially the action recreation, are mounted velocity, actual time.- A narrative has a dualism between the story and the discourse, the computer sport is divided between the formal program and the fabric.- A narrative is principally something past, a computer sport something current.- A narrative needs human or anthropomorphic actors, a recreation will be abstract. You cant think about a narrative as abstract as Tetris.- In a narrative, the reader wishes to know the ending. In a game, the player desires to understand the construction of the game and to amass the abilities to make use of this knowledge.- A narrative is something you eat once, a recreation is something you play many times.

To sum it up. Computer video games and narratives are very different phenomena. Two phenomena that combat each other. Two phenomena that you simply basically can not have at the same time. Any interactive narrative or try at interactive storytelling is a zigzag between these two columns.

Afterword

This paper was offered in an attention-grabbing scenario, where no less than two different papers have been based mostly on premises opposed to this papers conclusions. I should make clear that I do agree that many pc games include narrative components, and that in lots of cases the player could play to achieve a narrative sequence. My level is that each one such pc video games are a battle between the now of the interaction and the past of the narrative. You cannot have narration and interactivity at the same time.

I'm not saying this to suggest that games and narratives can't or should not be combined. It is very harmful to say any downside or conflict to be of no aesthetic worth. It'd happen, any person might discover a method to use this clash for artistic or leisure functions. I'm just saying this to point to an inventory of commonplace issues inherent in the concept of interactive stories. There's isn't any such thing as a repeatedly interactive story.

Briefly occupied with the way forward for this field, I do see progress. In literary idea, it has always been presupposed that one has read perhaps one thousand books and seen a a thousand motion pictures. But when learning computer games, it has been acceptable to play 4 laptop video games and then write articles about it. Fortunately, we seem to be slowly transferring from seeing the pc game as a sociological or even pathological phenomena towards seeing it as an aesthetic object to examine.

Hypertext, and the pc as such, has typically been linked with the postmodern (or even the poststructural). But is the computer sport postmodern? Literary theorist Brian McHale has prompt that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is that modernism is epistemological; oriented in direction of information and the conditions for our figuring out the world, whereas postmodernism is ontological; oriented in direction of creating fictive worlds. The computer game is kind of hard to put. The participant clearly tries to discover how the sport is structured - which is epistemological. But creating a game is clearly making a world, and one which is normally with out particular reference to something. So computer video games do not fit neatly into one category or the other.

Literature

Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text. Fontana, 1977.

Peter Brooks: Reading for the Plot. Knopf, New York, 1984. Harvard University Paperback Edition, 1992.

Cyan: Myst. Brøderbund, 1993.

Sharon Darling: "Byron Preiss and Ronald Martinez. Trillium Software Designers". In Compute's Gazette. December 1984.

Gerard Genette: Narrative Discourse. Cornell University Press, 1980.

ID Software:

Doom. GT Interactive, 1993.Doom II. GT Interactive, 1994.Quake. GT Interactive, 1997.

Infocom:

- "We unleash the world's most highly effective graphics know-how". Ad in Creative Computing. September 1983 p.112-113.

- "And now for one thing incompletely different!". Ad in Compute's Gazette. December 1984, p.14-15.

Jesper Juul:

Puls in Space. http://soupgames.internet/pspace, 1997. (Graphics: Mads Rydahl.)

Euro-Space. http://soupgames.web/eurospace, 1998. (Graphics: Mads Rydahl.)

George P. Landow: Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Sid Meier: A Revolution. In Game Developer. April-May 1997 p.72.

Alexey Pazhitnov: Tetris. Spectrum Holobyte, 1985.

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