Narrative rules!

Sorry I’m late posting. I have been incapacitated by some manner of feverish bug since late last week. Hopefully this post isn’t completely apart from what was discussed today in class; if it is, I hope the divergence is productive. Lastly, I had hoped to make this a bit shorter, but this is what I ended up with. Pick and choose where you’d like to engage me, if at all – my thoughts on this are multifarious and scattered.

The slugfest between ludology and narratology (“There was no slugfest!” pipes an indignant Mr. Bogost) now sufficiently abated, we are left with a somewhat more nuanced view of the interplay between systems of rules and narratives in video games. According to Bogost, the torchbearer is not Aarseth, but Juul, who in his earnest syncretism admits that a game can be meaningfully ludic and fictive. What a relief!

As an avid consumer of single-player, story-driven games, it was difficult for me to even humor the idea that video games narratives could be, as Eskelinen reductively has it, “just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games,” “marketing tools” devoid of meaning. I knew this couldn’t be the case. I cut my teeth on Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, Xenogears and Star Ocean—games that exist to immerse the player in a fantastical story. And yet, I also knew that the gameness of games could not reside in traditional narrative. It would have to be a very specific kind of game narrative, or else (as Roger Ebert argues*) the game would simply be a representation of another form.

At the moment, I tend toward the school of thought that says a game is inescapably a kind of narrative. I am not speaking of the sweeping plots of a 100-hour long RPG, but the inherent quality of a game, be it Monopoly or Texas Hold ‘Em or a Halo frag-fest. It begins, it twists, it rises, it climaxes, and it often even settles into a dénouement (that sad realization, some time before the actual end of a game, that someone else has already won). The form and action of each game tells its own story. This is to say nothing of the fact that most classic games (though, to be honest, I’ve done no research at all on the topic) seem to have originated as simulations of warfare—born from narrative.

If I am on the right track, I believe there is an exciting distinction to draw here between the narrative inescapably enacted by the game system and the “story” rendered on top of it. This is difficult to illustrate with a modern game, but take Tetris, for example. As much as someone like Aarseth may decry me for saying so, I believe there is a meaningful (if hardly singular) narrative to Tetris. But what would happen if the creators decided to superimpose a new canonic narrative atop it? What would it mean? And what happens if that new narrative clashes with the existing narrative order? Would it resemble the poetry of an amateur, in which the sounds clash disharmoniously with the themes? I am still working out this idea, but I think it can be effectively demonstrated that there are games that enact one narrative by way of gameplay and another clashing narrative “story.”

Bogost, for his part, wants to blow the whole house down. He applies Levi Bryant’s flat ontology to what he sees as the hierarchized ontology of video games (giving primacy to the rules, privileging the player-game relationship), opening up a vast array of new meaningful connections to explore. To some extent he shares an ideal in common with Steven Jones, who also wants to expand out and away from the ludic model. Jones adopts Genette’s concept of paratext, opening it up to refer to the complete production and reception of the work by players, reviewers, fans, critics, and so on.

Operating from a new textual studies angle, he applies the pivot away from authorial absoluteness and textual authority in books to video games: our studies should “break the hermetic seal of the text” (a phrase he deploys with some frequency) in order “to interpret across the boundary dividing the formal aesthetic object from the social world into which it is received” (93).

His main concern does indeed lie with the social world of the game and the gamer. I will leave you with what I think is the best distillation of Jones’ very valuable work, with just one caution. By placing all his eggs in the basket of social, “threshold” gaming, Jones is doing no small injustice to the immensely successful and innovative field of immersive single-player RPGs. These are not “Where’s the Cheetos?” type experiences—these are head-first dives into fully absorptive worlds. Jones seems aware that he is short-changing certain types of gaming experiences, offering the defense that shallow gaming is the norm. Maybe—but immersion-gaming is no niche.

            “As with the complex verbal texts we study, we need to understand games such as Halo as existing at the center of a kind of spreading possibility space, a multidimensional virtual grid running off in many directions, the imagined vectors of any number of possible moves, performances, or instances of gameplay, all of which are contained, in potential, within the “code” of the object itself, whether or not any particular state of the game or sector of the grid is activated at any particular time.” -S. Jones

*http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html