This is just a quick smattering of a few quotes about the maturation of various media. Continue reading
Author: Ellen
Novelist and experienced game developer
The Myth of the Unnarratable Game
Tonight, I was talking to a friend online, and he said he was having a debate with his housemate over whether or not all games had narratives.
My personal opinion? Yes, all games have narratives. It is important that we do no limit our perception of what constitutes a narrative. Generally speaking, a narrative/plot/story is a sequence of events tied together and recounted in such a way as to create meaning. According to Aristotle, a plot requires action, but not necessarily character. There are good plots, and there are bad or weak plots. There are plots that are simple and some that are complex, and they can be categorised according to their strutural and formal attributes.
There is also the whole aspect of self-narration and identity formation that I’m not even going to touch in this post. That’s huge and I love it, but that isn’t what this is about.
There were arguments put forward about MMOs (grind erases narrative), as well as sandbox and “sim” toys (note: I use the term “toy” because Will Wright does). I was surprised that “puzzle games” didn’t come up.
If you play any of these types of games, here’s an activity to do: think about the best game you played of it. What is going through your mind? Key events and moments, strung together in a sequence. There ma or may not have been character, but there was action. By Aristotle’s definition, your “unnarratable” game just achieved the status, “Plot!” Congratulations. You just narrated the unnarratable.
Shaking up Shakespeare
I keep thinking it’s odd that, while Aristotle noted dramatists using their work to neuter dangerous, hubristic inclinations within their society that would destabilise the democratic power structures of the time, Shakespeare’s tragidies seemed to focus more on questioning the natural order or divine/man-imposed right to power: to the throne. Continue reading
inversion
I feel too used to criticising the society and not the individual. I want to make my tragic hero properly heroic, and martyr him or her to reveal the flaw of the society.
I am far too used to plays that say, “So this is your society: a little fucked, isn’t it?”
Instead I need to think in terms of catutionary tales. I need to think in terms of an external society that is okay, and an individual who represents a seemingly alright deviation within society, or a sub-group of society.
Hubris as a positive trait
In Aristotle’s Greece, the society was pretty afraid of Pharmakos, or what we would call a “tall poppy.” These were members of society treated as scapegoats, often because they had too much good fortune or luck. Democarcy was the political system of the time, and anyone in the minority was treated with suspicion. Hence the tragic hero: full of hubris, the sense that their personal moral choices were more relevent and valid than those of their society or their gods.
But in today’s society, we have almost an excess of hubris. Everyone is expected to have their own opinion, and they have the right to that freedom of speech. What could be understood as slandering another is acceptable today: telling someone, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” treads all over their right to freedom of speech.
Is hubris encouraged in today’s society? Is being selfish exactly what we expected we should be? Is this a change, or is this a good thing?
We may have more contestants to win the meritocracy crown, but does it just give rise to the stupidification of the masses based on the misiformation of one?
Are we freeing ourselves to uncover “The Truth,” or are we just second-guessing everything?
Preventing social and personal change
I’ve been doing more creative research lately, starting to read up on Atlantis and the Knights Templar. The current edition of Hyper magazine is exploring moral choice in games. Very heartening, but also interesting because it isn’t exactly what I’m looking into.
I also gathered together my two essays and put them together to the best of my ability to begin my exegesis. I’m formatting it with topics and conclusions which then become my design constraints. In doing this, it has more brought to my attention where I’m going wrong with my thought process on Tragedy. Until now, I’ve kindof been seeing it as a way of changing society or personal thought. But I’ve since realised that this is backwards:
Tragedy is not about changing society, but preventing change and maintaining what else exists.
Thus, I need to ensure that the theme of my game isn’t about something I dislike about society, but something I do like that is being challenged. I’m supposed to be reinforcing behaviour and thought, while warning against incorrect choices. So, I need to ensure that the first part of my game design is aimed towards building up the relationship between the player-character and the tragic hero. I can’t have him/her be too deviant from the start, or else the deviancy must be understandable/interesting/tempting for the player as well.
It’s difficult, because my instinct is to show a “normal” hero or underdog- someone who goes against the corrupt society and is revered for it. Instead, I need to make sure that whatever I am depicting in the society in which this is set is what I want to reinforce, or otherwise the tragic hero needs to take their society to excess, and make sure that the law of their city is what they follow, instead of the law of the Gods of their time.
Surprise!
So this is what happens when you go deep into research mode. Everything, all communication with the outside world fails. Or at least, all communication with the virtual world fails.
So what have I been up to?
Well, I gave my presentation/pitch for my research project, and did pretty darn well. I have come to the realisation that I don’t feel I have a department. Well, I guess I have “Media, Culture and Creative Arts,” but here I am, with a Performance Major, an Internet Studies supervisor, as well as the interest/understanding of Literary and Cultural Studies and Film. I feel very supported yet slightly lost.
I wrote my second essay, this time using Foucault’s concept of Panopticism to explain the discipline function of Tragedy in theatre. That was fun, I think I linked things together, but the marker felt there was a lot more I could have looked at. So I got a good mark, but not a great mark. Whatever. Next semester and The Final Thing are far more important.
Right now, I’m writing my “Literature Review,” which, for me, is essentially a big first draft of my exegesis, sans-introduction or conclusion. It’s currently sitting at around 3k words, which means I’ll have another 2-3k to play with in the future.
In a day and a half, I’ll be flying across to the other side of the world to be with my boyfriend for maybe a month. This is after an absence of about four. It’s surprising and very nice that we managed to stay together. Don’t ask me how we did. I’ll also be seeing Tim and Jess, as well as Ian (if things go to plan!) Huzzah for seeing people I haven’t seen in a while!
Game-wise, I’ve been obliterating Plants vs Zombies (PopCap) and trawling through The Path (Tale of Tales). I’ll review them soon. Not that there’s much to say about PvZ except it’s great. Also had a brief (ie, maybe four hours!) play with The Sims 3. There’s a reason I’m not buying until post-October 30th. Honours will suddenly disappear!
I’ll try be better soon, I promise!
Until then~~
Shifting Protagonist and Narratology
I was reading a post on GameVixen, and started thinking about some of my past favourite games. The most activley adored game, for me, was Chrono Trigger.
And I started thinking about the scene where Crono sacrifices himself to Lavos, and then you suddenly become Marle and get a Crono Doll and swap it in using some magic time-freeze thing (I can’t remember the details, this was a while ago). So here you are, playing the silent protagonist (almost silent, anyway), when suddenly you martyr yourself… and then shift to another character to play? Sounds to me like the Bernard-John shift in Huxley’s Brave New World.
This actually strikes me as an odd narrative device for games. Game narratives have become so Structuralist in their nature, relying on Jospeph Campbell and Aristotle. And poor “Ludologists” throw around the name of their enemy without understanding what Narratology actutally is, and without noticing that so many “Game Design” books talk about story in a way a Narratologist would point at and say, “Oh, how very Structuralist of you guys, let’s be friends!” Whoops.
Well, by the end of this year, they might actually have someone happy to say to their faces, “Yeah, I’ll be your Narratologist. Guess what? You don’t want to throw away stories any more than I want to throw away your storytelling devices, aka gameplay elements.”
Braid
The other weekend, I downloaded and played through Braid. It was pretty interesting, with the fractured narrative being delivered to you like the puzzle pieces you collected through each stage. The time-rewinding mechanic was really awesome, too: it allowed the game to be challenging, but not in that “restart at checkpoint,” way; and the variations created some very interesting puzzle-solving techniques. The penultimate stage (World 1-1), was clearly the most basic and clever use of this forgiving device.
However, I, among many others, have a gripe with the designers.
In a game that focuses on a desire to undo mistakes realised too late (sounds like hamartia to me!), the player’s incapacity to do this WHEN THEY PUT A PUZZLE TOGETHER CORRECTLY is extremely frustrating. What am I talking about? Well, there are these “hidden extras” found in the levels in the form of invisible stars. Collecting the stars changes the ending of the game. Most of the stars can be collected at any time during the game. But one of them is created by incorrectly solving one of the jigsaw puzzles. Please note that once you put the puzzles together, you can’t take the pieces apart. Whoops. I just denied myself a different ending because I did something right.
Now, I don’t care what wanky excuse the designers come up with, such as, “Oh well if things were done right in the first place, then nothing would have gone wrong.” Ah, but see, they created for the player a moment of hamartia: I put together the puzzle in a way which I believed was right, and yet I’ve done it wrong, and now I have to do it all again? Well, screw collecting the stars. Someone else will do it and I’ll watch that on YouTube.
So, does the player/audience enjoy being the one who has hamartia? Of course not. This is why they could, should, never be the Tragic Hero.
Tick Tick Smileyface for me. Thanks for proving me right 😉
Tragedy for Social Change
I’ve been absent for a while. I’m sorry. I’m going to write up my response to playing a few games of various sizes shortly, but before that, it’s more important (for myself, at least) that I talk about this.
You may recall the post where I talked about Tragedy and the “Role of Games in Personal and Social Change.” Well, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the whole “serious games,” thing. And yet, what is the purpose of Tragedy is to arouse emotions while potraying events that are considered negative in society. Gonzalo Frasca looked toward Brecht and Boal to find a way to create social and personal change. However, myth and cautionary tales have been used perfectly well as a form of implicitly enforcing societal expectations and laws. Is there one amongst us who has not had an experience with some story, whether through literature, film, music, fine art, or performance, that has changed the way we consider our lives?
Therefore, I no longer wish to concentrate on the means without the purpose or the end. No longer do I wish to position my aim as “making Tragedy playable in games,” or “invoking Catharsis in a game player,” but rather as updating Tragedy for social change through electronic games.
Ellen Jurik 