Readings in Game Studies: Avatars of Story and Half-Real

These are my final two books for now, and I'd like to offer them side-by-side for comparison purposes. These books represent two opposed schools of thoughts in game studies: narratology and ludology.

From what I've gleaned from my reading, this particular argument has gotten muddier and muddier as time has gone on. On the surface, the question is simple: should video games be studied as narrative artifacts, or as examples of games? (Perhaps, ludological artifacts? Or ludive? Ludic?) But both arguments have had voices that tend to lend a certain extremism and, importantly, both arguments have framed the other as extremist. The extremist narratological view states that games with stories are necessarily better, and that every game has narrative. The extremist ludological view states that games cannot have narrative, and that the goals of games and storytelling are fundamentally opposed to one another.

I agree with neither school in particular - my personal feeling on the matter (which I discuss in chapter 1 of my paper) is that games should be treated as the medium in which a story takes place, and thus the study of narrative in games is nearly impossible without looking at the game elements. Similarly, games can be studied as games in themselves in the same way that language can be studied separate from its content, but a full study would not be complete without looking at the unique tools that they offer the art of storytelling.

Still, I'd like to present these two books as the quintessential viewpoint for each school of thought.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Ryan offers some rather excellent summary and analysis of how narrative has been constructed in the past, in more traditional media, and how interactive narrative is now being born in new media. Her actual reference to video games is rather small, consisting of a single chapter in the entire book. Rather than dwelling on one particular form of interactive media, Ryan explores all aspects of how storytelling can be dynamic, including such experimental forms as hypertext fiction. Her approach is largely theoretical, and includes, for instance, a very informative series of diagrams on different potential narrative structures.

My one beef with Ryan's work is that, when she discusses video games, she seems to speak from a position of complete inexperience. With most other game studies writers, it is obvious from the text that the writer is familiar with video games, has - to a greater or lesser degree - played some of them, and, while perhaps not preferring it, has the potential to adopt a "gamer" persona when necessary. Not so with Ryan. Her references to various games come across as stilted and distant, and often she goes so far as to underestimate and even denigrate the medium she is supporting.

For instance, she refers to the narrative in FPSs as an "'affective hook' that lures players into the game. [...] Once the players are absorbed in the fire of the action, they usually forget whether they are terrorists or counterterrorists, humans defending the earth from invasion by evil aliens or aliens conquering the earth. Having fulfilled its role as a lure, the story disappears from the player's mind displaced by the adrenaline rush of the competition" (197). While this may be true of multi-player shooter "death-matches," single-player FPSs often have protagonists that the player identifies with more closely than with any other genre. Only the cheapest instances of the genre have stories bland enough to allow for this kind of disregard. (Granted, this book was written in 2006, and some of the best examples of storytelling in the FPS genre have only come out within the past two or three years. But that does not mean that reasonable examples were not present before that.)

Similarly, when describing how we look at/study games, she says, "A game does not need to tell stories that would provide suitable literary material to immerse the player in the fate of its fictional world, because the thrill of being in a world, of acting in it and of controlling its history, makes up for the intellectual challenge, the subtlety of plot, and the complexity of characterization that the best of literature has to offer" (195). It may be unintentional on her part, but she seems to be implying here that video games don't or can't contain "intellectual challenge," "subtlety of plot," or "complexity of characterization." Granted, a lot of current games don't contain these things. But then, neither does most current fiction. The "best of literature" is few and far between, and I do believe that games are fully capable of this depth, and that it has already been seen in some current examples of games. (Try Portal for "subtlety of plot," given how creatively the game asks the player to construct backstory from carefully-planted clues.)

She continues: "The pursuit of large audiences by the game industry and its reluctance to take risks explains in part why it has been sticking so far to stereotyped narrative themes and formulae, such as medieval fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, horror, and the mystery story. But through their emphasis on action, setting, and imaginary creatures of fantastic appearance, these narrative genres are much more adaptable to the interactive and fundamentally visual nature of games than "high" literature focused on existential concerns, psychological issues, and moral dilemmas. Literature seeks the gray area of the ambiguous, while games and popular genres thrive in the Manichean world ofthe "good guys" versus the "bad guys": if players had to debate the morality of their actions, the pace of the game, not to mention its strategic appeal, would seriously suffer" (195-196).

This just seems to indicate an ignorance of modern trends in gaming; morality and the player's consideration of it has become such an overused trope in modern gaming that it has in some cases been reduced to the level of gimmick. Gray areas abound in modern games - what about the US marine in Call of Duty 4 who dies slowly in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, unable to do anything to save himself? Consider the commentary this offers on warfare within a game focused on the player's participation in war. What about the scene towards the end of Metal Gear Solid 3, where the player is forced to kill the main character's mentor in order to fulfill his mission, despite the character's emotional attachment to her? Granted the game industry has often stuck to more easily implemented genres, as she says, but that doesn't mean that deeper, more meaningful games do not exist and, importantly, have the potential to exist in the future.

But I suppose one of my biggest complaints is the fact that she seems to show little regard for the games as artifacts in themselves. It may not seem like a big deal, but the fact that she gets a popular game title wrong (it's Tomb Raider, not Tomb Raiders) is almost personally offensive to me. Combine this with the fact that she does not list any of the games she mentions in her bibliography, and one begins to wonder if she actually played any of these games at all.

Still, regardless of this (and for many who might be interested in the sort of subject material she discusses, this criticism is really little more than a pet peeve on my part), she does have some truly insightful discussion of narrative, which is worth taking a look at. In particular, I found her three sets of diagrams of narrative structure (mentioned earlier) to be an excellent summary of some often very difficult concepts. She also has a very good point-by-point rebuttal to the classic arguments of the school of ludology.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2005.

Compare this to Jesper Juul's Half-Real, which Avatars of Story references directly upon occasion. Juul is a ludologist, and believes that games should be studied as game objects, not as narrative objects. Although this book takes a more compromising stance than previous remarks on the viewpoint. (He now argues that it depends on how one defines "narrative" - a perfectly reasonable argument, although I still disagree with his conclusions.)

Juul prefers to look at the gaming experience as something that is half real - that is, half made up of a player's experience interacting with a set of concrete rules that define a game - and half fictional, referring to the virtual worlds in which these games take place, and the cues that the fictional aspect of games can lend to the rule-based system. (I know that agent X is a bad guy, because it looks like the green slimy aliens that my character is defending the world against.)

While I disagree on several of the points where Juul implies the lack of importance of game narrative, his arguments are well-formed and completely reasonable. His approach, while not the only way, is certainly one entirely valid way of studying games in general and even video games in particular. His compromising position provides more of a concession to the importance of the fictional aspect of games than do many ludological approaches, and thus helps prevent a certain loss of richness in study that one might get from an approach that completely disregards all narrative elements.

Both texts are worth a read, both on their own merits and the way they frame the ludology/narratology debate. As a conclusion here, I would like to present a short summary of the ludology vs. narratology question, as presented by either school.

Narratology:
Basic Idea:
Games can be studied as narrative artifacts, looking at the way they tell stories.

Extremism (as framed by own school):
All games tell stories; they are a superior story-telling medium to other media.
"[Tetris is] a perfect enactment of the overtasked 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." (Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 1997: 144 (quoted in Juul, 133))

Extremism (as framed by opposite school):
Games are better the closer they resemble more traditional narratives.
"In the rhetoric of narratology – or the storytelling rhetoric – we find an aesthetic understanding of video games in which researchers study how games might live up to the demands and requirements of narratives in literature and movies. Usually literary and film theorists are involved as representatives for this kind of rhetoric. Looking for narratives, the focal point of attention has explicitly been narrative-based games like adventure and role-playing games." (Aarseth 1997 (quoted in Konzack, 2007))

Ludology:
Basic Idea:
Video games are examples of games as a form of play, and should be studied as rule-based systems.

Extremism (as framed by own school):
Games and stories are of opposite nature and therefore incompatible.
"...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. Creating a "storytelling game" (or a story with game elements) is attempting to square the circle, trying to invent a synthesis between the antitheses of game and story." (Costikyan, "Story vs. Game," 2000)

Extremism (as framed by opposite school):
Games are incapable of telling stories, and narrative can only be found in literature.
"Ludologists [...] are generally partial to the definition proposed by Gerald Prince in 1987, but since modified by its author [...]: "Narrative: the recounting ... of one more more real or fictitious events communicated by one, two or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two or several (more or less overt) narratees. A dramatic performance representing many fascinating events does not constitute a narrative, since these events, rather than being recounted, occur directly on stage." (1987, 58)." (Ryan, 184)


Having read these two texts, I think I shall have to rescind my earlier position as "probably a ludologist" and claim the title of narratologist. It's hard to determine where one fits in when so much of the argument is framed by the opposition, but the fact of the matter is that I'm looking at how games tell stories. So that makes me a student of narrative, and thus a narratologist.