Agency - To Be Desired?

It's a legitimate question, and one that seems to be coming up a lot in one of my classes: how much agency do we really want in a media experience? Certainly we want some if we're expecting a game; without any at all, then we might as well just be watching a movie. But is more agency necessarily better? How much is too much? Is there even such a thing?

The games that give us the most agency, games like ''The Sims'', where there are no rules holding us down and we can do anything we want, are often the least "game-like" experiences. This is because games are defined by rules. The confines of the system are what give us a solid structure in which to work, to problem-solve, and to explore. It is the reduction of our agency in certain areas that highlights our agency in others.

Rules allow the game's creator to structure an experience. It allows him to provide atmosphere, to dictate events in such a way that our feelings are manipulated (the final goal of all art forms) in the way the designer desires. Such a guided experience can be very pleasurable. But if a guided experience is what we're looking for, then what separates interactive media from movies? Should we not dispense with the interactivity altogether and simply go back to our static films? This, after all, would allow for maximum structure on the part of the creator.

The fact that we do not must mean that there is something inherently pleasurable about interacting. Under this assumption then, how do we compromise? How do we maintain the pleasure of interactivity, while not losing the pleasure of a structured experience, the way we do in ''The Sims''? Game designers are still struggling with this problem, and will likely continue to do so for some time. Rather than trying to define a single answer, perhaps an impossible task, perhaps we should look at what interactivity gives us that is pleasurable. What is it about interactivity that we WANT to keep?

Perhaps foremost (arguably; I would be more than happy to debate this point with anyone who so chooses), interactivity is a powerful tool for empathy. Compared to a passive movie-going audience, players are incredibly invested in the life and well-being of the main character, because they are directly responsible for it. It is the decisions and skill of the player that determine what happens to the main character and whether that character lives or dies. By the same token, anything that happens to the character reflects back on the player. If the character is injured, it is not just the character: it is YOU who is injured. If the character murders someone close to him, it wasn't just the character's action: it was YOUR action. When a player is in control of a character, he effectively becomes that character. His own fate, his own success or failure, is innately tied to that of the character. The emotional resonance that occurs therein is therefore necessarily stronger than with other forms of art, simply by virtue of the fact that the player is participating in it.

So then, in order to make use of this powerful empathy, a player must feel like he has control over the character. If too much of the character's actions, or the effects on the character, are out of the player's control, then he no longer feels that these actions/effects are his responsibility. The feeling of empathy is broken. This can happen once the player falls below the threshold of "enough" agency, at which point he feels as though he has no control over the character, or his control makes no difference. At this point, the character becomes just as sympathetic as a character in a book or movie; we might feel something for them, but in a detached sort of way that allows us to distance ourselves from them.

So then, let us return to the question of what is "enough" agency. How much is too much? I would argue that a highly-structured media experience is preferable to an unstructured one. After all, if no creative mind is shaping our experience, then what is the point of being an artist of the medium? However, it is vital that these experiences allow enough agency to make the player feel not only that he has a vested interest in the fate of the main character, but that he has a palpable ''effect'' on the fate of the main character. When he feels this, he becomes engaged with the material, and video games (and other interactive experiences) can do some of their most powerful work.

Emotional Experiences in Gaming

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR "SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS," "PORTAL," AND "CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE."

So I've been thinking recently about emotional experiences I've had playing games, and what causes them. Games, especially good games, have given me quite a few to consider. In "Portal," for instance, I've had moments of genuine laughter, and of genuine panic and fear. Games have given me and others moments of real sadness, and a very real feeling of achieving victory. So what is it about these games that can make me feel so much? Emotional experiences in gaming, I've found, tend to break down into two categories, according to cause: those caused by narrative elements, and those caused by game elements.

Emotional experiences caused by narrative elements are similar to those in other fiction media. When Aggro hurled me over the edge of the crumbling bridge in "Shadow of the Colossus," and subsequently fell to his own (presumed) death, I felt real anguish. Aggro was a character I had grown attached to. He was my sole companion throughout the game, my vital aid in many previous missions, and though I was occasionally annoyed when he had a slower reaction time than I wished, I had really come to think of him with fondness. In fact, I didn't realize just how attached I had become to that horse until I watched him plummet into the canyon.

Most of us are familiar with this sort of experience. Many of us remember crying when we first read "Bridge to Terabithia" or "Where the Red Fern Grows." We become absorbed in fictional worlds, attached to their characters, and invested in their plots. The process of storytelling gives us mental models in our minds of people and events that are as real as those models we create to represent people, places, and things that actually exist in the real world. The things that happen to fictional characters are as real to us as the things that happen to, say, celebrities, sometimes more so - since we often know more about a fictional character's life and motivation than we ever know about the mysterious lives of the rich and famous. So it's not strange when emotion is evoked by a story. We're sort of used to that.

The other way games evoke emotion are through the experience of gaming - the feeling of "yes, success!" when we accomplish a difficult goal, for instance. Puzzle games can be particularly pleasurable for the feeling of cleverness and self-appreciation we get when deciphering a particularly complex brain teaser. We feel a sense of triumph - over the machine, over other players, even over the rules of the game itself. Likewise we can feel defeat, frustration, determination, unease, and even fear, concerning the goals of the game and our progress towards them. Just yesterday I felt such successes and failures when playing a fighting game with a group of friends.

This second type of experience doesn't require story - it comes straight from our real-world experience with the act of playing the game. I can be argued therefore that this type of emotion is therefore more "real," although that term seems to belittle the story-based emotional experiences, which can often be incredibly powerful - sometimes even more than these so-called "real" emotions. (In my opinion, both sets of emotions are real, whether the source they stem from is fictional or not. After all, both emotional experiences take place in the same centers of our brain.)

These two methods of evoking emotion have historically been very segregated in their study. The practice of evoking emotion with fiction has long been the study of the creative fields - creative writing, film-making, literary study, theater, and so on. Whereas the evocative powers of games, when studied at all, tend to fall more into the psychology or sociology category - how do humans deal with success and failure? With stress? With competition? It is perhaps because of the vast separation of these two fields that it becomes somewhat difficult to think about the unifying of the two types of emotional experiences.

Some of the most moving emotional experiences I've ever had in games, however, come not from either of these categories, but from clever hybrids of the two. Video games are in the unique position of being able to provide a game experience and a story experience at the same time. Here are a few examples:

When I first played "Portal," and completed the last of the official missions, I was feeling very satisfied with myself. I'd been doing very well, thinking around obstacles and proving myself to be smarter than the machine. GLaDOS was just congratulating me on finishing the test.

Then the platform I was riding turned a corner, towards a bank of fire, and I panicked. An eerie, tense techno theme rose in the background as thoughts flashed through my mind: 'Oh no, GLaDOS betrayed us' - 'I'm going to die, what should I do?' - 'Where can I put a portal?' - 'So that's why the lab is empty, this is what happened to everyone else' - 'Ohshitohshit! I'm gonna die! I have to jump!'

This series of thoughts illustrates the combination of emotional occurrences. On the one hand, my panic was engendered by fear for my game success. I had only seconds to make a difficult decision, solve a puzzle, or else the result would be failure. Actions I had been performing more or less at leisure the rest of the game were suddenly put under extreme time pressure, which caused an equally extreme anxiety.

But on the other hand, part of my panic was entirely story-related. I realized that my character had been betrayed. That all along, the AI had been planning to get rid of my character after she analyzed my abilities. I realized that this must have happened before - that all the test subjects who came before me must have been hurled towards this same fire, that maybe they'd found a way out, but maybe they'd burned to death in the flames. I panicked wondering how I - how my character - was going to get out of this situation.

Another such powerful experience comes from the game "Call of Duty 4," and is one I've written and talked about often before. In the game there is a sequence where one of the characters - a character which the player has been controlling for about half the game thus far - is caught in a nuclear explosion while trying to escape by helicopter. The helicopter goes down, and the player assumes that the character has died.

But wait - he's alive! The GPS locator in the game's loading screen focuses on the character, finding him amidst the wreckage, and the game drops you down into the man's body once more. You awaken to find yourself in the midst of the helicopter wreckage, so injured you can barely move except for a slow crawl. As you stumble out of the twisted hulk of metal, you find yourself in the midst of the nightmarish aftermath of the explosion. An enormous mushroom cloud towers over you on one side, while the wind blows pale-colored dust and debris in a fierce storm all around you.

It quickly becomes horribly obvious: this situation cannot end well. There is no reasonable hope of escape. Everything around you is dead, dying, or destroyed. The faint hope you felt at finding your character alive quickly dwindles into a shocked acceptance of the truth: you are going to die.

The emotional impact here is once again two-fold. On the one hand is the obvious impact of the story elements, the horror of nuclear war, the desolation of the environment, the doomed fate of a well-liked character. But on the other hand, the despair is also game-based: there is no way to win. All the previous missions (with the exception of the "mission" over the opening credits, which is almost more of a cinematic sequence, and should probably be considered differently for a variety of reasons which I won't get into here) have always had a win state, a goal to accomplish, a way to survive. Now, the player must gradually come to terms with the fact that there is nothing he can do. There is no way to win, no way to save the situation, or keep this character around for later use. This is it. You lose.

By combining these two emotional impacts, the game delivers an exceedingly strong message about the danger and destructive force of nuclear war. Neither emotional resonance on its own would do the trick - just forcing you to lose a mission without the story context would be meaningless and frustrating, while having you watch a static story-based cutscene about the character's death would seem preachy and cliche. But together, the combination of the two delivers a startlingly effective experience, reaching out to the heart and soul of the player.

Because of the strength of this impact, I think it's very important in the study and creation of games for us to think about the nature of such emotional experiences - after all, the ability to evoke emotion is one of the strongest powers of Art, no matter what its format. We must learn to appreciate the nature of games in both their capacities to evoke emotion, and think long and hard about the best ways to combine them.

Readings in Game Studies: What Video Games Have to Teach Us

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Revised and Updated Edition. New York: Palgrave and MacMillan, 2007.

This book is excellent - I highly recommend it for anyone interested not only in gaming, but in anything to do with teaching, learning, and literacy. Gee uses the medium of games and how they teach skills as an example to express the necessity of teaching (particularly in schools) in dynamic and involving ways. The writing style is engaging and his analysis is fascinating. Definitely a good read, even for the non-academic.

As for relevance to my own work, I marked so many passages in this book that I actually ran out of post-it notes halfway through and had to go out and buy more. There are so many quotes from his book that I find useful that I'm not sure I'll be able to fit them all in a single post. So, while very much of his work directly impacts my own, I'd like to focus for the purposes of this post on a single section that I felt was of the most interest - Gee's categorization of video game identity.

Because I've been studying narrative theory a lot lately, I've been getting caught up in the terms they use to describe the voices that go into the telling of a story and the reception of it. Terms like "implied narrator" and "implied reader" and so on. However, when one tries to transfer these personas to video games, the terms start to break down. The narrator is the character through which the "text" is experienced, but in a game, that same character is also the implied reader, since the player is assuming that character's role. It seems the previous literary terms must be discarded in favor of a new system of terminology. That's where Gee comes in.

Gee breaks the identity of the video game player down into three categories, each with different degrees of actual existance. His categories are the virtual identity, the real-world identity, and the projective identity. The real-world identity is the player playing the game - James Paul Gee, or Kyla Gorman. The virtual identity is the character in the game - Sora from Kingdom Hearts, or Gordon Freeman of Half-Life. The projective identity, in my opinion the most interesting of the three, sits somewhere between the two. The projective identity is the player as character. This identity represents the player's imagining of herself in the role of character - a "projection," as well as the player's wishes for the character to develop in a certain way - the player's "project."

Video games use this intermediary projective identity as a way to equate the other two identities, drawing them closer together and creating the player/character empathy I'm always harping on about. Through the projective identity the player feels involved on two levels - the level of experiencing the events of the character - the projective-virtual connection, and the level of removed interest in fulfilling an implicit game goal, controlling the character's development - the real-world-projective connection. By linking these three identities together, the real-world identity can mentally place herself in the position of the virtual identity, through the projective identity. This creates immersion and empathy, which in turn is responsible for much of the power of digital storytelling.

(If this sounds interesting to you, you really should read the book - Gee's identity formulation can be found in Chapter 3, "Learning and Identity: What Does it Mean to be a Half-Elf?")

I'd like to start by sharing the Gee quotes I've marked about identity, followed by the quotes on immersion, of which there are also quite a few. Finally, I will add the other miscellaneous relevant quotes to finish. I fully realize that there is a great deal of quotation here, but keep in mind that this is AFTER I have pruned what I marked and taken out the less-relevant remarks. As I said, Gee is a very insightful guy.


On Identity

"Each of these traits [that the player can customize] will affect how your character--that is, you--carries out dialogue and action in the world of Arcanum and how other characters in the world respond to you." (46)

"First, there is a virtual identity: one's identity as a virtual character in the virtual world of Arcanum--in my case the half-elf Bead Bead. I will represent this identity as "James Paul Gee as Bead Bead," where Bead Bead is italicized to indicate that, in this identity, the stress is on the virtual character Bead bead acting in the virtual world of Arcanum (though I am "playing/developing" her)." (49)

"The successes and failures of the virtual being Bead Bead (me in my virtual identity) are a delicious blend of my doing and not my doing. After all, I made Bead bead and developed her, so i deserve--partly, at least--praise for her successes and blame for her failures." (49)

"A second identity that is at stake in playing a game like Arcanum is a real-world identity: namely, my own identity as "James Paul Gee," a nonvirtual person playing a computer game. I will represent this identity as "James Paul Gee as Bead Bead," where James Paul Gee is italicized to indivate that, in this identity, the stress is on the real-world character James Paul Gee playing Arcanum as a game in real time (though Bead Bead is the tool through which I operate the game)." (49-50)

"A third identity that is at stake in playing a game like Arcanum is what I will call a projective identity, playing on two senses of the word "project," meaning both "to project one's values and desires on to the virtual character" (Bead Bead, in this case) and "seeing the virtual character as one's own project in the making, a creature whom I imbue with a certain trajectory through time defined by my aspirations for what I want that character to be and become (within the limitations of her cpacities, of course, and within the resources the game designer has given me)." This is the hardest identity to describe but the most important one for understanding the power of games like Arcanum. I will represent this identity as "James Paul Gee as Bead Bead," where the word "as" is italicized to indicate that, in this identity, the stress is on the interface between--the interactions between--the real-world person and the virtual character." (50)

"The kind of person I want Bead Bead to be, the kind of history I want her to have, the kind of person and history I am trying to build in and through her iss what I mean by a projective identity. Since these aspirations are my desires for Bead Bead, the projective identity is both mine and hers, and it is a space in which I can transcend both her limitations and my own." (51)

[In discussing the difference between the three identities as exposed by the way failure is represented differently by each.] "The projective identity of Bead Bead as a project (mine) in the making can fail because I (the real-world James Paul Gee) have caused Bead Bead (the virtual me) to do something in the game that the character I want Bea Bead to be would not or should not do." (52)

"It is not uncommon, even when young people are playing first-person shooter games featuring a superhuman hero (like Master Chief in Halo)--a character that, unlike Bead Bead, they usually cannot choose or develop but must take as is--that they will redo a given fight scene because they feel they have "let their character down." They want to pull off the victory more spectacularly, as befits a superhero. They feel responsible to and for the character. They are projecting an identity as to who the character ought to be and what the trajectory of his or her acts in the virtual world ought, at the end of the day, to look like." (53)

"As a player, I was proud of Bead Bead at the end of the game in a way in which I have never been proud of a character in a novel or movie, however much I had identified with him or her. [...] my satisfaction with Bead Bead is thinged with pride (it could have been regret had things turned out differently), at various levels, in and with myself. This feeling is not (just) selfish. In a sense, it is also selfless, since it is pride at things that have transcended--taken me outside of--my real-world self (selves), if I am playing the game reflexively." (54)

[on students in science classrooms, projecting their identity as scientists] "They want their scientist to become this sort of person, whether or not they are themselves anything like this in their "everyday" lives. In good science learning, learners are not just role-playing being a scientist of a certain sort (their virtual identity). They are also proactively building that virtual person as a certain kind of person with a certain kind of history. They are projecting their own hopes and desires onto that person." (62)

"The learner, in this case, gets to customize the identity the game offers him to a certain extent--this, in fact, is an important feature of good video games." (37)

"Thus, Von Croy's remark [about which buttons the player should push] perfectly melds and integrates talk to Lara and talk to the player. This melding is part of what marries the player's real-world indentity as a player and his or her virtual identity as Lara. This type of talk is very common in video games." (118)

"Such language is one among many devices in a good video game that encourages the player to relate, juxtapose, and meld his or her real-world identity (actually, multiple real-world identities) and the virtual identity of the character he or she is playing in the virtual world of the game. Such a process also encourages the player to adopt [...] a projective identity." (121)

"...when you are playing as a virtual character in a video game, that character, (you) is the hero (center) of the story and in that sense the "good guy" no matter how bad he or she might be from another perspective." (147)

"Good video games offer players strong identites. [...] In video games, players learn to view the virtual world thorugh the eyes and values of a distintive identity [...] or one they themselves have built from the ground up." (216)


On Empathy

"Players can choose strategies that fit with their style of learning, thinking, and acting. This, of course, is highly motivating both for learning and for playing the game and a rich source for reflecting on one's own styles of learning and problem solving (and, perhaps, experimenting with new ones)." (78)

"When the character you are playing dies in a video game (and it is always, of course, a main character), you can get sad and upset, but you also usually get "pissed" that you (the player) have failed. Perhaps you even feel that you have failed yoru character. And then you start again, usually from a saved game, motivated to do better. The emotional investments you have in a video-game story are different from the emotional investments you have in a book or movie." (80)

"Players are placed, by the very design of the game, in the same psychological space as Lara--learning from Von Croy but not subordinating themselves entirely to his old-fashioned professorial need for dominance. The game's design encourages the player to take on a certain sort of attitude and relationship with Von Croy--and, more generally, a certain sort of personality--that represents, in fact, just the sort of person that Lara is." (117)

"As we said earlier, the player is encouraged by the very design of the game to be more Lara-like--playful and willful--leaving behind fears and hesitations about authority and the risks of exploration." (122)

"But, alas, Heinrich got me in the end. I went down with more pride and dignity (remember, in my projective identity, I care about such things), but I went down nonetheless." (127)

The movie Saving Private Ryan [put the audience in the middle of a full-scale battle] as well, but the game puts the player right in the midst of the action, pinned to the ground, surrounded by deafening noise and woundedm, wometimes shell-shocked soldiers, and facing the near certainty of a quick death if he or she makes one wrong move." (145)

"Video games have an unmet potential to create complexity by letting people experience the world from different perspectives. Part of this potential is that in a video game, you yourself have to act as a given character. As you act quickly, and not just think leisurely, and as you (while playing) celebrate the character's victories and bemoan his or her defeats, you must live in a virtual world and make sense of it." (159)

"[...] players feel a real sense of agency, ownership and control. It's their game." (217)


Other

"The experience brought home to me, forcefully, that learning should be both frustrating and life enhancing, what I will later call "pleasantly frustrating." The key is finding ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don't fall back on learning only what is simple and easy." (3)

"Rather, [people] think best when they reason on the basis of patterns they have picked up through their actual experiences in the world, patterns that, over time, can become generalized but that are still rooted in specific areas of embodied experience." (9)

"Finally, despite some claims to the contrary, the fact of the matter is that the effect size of video-game play on aggression is smaller than the effect size for television, thereby rendering the claim that there is something special about the interactivity of games as a source of aggression suspect." (11)

"The game [Pikmin] encourages him to think of himself as an active problem solver, one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes, one who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning. It encourages him to be the sort of problem solver who, rather than ritualizing the solutions to problems, leaves himself open to undoing former mastery and finding new ways to solve new problems in new situations." (36)

"The story line ina video game is a mixture of four things:

1. The game designers' ("authors'") choices.
2. How you, the player, have caused these choices to unfold in your specific case by the order in which you have found things.
3. The actions you as one of the central characters in the story carry out (since in good video games there is a choice as to what to do, when to do it, and in what order to do it).
4. Your own imaginative projection about the characters, plot, and world of the story.

The first and fourth of these itmes are true of books and movies, as well, but items two and three are true of video games only.

Thus, in video games like Deus Ex, stories are embodied in the player's own choices and actions in a way they cannot be in books and movies." (79)

"The intertextual principle is concerned with the fact that after players have dealt a good bit with certain types or genres of video games and the texts associated with them, they can begin to see these texts themselves as a gmaily or genre of related texts." (106)

"...the episode is also meant as a training module where the player is explicitly coached on how to play the game." (116)

[on a character referencing the control scheme for instructional purposes] "Now this is, if you think about it, a strange thing to say. However, it does not seem the least bit strange when one is actually playing the episode. Von Croy is tlaking to the virtual character Lara, a character who walks and jumps in the virtual world but has no computer whose keys she can press, push, or hold." (118)

"In a good game, the player leanrs to play the game by playing in a "subdomain" of the real game. This is an important learning principle and, again, one regularly ignored in school. [...] Furthermore, this episode usually offers a concetrated sample of the most basic and important actions, artifacts, and interactions that the player will need to deal with throughout the game." (122-123)

"This and other games have brought home to me that I hold cultural models about learning like: "The final goal is important, defines the learning, and good learners move toward it without being distracted by other things" and "Good learners move quickly and efficiently toward their goal." I also hold other models: "There is one right way to get to the goal that the good learners discover (and the rest of us usually don't)" and "Learning is a matter of some people being better or worse than others, and this is important." These models all get entrenched in school repeatedly." (173)

"In playing video games, hard is not bad and easy is not good. The six-year-old mentioned earlier was once asked whether easy or hard was better in a video game. Without a pause, he said hard is always good, easy is not. Would that children said such things about learning in school." (175)

Readings in Narrative Theory: The Rhetoric of Fiction

I have saved the best of my narrative theory summaries for last with Wayne C. Booth's classic The Rhetoric of Fiction (second edition). This book and this critic have been cited in nearly ever other narrative theory work I've read (at least, the ones that came out after this book was published). To be quite frank, I can see why. Not only is he complete and insightful, he is also clear and concise. Therefore, before I get to the actual text, I would like to begin this post with a short note about writing style and readability.

It is a painful task for students, scholars, and general audience readers to have to slog through a badly-written text, particularly an academic text. Writing clearly and obviously is a skill that many academics seem to lack. If your text is indecipherable to the average reader outside the field, this does not automatically make it a good text. In fact, unless it is about a topic so specific that such language and obscurity is required, I would even go so far as to say that this automatically makes it a bad text.

I've heard excuses before like, "This author is very dense, and you have to read him several times to truly understand what he's talking about." But in my mind, this is not an acceptable excuse. Booth is very dense, and his text definitely benefits from re-reading, yet The Rhetoric of Fiction text is still entirely accessible. Compare, if you will, a selection from two narrative theory works. The first is from Reading for the Plot, by Peter Brooks. (Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. New York: Knopf, 1984.) The second is from the Booth book:

"Plot, then, might best be thought of as an "overcoding" of the proairetic by the hermeneutic, the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance. If we interpret the hermeneutic to be a general gnomic code, concerned not narrowly with enigma and its resolution but broadly with our understanding of how actions come to be semiotically structured, through an interrogation of their point, their goal, their import, we find that Barthes contributes to our conception of plot as part of the dynamics of reading." (Brooks, page 18)

"For experienced readers a sonnet begun calls for a sonnet concluded; an elegy begun in blank verse calls for an elegy completed in blank verse. Even so amorphous a genre as the novel, with hardly any established conventions, makes use of this kind of interest: when I begin what I think is a novel, I expect to read a novel throughout, unless the author can, like Sterne, transform my idea of what a novel can be." (Booth, page 127)

To me, the latter paragraph displays a high degree of skill in communication. While the relative value of the subject matter may be something for critics to debate, the forms in which the subjects are related are clearly of very disparate quality.

There are three reasons, I think, why a critic might write with the former tone rather than the latter. The first is a lack of ability to communicate clearly, either through an intrinsic inability or perhaps the blunting of communication skills through too much exposure to similar academia. Judging by the prestigious list of schools attached to Brooks's name, I would hesitate to attach such lack of skill to the man. Especially considering he is working in a field dealing with the English language, if anyone should be able to communicate effectively, it should be him.

The second reason a critic might write with such obfuscating language is that the subject matter is so detailed and in-depth that it defies more conventional language. I think this excuse is dangerous territory, although it may often be the justification that writers use for themselves. Booth covers very detailed and nuanced ground with perfect clarity. My suspicion is that Brooks's own points have the potential to be captured just as neatly, with the right choice of language.

The third reason is a selfish and misguided one, and that is a certain pretension of appearance. The idea that such language will keep those who are "not worthy" from understanding the subject matter, or the idea that there should be no reason why the author should have to "dumb down" his language for the sake of his audience. Clear communication is not dumbing-down - in fact it shows the author's skill more clearly. Not only that, clear communication allows readers of all levels to enjoy a work and to absorb the ideas it contains, which should be the goal of any author who is convinced that his ideas have merit. I can't claim to be an expert in such clarity myself, but I think it is something that one should strive for.

I'm not sure which of these three reasons - if any - afflict our dear Mr. Brooks, but I do have to say that I was disappointed with his text. I think the writing style is an unpleasant barrier to the understanding of his work, and that his ideas suffer for it. It is my hope and my goal to write in a clear, understandable way. If I am not, feel free to call me on it.

Anyway. Now that I've gotten that particular vitriolic rant off my chest (I apologize - sometimes I get a little too passionate about these things), on to Booth.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, 1983 (second edition).

I've found much of interest in my reading of Booth, even beyond what directly relates to my project. For anyone doing anything even tangentially related to narrative theory, I would include this work as a must-read (even somewhat dated as it is). Don't be afraid of its large size - it's relatively easy to read (for an academic text, very easy). Because of space limitations (this entry will be quite long as it is), I will only cover the areas I found directly related to my work, but even so, there are multiple. I will therefore be dividing up the rest of this post into segments based on focus.


Section 1: Reader Objectivity / Player/Character Empathy


As readers of this blog might remember from previous posts, I have a particular interest in the ability of games to give the player a strong emotional connection to the character she plays. In the novel, it is much more difficult, requiring great skill on the part of the author, to give the reader a sense of emotional connection to his characters, especially if the characters are very different from the reader. (Booth compares the reaction of two readers - one with a lisp and one without, to a character that speaks with a lisp. Obviously the more similar reader will react more strongly to the character.)

I will not go into too much depth at the moment about how this technique of empathy is evoked, since I do so not only in previous posts, but also in the section below. Nevertheless, I would like to offer the quotes that Booth has on the subject.

[speaking about the tendency towards an "alienation effect," where good works are considered those that don't involve the emotions] "...the novelist will find himself in difficulties if he tries to discover some ideal distance that all works ought to seek. "Aesthetic distance" is in fact many different effects, some of them quite inappropriate to some kinds of works. More important, distance is never an end in itself; distance along one axis is sought for the sake of increasing the reader's involvement on some other axis." (123)

"It is only as I read that I become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author's. Regardless of my real beliefs and practices, I must subordinate my mind and heart to the book if I am to enjoy it to the full. The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement." (138)

"Much more important [than authorial commentary], the sustained inside view leads the reader to hope for good fortune for the character with whom he travels, quite independently of the qualities revealed." (246)

"While only immature readers ever really identify with any character, losing all sense of distance and hence all chance of an artistic experience, our emotional reaction to every event concerning Emma tends to become like her own. When she feels anxiety or shame, we feel analogous emotions. Our modern awareness that such "feelings" are not identical with those we feel in our own lives in similar circumstances has tended to blind us to the fact that aesthetic form can be built out of patterned emotions as well as out of other materials. It is absurd to pretend that because our emotions and desires in responding to fiction are in a very real sense disinterested, they do not or should not exist. Jane Austen, in developing the sustained use of a sympathetic inside view, has mastered one of the most successful of all devices for inducing a parallel emotional response between the deficient heroine and the reader." (249)

[on a lack of authorial commentary] "[Miranda] must be accepted at her own estimate from the beginning, and that estimate must, for greatest effect, be as close as possible to the reader's estimate of his own importance. Whether we call this effect identification or not, it is certainly the closest that literature can come to making us feel events as if they were happening to ourselves. As we read, we know only Miranda's world and we know only her values. Our only value becomes, in a sense, her well-being, and we accept any threat to her happiness precisely as she accepts it. The slightest suggestion that she is at fault will create too much distance; the slightest sign that author and reader are observing Miranda from above rather than alongside will destroy at least in part, the quality of our concern and hence of our final revelation." (277)

"This kind of near-identification can be used for innumerable effects. [...] A motion picture can achieve this kind of thrill perhaps more easily than any other medium, but the devices of showing developed by modern fiction can do it well." (277)

"And then he is gone. He is dead, and we have experienced a personal loss, a personal blow, of a kind that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve with a technique which provided us with any clear moral or intellectual guidance about the meaning of his death." (278)


Section 2: Types of Literary Interest

Booth has a very interesting section in his text where he discusses the "types of literary interest," or the elements of fiction that keep our attention and force us to continue the experience. While this is related to the idea of immersion, I think a look at how these interests relate to games may deserve an additional section of its own.

Booth breaks up literary interest into three types: intellectual interests, completion of qualities, and what he calls practical interests, but which I shall call empathic concerns (since I feel that more accurately captures the sort of interests he describes).

Intellectual interests refers to curiosity. We have a sort of impartial, academic interest in facts and in how the story will play out. Completion of qualities refers to pattern recognition and the desire for pattern completion. Booth includes in this all types of pattern completion, from story concerns - capture and punishment being the natural completion of crime, and so on - to more formal concerns dealing with the literary discourse (the form of the story rather than the content) itself, as described in the first quote ("a sonnet begun calls for a sonnet concluded..."). Finally, empathic concern deals with our relation to the characters, and our desire to see things unfold based on how we relate to them. We would like to see sympathetic characters have happy endings, villainous characters get their just desserts, and so on.

Booth's analysis of these three aspects and how they interact with one another is quite in-depth, and I will not go into all of it here. (If you're curious about it, it's in chapter V of the book, beginning page 125.) What I would like to discuss is how these types of interest might relate to game studies. Let's put side by side the way each of the three interests work in both media.

Intellectual interest in the novel: I am curious about how this strange egg came to be in the middle of the field. I am curious about what the egg is. I am curious about what will happen if the main character goes up to the egg and touches it. I keep reading, hoping that the author will see fit to answer these questions.

Intellectual interest in the game: I am curious about how this strange egg came to be in the middle of the field. I am curious about what the egg is. I am curious about what will happen if the main character goes up to the egg and touches it. I go up to the egg and touch it, definitely answering at least the final question, and hoping that my interest will trigger further information about the first two.

The interest has gone from a passive experience to an active one. In the case of intellectual interest, a game can be directed by the specific interest of the player, allowing for more engagement - the player need not rely, as the reader must, on the good grace of the game's creator to focus in on what the player finds interesting. The player chooses the area of focus. However, she must still rely on the game designer to create the game in such a way as to allow it to respond to her curiosity in a satisfactory manner. The game designer can accomplish this by making as much as possible of the environment reactant. A reader, on the other hand, must hope that the author's area of intellectual curiosity matches up with her own, because only the author determines what areas of the novel are further explored.

The completion of qualities area is similar. Rather than waiting in suspense to see if the author will complete the patterns I see forming in the novel, I will actively seek out these pattern completions in a game, if I find them desirous. However, this does remove one element crucial to the enjoyment of the novel - suspense. Because he maintains total control, the author can withhold the completion of certain patterns as a method of keeping the reader interested. When the player can actively seek out completion, the suspense is weakened, if not destroyed.

Pattern recognition is also an integral aspect of gameplay, and the learning inherent in gameplay. Players learn that certain actions are available, and will have certain effects. Unlike the real world, the effects of actions in a game are generally consistent. We build our experience of playing the game through learning to recognize and use patterns, in fighting, in problem-solving, and in a number of other ways. Many players gain pleasure from the repetitions of certain patterns, as in the steadily increasing difficulty of certain puzzle games, where the answer to each new puzzle incorporates skills and tricks learned in previous puzzles, and a recombining and shifting of patterns produces new results, which can then be added to the player's repertoire of puzzle solutions for use on future puzzles.

Finally, empathic concerns. This, as touched upon previously, is an area where games really shine. Controlling the empathic relations of a character with their reader is exceedingly tricky business in a novel, and requires a good deal of skill on the part of the author. A game, on the other hand, generally starts with an advantage, given that the character is under the control of the player, and thus the player is forced to relate to their actions (as they are the player's actions as well). We have a very personal stake in whether the story will work out well for the main character, because this happy ending likely coincides with our successful completion of the game. There are, of course, exceptions to the happy ending - but we still tend to presume that we are moving the character towards a certain goal, and that the goal is somehow desirous, at least for the player. Our empathic concern is less necessarily for the happiness of this character, but more of the success of ourselves as players. Nevertheless, this method still operates by harnessing the same sort of interest as does our empathic concerns for a character in a novel. The focus has just shifted from an exclusive focus on the character to a mixed focus on the character and ourselves.

A combination of these three elements of interest are why I think games have a tendency to be "addictive." Combining a high degree of emotional resonance with the pleasure of repeated pattern recognition (technical, at the very least) and the ability to actively pursue the objects of one's curiosity combine to capture the audience's interest and hold it fast.

Here are some relevant quotes from this section of Booth:

"...our desire for causal completion is one of the strongest of interests available to the author. Not only do we believe that certain causes do in life produce certain effects; in literature we believe that they should. Consequently, we ordinary readers will go to great lengths, once we have been caught up by an author who knows how to make use of this interest, to find out whether our demands will be met." (126)

"If we look closely at our responses to most great novels, we discover that we feel a strong concern for the characters as people; we care about their good and bad fortune. [...] It is of course true that our desires concerning the fate of such imagined people differ markedly from our desires in real life. We will accept destruction of the man we love, in a literary work, if destruction is required to satisfy our other interests; we will take pleasure in combinations of hope and fear which in real life would be intolerable. But hope and fear are there, and the destruction or salvation is felt in a manner closely analogous to the feelings produced by such events in real life." (129-130)

"Such [emotional] concerns are not simply a necessary but impure base, as Ortega would have it, to "make contemplation possible" but "with no aesthetic value or only a reflected or secondary one" (pp. 80, 76). In many first-rate works they are the very core of our experience. We may refuse assent when an author tries to manipulate us too obviously or cheaply with a casual bestowal of goodness or intellectual brilliance or beauty or charm. We all have use for epithets like "melodramatic" to apply against abuses of this kind. But his does not mean that human interest in itself is cheap. It is true that our involvement in the fate of Raskolnikov is not different in kind from the involvement sought by the most sentimental of novels. But in the great work we surrender our emotions for reasons that leave us with no regrets, no inclination to retract, after the immediate spell is past. They are, in fact, reasons which we should be ashamed not to respond to." (130-131)

"...it is clear that no great work is based on only one interest. Whenever a work tends towards an exclusive reliance on intellectual interests, on the contemplation of qualities, or on practical desires we all look for adjectives to whip the offender with; a mere "novel of ideas," a mere "desiccated form," a mere "tear-jerker" will offend all but the small handful of critics and authors who are momentarily absorbed in pushing one interest to the limit." (133)


Section 3: Person / POV

I don't have much to offer in the way of quotes for this section, but I am impressed nonetheless by the incredibly nuanced view which Booth takes towards the idea of "point of view" in literature, from distinguishing between "person" in the traditional manner to more complex ideas of "dramatized narrators" and so on. What I think is very interesting about point of view in games is the way that certain games embody what we often think of as traditional points of view.

A game is almost always told from the point of view of the PC. This makes the PC the "narrator-agent," as it were, or the narrator who is also a character in the story. However, the character also shares the experience of being the implied reader as well, as he is the intended avatar for the player within the game, and thus all responses to the player's input will be received via the game's relation to this character. In the same way as a text is "speaking" to the implied reader, the game is "reacting" to the character, which is implied to be the player. Narrative theory will have to come up with a whole new terminology to describe exactly what position the player and the PC hold within the narrative - games have a tendency to twist the existing terms to their breaking points.

Oddly enough however, what we think of as some of the most basic and elementary (in the sense of sort of juvenile, in addition to simple) categories of literary point of view hold true in games, and do so in ways that provide an interesting visualization for how we think of the literary equivalents.

First-Person
First-person games present a camera situated "behind the eyes" of the PC. Only the hands and perhaps some of the arms can be seen of the character being played. We see of the character and of the world only what we would see of ourselves if we were in the same situation, thus helping to increase our sense of being the character in question, the limited "I" perspective.

Third-Person Limited
Third-person games such as RPGs have a camera situated behind and usually slightly above the main character. We see the figure of the character from the outside, and a portion of the surrounding environment. This gives us a sense of greater grasp over the world/map, perhaps seeing some things that the character himself might not be able to. Thus we increase the scope of our viewpoint while limiting our identification with the character.

Third-Person Omniscient
Common to RTS and other God games, this perspective puts the camera high above the ground, allowing the player to see large portions of the world at once, and to move back and forth across the world independent of any particular character. This is also the only viewpoint where the player is not specifically relating to a single character in the game. In this perspective, we lose almost all empathy with individual characters - more often than not, characters are resources rather than individuals, and the player is an invisible god-force that controls their actions. With our view at its fullest availability, we sacrifice the most player/character empathy with any single character.

It would be very interesting to me to see these perspectives related, in turn, back to the literary medium, but I do feel that this is somewhat outside the scope of this project.


In conclusion, go read Booth. It will quite likely be less tiring than what you have just finished.

Readings in Narrative Theory: Narrative as Rhetoric

At the moment, I am doing some intensive reading in narrative theory and game studies. I'd like to present some summaries of my readings here, as well as quotes of interest I have found, and how the reading topics relate to my work. In addition to helping me organize my own thoughts, I hope the summaries might be helpful to others looking for readings on the same or similar subjects. Work summaries will be preceded in posts by their bibliographic information.

Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.

Of the chapters from Phelan's book I read, only one ended up frantically pasted with post-it notes; I found the chapter on second-person narrative to be particularly interesting and very relevant. One of the topics of my paper is the feeling of empathy that the medium can generate by combining the personas of the player (as audience, narratee, etc.) with the persona of the main character (as protagonist, narrator) - having the decisions and actions of the former control the latter, allowing the player to in effect mentally substitute himself for the character in the world. (What Gee apparently calls "projected identity.") Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best literary parallel I've come across so far has been second-person narration. A quote (this and all following quotes are from chapter 7 of Phelan's book, entitled "Narratee, Narrative Audience, and Second-Person Narration: How I--And You?-- Read Lorrie Moore's "How""):

"When the second-person address to a narratee-protagonist both overlaps with and differentiates itself from an address to actual readers, those readers will simultaneously occupy the position of addressee and observer. Furthermore, the fuller the characterization of the you, the more aware actual readers will be of their differences from that you, and thus the more fully they will move into the observer role--and the less likely that this role will overlap with the addressee position. In other words, the greater the characterization of the you, the more like a standard protagonist the you becomes, and, consequently, the more actual readers can employ their standard strategies for reading narrative. However, as recent commentators on the second-person narration have consistently observed, most writers who employ this technique take advantage of the opportunity to move readers between the positions of observer and addressee, and, indeed, to blur the boundaries between these positions." (137)

When Phelan uses "observer" in this passage, he means the audience as reader, the person observing and mentally cataloguing/interpreting the text. The "implied reader," to use the literary lingo. In gaming, this would be the audience as player. The gamer with the control pad, controlling the character's actions from outside the game's context.

The "addressee" on the other hand, is the "you" of the second-person narration, the addressed individual that the narrative describes. Phelan quotes from a work by Lorrie Moore ("How") as his example of second-person narration:

"Begin by meeting him in a class, a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes."

The addressee here is the "you" who is telling jokes. The "you" who meets "him" at a bar, or a rummage sale. The "you" is a character in the story, and has specific characterization (in particular, in this passage, she is female and dating). The gaming parallel here is the PC - the character that the player controls. Though characterized (we know exactly what Sora from Kingdom Hearts looks like, who his friends are, how he talks, etc.), the PC is still conflated with the player by allowing the player to control his actions, in the same way that the observer and addressee are connected by the pronoun "you."

Phelan's point about characterization steering the audience towards the observer role rather than the addressee role is particularly relevant to my work - in my chapter on player/character empathy, I posit that "implicit characterization" - or characterization that takes place mostly in the mind of the player, rather than in cues inherent in the game - lends itself more readily to a high level of immersion and empathy. This is as opposed to "explicit characterization," which provides the characterization for us within the game, and thus limits the degree to which we as a players can substitute ourselves into that character's role. If the player is thought of as the implicit "you," then he may assume that all characterization elements that apply to him also apply to the main character, unless told specifically otherwise. For instance, if I do not know the gender of a main character, I might choose to believe that she is female, to better empathize and put myself in her position. However, if I am told (as I often am) that the main character is male, this is one step of distance between who I am and who the character is.

For this reason (empathic generality), many games have silent protagonists (the "Silent Protagonist Phenomenon," as I like to call it) - the PCs have no voice, and no dialogue. This very important trait - how the character responds to the world around him, is left up to the player's discretion and imagination. A sarcastic player may choose to imagine sarcastic responses to questions posed to his character, while a sympathetic player may imagine sympathetic responses. We, as players, are allowed characterization that suits our preferences and personality, allowing us to draw as close to the character as possible.

Other quotes:

"Because Moore begins by narrating an event in which the actual reader is not directly involoved--girl meets boy-- the observer role is initially more prominent. But in the second paragraph, where the gender of the you is not specified and the general trajectory of the you's experience is widely recognizable, the actual reader is likely to feel the pull of the adressee role." (137-138)

"As Rabinowitz says, Prince's narratee remains "out there," distinct from the actual reader; a narrative audience, by contrast, occupies some part of the actual reader's consciousness and, given the default position, the actual reader also gives traits to the narrative audience." (143)

"Is it adequate to say, as a structuralist narratology would, that the unnamed you addressed by the narrator is the narratee and the protagonist, that the narrative's implied reader is different from this narratee, someone who infers from the narrator's address a larger cultural story about female-male relationships? Although this account gets at a good part of the communicative structure of the text, it is not fully adequate. It leaves out the way that the second-person address exerts pressure on the actal reader--even the male reader, as in the second paragraph--"to take on the role" of the narratee-protagonist as "you" experience(s) the ups and downs (especially the downs) of the relationship. In other words, continuing to assume that the narratee is a distinct character who is "out there" will mean not just that we prefer the structuralist to the rhetorical framework; it also will mean that the structuralist analysis will neglect a significant aspect of how the text attempts to communicate." (143-144)

"For the mimetic illusion and the emotional force of a play to work, we must enter the observer position of the "narrative" ("dramatic"?) audience and believe in the reality of, say, Othello, Iago, and Desdemona. Indeed, the oft-discussed instances of people leaping upon the stage to stop the action are, in these terms, examples of what happens when we enter so deeply into the narrative audience position that we fail to maintain our simultaneous participation in the authorial audience." (145)

"In narrative, where we always have narrative audiences and narratees, one of the variables in narrative discourse will be how much the narratee and the narrative audience overlap. As I suggested earlier, what second-person narration shows is that the more fully the narrative is characterized, the greater the distance between narratee and narrative audience; similarly, the less the narratee is characterized, the greater the coincidence between the two." (146)

"As I noted above, "How" identifies the narratee as female, but the second-person address blurs the separation of narratee and narrative audience frequently enough for the observer of either sex to be pulled into the narrative's subject position." (148)

"While the clear distinction between the narratee and the narrative audience allows us to infer so much about the narratee's behavior and situation, the "you" address also invites us to project ourselves--as narrative audience, authorial audience, and actual readers--into the narratee's subject position. Consequently, the inferences we make as we occupy the narrative audience position lead us to a complicated vision that mingles narratee and self in the narratee's position. We both occupy the position and know what the position is like in a way that the narratee herself does not. In this way, we feel addressed by the narrator but not fully coincident with the narratee." (151)

As you can see, Phelan's conclusions about second-person address have direct parallels with gaming. Because the player is required to participate in the narrative, she is always addressed as an implicit "you" by the game, by sheer virtue of the fact that her actions/decisions control the main character. The character is her window into the world, her remote-controlled puppet, and addresses to that character by the game automatically become addresses to the player as well, in the same way that the player's actions become the character's actions.