Playability 1

Well, it's been a chaotic couple of weeks - a wedding in Melbourne, Easter, birthday. I've barely been getting through the readings, let alone trying to work out what I really think about them.

But this week coming up, however, I am to lead the discussion on the topic Playability 1: Hypertext, net narratives and computer games.

Most of this week's readings however, seem to focus primarily on computer games. I haven't yet got on to readings three and four on the list, but so far the focus is squarely on the computer game and the questions being raised seem to largely concern trying to pin down what it really is. It seems that just calling something "a game" isn't really enough for the theorists, who are also trying to determine whether there are any links with narrative theory, and with other theories applied to more traditional story-telling such as literature, film and theatre. So I guess the first question is "is a game really about a story, or is the story just a means to make the gameplay more interesting because of its context?" - would the same game be just as interesting to someone regardless of whether its backstory involved, say, Chinese warlords or the Second World War? I guess a second question one could ask is "Does it really matter?". Do gamers spend their time discussing the plot of a game or strategies to reach their goal, to win the game?

I have my own questions too: starting with "what the hell is narrative theory?". So I guess I'd better go forth and google...

OK. So I've found a book chapter on the University of Cologne's website (Narratology: A guide to the theory of narrative, Manfred Jahn)which seems to make it pretty clear - in a basic sort of way anyway:

What are the main ingredients of a narrative? What must a narrative have to count it as a narrative? For a simple answer, let us say that all narratives have a story. But let us immediately add two additional requirements: (1) any kind of story is not enough; let us stipulate that a story must have an action which involves characters; and (2) let us also assume that all stories come with a story-teller... [or] narrator. A narrative has a story based on an action caused and experienced by characters, and a narrator who tells it

I guess the first part of this is applicable to some games - some have characters, others do not, some have sort-of characters such as Myst which appears to have a presence for the player, but no actual character with a name, history, etc. (Please forgive me if I get this massively wrong - I've never played Myst). However, it seems to me that for the most part, games tend to lack a narrator - the point of most games is to experience (and influence) the story - to be within it, not being told it by someone else. So they have a story, but don't qualify as a narrative.

Ah. apparently this basic narrative definition is derived from Gerald Prince and Gérard Genette. So now you know.

At any rate, "a backstory or plot is not enough. A sequence of events enacted constitutes a drama, a sequence of events taking place a performance, a sequence of events recounted a narrative, and perhaps a sequence of events produced by manipulating equipment and following formal rules constitutes a game." Hmmm. Sounds a bit to me like games are a combo of most of the preceding ones - events are enacted, performed (user action), and the backstory kicks in, often in quite a narrative sense. But I could be wrong...

Next statement: "In games, the dominant temporal relation is the one between user time and event time and not the narrative one between story time and discourse time". This seems to be a little less defensible than the narrative statement. It seems to me that user time and discourse time are going to be pretty much the same thing - stuff is happening to someone right now, whether that is being told a story or participating in a game. So then there's story time and event time which as I interpret them could also be pretty similar - stories have a tendency to fold up time into smaller parcels as required ("Ten years later..."); games do tend to follow a more contextually realistic timeframe, but there's nothing to prevent the user from tinkering with the event time, speeding it up or slowing it down to allow more or fewer actions within a space, allowing time to, for example, build up troops ready for an imminent invasion, or complete the construction of a building without having to wait around for it.

Sorry - that previous paragraph I think may have contradicted itself. Will come back to the idea of event/story time later.

"Formal games are systems of means and ends" - does this mean that a narrative is a type of system? It doesn't seem so to me. In which case, are we being fooled into even attempting to establish a link between games and any kind of narrative theory? Perhaps we should accept that computer games are more of a meta-artform - a system comprising elements of a bunch of other artforms, including narrative, cinema, music, sound design, all held together by a bunch of logic (which has little required place in other artforms) - perhaps the logic is the key????

Following this thread through, there doesn't seem to be any need for logic in other meta-artforms such as cinema - if a film isn't logical, you just sit back and let it wash over you and it generally gets called "arty"; do the same thing with a game though, and people would probably stop playing it - if you can't in some way predict the reaction that accompanies an action, how are you going to achieve the game's goal? If the game has no real goal, then is it actually a game? Would it not instead be some sort of immersive environment instead? Games imply rules; rules imply logic.