I found the old essays I wrote for my Arts Degree at Melbourne University (1997 - 2000), and decided to upload some for historical interest and general self-reflective purposes!
How do we begin to theorise the narrative forms present in the multi-linear narratives found in numerous computer games?
Subject: The Entertainment Experience
by Murray Lorden (1999)
Computer games are comprised of an "illusionistic reality" which is bound only by the programmers and how they have chosen to set up the environment and its "interactives". Bound within this collection of pre-programmed possibilities of interaction there lies a plot. Usually, this plot is singular or has only minor detours into sub-plots. Computer game plots are usually driven by a cause and effect chain based on character motivations, especially the goals of the protagonist (ie: you). This set plot differs however from the narrative which is different every time it is performed.
It could be said then, that every time a computer game is played, the actual "narrative" - or the actual way that the story is played out and performed - comes out differently. The playing-out of the plot is multi-linear, non-linear, and generally very multiple (and also paradoxical when it comes to replaying and reloading the game). In this sense, computer games are multiple in their execution in a way that films and other traditional forms of story telling are not. Traditionally, a text is exhibited in a totally fixed way; the product is complete before it is exhibited and is the same every time. Computer games are played, and although the plot remains intact, the particulars of the narrative are determined by the player.
Despite the changes that the multiplicity and non-fixedness of computer game "texts" provides, their narrative forms can still be understood better if we analyse how they work with the conventions of traditional story-telling media. Games freely and fluidly use familiar conventions from all the other story-telling media to "cue" the player as to how to interact with the narrative. A game does this through referring to the whole "array" of film, television, computer games, and every other media which has come before it that it wishes to make a part of its experience.
The "array" of media gone by
Whether an adventure game, a role-playing-game or a first person shooter, you enter a world that operates according to conventions. Janet Murray says that, "Genre fiction is appropriate for electronic narrative because it scripts the interactor." She means that the conventions that are employed by the programmers and offered up to the interactor provide the player with expectations of how to most effectively act as an agent in the given environment. The generic cues let us know what possibilities are likely to be open to us (and therefore programmed into the game) due to knowing - through our familiarity with the "array" - what actions and meanings are usually associated with these conventions.
For example, in an action game the player uses their prior knowledge of action cinema, war films, similar computer games and a mixture of other sources to deduce what attitudes can be taken into the game. For example, when you start a game in a high-tech sci-fi labyrinth with a gun in your hand and enemy scattered throughout the halls and rooms, you understand immediately what sort of conventions you are entering and are expected to act accordingly if you are to be successful in your agency.
You may need to escape from a planet infested by monsters. You begin the game alone in the middle of enemy territory where your space pod "accidentally" split from your fellow soldiers during deployment. And so starts a constant battle to achieve the team's mission on your own and then escape! Most action games are based on a similar premise, but often involve missions into enemy territory where missions must be carried out successfully to move on to the next mission. The door to the next level is naturally locked and guarded by furious monsters. You must find the key, or press the button, or pull the lever, or get the PIN code, and unlock that door. The door is unlocked and a new objective is set and a new hoard of monsters is standing between you and it. It is, in the end, very linear in form despite the fact that the level can be paced out in almost infinite different configurations. But whether you walk along the left of the corridors, the right, jump up and down, shoot everyone or run past them all really doesn't make much difference to the plot. The plot is essentially a tension between the goal of the mission and that which stands between you and it. However, the performance of the narrative is different every time you play.
Most games are the near ultimate embodiment of the "cause and effect chain", where you cannot access one part of the game until you have completed another. In this respect, games are very like films, where what is shown to you, and how and when it is shown to you, is predetermined by the author. Most games are really just an interactive linear narrative. The plots of these games can usually be written in blurb form, detailing what happens and how it happens. And this is how the events will happen when you turn on the game and play it to the end. It is only the unravelling (through participation) of them that is non-fixed (although pre-defined). It is the details alone which could usually be described as multi-linear, such as the particular route which you take through an environment, or the order that you collect certain objects.
To date, I don't think we have truly seen a game where the plot can diverge at a point where each split offers up a whole different narrative trail than the other choices. A game must be bound into a finite area of exploration and relevance. Generally, the way developers like to seal off the narrative possibilities in a game is this: The illusion of agency is given by allowing the player to make "wrong moves", such as falling off a cliff, letting the monster kill them, or by failing to collect the right items or information. These "mistakes" (or divergences from the intended "correct" narrative) do not result in a branching of the narrative however, but instead, the narrative will be stopped and you will be put back on track (by returning to a previous point). Usually this is done by a "mistake" that leads to death, or another form of immobilisation of agency (a "game over" state), such as imprisonment, or getting fired, etc.
Usually, the possible events are waiting to happen, generally in a very specific order, one unlocking the next like classical cinema's cause and effect chain. Therefore, in a game you cannot just decide to go to Rio. There is unlikely to be an airport in the game, let alone one which will let you fly wherever you like. You just can't program every plot possibility.
Playing the game against the goals
The only way you can diverge from the narrative in ways which are not "terminal" (ie: in ways which do not lead to death or loading a previous saved game) are by setting your own goal - different from those intended by the programmers - which can be achieved within the game world without requiring that you transcend the game's limited set of possibilities.
As Angela Ndalianis discusses in her articles in the readings, there are times when people play games in ways that they were not intended to be played. This could include wandering about, either for amusement or from lack of ability to figure out what to do. This produces an effect of non-narrative as is seen in some art-house cinema. It could be considered a sort of "mort temp" (dead time) where there is no apparent purpose in the "events". Although they are not helping the intended cause and effect chain of classical cinema (and classical game narratives), it could be said that every narrative path you choose is as valid as the intended one.
This reminds me of another subversion of gaming narratives that I have been involved in lately without really intending it. I have been wandering around the 3D environments of games taking screenshots (which stores the current view of your character onto your hard-drive as image files). This could be viewed much like taking photographs as a tourist. One such game that I have been taking "snap-shots" in is called Thief: The Dark Project.
The intended narrative of one mission (called "Assassins") is to break into a large mansion of a man named Ramirez who had sent assassins to kill you.
After they bungled the attempt on my life, I tailed them back to his mansion, discovering who had sent them.
I then decided I had plenty of time to go and look around the large township which surrounded the mansion. This is done purely for the enjoyment of immersing myself in the environments and admiring their aesthetic characteristics. I suppose such subversions of the intended forms of interacting do create alternative narratives for the player.
You are still inside the conventions set up for the game you are playing, yet you (as the protagonist) decide to put those priorities aside and to take on your own invented interests. This makes me think that we do need to open up our analysis of narrative to include the game environment as a narrative "possibility" in itself.
Multiple players in a recurring scenario
Perhaps an even more complex issue for game narratives is the option for games to be played with multiple players sharing an environment at once. This is called "multiplayer" and is often comprised of playing only with "real" player characters. These games often have no computer operated characters or any set narrative except for that which is offered in the environment's design. These games - such as Quake I, II, and III, Half-Life, Red Alert, Total Annihilation and many more (most of which also have a single-player, plot driven option) - are played out in a series of set arenas where the basic narrative could best be described as a "shoot-out", each with small variations.
Players meet up in these environments through the Internet on what are called "servers". The server usually has a set "timelimit" which, when reached, will change the map or scenario to the next one. Players join and battle for the highest score (often measured by their number of kills or wins). It is basically just a huge ongoing shoot-out. More recent versions of these multiplayer games include opposing teams where each has a specific goal (such as assaulting the other team's base while the other team tries to fend you off by killing you all). Each day these scenarios get a little more complex. Ultimately, only two outcomes can eventuate from each "round": one of the two teams will achieve their goal and the next round will begin. But this repetition of the same scenarios could still be described as a "narrative waiting to happen", where the exact outcome is always performed differently. A particular configuration of players acts in a certain way to bring about a particular narrative. These games are just like recurring mini war films or mini action films with the same scenarios occurring differently over and over. I don’t know whether these narratives are constantly frozen or in constant motion!
Massively Multiplayer Persistent Worlds
This brings me to another form of computer game: the Massively Multiplayer Persistent World game (MMPW). These games - of which there are only a few so far - are games which involve a massive world which could be explored for weeks of playing time and you would still not have been everywhere. These huge environments are then opened up for players to enter together over the Internet where an ongoing narrative begins and potentially never ends. Thousands of players are involved at a time. Each player has a small character who participates in the land much like a comprehensive simulation of a living adventurer.
What you do when you are inside this world is largely up to you. This totally undermines our traditional notion of a "director" of the action. Here, the notion of "author" relates only to the setting out of the story's parametres, such as the environment's design. The player is then set free to do anything from killing other players, to killing monsters, to being a pacifist, to selling bread to other players, to being a hermit, even being a flaneur, being an explorer, being anything that you wish, at any time you wish. You can either try to be consistent about your character or be totally polymorphic in character, changing your goals and intentions willy-nilly. You can join "guilds", some of which are set up purely to counter other guilds. In "Ultima Online" A large sit-in was staged at the King's castle by a hoard of players because many did not like some of the particulars of the way the game was being run.
In this environment, how do we understand what is going on in terms of "narrative"? It is such a good example of a narrative in that it is a chain of events played out by characters with goals and aims. Yet it somehow seems, at the same time, to defy all notions of narrative in that it is so massively "multiple" and potentially "un-directed".
Such games, however, still revolve predominantly around traditional motifs. Computer games such as these have the potential to offer up innumerable different potential plots jointly participated in by innumerable players. How to theorise such narratives is perhaps best dealt with through an analysis of story elements (such as those conducted by Propp or Tobias) rather than through the idea of the "author" and the fixed-text.
Universal myths and characters have developed over the centuries and these have given form to what Ronald B. Tobias considers a "limited number of plot structures". Vladimir Propp analysed Russian oral folk-tales, coming up with a list of "essential morphemes" - or plot characteristics which fit into patterns, each with limited (and often merely arbitrary and irrelevant) variations. It was the author who gave each telling of the narrative it's individuality and specific character. It is the repetition of a basic plot structures which is then colored, and filled out by the teller, often spontaneously.
In a similar way, it is now the player who puts all the flourishes on the performance of the plot structures laid out by game programmers. But does this agency make the player the author or an actor?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Aarseth, E., "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory", in Hyper/ Text/ Theory, (ed.) George P. Landow, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 1994, pp. 51-86.
- Haddon, L., "Interactive Games", in Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen,
- (eds) Philip Hayward & Tana Wollen, BFI, London, 1993, pp. 123-147.
- Laurel, B., "The Nature of the Beast", in Computers as Theatre, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, Massachusetts, 1991, ch. 1.
- Murray, J., "The Cyberbard and the Multiform Plot", in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1997, ch. 7.
- Ndalianis, A., "Evil Will Walk Once More: Phantasmagoria ~ the Stalker Film as Interactive Movie?", in On A Silver Platter: CD-ROMS and the Promises of a New Technology, (ed.) Greg Smith, New York, New York University Press, ch. 4.
- Snyder, I., "Reconceiving Textuality", in Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth, Melbourne University Press, 1996, ch. 3, pp. 39-60.
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