A Multimodal Approach to Video Games and the Player Experience

Weimin Toh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351184755
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume puts forth an original theoretical framework, the ludonarrative model, for studying video games which foregrounds the empirical study of the player experience. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to and description of the model, which draws on theoretical frameworks from multimodal discourse analysis, game studies, and social semiotics, and its development out of participant observation and qualitative interviews from the empirical study of a group of players. The volume then applies this approach to shed light on how players' experiences in a game influence how they understand and make use of game components in order to progress its narrative. The book concludes with a frame by frame analysis of a popular game to demonstrate the model's principles in action and its subsequent broader applicability to analyzing video game interaction and design. Offering a new way forward for video game research, this volume is key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, discourse analysis, game studies, interactive storytelling, and new media.

1
Introduction

Apollo Square is not for the faint-hearted. But then again, the entire of Rapture isn’t. Stepping into the sepulchral confines of the once-lively public forum, Mary¹ is met with the grotesque sight of bodies hanging from overhead beams. A banner marked with the words “Gene Traitors” hung on the wooden beam, shaming these people even in death. Mary approached the nearby vending machine to interact with it and started the mini game with pipes. “Apollo Square is very run down”, Mary exclaimed as she played the mini game. When Mary completed the mini game, she proceeded further into Apollo Square. All around, Mary only spotted grime and desolation. “Apollo Square resembled those slums where poor people lived in real life”, she commented. The barbed wires everywhere only added to the sense of oppression one felt, as if she was in a prison. “If Olympus Heights is where the rich and powerful live, then Apollo Square is probably where all the poor people live”. A nearby audio log on the ground caught her eye and she picked it up to listen to it. The audio log titled, “What’s Happening Here?” provides more contextual information about Apollo Square. The NPC Diane McClintock narrated in the audio log how a woman climbed over the fence to try to escape but was lit on fire by one of Andrew Ryan’s guards. As Mary continued exploring Apollo Square, she reflected on the audio log by focusing on Andrew Ryan’s characterisation. “Andrew Ryan is not very good at dominance because he is not very nice to the poor people”, she exclaimed, “the riots started because there were many people living in poverty who started to fight back. That’s how revolutions happen”. An ethereal yet sinister voice floated from somewhere close. It was the unmistakable sound of a Little Sister. As Mary rounded the corner, she was taken aback by the sight of a Big Daddy fending off the attacks of various zombie-like Splicers. The Big Daddy was a formidable presence, decked from top to bottom in heavy-duty metal and wielding a nasty-looking conical drill. It was going to be a challenge to take it down. She strategised, “I realised how useful electric gel is when fighting Big Daddy”. Mary produced her Tommy Gun and entered the fray. A burst of gunfire, the nauseating squish of metal meeting meat, and the Splicer was dead. Mary then turned her attention to the Big Daddy. She took aim at the Big Daddy using her incinerate power and enraged it. Boom! The Big Daddy swivelled around and retaliated with a bomb right smack in Mary’s face, drawing a pained shriek from Mary. It was time to end it all. Deftly switching to her chemical thrower, she released a torrent of electric gel at the Big Daddy. The Big Daddy was stunned and could only watch helplessly as Mary blasted the life out of itself. “Super useful, I would say!” Mary mused, “Look at how quickly it (the electric gel) runs through its health”.

As I watched the video recordings of the participants of my study, I was able to obtain a deeper understanding of their player experience. This deeper understanding came from my observation of how they interacted with the game world in the game laboratory and the gameplay recordings. More importantly, I was able to access their thought processes from the think-aloud protocol (van Someren et al., 1994; Theodorou, 2010; Tan et al., 2014) that I have instructed them to engage in when recording the game-play for my viewing and analysis. As we can see from the example above from Bioshock (Irrational Games, 2007), the participant focuses initially on the construction of mental or situation models in narrative comprehension (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan et al., 1995; Arthur et al., 2002; Cardona-Rivera & Young, 2012). She pieces together the narrative events from multiple sources such as the game’s environment or environmental storytelling and the embedded narrative (Jenkins, 2004) in the audio log. As she proceeded in the game world, her focus shifted towards her gameplay strategising as she encountered the boss fight with Big Daddy.

For games which are dependent on whether the player has a good experience playing them, user research (e.g. Bernhaupt, 2010; Drachen et al., 2018) to obtain a deeper understanding of the player experience is essential and integral to the process of analysing and developing games. I offer an approach or a framework that scholars can draw from when designing their own studies of video gameplay and the player experience (e.g. Chen, 2010, 2012; Schott et al., 2013; Toh, 2014; Milik, 2015; Upton, 2017; Yu, 2017). To facilitate this aim, I examine video games as a ludonarrative form grounded in the player’s experience by pursuing answers to three questions: What are the relationships between the narrative and gameplay in video games? How does the player experience relate to the various ludonarrative relationships in video games? What insights about video game design can we obtain when the ludonarrative model is applied to analyse specific video games? In our case, ludonarrative is defined as the implied “whole” of every video game and it includes the gameplay (“ludo”), the story (“narrative”), and the player.

The Player Experience in Ludonarratology

I use a qualitative exploratory and empirical-based approach (Roth & Koenitz, 2017) for the development of the ludonarrative model which I refine using the player experience. For the study of the player experience, I adopt a mixture of humanities (e.g. multimodal discourse analysis) and social sciences methods (e.g. player observation and interviews). My approach sees “games as object”/“artifact” (cf., Björk & Holopainen, 2005; Bogost, 2007) and “games as process”/“activity” (cf., Atkins, 2003; Malaby, 2007; Wardrip-Fruin, 2009). The former involves studying the game as text (using close reading, reflection, and multimodal discourse analysis; cf., Masso, 2009) to categorise formal aspects of games. The latter involves studying concrete gaming practices (e.g. gameplay observations and interviews) and arguing that gaming is context and situation dependent (Jørgensen, 2003) and cannot be studied in the abstract (Smith, 2006). From a textual perspective, we can only analyse the video game as a product without the presence of the player. In video game analysis and game studies where games are action (Galloway, 2006) and performance-oriented, it is important for us to incorporate the player as an obligatory element in the playing process (Pagulayan et al., 2003; Gee, 2008; Nacke & Drachen, 2011).

Player experience research (Pagulayan et al., 2003; Pagulayan & Steury, 2004; Fernandez, 2008; Mandryk, 2008; Drachen et al., 2009) overlaps with user experience research (Jordan, 1999; Garrett, 2003; Kankainen, 2003; Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006; Sánchez et al., 2009). Player experience research combines the study of the players’ internal state (e.g. personality), the designed system’s characteristics (e.g. ludonarrative) and the context of interaction. From this perspective, the players’ mental models of the video game narrative are tied to their past and present gaming experiences. Their gaming experiences are in turn related to or combined with goal-oriented action in the gameplay which varies among different players to produce the unique narrative experience (Caracciolo, 2014) of each player. An important issue in the study of the player experience is that the researchers’ performances might not be the best source for study, especially when we are analysing our own playing (Aarseth, 2004a). For the researchers, playing the game is essential for understanding formal aspects of the game structures, but we should also combine our playing with other sources whenever possible (Aarseth, 2004b). To strengthen the analysis or guard against misinterpretations, we should match the results of our analysis or interpretations of our gameplay to the empirical basis (Aarseth, 2004b). We can also reflect on both our own playing experiences (Cameron & Carroll, 2004) and the other players’ experiences (Williams & Kirschner, 2013). Therefore, we should incorporate the subjective experiences of different players to obtain a more complete understanding of the players’ video gameplay when we perform game studies with our aim of constructing a theoretical model.

One of the most useful contributions of the theoretical frame of ludonarratology is in the research method of data collection and analysis in which I constantly modify and refine the theoretical model as I collect more empirical data. Drawing upon the process of game development/design, I use an iterative (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004; Fullerton et al., 2004; Fullerton et al., 2006; Fullerton, 2008; Brathwaite & Schreiber, 2009; Coulton & Hook, 2017; Dormans & Holopainen, 2017) and emergent (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004) approach in the construction of the ludonarrative model and its subcategories. A theory or model is good only if we can use it to predict or describe a phenomenon in useful terms (Dewey, 2005a). Therefore, theories and models should strive to describe data accurately or provide good predictions about how things behave. In this sense, research is an iterative process where theoretical concepts are rejected or refined based on new findings (Lankoski & Bjӧrk, 2015) derived from our interactions with reality (Dewey, 2005b). These interactions refer to my discussions with the players during the interviews about their playing experience. My focus is the study of players’ gameplay to construct the model for the understanding of our interaction with video games. As I gather new data from the players, they are used to re-contextualise my understanding of the game-player relationship (Mäyra, 2008) and serve to constantly refine the ludonarrative model.

Due to the undeniable complexity of the process of meaning construction from the players’ interviews and my subjective playing experience (cf. Taylor, 2009), any arbitrary conventions of data analysis would unnecessarily decrease the research potential of discourse studies in terms of reliability, validity, and credibility (Santiago-Delefosse et al., 2016). In the approach I have adopted, the emphasis is on understanding the agency of the human players which is situated in the complexity of their social reality. By using the players’ experience to refine the theoretical model, I introduce the element of subjectivity into the model because of the players’ and my subjective judgements. This is unavoidable because discourse analysis, social semiotics, and open-ended interviews are traditionally focused on understanding how humans perceive reality, which is unpredictable. Therefore, because of the subjective element of the research method and subjects used to refine the theoretical model, we need to regard all findings in this volume as but one possible way of interpretation.

The value of this volume lies in seeing the meaning potential of a form as generally heterogeneous where the meanings ascribed in interpretation are open. I adopt the method of the triangulation (Cicourel, 1969; Kuper et al., 2008; Twining et al., 2017) of data to build the theoretical model and enrich the interpretations from multiple sources (Hanington & Martin, 2012) to include the lived reality of the players. The triangulation method (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011; Armstrong et al., 2011; Annabi & McGann, 2013; Bruneel et al., 2013, p. 132) involves theoretical triangulation (Denzin, 2006). Multiple theoretical frameworks from different disciplines (e.g. literary studies, social semiotics, and game studies) are used “in the analysis of a specific discursive occasion” (Weiss & Wodak, 2003, p. 22) to develop and refine the theoretical model. Data triangulation (Denzin, 2006) has been used to gather data from different players. Finally, method triangulation has been used for data gathering and analysis (Denzin, 2006; Torrance, 2012; Barr, 2017) which can increase the validity of interpretations (Birt et al., 2016). The different methods of data collection include the observation of the players’ gameplay in the laboratory, the interviews, and the gameplay recordings. Accordingly, in this book, the player experience is explored through the process of “the negotiation o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Multimodal Approach to Ludonarratology
• 3 Theoretical Conceptualisation of the Ludonarrative Model
• 4 Ludonarrative Dissonance
• 5 Ludonarrative Resonance
• 6 Ludonarrative (Ir)relevance and the Player Experience
• 7 Methodological Considerations in the Ludonarrative Model
• 8 Narration I—Players’ Mental Models
• 9 Narration II—Video Game Narrative Analysis Framework
• 10 Gameplay I—Players’ Actions and Mechanics
• 11 Gameplay II—Loop, Phase Types, and Stage(s)
• 12 Video Games as Ludonarrative: Application and Future Directions
• Appendix A: Session 1’s Open-Ended Interview Questions
• Glossary
• Index