Videogames and Education

Harry J. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780765619969
• eBook ISBN: 9781317452652
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

Video games challenge our notions of identity, creativity, and moral value, and provide a powerful new avenue for teaching and learning. This book is a rich and provocative guide to the role of interactive media in cultural learning. It searches for specific ways to interpret video games in the context of human experience and in the field of humanities research. The author shows how video games have become a powerful form of political, ethical, and religious discourse, and how they have already influenced the way we teach, learn, and create. He discusses the major trends in game design, the public controversies surrounding video games, and the predominant critical positions in game criticism. The book speaks to all educators, scholars, and thinking persons who seek a fuller understanding of this significant and video games cultural phenomenon.

I

POETICS

1

Videogames and Storytelling

In “Vafthrudnir’s Sayings,” part of the collection of Old Norse legends known as the Poetic Edda, Odin, the chief god of war and wisdom, seeks Vafthrudnir, the all-wise giant, in order to test the wisdom of the gods against that of their ancient adversaries. The two pose questions to each other until Odin wins Vafthrudnir’s secrets, but the god does not revel in his triumph: Vafthrudnir foretells Odin’s doom at Ragnarök. As bearer of the knowledge of the end of the world, Vafthrudnir is more than a giant. He is fate—all that is antagonistic or unknown to men and gods.

The dialogue between Odin and Vafthrudnir is a mythical expression of the wisdom contest, a game common in ancient cultures. The rules are simple: opponents swap questions or riddles until one fails to answer. In order to prove his wisdom superior to that of his opponent, the asker must know the answers to his own questions. Odin’s answers to Vafthrudnir reveal the names of the horses that draw the sun and the moon, the name of the river that divides the realm of the giants from the realm of the gods, and the name of the field where the final battle between the gods and the giants will take place. Vafthrudnir’s answers, in turn, reveal the history and the destiny of the world. In this sense, “Vafthrudnir’s Sayings” is not only a game but also a story, a narrative collaboration between hero and antagonist that sketches the settings, characters, and plots comprising the Norse cosmos.¹

As both contest and collaborative narrative, “Vafthrudnir’s Sayings” is a literary archetype for current adventure and role-playing games, and it frames one of the predominant controversies among those who study the morphology and history of videogames. Are videogames games or stories? Are they primarily constituted by a system of rules, like tic-tac-toe or chess, or a sequence of imagined events, like a novel or a film? Adventure games and role-playing games that integrate cinematic storytelling with interactive problem solving stand at the center of the debate.

Ludologists, those who study videogames as games, insist that playing a game differs cognitively from reading a novel or viewing a film. While the emotional satisfaction we derive from a narrative relies on following a sequence of events and identifying with characters, the ludic or gameplay experience relies instead on the mastery of puzzles and problems. Markku Eskelinen pointedly writes, “If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.”²

Narratologists, those who study videogames as stories, draw a categorical distinction between puzzle games lacking narrative structure and adventure games with recognizable plots and characters. While they grant that interactivity radically complicates traditional concepts of plot and character, they claim that adventure games, like fiction and film, invite the audience to identify with characters and experience emotional catharsis. Media scholar and videogames advocate Henry Jenkins argues, “There is a tremendous amount that game designers and critics could learn through making meaningful comparisons with other storytelling media.”³

The videogame industry reflects this theoretical divide, as development studios struggle to define the role of the videogame writer and, more broadly, to reconcile the tasks of game design and storytelling. What does the game writer actually write—the stories that frame the player’s actions or the rules that govern them? Are these tasks connected or separate? Alexis Nolent, story designer for Ubisoft, differentiates game design from game narrative. “Game design,” he says, “can be defined as establishing the rules for the game, what will make the game experience unique and addictive, while game writing is what will make it believable and worthwhile, from an emotional and quality standpoint.” At the same time, Nolent admits that in the process of making of a game, game design and writing are closely related and perhaps “impossible to differentiate.”⁴ Technology writer Stephen Jacobs concludes that the growth of the industry depends on the theoretical reconciliation of game and story, as well as the more practical recognition and support of skilled writers: “In an environment where play drives story … the industry will need to learn how to identify, grow, and nurture these types of professionals.”⁵

This debate about the nature of videogames is equally important for literary studies. While ludologists like Eskelinen, as well as more conventional literary scholars, believe that the study of games and the study of literature are separate disciplines, other scholars like Jenkins feel that videogames demand the scrutiny of literary scholars, and that literature, by the same token, demands the attention of game designers. Determining the relevance of videogames to literary studies, however, requires a new understanding of fundamental literary concepts. How can we craft a measured, emotionally compelling plot in a medium that grants the player control over the events in the story? How can we understand character development when the roles of reader and protagonist collapse into that of the player character, or avatar? If videogames are formed of both rule systems and narrative sequences, then what is the formal relation between rules and stories in games?

Like “Vafthrudnir’s Sayings,” videogames are both wisdom contests and narrative cosmogonies. They test our ingenuity and intellect while they immerse us in an imaginary world textured by narratives. By most accounts, however, the emergent genre still awaits its Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Dickens, one who can take a merely popular art form and make it transcendent. This chapter considers the craft and critique of narrative in relation to videogames and addresses the special problems that interactivity poses to established ideas of plot and character, particularly in adventure and role-playing games. Further, it evaluates game designers’ recent attempts to synthesize narrative and ludic experiences through the development of new narrative models and more complex artificial intelligence (AI) systems— that aim not only to make games more successful on the market, but also more capable of transforming consciousness, in the way that great literature does.

Riddles, Rules, and Role-Playing

In their attempt to define their new discipline and defend it from colonization by literary scholars, ludologists sometimes reject literary analogues, in which puzzles serve as vehicles for the revelation of fictional worlds. In his book Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Nick Montfort surveys the cultural history of text adventure games and interactive fiction (IF), tracing the earliest synthesis of narrative and ludic experiences to riddle poems such as those in the Poetic Edda or in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon codex known as the Exeter Book. Montfort suggests that these riddles posit a “metaphorical system” containing both a question and an answer. In order to find the answer, the reader must “inhabit” the system and engage it on its own terms. Likewise, Montfort concludes, adventure games invite the player to inhabit an imaginary world and, in playing the game, “to enact an understanding of that world.”⁶ Like riddles, adventure games begin with undiscovered meaning, a locked door, and the dark entrance to a cave. But they do not withhold the key from us. They only require us to search for it, and in order to do so, we must inhabit the world it evokes.

Gary Gygax seized on this idea of intellectual immersion as the premise of his 1974 tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, in which players inhabit a Tolkienesque fantasy world, fight mythical monsters, and solve an array of problems—from disarming a trap to negotiating a diplomatic agreement between rival kingdoms. Gygax created the game by adapting the rules of his 1971 medieval strategy game Chainmail to encounters between individual characters. Instead of generic units of infantry and cavalry, Dungeons & Dragons players control avatars with simulated appearances, personalities, and skills that determine their capabilities within the game. Instead of flat, schematic battlefields, a verbally rendered fictional world, populated by other characters and deepened by subterranean labyrinths, provides the play environment. In short, Gygax transformed something like chess into something more like The Hobbit.

Because players may become dwarves, elves, wizards, rangers, and numerous other fantastic character types, Gygax, though he denies the charge, seems to have pilfered Tolkien and other popular fantasy writers.⁷ But he also created something essentially new: not an epic narrative like Tolkien’s, but rather a formal narrative system capable of generating an infinite number of stories. First, he conceived the “dungeon master,” a player who assumes the role of the imaginary world itself, establishing the setting for the game, presenting quests and problems to the other players, and determining the results of player action within the game world. Second, he devised an intricate rule system governing player action, compiled in three core rule books: the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide. In collaboration with the players, the dungeon master crafts an improvisational oral narrative to frame player action and applies the rule system, using die rolls and numerical tables to decide the outcome of exploration, combat, and attempted feats of skill. The rule books define the parameters for these collaborative narratives, setting the limits of what a dungeon master might contrive and what players might enact within that contrivance. As a contest of wisdom forming a mythic world, Dungeons & Dragons recalls “Vafthrudnir’s Sayings” and the tradition of riddle poetry. As a system for generating stories through player interaction, it represents the first formal model for computer adventure games.

In 1975, programmer and role-playing enthusiast Will Crowther attempted to replicate the experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at the technology company Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, synthesizing Gygax’s dungeon master as a textual database containing descriptions of different game areas and a word parser to interpret the user input. Distributed on the ARPANET and modified many times by other programmers, including Don Woods, who shares credit with Crowther for the original game, Crowther’s Adventure signaled the emergence of the text adventure. The game opens with a second-person description of the player’s surroundings resembling one a dungeon master might offer at the beginning of a quest: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gulley.” From here, we may issue a variety of commands, including directional movements and simple actions. The command “enter” takes us inside: “You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. There are some keys on the ground here. There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. There is food here. There is a bottle of water here.” We may “take” these useful items, “exit” the building, and go “down” into the gulley, where we find a metal grate. Using our keys, we “unlock” the grate and enter a small dark passage. Further exploration of the cave system beneath the grate uncovers treasures and monsters, including a pirate, who compulsively robs our collected tools and treasures. While the game is mediated by a machine instead of a dungeon master, it functions as a narrative system like Dungeons & Dragons, unfolding a story in response to player action, according to programmatic rules.

In 1978, Atari programmer Warren Robinett created Adventure, adapting Crowther’s game to the graphical interface of the Atari 2600 console. Again, we face monsters, thieves, and puzzles in search of treasure. With a pixilated golden sword and small collection of tools, we scramble to slay three dragons, which replace the underground denizens in Crowther’s game; evade a thieving bat, which replaces the pirate; and recover the magic chalice, which replaces Crowther’s more varied treasures. Most significantly, Robinett’s game, which we will examine more closely in the next chapter, gives a visible shape to the “you” in text adventure games. The small, plain square that flits across the screen is the first visual projection of the videogame player into the game world, the embryonic avatar, who has since assumed endlessly diverse proportions in current videogames.

Dungeons & Dragons, Crowther’s Adventure, and Robinett’s Adventure represent three of the most significant evolutionary leaps in the development of current adventure and role-playing games. Drawing from popular fantasy, Gygax created a narrative system comprised of rules for generating stories through player dialogue. Crowther, in turn, synthesized this narrative system on a computer, enabling solitary players to participate in dialogic storytelling. Robinett, finally, rendered Crowther’s textual world in spaces, shapes, colors, and sounds, providing an archetype for subsequent graphical adventure franchises, such as Ultima, King’s Quest, Myst, Forgotten Realms, Final Fantasy, and The Elder Scrolls.

The theoretical and practical difficulties of reconciling narrative and interactive gameplay arise from these same technical transformations. A computer cannot improvise in its programmed dialogue with a player, nor can it consider subtle nuances in its application of game rules, as a human dungeon master can. For these reasons, videogame plots often seem contrived, and characters often seem robotic. The industry recognizes that its own creations are, in a sense, Rube Goldberg machines that only awkwardly replicate the unmediated, organic dialogue at the core of Dungeons & Dragons. In the attempt to define an ideal form for interactive storytelling, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) looks back, past the most popular and commercially successful games of the last three decades, to tabletop role-playing games: “The quest for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• History, Humanities, and New Technology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Part I Poetics
• Part II Rhetoric
• Part III Pedagogy
• Notes
• Glossary
• Videogames Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author