Analyzing Digital Fiction

Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Hans Rustad, Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Hans Rustad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135136031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Section II
Social Media and Ludological Approaches

5 Playing with Rather than by the Rules

Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy, and Illusory Agency in The Path

Astrid Ensslin,
Bangor University, Wales

Introduction

Our contemporary media landscape has seen boundaries between arts and genres blur increasingly in the past decade. It is no longer possible to talk about specific digital art forms in terms of clear-cut categories—least of all digital narratives, which integrate written and spoken language, animation, still images, video, audio, games, hypertext, and hypermedia in multifarious ways, and with various aesthetic effects. Nevertheless, each artifact tends to be labeled, or referred to, by its maker by a specific genre tag, such as Flash fiction, multimedia narrative, poetic game or interactive drama. Despite this tendency, and depending on their individual expertise, political agenda, and unique experience of a digital artifact, author-programmers, readers, players, and critics don’t always agree on these labels. Jason Rohrer’s memento mori mini-game, Passage (2007), for instance, has often been likened to poetry (e.g. Thompson 2008; Magnuson 2009), although it doesn’t feature a single verbal item. Kate Pullinger et al.’s The Breathing Wall (2004) is based on a sequentialized hypertext narrative but has at its core a breathing game, which releases—to the successful breather—essential clues for solving the murder mystery it narrates, and it communicates to a large extent through still and animated images, blended with spoken text (Ensslin 2009, 2011a). Regardless of its tendency to cause terminological ambiguity and controversy, the interface between digital writing, audiovisual art, and game programming has proven to be one of the most prolific breeding grounds for digital artists and writers in the twenty-first century thus far, and this chapter seeks to showcase the importance of this merger for contemporary narratology and other forms of text and media analysis.

Like numerous new media scholars (e.g. Gee 2007; Jenkins 2005; Tavinor 2009), I assume that video games are an art form in their own right, and that some contemporary games—especially art games—have specific literary-fictional qualities that can be close-read using a mixture of narratological, stylistic, semiotic, and ludological analytical principles. Although this doesn’t make them novels or short stories, it places them on a continuum with other hybrid digital artifacts that combine ludic and literary qualities. Typical examples of such ludic-literary hybrids are digital fictions with game-like components, such as geniwate and Deena Larsen’s The Princess Murderer (2003), Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s Inanimate Alice (2005–2008), and Steve Tomasula’s TOC: A New Media Novel (2009). They exhibit a variety of ludic devices, such as a performance meter called “Princess Census” (The Princess Murderer), point-and-click mini-games (Inanimate Alice), and an interactive musical clock, which operates as a navigational device (TOC).

Digital fiction is born digital, which means it is “written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium” (Bell et al. 2010: n.p.). The Digital Fiction International Network, which formulated this definition, further details in the same publication that this excludes certain digital art forms that are akin to digital fiction but can’t be analyzed as such. These include nonfictional blogs and other Web 2.0 forms of “life narratives”, but also paper-under-glass artifacts such as e-books, which read in the same, quasi-linear way in print and digital form and can therefore be printed. Importantly, the above definition also excludes “games we can’t ‘read’, or rather games where there is no dynamic relationship between the gameplay (rules) and its themes (representations) that we can read into, reflect on, or interpret” (Bell et al. 2010: n.p.). Quite literally, “reading” here refers to linguistic decoding as well as any abstract or metaphorical meanings of the term, such as reading music, visual arts, or the procedural rhetoric of a video game (Bogost 2007). 1 Hence, video games aren’t by definition exempt from literary, digital fictionality (see Ensslin 2014). Rather, to qualify for analytical engagement under the “digital fiction” umbrella, they need to exhibit specific elements of readability, which include the written and/or spoken word and particular aspects of textuality that facilitate or even call out for stylistic, narratological, and ludic analysis.

To provide an example of how literary-fictional video games might be examined systematically, this chapter will offer an analysis of the literary art game, The Path, by Tale of Tales (2009a). I will begin by examining the question of why a digital artifact that—in its subtitle (“a short horror game”)—explicitly refers to itself as a game can or indeed should be included in a volume titled Analyzing Digital Fiction. To do so, I shall first explore the ludic-literary continuum (see Ensslin 2012) and provide a working definition of literariness for digital fiction. I shall then go on to explain how The Path meets these criteria, thus underscoring its hybrid status between art game and digital literary narrative. This will be followed by an explanation of my analytical framework, which develops Ryan’s idea of functional ludo-narrativism (Ryan 2006: 203).

The final and most extensive section of this chapter offers a systematic ludo-narratological reading of The Path. It is informed theoretically by the Situationist concept of détournement, which combines processes of aesthetic appropriation and subversion “[u]sing play as a practice to transcend rigid forms and to break constraints” (Dragona 2010: 27). In particular, the analysis will take into account three etymological variants of playfulness (from the Latin “ludere”): (1) metaludicity, that is, the ways in which The Path thematizes and problematizes game mechanic features typically occurring in commercial blockbusters, such as high-speed action, navigability, achievement, and reward, and interweaves them with plot and character development; (2) allusive fallacy in the sense of design features that use intertextuality, pro- and analepsis as disconcerting rather than cohesive narrative and navigational devices; and (3) illusory agency (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2007), which refers to projecting false impressions of player freedom and impact on the development of the game and its underlying fictional world.

Games as Literary Fiction

There is no doubt that, first and foremost, games exist to be played. However, some serious game artists have shown that it is possible to experiment with other forms of cultural expression, such as visual and literary arts, and embed them in ludic structures so as to create specific aesthetic and hermeneutic effects in players. Likewise, digital writers have experimented with ludic structures and embedded them in their fictional and poetic artifacts. What results is a rich ecology of hybrid digital artifacts that defy clear categorical boundaries and challenge recipients’ transmedia abilities and analysts’ critical repository. To allow for systematic scholarly engagement with this hybrid ecology, I have, in my earlier work (Ensslin 2011b, 2012), suggested a textual continuum between ludic digital literature and literary video games. Ludic digital literature is primarily “read” and foregrounds overstructured (or deliberately understructured) oral or written language, yet it also features ludic elements in order to simultaneously subvert or exploit them. Literary computer games, by contrast, are primarily played (and often explicitly referred to as “games” in the title or front matter) but feature some distinctive poetic, dramatic, and/or narrative-diegetic elements, which demand from players a hermeneutic stance that facilitates the close reading of ludic and textual structures and the simultaneous reflection on subludic and subtextual layers of meaning. Prominent examples include Jason Nelson’s ArcticAcre tetralogy (2007–2009) and Gregory Weir’s Silent Conversation (2009).

As ludic-literary hybrids in the digital sphere exhibit a wide variety of semiotic codes, of which verbal language is a constitutive one, literariness here needs to be understood in the sense of experimental verbal arts. Such works include texts that employ and foreground spoken and written language in unconventional ways and embed them, kinetically and multimodally, in what are essentially digital Gesamtkunstwerke, rather than following a rigid paper-under-glass trajectory. The term “literary”, thus, has to be dissociated from print and its implications for reception (e.g. sequentiality, closure and two-dimensionality) and production. Rather, it should be understood in the sense of “visual poetry”, “interactive drama”, and, of course, literary digital fiction; in short, artifacts that aim to “knock . . . down the verbal structures of linear [print] discourse and [to] melt . . . different poetics into a hybrid tradition” (Beiguelman 2010: 409).

Of particular importance in this quasi-iconoclastic, experimental paradigm is the degree to which computer games implement the ideas of détournement and (playful yet serious) deconstruction, and thematize and/or problematize—linguistically, multimodally, or otherwise—the essence of (digital) gameplay. As Dragona puts it,

[u]sing play as a practice to transcend rigid forms and to break constraints is a distinctive feature of today’s game-based art. Artists working in the field are playing with the rules, rather than playing by rules; they modify or negate instructions, structures, aesthetics and norms, seeing contemporary gameworlds as a reflection of the contemporary digital realm. (2010: 27)

In computer games/gaming as literary art, then, literary and poetic techniques are employed in order to explore the affordances of rules, feedback, challenges, performance monitoring, and other ludic mechanics.

My methodological approach differs somewhat from Marie-Laure Ryan’s distinction between “ narrative game, in which narrative meaning is subordinated to the player’s actions, and the playable story, in which the player’s actions are subordinated to narrative meaning” (2009: 45). Ryan’s concept of narrative game is a much more inclusive one than that of literary video games, and covers commercial blockbusters such as Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto as well as narrative nonprofit indie games. By the same token, Ryan does not define playable stories in literary terms but rather in terms of emergent gameplay, where players create their own stories, for instance, by making characters enact a sequence of events in The Sims, or by deciding on a specific reading path in hypertext fiction. Ryan bases her distinction on Caillois’s (1979) typology of games, which assumes a spectrum between highly structured, rule-driven games (ludus) and games that operate in a largely unstructured, improvised and spontaneous fashion (paidia). In Ryan’s view,

[w]hile ludus inspires narrative games, the spirit of paidia infuses playable stories. In a playable story there is no winning or losing: the purpose of the player is not to beat the game, but to observe the evolution of the storyworld. Playable stories induce a much more aesthetic pleasure than narrative games because the player is not narrowly focused on goals. (2009: 46–47)

This seems to make perfect sense with regard to Ryan’s own theoretical framework and textual spectrum. Nevertheless, as my analysis of The Path will demonstrate, the situation relating to ludic-literary hybridity is significantly more complex.

The Path—A "Literary" Horror Game?

The Path by Tale of Tales (2009a) is an art game that transmediates the Perrauldian tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” (“Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” 1961 [1697]). It replaces the linear plot of the original folk narrative with a gameworld placed in a contemporary gothic setting and increases the original character repository by introducing six female protagonists at different stages of adolescence. The player can choose, for their player-character, between six sisters aged between nine and nineteen, whose names are all quasi-synonyms of the color red (Robin, Rose, Ginger, Ruby, Carmen, and Scarlet) and who are dressed in various hues of saturated red and black. They all have their own age-specific personalities and ways of expressing them. Robin, the youngest, is a lively young child dressed in the famous Grimmsian red cap, and loves playing in the woods. Wolves are “her favorite kind of animal” (Tale of Tales 2011). Rose is a precocious eleven-year-old who enjoys and enthusiastically protects the beauty and innocence of Mother Nature. She wears a black dress with a red hemline and bright red stockings. Thirteen-year-old Ginger is a tomboy full of wild ideas. Determined never to grow up, she tends to get completely absorbed in gameplay. She wears black Indian feathers in her red hair, and the two studded red belts wrapped loosely around her short black pantsuit give her the appearance of a bandit. Ruby, the “goth”, is a pessimist and nihilist. Her black leg brace suggests an injury, but we do not learn why the enigmatic fifteen-year-old is really wearing it. The only color she allows in her appearance is in the black-and-red stripes of her shirt. Seventeen-year-old Carmen is aware of her beautiful body and the effect it has on the male onlooker. She enjoys flirting and dreams of a man who will hold and protect her. Her tight black-and-red shirt and leggings and swinging gait underscore her sexual appeal. Scarlet, finally, is the oldest in a family “with an invisible mother” (Tale of Tales 2011). Being responsible for her younger sisters takes its toll, and she longs for a calmer life and the company of a like-minded individual. Her outf...