Video Games and Storytelling

Reading Games and Playing Books

Souvik Mukherjee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137525055
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-à-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.

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Introduction: Video Games and Storytelling

Video Games telling stories: A debate revisited

Imagine being told to ‘start this mission by entering the red marker at the Johnson House’ (GTA Net, 2015) and then as you, Carl Johnson or CJ, meet your brother Sweet, a rival gang performs an unexpected drive-by shooting and you are to ‘hop on a bicycle and follow Sweet, repeatedly tapping “X” to build up momentum’ (GTA Net, 2015). Is this a story, is it another violent episode in a soap opera or is the reader being mistaken for a member of a real-life criminal gang? The uninitiated reader will probably be having serious doubts about what is happening in the above quote. At first sight, this extract seems to be the story of a certain gangster, Carl Johnson; if it is, then the story strangely seems to be waiting for the reader to create all the events that follow. You, the player (or reader, one could say), are suddenly thrown into someone else’s story and are expected to continue the tale. The part about ‘repeatedly tapping “X” to build up momentum’ makes it seem even stranger: it is as if, besides all the possibilities described above, there is also some kind of interaction with a machine. Given this hybrid scenario, the reader must be excused if she does not guess that this is an extract from a ‘walkthrough’, or a set of possible strategies for playing the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar North, 2004).

Paradoxical as this may sound, this book is about playing stories and reading games. As the extract from the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas walkthrough shows, video games have begun to raise questions about their own ludicity (or ‘gamelike-ness’; ludus is the Latin word for ‘game’) and about whether this intrinsically involves storytelling. In simple words, this is an analysis of whether video games tell stories and if so, of how they do this. The relevance of such discussions has increased manifold in recent years: the Entertainment and Software Association (ESA) declares that ‘no other sector has experienced the same explosive growth as the computer and videogame industry’ (Interactive Games & Entertainment Association, 2013) and almost as if to prove them right, Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North, 2013) sales reached a billion US dollars in just three days – a global record. With the soaring profits and the burgeoning user-base of the video game industry, games have now attracted the attention of researchers from various disciplines the world over and issues relating to gaming culture and the gamer’s experience have gained more relevance. Despite the increased research focus, one crucial issue – that of storytelling in video games – retains its complexity and still remains hotly debated.

The popularity and currency of the issue is clear from the fact that critics from other media have entered the discussion: a good example is the late Roger Ebert’s famous (or notorious) assertion that video games are not art. Other celebrities from the film industry, the directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, have commented directly on the storytelling potential of video games. Lucas claims that the game industry is now beginning to discover how to build characters but that ‘by its very nature there cannot be a plot in a game. You can’t plot out a football game. You can’t plot out feeding Christians to lions. It’s not a plot’ (Empire Online, 2015). For him, the story is author-driven: ‘you are leading the audience along [ … ] if you just let everybody go in and do whatever they want then it’s not a story anymore [but] it’s simply a game’ (Empire Online, 2015). Spielberg, who himself has a past with gaming, feels that the bottleneck is simple: once the game-controller itself is gone, the storytelling experience will improve. He states that the game has ‘got to put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you’re surrounded by a three-dimensional world. And that’s the future’. Will Wright, the designer of The Sims (Maxis, 2000) games, declared in a CNN interview that ‘games are not the right medium to tell stories’ (Millan, 2011) but conceded that they are about ‘story possibilities’.

However, gamers from all over the world think differently. In his recent book on video games, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Dylan Holmes comments: ‘Games are bringing something new to the table. As the first widely adopted form of interactive media, video games have served as the testing ground for interactive storytelling techniques’ (Holmes, 2012, p. 10). Celebrity game designer and creator of the Metal Gear series, Hideo Kojima, has no illusions about the storytelling potential of games. He believes that ‘games are able to achieve something neither movies nor novels can do, it’s a unique form of story telling’ (Metal Gear Informer, 2012). Intriguingly, Wright states that he does not like playing the Metal Gear games that Kojima is famous for (Millan, 2011). Other game designers, however, agree that storytelling is important. When asked about stories in video games, Tim Schafer, the creator of legendary games such as Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, states, ‘I put story in my games just because I like making up stories. I think it makes the world real and makes the experience more immersive and engaging for the player. Also, the desire to see the story unfold provides a motivation for the player’ (Kasavin, 2005). Ragnar Tornquist, designer of Dreamfall, adds that although ‘all games don’t need stories [ … ] the fact is, once you’re dealing with quests, characters, worlds, role-playing – and more complex human (or, hey, alien) emotions – then you need to tie everything together with some sort of narrative’ (Kasavin, 2005). Adding his influential voice to the argument of the literariness of video games is the author Salman Rushdie. Rushdie famously announced that he played video games during the trauma of his fatwa years. In his recent novel, Luka and the Fire of Life (Rushdie, 2010), video games feature importantly and in an interview about the novel, Rushdie declares:

There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I’ve always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end – to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.

(Rushdie, 2010)

Given the contentiousness of the issue, it is hardly surprising that the academic discussions around gaming as a cultural phenomenon should have started off by framing themselves around storytelling and that storytelling in video games continues to provoke critical debates. Writing on his blog ‘The Ludologist’, eminent game studies academic and one of the pioneering researchers in the area, Jesper Juul gently dismisses Rushdie’s comments on storytelling in video games as being ‘a bit on the short side’ although he concedes that Rushdie ‘understands Rockstar’s typical mostly-linear + sandbox game structure’ (Juul, 2011). Juul’s earlier work clearly delineates a ‘clash’ between games and narratives and his reservations about Rushdie’s claim for storytelling in video games are understandable if one delves into the history of game studies.

The establishment of game studies as an academic discipline is a very recent phenomenon and the initial academic responses to seeing video games as an emergent storytelling medium were markedly polarised into the theoretical camps of the so-called Ludologists and the Narratologists. The Ludologists, mainly academics such as Juul, Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen, argued that although some video games may have ‘artistic ambitions’, they are ‘fundamentally games’ (Aarseth, 2006, p. 45). The so-named Narratologists, such as Janet Murray and Marie-Laure Ryan, argue that video games are a storytelling medium because they ‘promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework’ (Murray, 1997, p. 10). In 1997, Murray and Aarseth were writing separate pioneering studies on video games. Both recognised the capacity of video games to form multicursal structures and also their potential to be recognised as texts (although Aarseth later altered his position somewhat), but their respective approaches were very divergent.

In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray argued for an approach wherein the ‘interactor in digital environments can be the recipient of an externally authored world’ (Murray, p. 275). For her, ‘To play Mario Brothers or King’s Quest is to open ourselves to the vision of the shaping author in the same way we open ourselves to the author’s voice in the novel’. The externally authored world of the video game is described by her as a proto-Holodeck. The ambitiousness of Murray’s agenda for video games emerges more clearly in the following assertion:

As the most powerful representational medium yet invented, it should be put to the highest tasks of society. Whether or not we will one day be rewarded with the arrival of the cyberbard, we should hasten to place this new compositional tool as firmly as possible in the hands of the storytellers.

(Murray, p. 284)

As the title of her book suggests, she sees the video game as a step towards achieving literature of the calibre of Hamlet in a Holodeck-like electronic media. The Holodeck metaphor itself has major shortcomings when applied to video games but a deeper exploration of this is reserved for later. This section focuses instead on Murray’s intention to place the video game ‘firmly in the hands of storytellers’. Aarseth, for one, poses a strong objection to such a claim.

In his early study of video games in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Aarseth describes his attempt to define ‘a perspective on all forms of textuality, a way to expand the scope of literary studies to include phenomena that today are perceived as outside of, or marginalised by, the field of literature – or even in opposition to it’ (Aarseth, 1997, p. 18). It is understandable that for such an enterprise he needed to develop a different notion of textuality. As he states: ‘[i]nstead of defining text as a chain of signifiers, as linguists and semioticians do, I use the word for a whole range of phenomena, from short poems to complex computer programs and databases’ (Aarseth, 1997, p. 20). Aarseth maintains that the video game is an ‘ergodic’ medium, which means that it requires the reader/player to experience the text actively and use skills which go beyond using ‘eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages’ (Aarseth, 1997, p. 2). Surprisingly, however, in a later essay, he asserts that ‘games are not textual or at least not primarily textual’ (Aarseth, 2006, p. 47). Ergodicity, therefore, gets a different connotation, and as ergodic media, video games are not seen as texts per se and even less so as stories. Following Aarseth, commentators like Markku Eskelinen, Gonzalo Frasca, Juul and Greg Costikyan came up with a sustained (and often harsh) criticism of attempts to see video games as storytelling media, which they variously termed ‘Narrativist’ or ‘Narratological’.¹ Their own position came to be known as ‘Ludology’, a neologism coined by Frasca meaning the ‘study of games’. The ‘Ludologists’ found their most vocal representative in Eskelinen who declaims:

If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories. On the other hand, if and when games and especially videogames are studied and theorised they are almost without exception colonised from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.

(Eskelinen, 2001)

For the firmer adherents of Ludology such as Eskelinen, the video game needs to be studied in isolation as a game and as nothing else.

Eskelinen attributes a kind of extraneousness to the story – he believes that the story in the computer game is like a prosthesis that simply enhances the marketability and is not essential to the gameplay. Aarseth, predictably, supports this idea: ‘the artistic elements are merely supports for what the Finnish avant-garde writer and game theorist Markku Eskelinen (2001) calls “the gaming situation”, the gameplay’ (Aarseth, 2006, p. 47). In a rather hyperbolic attack on stories in video games, he states: ‘[e]ven the most entertaining of these games, like Warren Spector’s Deus Ex (1999), contains a clichéd storyline that would make a B-movie writer blush, and characters so wooden that they make The Flintstones look like Strindberg’ (Aarseth, 2004, p. 51). This statement is, needless to say, rather extreme in its assertiveness and would probably upset many Deus Ex fans who enjoy the storyline of Deus Ex. In a recent lecture, Aarseth has spoken of the possibility of a ‘broken’ fictionality in video games; he still does not agree that video games tell stories. For the Ludologists, the story is still shown as an extraneous element: for the Ludologists, it is a prosthesis. Lending more weight to the Ludologist position, popular video game commentator Steven Poole (2000, p. 170), in his book Trigger Happy, refers to the back-story of a computer game as the ‘meat’ of the game, the actual storyline of which is nothing more than a record of steps and jumps. This idea of the prosthesis, however, is itself one that has come under scrutiny. A subsequent section shall explore it in detail.

Game designers have also started losing patience with the Ludology–Narratology debate because of the polarisation of opinions. As designer Ernest Adams complains:

There’s a lack of a common vocabulary; a lack of a common approach. And there are turf wars. Literary theorists of narrative – ‘narratologists’ believe that narrative is rightly their turf, so it’s up to them to decide what interactive narrative will be. Theorists of gameplay – ‘ludologists’ – believe that interactive entertainment is their turf, and only they can properly decide what interactive narrative will be.

(Adams, 2005)

Adams is right in pointing out that the sparring between rival academic camps does not help at all and that such extreme positions, whether they are Murray’s holistic claims for narratives in electronic media or the Ludologist argument against it, had game studies critics locked in a decade-long impasse regarding the nature of video games. Recently, however, Ludologists such as Juul, and those on the Narratologist (or rather ‘Narrativist’) camp, such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Celia Pearce, make much more moderate claims than those being made in the late nineties. In Avatars of Story, Ryan claims that storytelling in video games ‘must resist the temptation to try to rival the great classics of literature – a temptation that finds its expression in the title of Janet Murray’s well-known book Hamlet on the Holodeck – and it must learn instead how to customize narrative patterns to the properties of the medium’ (Ryan, 2006, p. xviii). She prefers what she calls ‘the middle ground’ in engaging with the problem. She defines narrative as a cognitive construct that can take a variety of shapes or what she calls ‘avatars of story’. Pearce also recognises the importance of the ludic element in games and that ‘[n]arrative, again, operates at a fundamentally different level in games than it does in other media’ (Pearce, 2004). Such a response perhaps complements and extends Henry Jenkins’s concept of transmedial storytelling that he defines as being ‘based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories’ (Jenkins, 2007). Jenkins’s description fits the complex worlds of the story-based (and especially sandbox-type) video games well. Pearce’s recognition of the importance of the ludic element develops the transmedial angle that Jenkins introduced earlier on.

In a similar more moderate Ludologist response perspective, Gonzalo Frasca advocates Ludology as another important method besides Narratology in analysing games where the intention is ‘not to replace the narratologic approach, but to complement it’ (Frasca, 1999). In a later work, Juul contends that video games are ‘half real’ (Juul, 2005, p. 166). He agrees that most video games ‘project a fictional world’ and that the fiction is contingent on the game’s rules. Juul’s shift in the Ludologist position is important – fiction is not defined as a prosthesis as it was in the earlier writings of the Ludologists, including Juul himself. Neither is the game and fiction seen as being mutually exclusive (as his master’s thesis, titled ‘A Clash between Game and Narrative’, claims). Rather surprisingly, Juul does not agree that video games tell stories; he argues that fiction is different from storytelling. Unlike the ‘middle ground’ advocated by Ryan, for Juul the story simply does not exist in multiple kinds: he believes that fiction is any kind of imagined world but ‘story’ is necessarily a fixed sequence of events.

Such a restrictive definition inevitably opens more avenues for more debate and storytelling in video games remains as contested as ever despite many attempts to resolve the problem. In his recent book, Steven E. Jones echoes other theorists, such as Ian Bogost and Rune Klevjer, in describing the Ludology–Narratology debate as being an exaggeration on both sides and Ludology as a reductive formalism. However, he expresses his sympathy with the Ludologists in recognising the uniqueness of games as a form although he does not wish to ‘cut them off from the larger culture’ (Jones, 2008, p. 6). In trying to locate the ‘meaning’ of video games, Jones concludes that these games are complex social networks and that meaning flows through these games and link up to other forms of media such as texts, institutions and groups. One could argue that there is a similarity here with Rushdie’s idea of video games allowing a ‘sideways’ reading of the text and its multiple alternatives.

As mentioned earlier, though, eminent critics (such as Juul) still do not agree with such a description, often ma...