Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age

Exploring Screen Narratives

R. Pearson, A. Smith, R. Pearson, A. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349481927
  9781137388148
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137388155
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Why do screen narratives remain so different in an age of convergence and globalisation that many think is blurring distinctions? This collection attempts to answer this question using examples drawn from a range of media, from Hollywood franchises to digital comics, and a range of countries, from the United States to Japan

Part I

Production

1

Super Mario Seriality: Nintendo’s Narratives and Audience Targeting within the Video Game Console Industry

Anthony N. Smith

At the conclusion of Super Mario Bros. (1986), the archetypal side-scrolling platform game, the player-character Mario confronts his arch-nemesis Bowser for the first time. The demonic monster Bowser – King of the Koopa – awaits Mario upon a drawbridge spanning a lava sea. The player’s game-long narrative goal is Mario’s freeing of Princess Peach by defeating Bowser, her captor;¹ the player must guide Mario beneath the Koopa King, who hops up and down hurling axes, having him then leap upon a larger glowing axe hovering at the opposite end of the drawbridge. Successful completion of this task results in the disintegration of the drawbridge and Bowser’s descent into the lava below upon which Mario enters an adjacent room where Peach awaits. Screen text conveys her highness’ gratitude – ‘Thank you Mario!’, confirming that the hero’s ‘quest is over’.

The Kyoto-based company Nintendo developed Super Mario Bros. for its first home video game console, the Nintendo Family Computer, released in Japan in 1983 and rebranded and launched in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. The company has developed further Super Mario games on each of its subsequent home and handheld video game hardware platforms. One of many such games is New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009), developed for the Nintendo Wii (the company’s fifth-generation home console, which launched worldwide in 2006). The game not only reprises the two-dimensional side-scrolling platform-game formula of Super Mario Bros., like many other Super Mario games, it also appropriates the specific narrative goal of the original game, Mario’s rescue of Peach. Additionally, New Super Mario Bros. Wii closely replicates many more specific narrative details from the original game, including its final showdown scenario between Mario and Bowser. Following the template established by the original game, the Koopa King awaits the player character at the far side of a lava-spanning bridge; again, the player must guide Mario beneath the bounding Bowser, dodging the latter’s deadly projectiles (this time, fireballs), and have Mario jump upon a large button (which has replaced the glowing axe) that collapses the bridge, sending Bowser hurtling below.

But on this occasion the quest isn’t over. The awaiting princess is revealed as an imposter, not Peach but rather a Magikoopa – a sorcerer servant of Bowser – adorned in blonde wig and the princess’s trademark pink dress. The Magikoopa sprinkles mystical dust over the lava into which its master fell, causing Bowser – now at least 20 times his previous size – to rise from the fire. To free the genuine Peach, the player must navigate Mario across a set of moving platforms, with a marauding Bowser in hot pursuit, towards a second button, which – once pressed – collapses the lava sea floor beneath Bowser’s feet.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s replication and variation of narrative content from the initial entry in the Super Mario series of games dovetails neatly with Nintendo’s broad industrial goals in recent years, specifically its audience-targeting strategies. As I go on to detail, the company has, from the mid-2000s onwards, aimed to attract a wide audience of both children and adults new to console gaming, while simultaneously appealing to dedicated video game consumers (so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers).² New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s reprisal of the basic narrative formula from the original Super Mario Bros. is appropriate for new gamers, as it offers a discrete and coherent narrative experience (Bowser kidnaps Peach, Mario rescues her). Yet New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s playful variations on narrative elements previously established within the series, such as its reworking of the original Mario–Bowser showdown, have the potential to surprise and delight dedicated players familiar with prior Super Mario games.³ This chapter explores further the connections between Nintendo’s video game narratives and audience-targeting aims. It details in particular how a specific mode of serial storytelling, emerging from Nintendo’s engagement with its back catalogue of games and ongoing innovation in video game technologies, serves to target these two distinct audience segments.

This chapter contributes to the games studies literature concerning the unique ways in which video games convey narratives, which I define as storyworlds – that is, spatio-temporal models of story that incorporate characters, props, actions and settings – and their presentations.⁴ As such studies make clear, video games are, at the level of textual artefact, not narrative objects per se, but rather interactive systems that facilitate the emergence of fictional narrative through the playing of games; controlling characters and props, players instigate actions within settings, and from this process video game storyworlds are conveyed via screens.⁵ Although important, this work typically neglects the industrial circumstances that inform video game narratives. These studies therefore usefully articulate how fictional narratives emerge from video games, but fail to account for the interplay of creativity, industry and technology that contribute to their formations. Taking an ‘historical poetics’ approach that links storytelling strategies to their conditions of production and circulation, this chapter accounts for the ways in which a significant industrial practice – namely, audience targeting – can inform narrative.⁶ Combining evidence of production – in the form of insights from Nintendo personnel – with narratalogical analyses of the company’s games, the chapter explores the ways in which Nintendo narratives are configured to meet the requirements of both new and experienced gamers. To contextualise this case study, the chapter first establishes the specific industrial conditions for the recent development of Nintendo’s software.

Nintendo narrative contexts

Nintendo operates within the video game console market, a specific sector of the video game industry concerned with the production, distribution and consumption of games intended for the home and portable console hardware devices currently manufactured by the oligopoly of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. The institutions that typically drive video game development in this sector can be divided into three distinct categories: the development studios (that create video games in code form), publishers (that often fund development studios, as well as manufacture, market and distribute the hard copies of video games) and the console hardware manufacturers (that build, market and distribute video game platforms). Publishers and development studios most typically operate separately from hardware manufacturers, releasing ‘third-party’ games for hardware manufacturers’ platforms (and paying licence fees to the hardware manufacturers on the basis of game sales). But it is, in addition, common practice for a given hardware manufacturer to seek market differentiation by developing and publishing its own ‘first-party’ games exclusively for its own platforms.⁷ Understanding the contexts of Nintendo’s video game narratives requires understanding the company’s wider goals and strategies for the hardware for which it designs its games.

In the mid-2000s, Nintendo wanted to regain the home-console hardware market share it had conceded to Sony and Microsoft over the previous years. Nintendo had been, with the NES and its successor – the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), dominant within this market in the late mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s (over its chief rival Sega).⁸ But competition from Sony (which entered this market in 1994 with the PlayStation) and Microsoft (whose first console, the Xbox, was released in 2001) led to a decline in Nintendo’s share.⁹ By the early 2000s, Nintendo had descended into third place in terms of home console market share (behind Sony and Microsoft) due to the poor sales of its fourth home hardware device, the Nintendo GameCube (released in 2001).¹⁰

Nintendo responded to the competition by reconfiguring its audience-targeting strategies for both its hardware and software. Part of Sony and Microsoft’s success had been built on targeting teenage and adult gamers with ‘mature’ narrative content, such as the third-party series Grand Theft Auto, with its violence and lawlessness, and Microsoft’s first-party series Halo, a militaristic science fiction saga. As Nintendo company president Satoru Iwata admitted in 2002, there was a widespread perception that Nintendo and its content were heavily skewed towards a pre-teen demographic in comparison to its rivals.¹¹ The company needed to change this perception in order to increase the consumption of its hardware (and thus software) by appealing more successfully to a teenage and adult audience.¹² But rather than focusing exclusively on those ‘hardcore’ consumers who had gravitated towards rival hardware, Nintendo instead prioritised a potentially far wider audience of adult gamers who might not purchase consoles because of their associations with young men and/or typically high levels of game difficulty.¹³ This broad target group included female gamers and older players, two demographics that console manufacturers and console game publishers have often neglected to address.¹⁴

To this end Nintendo conceived of two new hardware systems – the DS handheld console (released in 2004) and the Wii home console (released in 2006) – that would enable the company to distinguish itself from its competitors and simultaneously appeal to non-traditional gamers. The contrast in console user inputs between Nintendo and its competitors most obviously illustrates this point. User inputs have generally become progressively more complex and prohibitive since the days of the NES, with Sony and Microsoft console controllers each incorporating two thumb sticks and a myriad of buttons. But the DS and Wii each possess a highly intuitive and accessible mode of input; the former via a touch screen, the latter via motion control.¹⁵

Just as the Wii and DS systems were configured for a target audience of non-traditional gamers, so too were many of the first-party games that Nintendo developed for the system. Wii Fit (2007), which requires the player to carry out light physical activities while standing upon the Wii Balance Board motion-sensor device, is one such title. As Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal observe, the game’s goal of health improvement (which challenges common perceptions of video games being unhealthy) was specifically conceived for and marketed towards women who might be averse to traditional ‘hardcore’ console games.¹⁶ But, while developing new titles tailor-made for a non-traditional gamer audience, the company has also maintained its constituency of ‘hardcore’ gamers by consistently producing its more traditional content, chiefly in the form of new instalments for such long-running series as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda.¹⁷ As Iwata acknowledged, while Nintendo’s ‘primary goal’ became the ‘expansion of the gamer population’ through appeals to non-traditional gaming audiences, the company nevertheless remained committed to developing ‘the games most enjoyed by our core fans’.¹⁸

Yet, reflecting Nintendo’s broader industrial goals from the mid-2000s onward, developers have been motivated to en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Contexts of Contemporary Screen Narratives: Medium, National, Institutional and Technological Specificities
• Part I: Production
• Part II: Circulation and Reception
• Index