Video Game Narrative and Criticism

Playing the Story

T. Thabet

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349506729
  9781137525536
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137525543
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

The book provides a comprehensive application of narrative theory to video games, and presents the player-response paradigm of game criticism. Video Game Narrative and Criticism explains the nature of gameplay - a psychological experience and a meaning-making process in the fictional world of video games.

1

A Player’s Story

Abstract: Through literary and cinematic perspectives, the application of narrative theory shows how the player of a game story co-narrates, becomes the perceiving character, and replaces the protagonist by means of play/performance. Gameplay is an act of narration fulfilled by the player and the system. On the one hand, the player’s actions and responses create a form of subjective expression that substitutes the concept of voice in noninteractive genres. On the other, the player’s control of the camera is a storytelling function in the filmic sense as it determines what is focused on and what is ignored. However, the player is not the only narrator; the game system also narrates by means of a more complex and authoritative narrating agency that challenges the player’s own discourse.

Keywords: film narratology; impersonation; narrative theory; player’s narration

Thabet, Tamer. Video Game Narrative and Criticism: Playing the Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137525543.0004.

Taxonomy

The first question we need to ask about game narratives concerns their standing among other narrative forms. We will start with an extensive quotation by Roland Barthes that offers a useful framework for pursuing this question:

There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, [sic] conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds. (“An Introduction”, 237)

Manfred Jahn has organized the different genres, forms, and media referred to by Barthes in the following taxonomical diagram, encouraging his readers to add unaccounted-for genres to the tree structure: “If you come across a genre not accounted for by any prototype . . . radio plays? hypertext narratives? comic strips? . . . try fitting it in”.¹

FIGURE 1.1 Manfred Jahn’s tree of genres, http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm

In Jahn’s tree structure above, video games would have to be located among the performed narratives: Genre > narrative > performed > video games. Game fiction belongs to performed narratives for two reasons: the performance involved in the storytelling and the substance of which game fiction is made.

Performance

Drawing on the studies by Huizinga, Laurel, Pearce, Whitlock, Newman, and Hand, we can claim that performance is an integral part of the storytelling in games, just as it is in film and theater, where the story cannot be told without the actors’ performance.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga identifies two overlapping functions of play: it functions both as contest and as representation.² The element of performance is especially emphasized in the functions of play since to him the aspect of “representation” always involves a display before an audience. Celia Pearce describes six “narrative operators” in video game narratives. The second narrative operator she identifies is that of the “performative”: “The emergent narrative as seen by spectators watching and/or interpreting the game underway”.³ She argues that the narrative in games is the product of play and that conflict in games produces a performative action. This holds true in almost any 3D first-person video game. For example, in BioShock we find that the player decides how the protagonist is presented: as the indifferent person who gets shortchanged and paralyzed by his/her lack of responsibility, as the altruist who experiences the world’s plight with minimal strength and impact, or as a selfish figure who takes advantage of chaos with impunity. Both the concepts of performance and play imply taking a number of actions, and the difference between performance and play is that the first generally means a preplanned – and often rehearsed – series of acts according to a script, while the second means performing a number of acts according to a set of general rules.

Katie Whitlock argues that playing games is performance due to interactivity and that the narrative houses this performance,⁴ whereas James Newman in Video games underscores performance as an integral component in games’ narrativity and maintains that a player’s performance creates the plot and establishes the communication between the player and the system.⁵ Similarly, Richard Hand refers to gameplay as performance, and he maintains that this performance is an important point of access to studying games from a dramatic perspective.⁶ Play is conceptually performative, and it is an obvious component of game fiction because the player is a performer in the story.

Substance

Another reason for placing video games among the performative genres is because of the substance of which they are made. Here it is useful to repeat a line from Barthes’ citation: “as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s stories”. Barthes points to the potential that all substances can be used in storytelling. The video game as a vehicle of narrative is made of a mixture of written language, cinematic clips (cut-scenes), pictures, graphics, and the three filmic sound tracks (dialogue, music and effects). Films are generally created from an ordered mixture of text, pictures, and sounds, and the filmic components in video games bring them closest to the cinematic form. Based on their performative aspect and their substance, 3D games can be considered a performative narrative genre, and therefore, we can add them as a separate node on Jahn’s generic map:

FIGURE 1.2 Adaptation of Manfred Jahn’s tree of genres, http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm

Note: I added the video game node to illustrate video games’ standing among other genres.

Source: This figure is Manfred Jahn’s.

A place in the narrative

Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck explain the structuralist approach to narrative by adopting and systematizing Gérard Genette‘s method of dividing the narrative text into three different levels: narrative, narration, and story.⁷ First is the level of narration (narration in Genette’s French original), which refers to the concrete way the story is told and the level on which the narrating agent is situated. Then Genette speaks of narrative level (récit), which is the level that contains the events and characters presented to the reader. The organization of narrative elements is central to this level in terms of chronology (temporal organization) and perspective (the character’s perception). The final level is the story (histoire): On this level, the narrative elements are reduced to a chronological series. Story is an abstract construct not readily available to the reader. Regardless of the interactivity of the medium, video game narratives have the standard three levels of narrative, in which we will look for the player’s influence as a narrating and perceiving agent – narrator and protagonist.

My alias was Philip when I traversed the horrible world of Penumbra Overture. Before I became Philip, the story began with the mourning of a passing mother. A few days after the funeral, a letter from a long-thought-dead father instructed Philip to destroy the contents of a bank deposit box: a book, some personal notes, and a map of northern Greenland. After Philip’s loss of his single parent, the feeling of abandonment made him hold on to the idea that his father might still be alive. As a result, he did not comply with his father’s instructions; he kept the contents of the box and traveled to Greenland in search of his father. After the briefing, I imagined I would start the game and become Philip. The proposed protagonist was supposed to find specific answers, which was my job as a player. In this story, there is a narrator and a protagonist, and I found myself taking over these roles.

In narrative theory, there is a general agreement that the narrator is a metaphorical agent that is often anthropomorphized. The narrator’s voice is also metaphorical and imagined by the reader – with the help of textual markers – as if there is someone who actually recounts and comments on the events and characters. The narrator and the perceiving agent, the character whose perception presents the action, are treated separately by most narratologists since the narrator represents the text’s narrative voice or, in other words, answers the question “Who speaks?” in the text, while the perceiving agent (also called focalizer) is the character who sees (or, more generally, who experiences) in the text. Both the narrator and the focalizer have different sets of types and properties that can be determined by textual indications,⁸ and they belong to two different levels: the narrator plays a role on the level of narration, while the focalizer is to be found on the level of narrative. This is a depiction of the theoretical space where we need to locate the game player.

Hands off

What happens when you, the video game player, take your hands off the controller amid a play session? The answer depends on the specific game scene you imagine at this very moment. Is it an enemy charging at you? Or is it a scene where you stand still in a real-time environment? Before we get to these answers, let us review some relevant and fundamental aspects of the literary narrator and what it does.

It is said that “by definition narrative art requires a story and a story-teller”.⁹ Most narratologists argue that there must be a narrator, or a mediating agent, that projects a voice into the text: “Insofar as there is telling, there must be a teller, a narrating voice”.¹⁰ Whether it be Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Gerald Prince, Lubomir Dolezel, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, Roland Barthes, Franz Stanzel, or Marie-Laure Ryan, each assigns an important number of the text’s functions to the narrating agent they call a narrator.

A narrator is the speaker or “voice” of the narrative discourse. . . . He or she is the agent who establishes communicative contact with an addressee (the “narratee”), who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially, from what point of view, and in what sequence), and what is to be left out. (Jahn, “Narratology”, N3.1.1., emphases in original)

Chatman describes narratives as textual structures with a content plane (which he calls “story”) and an expression plane (called “discourse”). Discourse is how the content is presented, which is the narrator’s responsibility. In Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Chatman maintains that the narrator is the “teller”, the “transmitting source”,¹¹ which has the function to recount, record, and report.¹² Didier Coste describes the narrator as the “conveyor of narrative discourse”.¹³ Drawing on Dol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  A Players Story
• 2  Game Criticism
• Bibliography
• Index