Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games:
Four naughty concepts in need of discipline
Yes, discipline. On
one level, this essay is about identifying a desperate need for discipline and
the delivery of that discipline to its well-deserved targets. A kind of disciplinary spanking, if you will.
On another level, this essay is about games and
stories. Undoubtedly, there is a
tremendous amount of interest in the intersection of games and stories these
days. Academic journals, conferences, and
courses about computer-based storytelling, digital interactivity, and gaming
culture have flourished like a species of virulent weed in the manicured garden
of the university. On the commercial end
of things, game developers increasingly rely on filmic story techniques in the
design of their products, turning present-day computer and video games into a
kind of mutant cinema. Meanwhile,
shelves of books like this one are being written and published, tossed out like
stepping stones into the emerging terrain where design, technology, art,
entertainment, and academia meet.
Curiously, so much of this interest is driven by a kind of
love/hate relationship with the medium. For as much as we seem enamored by the possibilities of digital media,
we seem just as soundly dissatisfied with its current state. Lurking just below the surface of most of the
chapters in this volume is one sort of frustration or another: frustration with
the lack of cultural sophistication in the gaming industry; frustration with
the limitations of current technology; frustration with a lack of critical
theory for properly understanding the medium. Perhaps frustration is a necessary part of the process. But perhaps we can relieve some of that
frustration with some good old-fashioned discipline.
Looking Closer
Compared to the more robust fields which cluster about the
theory and practice of other media, it’s clear that the “game-story” as a form
remains largely unexplored. Terms and
concepts run amuck like naughty schoolchildren. And a more disciplined look would indeed seem to be in order. But what would it mean to take a closer look
at games and stories?
Does it mean figuring out how to make games more like
stories? Or how to make stories more
gamelike? Does it mean documenting and
typologizing new forms of game/story culture? Integrating games into learning? Mapping relationships between digital media and other media? Inventing programming strategies for
storytelling? Understanding the ways
that digital media operate in culture at large? There are as many approaches to the question of “games and stories” as
there are designers, artists, technologists, and academics asking the
questions.
The truth, of course, is that there are no right or wrong
approaches. It all depends on the field
in which a particular inquiry is operating and exactly what the inquiry itself
is trying to accomplish. However, there
is common ground. What everyone
investigating the “game-story” would share are in fact those two strange terms:
“games” and “stories.”
Concepts and terms do seem to be at the heart of the
matter. This essay tackles the
terminological knot of the “game-story” by prying apart and recombining the two
concepts into four: narrative, interactivity, play, and games. Each concept is considered in relationship
each other as well as to the larger question of “games and stories.” My goal is to frame these concepts in ways
that bring insight to their interrelations, with the larger aim of providing
critical tools for others who are attempting to create or study the conundrum
of the game-story.
Four naughty terms
Play. Games. Narrative. Interactivity. What a motley
bunch. Honestly, have you ever seen such
a suspicious set of slippery and ambiguous, overused and ill-defined terms? Indeed, they are all four in need of some
discipline, just to make them sit still and behave. Before I roll up my sleeves and get to work
on them, however, allow me to lay some of my cards on the table, in the form of
a series of disclaimers.
Disclaimer 1: concepts, not categories
In presenting these four terms (games, play, narrative, and
interactivity), I’m not creating a typology. The four terms are not mutually exclusive, nor do they represent four
categories, with each category containing a different kind of phenomena. They are four concepts, each concept
overlapping and intersecting the others in complex and unique ways. In other words, the four words are not the
four quadrants of a grid or the four levels of a building. They are “things to think with;” they are
signs for clusters of concepts; they are frames and schemas for understanding;
they are dynamic conceptual tools; they represent a network of ideas that flow
into and through each other.
Disclaimer 2: forget the computer
While digital media is certainly a primary vector in the
momentum of interest which has led to this book, the phenomena we call games
and stories – as well as play, narrative, and interactivity – predate computers
by millennia. Computer media is one
context for understanding them, but I’m going to try and avoid typical
technological myopia by examining these concepts in a broad spectrum of digital
and non-digital manifestations.
For each of the four key terms, I do present a “definition.” The value of a definition in this essay is
not its scientific accuracy but instead its conceptual utility. I give definitions not in order to explain
phenomena, but in order to understand them.
Disclaimer 4: why I’m doing this
Why does it matter to me to better understand “games and
stories?” Because I’m a designer of
game-stories, and a closet Modernist to boot. I’m looking to better understand the medium in which I work, in order to
create new and meaningful things which no one has ever experienced before. It’s certainly not the only kind of stance to
take. But now you know where I’m coming
from.
Narrative
First term: narrative. I’m going to begin with this close cousin to
the “stories” of the “games and stories” equation. My strategy of discipline for the term narrative is to present a broad and
expansive understanding of the concept, to think beyond the normal limits of
what we might consider narrative, to help uncover the common turf of stories
and games.
The definition: I draw my definition from an essay by J.
Hillis Miller: Narrative, from the
book Critical Terms for Literary Study (19**). Miller’s definition of the term “narrative,”
grossly paraphrased, has three parts:
1) A narrative has an initial state, a change in that state, and insight brought about by that change. You might call this process the “events” of a narrative.
2) A narrative is not merely a series of events, but a personification of events though a medium such as language. This component of the definition references the representational aspect of narrative.
3)
And lastly, this representation is constituted
by patterning and repetition. This is
true for every level of a narrative, whether it is the material form of the
narrative itself or its conceptual thematics.
It’s quite a general definition. Let’s see what might be considered narrative
according to these three criteria. A
book is certainly a narrative by this definition, whether it is a
straightforward linear novel or a choose-your-own-adventure interactive book,
in which each page ends with a choice that can bring the reader to different
sections of the book. Both kinds of
books contain events which are represented through text and through the
patterned experience of the book and its language.
A game of Chess could also be considered a narrative by this
scheme. How? Chess certainly has a beginning state (the
setup of the game), changes to that state (the gameplay), and a resulting
insight (the outcome of the game). It is
a representation – a stylized representation of war, complete with a cast of
colorful characters. And the game takes
place in highly patterned structures of time (turns), and space (the
checkerboard grid).
Many other kinds of things fall into the wide net Miller
casts as well – some of them activities or objects we wouldn’t normally think
of as narrative. A marriage
ceremony. A meal. A conversation. The cleverness of Miller’s definition is that
it is in fact so inclusive, while still rigorously defining exactly what a
narrative is.
Because, what I wish to ask is NOT the overused question:
Instead, the question I’d like to pose is:
In what ways might we consider this thing (such as a game) a “narrative thing?”
Interactivity
The definition: Try this on for size. It’s from dictionary.com:
interactive: reciprocally active; acting upon or influencing each other; allowing a two-way flow of information between a device and a user, responding to the user’s input
If what we’re after is relationships between our terms, it’s
important to find the terrain of overlap between narrative and
interactivity. But we don’t want the two
terms to be identical. It seems
important to be able to say that some narratives are interactive and some are
not – or rather, that perhaps all narratives can be interactive, but they can
be interactive in different ways.
Intuitively, there is in fact some kind of difference
between a typical linear book and a choose-your-own-adventure book. And it seems that the difference in some way
is that naughty concept of interactivity. Here’s one solution. Instead of
understanding “interactivity” as a singular phenomenon, let’s subdivide it into
the various ways it can be paired up with a narrative experience. So here are four modes of narrative
interactivity:
Mode 1: Cognitive
interactivity; or interpretive participation with a text
This is the psychological, emotional, hermeneutic, semiotic,
reader-response, Rashomon-effect-ish, etc. kind of interactions that a
participant can have with the so-called “content” of a text. Example: you re-read a book after several
years have passed and you find it’s completely different than the book you remember.
Mode 2: Functional
interactivity; or utilitarian participation with a text
Included here: functional, structural interactions with the
material textual apparatus. That book
you re-read: did it have a table of contents? An index? What was the graphic
design of the pages? How thick was the
paper stock? How large was the
book? How heavy? All of these characteristics are part of the
total experience of reading interaction.
Mode 3: Explicit
interactivity; or participation with designed choices and procedures in a text
This is “interaction” in the obvious sense of the word:
overt participation like clicking the non-linear links of a hypertext novel,
following the rules of a Surrealist language game, rearranging the clothing on
a set of paper dolls. Included here:
choices, random events, dynamic simulations, and other procedures programmed
into the interactive experience.
Mode 4:
Meta-interactivity or cultural participation with a text
This is interaction outside the experience of a single
text. The clearest examples come from
fan culture, in which readers appropriate, deconstruct, and reconstruct linear
media, participating in and propagating massive communal narrative worlds.
These four modes of narrative interactivity (cognitive,
functional, explicit, and cultural) are not four distinct categories, but four
overlapping flavors of participation that occur in varying degrees in all media
experience. Most interactive activities
incorporate some or all of them simultaneously.
So what we normally think of as “interactive,” what separates
the book from the choose-your-own-adventure, is category number three, explicit
interactivity. As we hone in on our four
terms, note that we’ve made enough progress to already identify those phenomena
we might call “interactive narratives.” The newspaper as a whole is not explicitly interactive, but the
letters-to-the-editor section is. Are
games interactive narratives in this sense? Absolutely. The choices and
decisions which game players make certainly constitute very explicit
interactivity. We’re getting closer to
games. But first: play.
Play
Perhaps more than any other one of the four concepts, play is used in so many contexts and in
so many different ways that it’s going to be a real struggle to make it play
nice with our other terms. We play
games. We play with toys. We play musical instruments and we play the
radio. We can make a play on words, be
playful during sex, or simply be in a playful state of mind.
What do all of those meanings have to do with narrative and
interactivity? Before jumping into a
definition of play, first let’s try and categorize all of these diverse play
phenomena. We can put them into three
general categories.
Category 1: Game
Play, or the formal play of games
This is the focused kind of play that occurs when one or
more players plays a game, whether it is a board game, card game, sport,
computer game, etc. What exactly is a
game? We’re getting to that soon.
Category 2: Ludic
activities, or informal play
This category includes all of those non-game behaviors that
we also think of as “playing:” dogs chasing each other, two college students
tossing a frisbee back and forth, a circle of children playing
ring-around-the-rosy, etc. Ludic
activities are quite similar to games, but generally less formalized.
Category 3: Being
playful, or being in a play state of mind
This broad category includes all of the ways we can “be
playful” in the context of other activities. Being in a play state of mind does not necessarily mean that you are
playing – but rather that you are injecting a spirit of play into some other
action. For example, it is one thing to
insult a friend’s appearance, but it is another thing entirely if the insult is
delivered playfully.
Quick structural note: the later categories contain the
earlier ones. Game play (1) is a
particular kind of ludic activity (2) and ludic activities (2) are a particular
way of being playful (3). But what
overarching definition could we possibly give to the word “play” which would
address all of these uses?
The definition: How
about:
Play is the free space of movement
within a more rigid structure. Play
exists both because of and also despite the more rigid structures of a system.
That sounds quite abstract and obtuse for a fun-loving word
like “play,” doesn’t it? But it is
actually quite handy. This definition of
play is about relationships between the elements of a system. Think about the use of the word “play” when
we talk about the “free play” of a steering wheel. The free play is the amount of movement that
the steering wheel can turn before it begins to affect the tires of the
car. The play itself exists only because
of the more utilitarian structures of the driving–system: the drive shaft,
axles, wheels, etc.
But even though the play only occurs because of these
structures, the play is also exactly that thing which exists despite the
system, the free movement within it, in the interstitial spaces between and
among its components. Play exists in
opposition to the structures it inhabits, at odds with the utilitarian
functioning of the system. Yet play is
at the same time an expression of a system, and intrinsically a part of it.
This definition of play does in fact cover all three kinds
which we mentioned above. Playing Chutes
and Ladders occurs only because of the rigid rules of the game – but the
gameplay itself is a kind of dance of fate which occurs somewhere among the
dice, pieces, board, and game players. Playing a musical instrument means manipulating within the free space of
audio possibilities that the structure of the instrument was designed to
engender. Being playful in a
conversation means playing in and among the linguistic and social structures
that constitute the conversational context. Play can manifest in a dizzying variety of forms, from intellectual and
physical play to semiotic and cultural play.
One way to link this understanding of play to narrative and
interactivity is to consider the play of an explicitly interactive
narrative. The challenge for the creator
of an interactive narrative is to design the potential for play into the
structure of the experience, whether that experience is a physical object, a
computer program, an inhabited space, or a set of behaviors.
And the real trick is that the designed structure can guide
and engender play, but never completely script it in advance. If the interaction is completely
pre-determined, there’s no room for play in the system. The author of a choose-your-own-adventure
creates the structure that the reader inhabits, but the play emerges out of
that system as the reader navigates through it. Even if the reader breaks the structure by cheating and skipping ahead,
that is merely another form of play within the designed system.
Games
We have arrived at our fourth and final term: games. With this concept, we have a new kind of naughtiness. Play, interactivity, and narrative threatened
us with over-inclusion. “Games,” on the
other hand, needs some discipline because it’s difficult to understand exactly
and precisely what a game is. My
approach with this concept is to define it as narrowly as possible so that we
can understand what separates the play of games from other kinds of ludic
activities. We are, after all, looking
at games and stories, not play and stories.
The definition: The fact that games are a formal kind of play
was referenced above. But how exactly is
that formality manifest? Here is a
definition that separates games from other forms of play:
A game is a voluntary interactive
activity, in which one or more players follow rules that constrain their
behavior, enacting an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome.
It is a bit dense. Here are the primary elements of the definition, teased out for your
perusal:
voluntary
If you’re forced against your will
to play a game, you’re not really playing. Games are voluntary activities.
interactive
Remember this word? It’s referencing our third mode of
interactivity: explicit participation.
All games have rules. These rules provide the structure out of
which the play emerges. It’s also
important to realize that rules are essentially restrictive and limit what the
player can do.
artificiality
Games maintain a boundary from
so-called “real life” in both time and space. While games obviously do occur within the real world, artificiality is
one of their defining features. Consider, for example, the formal limits of time and space which are
necessary to define even a casual game of street hoops.
conflict
All games embody a contest of
powers. It might be a conflict between
two players as in Chess; it might be a contest between several teams, as in a
track meet; a game might be a conflict between a single player and the forces
of luck and skill embodied in solitaire; or even a group of players competing
together against the clock on a game show.
quantifiable outcome
The conflict of a game has an end
result, and this is the quantifiable outcome. At the conclusion of a game, the participants either won or lost (they
might all win or lose together) or they received a numerical score, as in a
videogame. This idea of a quantifiable
outcome is what often distinguishes a bona-fide game from other less formal
play activities.
Games embody the same structure-play relationship of other
ludic activities, where play emerges as the free space of movement within more
rigid structures. But the fact that
games are so formalized gives them a special status in this regard. To create a game is to design a set of game
rules – as well as game materials, which are an extension of the rules.
The rules of a game serve to limit players’ behaviors. In a game of Parcheesi, for example, players
interact with the dice in extremely particular ways. You don’t eat them, hide them from other
players, or make jewelry out of them. When it is your turn, you roll the dice, and translate the numerical
results into the movement of your pieces. To take part in a game is to submit your behavior to the restrictions of
the rules.
Rules might not seem like much fun. But once players set the system of a game
into motion, play emerges. And play is
the opposite of rules. Rules are fixed,
rigid, closed, and unambiguous. Play, on
the other hand, is uncertain, creative, improvisational, and open-ended. The strange coupling of rules and play is
one of the fascinating paradoxes of games.
Mixing and Matching
We’ve arrived at a relatively clear understanding of exactly
what constitutes a game. So how do games
intersect with the other three concepts at hand?
Narrative: As we observed with Chess, Games are in fact narrative
systems. They aren’t the only form that
narrative can take, but every game can be considered a narrative system.
Interactivity: Games are interactive too. They generally embody all four modes of
interactivity outlined in this essay, but they are particularly good examples
of the third kind: explicit interactivity.
Play: Games are among the many and diverse forms of play. The formal quality of games distinguishes
them from other ludic play-activities.
What does this mean? It is possible to frame games as narrative systems, or as interactive
systems, or as systems of play. While
this seems like an obvious set of conclusions to draw, remember that the goal
wasn’t to place the concept of games inside some categories and keep it out of
others. Armed with very particular
understandings of narrative, play, and interactivity, these three concepts
become frames or schemas that we can use to tease out particular qualities of
the complex phenomena of games.
And it goes without saying that there are innumerable other
terms we might bring to bear on the concept of games as well: games as
mathematical systems, ideological systems, semiotic systems, systems of
desire. It’s an endless list. I chose play, narrative, and interactivity in
order to shed light on the game-story. So let’s get back to that important question.
Stories & Games
So. We’ve disciplined
our four naughty terms until they’ve finally behaved and we’ve come full
circle, back to the original question of games and stories. This essay began by observing a general
dissatisfaction with the current state of game-story theory and practice. Perhaps it can end with some suggestions for
future work.
A story is the experience of a narrative. And the dissatisfaction with game-stories is
a dissatisfaction with the way that games function as storytelling
systems. Remembering the concept of
narrative, story-systems function by representing changes of events though
pattern and repetition. This act of
representation – or, we might say, signification – is how narrative operates.
So one relevant question to ask is: How can games represent
narrative meaning? Or rather: How can
games signify? Remember, it’s not a
question of whether or not games are narrative, but instead how they are narrative. And if my agenda with this investigation of
the “game-story” is to inculcate genuinely new forms of experience, then we
need to ask not just how games can be narrative systems, but we need to ask how
games can be narrative systems in ways that other media cannot.
It’s clear that games can signify in ways that other
narrative forms have already established: through sound and image, material and
text, representations of movement and space. But perhaps there are ways that only games can signify, drawing on their unique status as explicitly interactive
narrative systems of formal play.
Example: Ms. Pac-Man
This much we know: one way of framing games is to frame them
as game-stories. So let’s take a well-known
example – the arcade game Ms. Pac Man – and look closely at the diverse ways
that it signifies narrative.
First observation: there are many story elements to Ms.
Pac-Man which are not directly related to the gameplay. For instance, the large-scale characters on
the physical arcade game cabinet establish a graphical story about the chase
between Ms. Pac-Man and the ghosts. There are also brief non-interactive animations inside the game, which
appear between every few levels. These
simple cartoons chronicle events in the life of Ms. Pac-Man: meeting her beau
Pac-Man, outwitting the ever-pursuing ghosts, etc.
But while these story-components are important parts of the
larger Ms. Pac-Man experience, they are not at the heart of what distinguishes Ms.
Pac-Man as a game-story. The arcade cabinet graphics and linear
cartoon animations sit adjacent to the actual gameplay itself, where a
different kind of narrative awaits. As
the player participates with the system, playing the game, exploring its rule-structures,
finding the patterns of free play which will let the game continue, a narrative
unfolds in real time.
What kind of story is it? It’s a narrative about life and death, about consumption and power. It’s a narrative about strategic pursuit through
a constrained space, about dramatic reversals of fortune where the hunter
becomes the hunted. It’s a narrative
about relationships, in which every character on the screen, every munchable
dot and empty corridor, are meaningful parts of a larger system. It’s a narrative that always has the same
elements, yet unfolds differently each time it is experienced. And it’s also a kind of journey, where the
player and protagonist are mapped onto each other in complicated and subtle
ways. This is a narrative in which
procedures, relationships, and complex systems dynamically signify. It is the kind of narrative which only a game
could tell.
Quick reminder: although I may have focused on the gameplay
elements of the Ms. Pac-Man narrative, ultimately the player’s experience of
the game-story is composed of the entire arcade game. This includes not just the gameplay itself
but the cabinet graphics and the cartoon animations, the sound of a quarter
dropping and the texture of the joystick, the social and architectural dynamics
of the arcade itself, the gender ideologies of the game and its historical
relationship to the original Pac-Man, the marketing of the character and its
penetration into pop culture at large.
But at the center of this expansive game experience is the game of Ms. Pac-Man – that artificial
conflict with a quantifiable outcome. The gameplay of Ms. Pac-Man is in some sense the kernel at the center of
the machine, the engine which drives all of the other elements, putting the game in the game-story.
And as a story, it is compelling enough to have found Ms.
Pac-Man a worldwide audience of dedicated players. It’s important to note that the “story” of
the Ms. Pac-Man game-story certainly does not provide the same pleasures of a
novel or film. But why should we expect
it to? The question is, what pleasures
can it provide that books or film cannot?
Wrap-up & Send-off
Because games are always already narrative systems, the
question which frames this section of the book, the question “Is there a
game-story” is ultimately moot. Recognizing that narrative is one of many ways to frame a game
experience, for me a more important question is: How can we capitalize on the
unique qualities of games in order to create new kinds of game-stories? What if dynamic play procedures were used as
the very building-blocks of storytelling?
There are already many wonderful examples of this kind of
thinking. The children’s board game Up
the River by Ravensburger uses a modular game board to procedurally recreate
the rhythmic flow of a stream. And The
Sims, a computer game mentioned often in this volume, is a game-story too. Instead of presenting a pre-scripted
narrative like most digital “interactive narratives,” The Sims functions like a
kind of story-machine, generating unexpected narrative events out of complex
and playful simulation.
But much more needs to be done. Any observation made about games, play,
narrative and interactivity could be used as the starting point for a new kind
of game-story. Here are some examples
that cannibalize statements I made earlier in this essay:
The
concept of “narrative” casts a wide net. Many experiences can be considered narrative experiences, like a meal or
a marriage ceremony. How would we make a
game-story about these kinds of subjects?
Interactivity
can occur on a cultural level. How
could game-story be designed with meta-interactivity in mind, so that the
narrative emerged as the sum of many different player experiences in otherwise
unrelated games?
Mischief
is a form of play. What would a game
be like that encouraged players to break the existing rules in order to form
new ones?
Games
are about conflict. OK, so we’re
drowning in fighting games. What about a
game that told a story of the feints, bluffing, trickery, and intimidation of a
good argument?
Yes, these are difficult kinds of challenges. But if we’re going to move through our
collective dissatisfaction with the current state of the game-story, it’s time
to re-think the terms of the debate and arrive at new ways of understanding
game-stories, and new strategies for creating them.
This essay attempted to re-present some of those terms. In this painfully brief space, I have been
able to do no more than gesture towards some of these new avenues. There are many more concepts in need of
discipline. And the rest is up to
you.
Endnotes
Many of the ideas in this essay were generated in
collaboration with Frank Lantz, with whom I have taught Game Design and
Interactive Narrative Design for many years. Many ideas also stem from my collaborations with Katie Salen, with whom
I am currently co-authoring a Game Design textbook for MIT Press.
The four categories of Narrative Interactivity first
appeared in print in an essay called Against Hypertext for American Letters
& Commentary, Issue 12, 2000.
The definition of games presented here is loosely inspired
by a definition of games presented by Elliott Avedon & Brian Sutton-Smith
in The Study of Games (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1971). However,
elements are also borrowed from Roger Callois’ Man, Play, and Games (New York: The Free Press, 1961) as well as
Johannes Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study
of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955) and Bernard
Suit’s Grasshopper: Games, Life, and
Utopia (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990).
Lastly: Despite my extensive and gratuitous use of the
disciplinary metaphor, I do not advocate spanking children in any context. Disciplinary activity that occurs between two
consenting adults is another matter entirely. In any case don’t let the bad pun distract you - the
"discipline" I am talking about in this essay is a discipline: the field of game design.
copyright © 2010 eric zimmerman |
be playful |