Critical Evaluation

While choosing the topic I went quickly through the list of the topics and from the start I liked the idea of dramatic elements and their relevance to video games. Before I even started chasing the topic and researching into it I had a few conceptions about different types of narratives in games. However I would never guess that this is such a broad topic to uncover, and so much has been written about it, though it's not even a fraction of what is there to state and research. I found this topic very interesting and certainly I will keep up to date with new works that are going to come out about the issue.

When I started researching the topic I realized my former misconception. On the beginning I thought of researching different types of narrations in games and role playing and story telling aspects in video games for I have a significant back ground in role playing games, and they naturally drew me to the topic. Also I am a story/plot lover and take every opportunity to play games with interesting narratives. Hence my initial concept of the topic was concentrated around game plots. Instead of that I found after a brief search on google scholar plenty of the material about game theorists struggle with narrativists, and vice versa. I counted to find some more essential writing about actual issue in games. Even if that was not exactly what I was thinking of it came to be a great help and progress in my work. I was mainly influenced by convincing essays of Jesper Juul and Markku Eskelinen. Later I went to check books such as Aristotle’s The Poetics, Jesper Juul’s Half Real, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature by Espen J. Aarseth, Story and discourse by Seymour Chatman and Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray.

During progression of my blog I found out that amount of resources I went through was uncontrollably piling up. I could spend a day just researching an issue of some article that was vaguely relevant to my topic, such as; why there are little games with experimental narratives. Whereas, experimental narratives in video games would be much better idea to cover. In the future I need to discipline myself and improve my time management and focus on my main idea, not to drift away from it.

I think I got on the right track after reading some other blogs and found perfect topic to write about after reading "Rules of Play". I appreciate the input of this book into my research for the clear explanations of the ideas the authors had to share. This was in a particular way a breakthrough in the progression of my blog. Still I was forcing myself to push my work into something even more academic than it was possible for me, so I kept discarding things that didn't fulfil my demands. I think initially I reckon I sought for my own opinion about dramatic elements in video games than just research of other theorists.

On the other hand I found outlet of my brainstorm producing in a way my own ideas and observations of different games. Also I felt that It is much easier to state some theory and then give an example of a game that is relevant to the idea. This was most comforting way of recording new posts in my blog.

Even though in a way I avoided to write about narratology and ludology, because I thought it wasn’t as relevant to my blog as the concept of narratives in video games I included contradictory ideas of both fronts. I found that the whole idea of researching the narratives and actual attempting to improve it are stuck in a place because of struggles of the theorists trying to prove one or other idea, and have upper hand in the discussion. Therefore, I found little of the material that was relevant to the sheer topic, and how it interrelates with other game aspects, such as interaction, genre or play. I selected one fairly big quote for my task, and a few smaller although I didn’t interlinkedthem together, what I should have done.

I found use of the blog very convenient for its features such as possibility of embedding videos and images that support my written work and serve as an medium to clear out my explanations. Also watching others progress was a very motivating to keep to date and search for new websites and articles.

In my opinion this task opened a new field of more academic knowledge in front of me. I feel it also improved my academic skills of articulating my thoughts in a more scholar way. I felt though that when I was starting with my writing the topic was expanding in a completely natural manner.

In future I will try to keep posting more consistently new messages. I would like to improve the structure of the blog, and research the core topic first and then add more subtopics that would add the depth to the research. Even though I went through works done by theorists I had problems with extracting relevant quotes and articulating the importance to my blog. In future I hope to perform better in research, to improve the relevance of my posts to my chosen topic.

How narrative elements can help in creating mood in a game. This post will analyse the case of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth. The game is made upon horror novels of H.P Lovecraft, so designers needed to keep the gameplay scary. This is how they dealt with the issue.

On the video can be seen walkthrough part of the second chapter of the game. The main character penetrates sewage canals under the city. During progression of his quest he updates the player on certain aspects that are worth attention, or responds to players actions by stating facts. Suddenly, character discovers a body ling about which causes a shock and his heart starts beating faster. Since then in the speakers the player hears blood throbbing in characters ears. Also player sees a girl in one of the side canals, but she runs away before any contact is initiated. To the throbbing add childrens voice echoing in pipes, the character starts getting paranoid. In the tunnels appears the girl and quickly disappears. Player watches some unclear flashbacks from the time when main character was closed in Arkham Asylum. All those aspects keep building up a claustrophobic atmosphere. When the character gets more psychotic his vision blurres, ocasionally screams and mumbles, visibly gets crazy.

The interface is not clattered with any cursors or health bars. Health of the character is shown actually by his behavior, if he gets shot in the leg, he would stared limping, hit in the head - would obscure the vision with blood, wounded arm - would aim less precisely and so on. Lack of any on screen controls helps in creating the feeling of helplessness.

Games as Narrative Systems

The creation of a game narrative is really the creation of a narrative system. This

notion unifies all of the concepts presented so far in this chapter. As a design problem, creating the narrative elements of a game is very much like creating other aspects of your game. You are crafting a system of parts, simple elements that interrelate to form a complex whole. The meanings that emerge from a system arise out of the individual relationships between elements, as well as the more global patterns that emerge across many sets of smaller relationships.

Case Study: Drome Racing as Narrative System

Even games that are not explicitly oriented toward story creation can be framed as a narrative system. The LEGO Drome Racing Challenge is a massively multiplayer game in which players create a game persona, collect and customize LEGO race cars, and then race them against each other on a variety of tracks. During a race, players do not directly control their cars but instead see how their racing strategies and car customization plays out on the constantly changing tracks. As a

large-scale community game, the Drome Racing Challenge offers many modes of interaction, manifesting narrative play through a variety of means.

As a game system, the narrative of the Drome Racing Challenge emerges from the interaction of the many parts of the game. The total narrative experience of the Drome Racing Challenge does not lie in any one of these individual elements, but instead, their overall effect arises out of the system as a whole, which includes:

Pre-existing backstory. The game exists within a larger narrative world that includes comic books and the LEGO Racers toy products. This sci-fi racing fictive world, where speed-hungry drivers compete against each other in the many dangerous tracks of the Drome, provides the setting for the game, as well as the

primary frame for the narrative play.

Player as protagonist. Each player constructs a driver character that represents him or her in the world of the Drome Racing Challenge. This driver is defined through a cluster of narrative descriptors: team name and colors, helmet icon, racing motto, and text phrases that the driver utters when making or accepting a racing challenge and winning or losing a race. All of these characteristics are embedded narrative content, selected by the player from pregenerated lists. Other player characteristics, such as a player's racing record, status on the leader boards, progress toward the next license rank, and particular cars and parts collected and assembled, are more modular and emergent ways of personifying the player.

Multiple goals. The Drome Racing Challenge embeds long- and short-term goals throughout the game experience and ties them directly into the narrative. Players build a collection of cars and parts, upgrade and evolve cars that they own, improve their license class, compete on the rankings boards, and interact in limited social ways with other players through the narrative world of the game.

The total narrative experience of Ms. Pac-Man arises from a myriad of components: the title of the game and its reference to the existing narrative of Pac-Man, the arcade cabinet graphics and text, the looping animated title screens, the in-game cartoons between levels, and all of the visual and audio elements of the

game itself. These elements do not exist in isolation, but combine to form a narrative whole that is more than the sum of the parts. The narrative is multi-faceted, and not only establishes a cartoony fictive world and a romantic backstory for the protagonist, but also provides a narrative framework for the game play itself. The play produces intense emergent narratives of insatiably hungry consumption, strategic avoidance and survival, and dramatic turnabout where the hunted temporarily becomes the hunter.These emergent experiences exist in counterpoint to the light and colorful fictive world of the game, resulting in a richly textured narrative experience in which every element plays a part.

A game oriented more explicitly toward narrative play is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D and other tabletop role-playing games, the game is a system for generating narrative play, a system that can help define the characters, settings, conflicts, plots, and goals of the game narrative. These designed game materials usually include a formal system that details the rules of the game, as well as a narrative world that provides the overall settings and backstory. These two components are intertwined into the larger narrative system of the game. For example, in the fantasy medieval world of D&D, rules for armored swordplay, fantastical creatures, and magical spells are included, whereas rules for computer technology are not.

Although players can purchase pre-generated D&D adventures, it is more common for a game's Dungeon Master (the player that leads each role-playing session) to create original adventures. The Dungeon Master leads the rest of the players

through these homebrewed stories, each participant role-play-ing a single player-character. The Dungeon Master provides the rest of the narrative elements, describing each setting the players enter, role-playing allies and enemies the players encounter, and slowly revealing the dark mysteries and unexpected plot twists of the ongoing story.

Dungeons & Dragons and other similar games are quite explicit story-creation systems, designed to facilitate the structured, collaborative authorship of narrative play. Each player is a part of that system, as are the player-characters, the Dungeon Master, and the many elements of the game world. These game world components might be formally defined (a long sword does 1–12 points of damage),

narratively defined (the wizard hermit doesn't seem to like us), or both (if we can convince the wizard to enchant my long sword, it will do +2 damage). As the players converse, roll dice, and consult the game rules, they enact pitched battles and dramatic dialogues, brokering power, knowledge, and personality as they together create meaningful narrative play. Every action taken, whether a difficult feat that requires a die roll or a clever conversational stratagem, has its place in the overall narrative system, buoyed up by the formal rules that make such actions possible. Actions simultaneously expand the ongoing story as new narrative elements are added to the series of events.

(Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals, 2004

Massachusetts)

Salen and Zimmerman explain how interlinked parts of games cooperate creating a broader narrative medium. They highlight that narrative can be successfully achieved in games that are not designed specifically to convey any particular story. However, through participation of players into game and many interactive components that interrelate with each other create a narrative.

The article says that some game designers try to encourage players to create their own

narrative within the system of game. This happens often by character creation and later customization, collecting resources and interaction with other players or npc's.

On the example of a simple ms pac-man game Salen and Zimmerman showed how all the aspects of the game itself create a narrative system; starting from the design of the arcade cabinet to the game play creating certain dramatic effects. In fact games are narratives on its own and don't need to be centered around any particular plot. Often fighting games have additional storyline, or character back stories. Those little elements make games much more interesting even though players while having a duel usually pick the strongest character possible, not one with the most interesting story. However, game becomes much more interesting when each of the characters have some type of personality. For example in Soul Calibur III it's

certainly much more immersive to know that the character player uses is Heishiro Mitsurugi, who has this particular story and is motivated by certain things and craves revenge on someone he used to be wounded by, than that its a random samurai. Also in the game players collect weapons, different for each character, and additionally for each character there is also a one exclusive weapon linked to their story.

This also has been supported by Raymond Padilla the Senior Console Editor of Game Spy, his thoughts on this topic can be found on http://uk.gamespy.com/articles/543/543264p1.html

Whereas on the next page his arguments are countered by Phil Theobald, Associate Console Editor.

The last quote brings as an example tabletop games such as DnD which provide system of rules for generating a narrative play. This comes to the User Generated Content in video Games. On the basis of already existing games players using map editors and some programing change narrative structure to create so called mods. As the name says mods slightly change the content of game. One of the most popular mods are Zombie survival mod and Team Fortress in Couter Strike and also various arena mods in WarCraft III.

Following videos show a video of Invasion of Minas Tirith made in WarCraft 3 and some peculiar modifications in Fallout 3.

"In literature, theatre and film everything matters or is conventionally supposed to matter equally - if you've seen 90% of the presentation that's not enough, you have to see or read it all (or everything you can). This is characteristic of dominantly interpretative practices in general. In contrast, in computer games you either can't or don't have to encounter every possible combinatory event and existent the game contains, as these differ in their ergodic importance. Some actions and reactions in relation to certain events will bring the player quicker to a solution or help her reach the winning situation sooner or more effectively than others. There are events and existents the player has to manipulate or configure in order to progress in the game or just to be able to continue it. Events, existents and the relations between them can be described at least in spatial, temporal, causal and functional terms. It's equally self-evident that the importance of these dimensions varies from game to game and sometimes also within the phases and levels of an individual game."

(Eskelinen [online])

Two game titles illustrate this matter perfectly one of them is the Witcher, and the other one is The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. The former shows the narrative side, whereas the latter functional.

The first game sets the player as one of the profesional beast slayers some time after events from the narrative saga. The protagonist loses his memory and players side mission during the game is to reclaim it. As we get to know soon it can be done only when Geralt, the main character, will abandon his tries to stay neutral, and stand on one side of the barricade in the war between humans and allegiance of elves, dwarves and gnoms. However, this brings consequences and influences future events, not only on immediate, but also the ones far in the future. Also behavior of different characters can change towards the player.

In one of the quests player needs to investigate case of a spy of the organization called Salamadra. After some time of questioning different npc's we gather a wide range of colourful suspicious looking folk. This forces us to ask difficult questions and if we press to much, people we talk to refuse to provide any further explanation, this can result in omitting some side quests. On the other side we can help the Burning Rose champions in scouting future battlefield, which will lead to their win, and their leaders promotion. Since then Geralt would have a strong ally on his side but also would need to stand the fact that he put a hand to slaughtering a band of elves. Also some quests contradict with each other. In the previously explained one we would automatically fail the quest of delivery a letter with a pledge for weapons to a dwarven blacksmith.

In Elder Scrolls series we encounter different type of multiple choices that affect the gameplay, are closer to what Eskelinen says in his essay. I'll take as an example Morrowind. The game just after accomplishing the character creation sets the player completely free to explore the world, and start any quest he wants, though often they are over the characters present abilities. Player can start the quests in whatever order he prefers, also he may choose not to pick them and it won't affect the later storyline but only his statistics and equipment. Also some events are generated randomly, like an attack of a wild creature or an ambush on a track. This makes the game highly replayable.

Emotional attachment and narratives

In one of my first computer games magazines I bought I found an article featuring different types of game deaths. The most interesting was that the writer had problems with finding an example of a beautiful death and managed only to mention about that he was really upset when he was playing Final Fantasy. Why is that? This is certainly not because games permanently try to accustom players with killing with cold blood or ignore death of others, there are people who would argue the point though. This phenomenon happens because of that the storylines of games very rarely are sophisticated enough for players to make them feel the bound with the characters, or even the playable avatar. The upper boundary of players’ feelings possibly is that they lost a useful tool or mere pity that an interesting character got killed. It almost never happens that players would mourn over characters death in the same way as for example reading a book, not mentioning real world.

"Aarseth describes this difference graphically in his account of playing Lara Croft: “When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it” and adds, “the polygonal significance of Lara Croft’s physique goes beyond the gameplay. But that doesn’t mean it tells us much, if anything, about the gameplay, does it?” For game players, characters are vehicles onto which they project their own goals, skills, experiences and understanding of the game. Characters in games, one might say, are functional and not emotionally and psychologically characterized entities as their counterparts in narratives."

Markku Eskalinen on Gaming situation http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/

This is a good example showing how dramatic elements in games lack advancement and sophistication needed for the player to immerse not only within the game but also the storyline. Aarseth claims that this makes a difference between games and narratives, though in my opinion a it is possible to make a character that binds emotionally. In Baldurs Gate II it is quite often that players keep in the team certain characters only because they like them.

Aeris's death; one of the most upsetting moments of Final Fantasy VII. Also according to wikipedia had a huge emotional impact on the players.

One of the examples of a game with issue of disengaging storyline is the Borderlands. The game can be gone through without even a glimpse at storyline messages; the only thing that draws to the game is the challenge that characteristic to linear shooters in which player has very little possible space to manoeuvre and is dragged through another levels. The Borderlands is a game of immersion, specially balanced with thousands of guns, enemies to kill and a system of special challenges, which on its own almost excludes the storyline pushing it onto the further plan. However it is a good game on its own.

Another interesting think I found in the article I mentioned on the beginning was that the writer while listing games in which killing amuses players, such as Half Life or Sodier of Fortune 2. The author pointed out that players never think about characters they kill, and probably if they found, for example in a pocket of a dead guard, wallet with a photograph of visibly ill wife and a bunch of little children, and a mobile phone with a message “Dad, we miss You, come back soon.” In this case player would try to stun the guard, to pass them without killing. That would also be a good start to make storylines more complex. This also touches a significant point which is role of emotional attachment of player to games protagonist/s. This has been shown on example of chess. On their own the game is a simple simulation of a battle. Each side has a fair set of different pieces that have different abilities. The players command their pieces against each other until one of them loses the queen. Who would care about losing a pawn if on the board are still a few more? What would happen if all pieces had different names, own histories and personalities? Players would probably be more attached to some than to others. Now, why the just created characters fight? During the chess session the answer is easy to win, but what if they had a reason? What if they fought to defend their homeland or were just a mercenaries, all of these would change the situation on a real battlefield.

An example of a story almost completely rid of all of those elements is “gone with the blastwave” http://www.blastwave-comic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=1

It is interesting because all the characters in this webcomic wear similar suits and differ only with colours that group them into three different teams, and it can be sensed that these soldiers as a reader are careless whether they die or not. Just like in strategy games like chess.

Concluding it is the back story or experiences of players avatars with npc’s that helps emotionally attach to them. Instead of using narrative and drama I used words back story and experiences not without a reason. Though games are considered to be sub-groups of the former, this still is being researched and the case probably will never be closed. On the other side I hesitate to use a word narrative while discussing some aspects of computer games.

“The problem is that this really is an a priori argument. Narratives may be fundamental to human thought, but this does not mean that everything should be described in narrative terms. And that something can be presented in narrative form does not mean that it is narrative.

(...)A more interesting argument centres on the fact that most games have a story written on the package, in the manual, or in intro-sequences, placing the player's playing in the context of a larger story (back-story), and/or creating an ideal story that the player has to realise:”

Jesper Juul “Games Telling Stories?”

In classic meaning of this word video games are not a narrative, but derive from games. According to Eskalinen, Narrative is

“the recounting…of one or more real or fictitious events communicated by one, two or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two or several (more or less overt) narratees” (Prince, cited by Eskelinen, 2001).”

And widely games are being participant experience are being excluded from this group, because of the fact that player can put effort into changing the future events. This means that it is not recounting, in a way re-enacting of the events but creating them in the present time. Hence the Interaction is the main difference between games and any other narrative medium.