Talk to the Boss: Narrative and Gaming

1
Talk to the Boss Narrative and Gaming

• Sandy Baldwin
• West Virginia University

2
The Boss Nihilanth

• Final boss in the original Half-Life
• Aporia / gap / or stoppage between segments of
  narrative and code
• Movement as narrative addressing

3
Initial Proposals (following Juul)

• At least three standard arguments for
  intersection of narrative and gaming
• We use narratives for everything
• Most games feature narrative introductions and
  back-stories
• Games can be analyzed through narratology

4
Cultural Technologies

• Narratives practical memory, reservoirs of
  knowledge
• Narratology is a method of analysis
• Games rules and combinatory free play
• Ergodic path breaking, non-trivial effort
• Classic works on games Huizinga, Homo Ludens
  Callois, Man, Play, and Games

5
What is (not) narrative?

• It is not tied to fictionality
• It is not tied to language
• It is tied to elements, events, and actions in a
  sequence, and therefore to a telling or at
  least to a perspective (even if this is not
  explicit)

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Narrative Defined

• Narrative connected events / actions
• Narrative level storyworld / environment
  described by narrative can be single or
  multiple
• Narrative context / act / performance character
  to character, or narrator to addressee, or author
  to reader, i.e. all acts of addressing/sending

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Narrative Elements

• Event transition from one state to another
  within the storyworld
• Action a willful act or intentional behavior by
  a character within the storyworld
• Also Description, argumentation, etc.
• So, an action may be an event but events are not
  necessarily actions

8
Story and Discourse

• Discourse (suzjet) the sequence of narrative
  events rendered by the text. How the narrative is
  told.
• Story (fabula) the discourse returned to
  chronological order and logical essentials. What
  is told.
• Story and discourse may be very different!
• Artifact the material presence of narrative
  signs (words, images, etc.)
• The first two are cognitive, while the artifact
  is phenomenal

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Plot vs. Story

• E. M. Forster defined story as the chronological
  sequence of events and plot as the causal and
  logical structure which connects event
• The king died and then the queen died (story).
• The king died and then the queen died of grief
  (plot).

10
Narrative Problems in Gaming

• Narrative as reflective and analytical
  perspective is problematized differently in
  different media/artifacts
• Gaming problems of space/time,
  projection/introjection, the end of gaming
• Even more complicated by wider analysis of games,
  including squad based, strategy, and multi-player

11
The problem of focalization

• Address person or enunciation of narrative
• Focalization who does the seeing, whose
  perception are we seeing through in this
  narrative
• Relates to place

12
Suture in the murder simulator

• Suture inserting the subject (us)
• Stitching the implied reader / viewer
• Seeing myself seeing
• What happens to narrative act? How does the
  interface become invisible?

13
JODI Untitled Game Quake hack

• "Arm yourself against the cannibalistic Ogre,
  fiendish Vore and indestructible Schambler using
  lethal nails, fierce Thunderbolts and abominable
  Rocket and Grenade Launchers"
• Blind internalization / projection of game and
  controls
• Is this playable?

14
Problems of time

• Story time the time of the events told, in
  their chronological order
• Discourse time the time of the telling of
  events (in the order in which they are told)
• We reconstruct story based on discourse
• Also, reading or playing time i.e. the
  phenomenological time engaged with the artifact

15
Gametime

• What is the time of games?
• Story time is already not necessarily linear
• Is gametime now? i.e. in FPS
• What about respawning? What sort of time is this?
• General problem of boss/aporia/stoppage
• Interface what time (and space) is it in?

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The problem of the end of games

• Game Over vs. The End
• Is the end winning?
• Can you lose to win?
• Can you lose in order to think? (narrative as
  reflection and analysis)

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"Remember kids, you can't win this game, just
lose."

• The agonal limit of the arcade game (measuring
  what?)
• Kabul Kaboom (and New York Defender, etc.)
• The narrative threshold the limit of game
  over reflects on narrative context

18
Joseph Delappes dead-in-iraq

• a fleeting, online memorial to military
  personnel killed in this ongoing conflict
• As of 8/27/07, I have input 3306 names. I intend
  to keep doing so until the end of this war
• "a way to communicate a sense of loss and
  frustration with the fact that soldiers are dying
  over there and life just seems to be going on
  like normal over here"

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Are those real people?

• please this is not the forum to do this
• shut the up!
• man will all the hackers go play ping pong
• Whats your point?
• I'm here to play a game, not read a CNN report
• I am sorry
• You arent encouraging me to join the service

20
Americas Army recruiting game

• Clearly a problem of overlapping narrative
  contexts, i.e. is the act of narrative within the
  storyworld or at other levels (suturings) as
  well?
• As of June, America's Army users spent over 160
  million hours playing the game and clicked on
  goarmy.com 1.35 million times
• Military investment of 2.5 million per year to
  expand and update the game
• America's Army Real Heroes lists the
  accomplishments of soldiers who earned the
  nation's highest awards for valor

21
Game Over, The End

• The point is not whether games are narratives but
  in what way, a question that gives us a
  vocabulary for describing games and an
  understanding of how they work in our culture