A friend sent me this after an argument about storylines in games. Would anyone like to assist ripping it up? Don't hold back. Or alternatively agree and explain why.The issue with gaming narrative is that ultimately the medium of games is not one based upon a communicative language but a causal one. This is specifically to do with how games are scripted, as they utilise a notated logic that can loop and feed into other statements (something you obviously already know). However, this is very similar to how music is composed, as the notation is almost identically causal and has to be ultimately played out – this is why bemani games have worked so well and why titles like Rock Band and Guitar Hero have an almost implicit rapport with how the music is played.
Literary form on the other hand isn’t causal in terms of the language. There are no loops or logic that feed into other causal statements; linguistically it’s entirely linear.
This is why films, theatre and literature are closely linked, as the language used for these media is communicative, not causal. This allows the same kind of narrative to be told as the language used follows the same linear rules; this allows the author to specifically frame the viewpoint of the reader without the fear of limiting their understanding of the narrative. In gaming, this is something that often can’t be done during gameplay and has to be set aside as a cutscene. Some people have tried various approaches around this but it’s not something that the medium lends itself well too.
Consequently, critics like Roger Ebert and a slew of others are able to, quite justifiably, lambast gaming narrative as being an obvious hack job and consequently not meaningful in comparison to film or literature; as the medium is not geared for that kind of narrative approach. Now, they’re not criticising the functional aspect of gaming just how the narrative is delivered within the context of that.
Games aren’t communicatively linear. Each player can break an attempt at literary form at any point, even in a game that is heavily causally linear. For example, Super Metroid is very linear in terms of the functional causality but you can get lost in the game and re-do a set of rooms over and over again. Within the rule-set of a game this is entirely to be expected and catered for but the equivalent of that literary form would be to re-read the same three pages over and over again until you figured out how to turn the next page.
The way that games have gotten around this incompatibility is by having bones of narrative tied to the causal skeleton for the game (like the cutscene). However, this is an unnatural linguistic pairing and one that is still rife with.
This is not to say that narrative cannot be told in a gaming context but that literary form is not the best candidate.
So why do people even bother with it? There are two reasons to this, the first is to do with societal kudos and the other is the reason you cited.
American games publishers have a chip on their shoulder about Hollywood, they want that lifestyle basically and to be treated with more kudos (this was really openly discussed at places like Disney, bearing in mind that everyone there came from all over the publishing sector). This is why a filmic narrative is so prevalent in the big AAA games of late and why the quest for photo-realism has been sought after so vigorously. The problem with all this is that ultimately games will only over be allowed to copy Hollywood, which in turn means that culturally they’ll always considered to be the lesser candidates. The irony is that in copying linear narrative games won’t be able to make any kind of real cultural impact.
The second reason is also tied into the first somewhat, as gamers (especially in America) are also influenced by Hollywood and want to feel as though they’re playing through the events of a film. This is more interesting as the desire for this can be implemented in more than one way, though (American) publishers won’t fund that for the reason cited above. Ultimately you can deliver the sense of being part of a narrative without the need for a linear linguistic approach.
For instance, music has been able to infer narrative via its causal language for centuries. Works such as Danse Macabre and Phaeton by Camille Saint Saens have endured the test of time with a remarkably potent form of inferred narrative borne out of the linguistic restrictions of that medium. This is something that games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion will never be able to achieve, as most people won’t even remember those games in the next hundred years. That’s not to say they are bad but that their narrative is a linguistic foreign body within their causal framework.
Compare those two games to something like Demon’s Souls, which isn’t influenced by Hollywood (as it’s funded by a Japanese publisher) and the vast majority of that narrative is inferred and consequently you feel more invested in what’s happening, as the player has to think and deduce the causal elements that have occurred in the narrative to understand what was happened to the game world.
Gaming isn’t a purely narrative medium. Music has for endured millennia and whilst there are tone poems and opera amongst that compositional pantheon, they represent a tiny fraction of the medium as a whole. Gaming has been with us for as long, after all sports are games too, but whilst there is a place for narrative in gaming it’s not the main purpose for why the medium exists in the first place.
It’s a functional medium and whilst interweaving a narrative into facets of that is a noble and worthwhile goal it’s not indicative of what games are. After all, Tetris and Chess have endured without any form of real narrative to speak of. Games cover the cognitive blind spot in how our minds use deductive reasoning; they produce abstract concepts that can only be solved in that artificial context (this is why a lot of AI research is closely tied to the cognitive effects of gaming).
EDIT: Would this be better in SLAM? It's full of so much bull, I'm not sure.
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- PeZook
