August 8, 2008
Narrative, Design, and Games.
Michael Abbot of the Brainy Gamer has a very fine olio of quotes with commentary on what is hopefully a new movement in game design:
As far as I can tell, the current momentum for change has its roots in a presentation by Doug Church entitled “Abdicating Authorship,” delivered at GDC in 2000. Church observed:
Our desire to create traditional narrative and exercise authorial control over the gaming world often inhibits the player’s ability to involve themselves in the game world. … The revelation of the [game] designer’s intent is not interactivity. [1]
This core notion – that “interactive gaming” in its current state is essentially a sender-receiver relationship between designer and player – serves as the basis for nearly all the brainstorming and deep thinking about narrative video games today.
Update: Chris over at The Artful Gamer on narrative and games:
Since Pong, we’ve relied upon the idea that what is physically on the screen should change whenever the player does something. Player-game interaction is what we typically mean by interactivity. Player choices and decisions are tantamount here, and the game enables the player to accomplish her/his goals.
But doesn’t that seem a bit suspect? Like the first time a cat sees its reflection in a mirror and realizes that it can make its doppelganger do its bidding? Have we been pushing pixels around a screen for 25 years and marveling at the novelty of technology?
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2 Responses to “Narrative, Design, and Games.”
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So, then, the goal is in essence to create game narratives that don’t feel like narratives–that is, that don’t feel like ordered, structured sequences of events that lead to a pre-determined outcome? Isn’t that the essence of Second Life? But then again,. I don’t think of Second Life as a game–I mean, what is its object, really?
I’m coming at this from the lit. crit. direction and I’m not at all conversant in game theory, so I’m probably missing something, but: it seems to me that with traditional games (say, chess), there’s a clearly-stated object and certain rules (those serve as the parameters, the metaphysical field of play). Within those parameters, there is any number of ways of accomplishing that outcome. There is no one narrative that will result in the achieving of the object. But with narrative, the eventual outcome is always known in advance and the actions taken/not taken by characters sooner or later lead to that outcome . . . but no matter how often we read the narrative, characters always make the same choices. Put another way: Chess is a game; the recounting of Bobby Fischer’s first match with Boris Spassky on July 11, 1972, is a narrative.
I don’t know. I’m just a simple caveman. But it seems to me that “game” and “narrative,” sooner or later, just won’t mesh with each other because they are fundamentally at odds with each other by virtue of their respective natures.
I have been bouncing your notion back and forth in my head all weekend. My shoot-from-the-hip reaction is to say you are approaching the whole discussion with too narrow a notion of what “game” is.
Surely, chess is a game but it is not that is trying to do the same thing that World of Warcraft is trying to do. The latter is trying to create a world in which we care about our actions for more than strategic reasons (ideally). When you have those broader concerns, namely narrative. T
he governing assumption of these fellows perspective, of course, is that life doesn’t have a cohesive, over-arching narrative and, in order to make a game more immersive, it needs to imitate life. There may be problems there, but that is a more philosophical question.