Interaction - Michael Mateas

UC Santa CruzSchool of Engineeringwww.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps148/Winter2009michaelm@cs.ucsc.edu14 Jan 2009

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Process Intensity Process intensity - term coined by Chris

Crawford

Refers to the “crunch per bit” ratio How much processing does the computer do on the

data?

Instantial assets – data displayed by computer Sound files Bitmaps Text Animations …

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Instantial assets: a temptation

When first learning to program, instantial assets provide immediate reward For art and humanities students, might

feel more “safe”

But, instantial assets Don’t make use of the unique properties

of computational media Limit possibilities for interaction Create an authorial bottleneck Are computationally “opaque”

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The essence of the medium The essence of the computer as a

representational medium is not Intervention in the production or display of 3

dimensional forms or visual imagery (tools) Interaction with a participant/observer

(interactivity) Control of electro-mechanical devices (installation) Mediation of signals from distant locations

(communication)

The essence of the computer as a medium is…Computation, processes of mechanical

manipulation to which observers can ascribe meaning

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The conversation model of interaction Listen – what is the range of possible utterances

(verbs) provided to the player?

Think – how deeply does the system process the player’s utterance (understanding)?

Speak – what is the range and complexity of the system’s responses to its understanding of the player’s utterance?

Interaction is a combination of the depth of the listen/think/speak loop and the speed of the loop

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Instantial assets limit interaction

More degrees of interactive freedom require more complexity of response As the interactor can say more, the program

needs to be able to think and speak more

Responses generated from instantial assets… Limit response to combinations of assets Require more assets as the range of response

grows Can be an authorial bottleneck

Instantial design tends to limit interaction or collapse response

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Computational opacity

The meaning of instantial assets are opaque to code Example: code that triggers video clips

can’t reason about or manipulate the meaning of the clips

This opacity limits the code’s ability to resequence these assets in meaningful and interesting ways Assets must be designed for

sequencibility or… Assets must be “opened-up” to the code

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But instantial assets aren’t “bad”

Can tap into rich meaning systems Complex connotations, emotional flavor…

We don’t know how to procedurally generate rich instantial assets This can quickly become an AI complete

problem Purely procedural work may be overly abstract

Need to appropriately balance the use of instantial assets and procedurality Develop strategies for manipulation of

instantial assets

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Drama and Interaction

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Two analytic frameworks

Laurel (1986, 1992): Aristotelian theory of interactive drama Structural – what are the “pieces” of an

interactive dramatic experience?

Murray (1998): the pleasures of interactive story Experiential – what does an interactive story feel

like?

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Laurel’s treatment of Aristotle

Action (plot)

Character

Thought

Language (Diction)

Pattern

Enactment (Spectacle)

Infe

rred Fo

rmal C

ause

Mate

rial C

ause

Enactment

Intensity

Catharsis

Intensity

Closure

Dramatic properties Structure

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Murray’s experiential categories

Immersion Engagement; acceptance of internal logic

Transformation Masquerade; variety; personal transformation

Agency Action with effects relating to player intention

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Combine agency with Aristotelian categories Agency chosen as primary

Immersion - engagement and identification Transformation - change in the protagonist Agency – not implicit in Aristotelian categories

How does the category of agency relate to the Aristotelian categories

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Structural prerequisites for agency

Action (plot)

Player character

Thought

Language (Diction)

Pattern

Enactment (Spectacle)

Infe

rred Fo

rmal C

ause

Mate

rial fo

r act

ion

Mate

rial C

ause

Plot Constraints

Maximize agency when material and plot constraints are balanced

Pla

yer in

ten

tion

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Classic adventure game

Action (plot)

Player character

Thought

Language (Diction)

Pattern

Enactment (Spectacle)

Mate

rial fo

r act

ion

Plot Constraints

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Modern storygame (RPG and openworld)

Action (plot)

Player

character

Thought

Language (Diction)

Pattern

Enactment (Spectacle)

Mate

rial fo

r act

ion

Plot Constraints

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Example: Classic FPS

Action (plot)

Player character

Thought

Language (Diction)

Pattern

Enactment (Spectacle)

Mate

rial fo

r act

ion

Plot Constraints

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Ludology Ludology is the study of games, with an emphasis on the formal

elements of games (rule systems, entities, attributes) The general term for the humanistic study of games is games studies –

the term ludology is generally reserved for the formalists Ludology is most commonly associated with being anti-narratology –

the ludology vs. narratology debate Wikipedia: “While scholars use many different theoretical and research

frameworks, the two most visible approaches are ludology and narratology.” Careful here – nobody really calls themselves a ludologist or narratologist. There is no single theoretical or methodological framework that describes either position. There are terms from a debate, not actual research strategies.

The three readings for today are written by three influential scholars who early on called for an new, autonomous discipline for studying games Espen Aarseth – Genre Trouble

Espen’s book Cybertext is a foundational text for ludology Markuu Eskelinen – Toward Computer Game Studies Gonzalo Frasca – Simulation versus Narration: Introduction to Ludology

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Games vs. narrative

Games have representational elements and rule systems

Much of the game vs. narrative debate turns on whether one should consider the rule system or representation primary

Narrativists Ludologists

Paradigmatic form: hypertext Paradigmatic form: gamesAcademic pedigree: literary theory Academic pedigree: games studies

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Genre Trouble

Games must be defended from the colonizing influence of narrative and textual analysis With semiotics, the notion of “text” generalized to

all of material existence But the essence of games can’t be captured by

semiotic analysis

Within traditional academic circles, games are seen as a low-culture phenomenon Some scholars try to recuperate games by

relating them to high-culture phenomena (like narrative)

But this high/low dichotomy doesn’t lead to interesting theory or methodology, and risks missing what’s truly new about games

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Games are not textual “Games are not "textual" or at least not primarily

textual: where is the text in chess? We might say that the rules of chess constitute its "text," but there is no recitation of the rules during gameplay, so that would reduce the textuality of chess to a subtextuality or a paratextuality.”

“Any game consists of three aspects: (1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld). Of these three, the semiotic system is the most coincidental to the game.”

“Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft's body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently. When I play, I don't even see her body, but see through it and past it.”

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Games are not intertextual Intertextuality refers to the meaning of a text

being derived from its relationships to other texts In contemporary literary theory, there is no

autonomous meaning in a text, only a web of meaning

“It follows that games are not intertextual either; games are self-contained. You don't need to have played poker or ludo to understand chess, and knowledge of roulette will not help you to understand Russian roulette.”

“Knowing Star Wars: The Phantom Menace will not make you better at playing Pod Racer (Juul 2001a). Unlike in music, where a national anthem played on electric guitar takes on a whole new meaning, the value system of a game is strictly internal, determined unambivalently by the rules.”

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Narrativism The ideology that narrative is the only mode whereby we

Communicate with each other Make sense of the world (and our own lives)

Everything is narrative “Life is a story, this discussion is a story, and the building that I

work in is also a story, or better, an architectural narrative.” This is Ryan’s metaphoric use of narrative

“Underlying the drive to reform games as "interactive narratives," as they are sometimes called, lies a complex web of motives, from economic ("games need narratives to become better products"), elitist and eschatological ("games are a base, low-cultural form; let's try to escape the humble origins and achieve `literary' qualities"), to academic colonialism ("computer games are narratives, we only need to redefine narratives in such a way that these new narrative forms are included").”

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Translation Stories can be translated across media (novel to comic book, to

movie, to TV series, to opera, …) “In the various versions of a story, key events and relationships

remain…”

Games can be translated across media (board and dice, to a live role-play out in the woods, to numbers and letters on a screen, to a three-dimensional virtual world…) “…in the versions of a game, the rules remain.”

“But when we try to translate a game into a story, what happens to the rules? What happens to the gameplay? And a story into a game: what happens to the plot? And, to use Marie-Laure Ryan's example (2001), what player, in the game version of Anna Karenina, playing the main character, Holodeck style, would actually commit suicide, even virtually? Novels are very good at relating the inner lives of characters (films perhaps less so); games are awful at that, or, wisely, they don't even try.”

Story-generating systems are not stories

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Story-game hybrids: the adventure game genre First evident in textual adventure games

Notes that this genre is alive and well as a hobby form (IF)

The desire to tell a story is in conflict with the game rules Need to force the linearization of events Compared to games like Civ, these games are generarlly not

replayable “Most critics agree that the Miller brothers (Myst) succeeded

eminently in making a fascinating visual landscape, a haunting and beautiful gameworld, but to experienced gamers, the gameplay was boring and derivative, with the same linear structure that was introduced by the first Adventure game sixteen years earlier. Nice video graphics, shame about the game.”

The biggest aesthetic problem for these games is believable characters Early adventure games avoided characters Later games introduce prescripted, repetitive dialog Unlike narrative media like novels or film, games are unable to

express interpersonal relationships and inner life

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The computer game is the art of simulation “The hidden structure behind these, and most,

computer games is not narrative -- or that silly and abused term, "interactivity" -- but simulation.”

“In the adventure games where there is a conflict between narrative and ludic aesthetics, it is typically the simulation that, on its own, allows actions that the story prohibits, or which make the story break down. Players exploit this to invent strategies that make a mockery of the author's intentions.”

Often games like RPGs will employ narrative fragments, but they are completely superfluous

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Electronic literature In this class we’re not talking much about

electronic literature, though it’s under the umbrella of interactive narrative Hypertext literature is a canonical instance here Quick look at victory garden

But electronic literature is not a game/literature hybrid, but fully literature Wants to remove it from consideration from the

debate What is it about electronic literature that makes it

“not a game”?

Interestingly, the real game/literature hybrid, IF, is still active, but “seems to have little influence on either game culture or literary culture in general.”

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Simulation-based interactive stories impossible A technical impossibility argument

Simulation-based approach to narrative would involve simulating both characters and an author

This is more than an AI-complete problem, because the system would have to be better than a human author in that it would have to write the story reactively and in real time How might we argue back?

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Towards Computer Game Studies Markuu comes out swinging

“So if there already is or soon will be a legitimate field for computer game studies, this field is also very open to intrusions and colonisations from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence.”

“For example, as we shall soon see, if you actually know your narrative theory (instead of resorting to outdated notions of Aristotle, Propp, or Victorian novels) you won't argue that games are (interactive or procedural) narratives or anything even remotely similar. Luckily, outside theory, people are usually excellent at distinguishing between narrative situations and gaming situations: if I throw a ball at you, I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.”

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The narrative situation

1 2 3 4 5

Diegetic universe

Story

1 5 3 2 4prolepsis (flash-forward)

analepsis (flash-back)

DiscourseFocalization

Interpretation

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The gaming situation

1 2

Game universeAction sequence

…

InterpretationConfiguration

(goals)

1 2

Configurable elements

…

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Observation

1 2 3 4 5

Diegetic universe

Story

1 5 3 2 4prolepsis (flash-forward)

analepsis (flash-back)

Discourse

Focalization

Interpretation

1 2

Game universeAction sequence

…

InterpretationConfiguration

(goals)

1 2Configurable elements

…

≠≠

The narrative and game situation are different Therefore games are not narratives

And interactive narrative is impossible?!? (at least high-agency interactive narrative)

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The gaming situation

Active configuration of game state

Formation of explicit goals, not only interpretation Interpretive Exploratory – actively opening up new content Configurative – changing game state along

predefined relationships Textonic – adding new content to the game

Focalization in games involves exploring the rule system – the player can actively control focalization

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Time in games Order – relationship between user time and time in the game

(there may be multiple levels)

Frequency – whether events and actions happen only once, an unlimited number of times, with some limit, are undoable or not

Speed – the pace of the game, and whether pace is controlled by system, player, or both

Duration – the player’s relationship to the duration of the game and individual game events

Time of action – when the player is allowed to act

Simultaneity – player’s relationship to simultaneous events

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Simulation vs. Narration Frasca argues that what’s fundamentally

different between games and narrative is that games can simulate while narrative represents

To simulate is to model a (source) system through a different system which maintains to somebody some of the behaviors of the original system

The sequence of signs produced by a simulation might look the same as a static representation, but the experience of producing that sequence (playing) is radically different Computational media artifacts are machines –

generative sign systems

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Advergames and political games

Advergames and political games may by the cutting edge of developing a simulation rhetoric Question: what does Super Mario Brothers simulate?

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Comparing narrative and simulation

Germinal – a novel about a strike held by mine workers – the workers lose

Bread and Rose – a film about a strike of janitorial workers in LA – workers win (though leader deported) These stories depict the issues of

worker rights and the fight for living wages

But they only show one possibility – narrative is inherently binary (the protagonist wins or not)

Simulation can present a space of possibility A strike game would allow players

to explore this space

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Anti-Aristotle

Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed is a participatory street theater for people to explore options for responding to injustice

Boal critiques Aristotelian drama for presenting irrevocable outcomes (dramatic necessity) and for turning off critical powers (engagement and identification)

Videogames of the Oppressed – games that allow people to explore options through simulation Share simulations in a social context

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Paida and ludus

Paida – games conceived as open-ended play

Ludus – games conceived as having strong goals

Four different ideological levels Representation – same as narrative Paida rules – govern the manipulation of the

gameworld Ludus rules – determine the winning condition Meta rules – govern player modification of the game

Rhetoric operates at all four levels

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Build it to understand it Building experimental games necessary

for theoretical progress in game studies

Façade as an empirical investigation of the ludology/narratology debate Resolving tension between game and story Authoring story structure (mixable

progressions)

The wicked nature of game design

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Game studies and game design A primary goal of game studies is to understand the

form and structure of games Usually accomplished by analyzing existing games

However, existing games sparsely sample design space Commercial games heavily constrained by market concerns Theories informed by existing games are at best incomplete

and at worst wrong

Theoretically informed construction of experimental games… Provides a more complete understanding of already sampled

regions Opens up new regions of design space, providing raw material

for theoretical and prescriptive advances

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Case study: the ludology vs. narratology debate The question: can gameplay and narrative

combine (to what extent do games and narrative overlap)

Status Fatigue and malaise (including claims that the debate

never took place) Occasional flare-ups indicate little progress Our concern is that if pushed, some game scholars

would say only “pure” gameplay can offer high-agency

Fundamental tension: agency vs. narrative progression

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Existing games insufficient Easy to conclude that narrative is

incompatible with gameplay from existing commercial games Canned missions and cut-scenes Fixed or mildly-branching paths

Can’t develop theories regarding intersection of story and narrative solely from existing points in design space You can’t make strong statements of what’s

impossible without building things; dangerous to be prescriptive

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Façade

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Game reinforcement and feedback

Concrete player actions directly manipulate state Game state is primarily numeric, relatively simple The score is directly communicated to the player

Run, jump, shoot

Position, time, score

Game state

“Score” (summary state)

Game

Player

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Story not amenable to simple numeric state

Plot structurePlot structure(global constraints)(global constraints)

Tensio

n/C

om

ple

xity

Time

Exposition Incitingincident

Rising action

Crisis

Climax

Falling action

Denouement

CharactersCharacters(consistency, inner life)(consistency, inner life)

• Personality• Emotion• Self motivation• Change• Social relationships• Consistency• Illusion of life

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Façade as social, dramatic game

Abstract player actions (discourse acts) manipulate social state Game state is heterogeneous, multi-leveled, symbolic and numeric Score is indirectly communicated through dramatic performance

Praise, bring up topic, flirt

Enriched dramatic performance

Game state

Head game scoresGame

Abstraction1

Abstraction2

Player

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Façade’s social games Affinity game

Player must take sides in character disagreements

Hot-button game Player can push character hot-buttons (e.g. sex, marriage) to

provoke responses

Therapy game Player can increase characters’ understanding of their

problems

Tension Not a game, but dramatic tension increases over time and is

influenced by player actions (e.g. pushing character hot-buttons can accelerate the tension)

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Multiple, mixable progressions Each social game, plus tension, forms a

mixable progression

A progression consists of Units of procedural content (e.g. beats, beat

goals) A narrative sequencer that manages the

progression and responds to player interaction

Multiple progressions run simultaneously and can intermix

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The progressions

Beat library

Beat manager

Beat sequencing (overall story + tension)

Beat goal sequencing(affinity game)

Canonical beat goalsequence

Handlers (ABL meta-behaviors) + discourse management

Mix-in library

Handlers + discourse

Global mixins (hot button game)Therapy game similar

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The atom of performance Joint dialog behaviors form the atom of

performance

Façade consists of ~2500 joint dialog behaviors Each 1-5 lines of dialog long (5-20 secs) System sequences these, including transitions

between Most are interruptible JDBs use ABL’s joint intention framework to

coordinate performance

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Local agency Players get immediate responses

interruption often possible context-specific <-> more general <->

deflection emotional information revealing

Narrative effects Which topics discussed, info revealed Current affinity Increase in tension

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Global agency Player’s “score”

Pattern of player’s interaction is monitored over time

Player’s response to key moments Used to modulate beats when possible

Some influence over beat sequencing More if we had more beats! Ending beat chosen by calculus and evaluation

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Lessons for game studies Narrative and agency can be reconciled through

intermixable, dynamic progressions Progressions provide narrative structure at multiple levels Progression management provides responsiveness to

interaction The narrative is potential – interaction evokes a specific

narrative progression

Generative narrative does not require an AI-complete “author in a box” Combine human authorship and autonomous generation

The “gun-toting Gandhi” problem is a red herring Constrained action spaces still create agency (just like in

games)

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Useful residue of the L. vs. N. debate so far “Interactive narrative” should mean something

Not enough just to declare all games “narrative” by fiat For a specific game-story, designers must clarify what they mean

by “story”

Pushes on procedurality and agency as the essence of games Any attempt to combine games and narratives should respect

this

But for a design field (like games), theoretical arguments (based, e.g. on theoretical definitions of “narrative” and “game”), will never be sufficient

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Wicked problems Introduced by Rittel and Weber in context

of public policy (1973).

Problem Solution

Lack definitive problem statement The problem is only understood through looking for a

solution

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The wicked nature of game design No definitive statement of problem

“Create a game in which you roll a sticky ball around and pick up stuff” does not define a fixed problem statement

No stopping rule Resource management determines when you stop

Solutions are not correct/incorrect Games are only judged relative to each other and in a social

and economic context

No immediate nor ultimate test of solution Every game design changes the design space (some subtly,

some dramatically)

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Interactive story as a wicked problem “Integrate narrative and gameplay” is not a

well-defined problem Need to build something to even figure out what the

problem is (e.g. “create progressions with both local and global agency”)

Formal definitions of narrative (e.g. structuralist) don’t provide a stopping criteria

Determining whether you’ve built a “high-agency interactive story” is fundamentally audience-centric

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Design and architecture

Game

An architecture is a machine to think with

PlayerAuthor

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Interactive story: architectural and design problem Concepts such as “progression”, “global agency”,

“cumulative history”, “discourse acts” are inextricably technical Relationship between two semiotic systems: the code machine

and the rhetorical machine

You must iterate architecture and content to explore new regions of design space

No design-only solution

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Conclusions Building games is a necessary part of

game studies Need to explicitly sample the design space

Game design is wicked A priori theorizing or empirical investigation of

existing games are insufficient to fully understand the design space

Construction of experimental games can shed light on thorny game studies questions Example: The ludology vs. narratology debate

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Game Design as Narrative Architecture Jenkins argues for a middle path in the games/stories debate

Not all games tell stories – for those games, such as Tetris, for which there is no strong narrative component, we need non-narrative terms and concepts

Many games do have narrative aspirations – games explicit tap the narrative residue of previous story experiences (e.g. the Star Wars games tap your memories of the Star Wars story)

Narrative analysis doesn’t need to be prescriptive – he’s not arguing that games must be narrative, but just that (some) games can contain narrative elements

The experience of playing games can’t be reduced to the experience of a story

Games will not tell stories in the same way as other media – “Stories are not empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another.”

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Evocative spaces “The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon

stories or genre traditions already well-known to visitors, allowing them to enter physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their fantasies.”

“Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests that, "you clearly can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," whereas a film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot (Juul 1998). This is a pretty old-fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy.”

“In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.”

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Enacting stories “Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic -- that is,

each episode (or set piece) can become compelling on its own terms without contributing significantly to the plot development, and often the episodes could be reordered without significantly impacting our experience as a whole.”

“Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player reaching his or her final destination…”

“The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution.”

“Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word "attractions" broadly to describe any element within a work that produces a profound emotional impact, and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements.” Micronarratives

“We might describe musicals, action films, or slapstick comedies as having accordion-like structures. Certain plot points are fixed, whereas other moments can be expanded or contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall plot.”

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Embedded narratives The distinction between story and discourse exists in games as well

The story is recovered through the active work of recovering information distributed across the game space

“Few films or novels are absolutely linear; most make use of some forms of backstory that is revealed gradually as we move through the narrative action. The detective story is the classic illustration of this principle, telling two stories -- one more or less chronological (the story of the investigation itself) and the other told radically out of sequence (the events motivating and leading up to the murder).”

“Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information across the game space.”

“To continue with the detective example, then, one can imagine the game designer as developing two kinds of narratives -- one relatively unstructured and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock its secrets; the other prestructured but embedded within the mise-en-scene awaiting discovery. The game world becomes a kind of information space, a memory palace.”

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Emergent narratives In an emergent narrative, the player’s choice deeply influence the

narrative When considering a game as using the emergent narrative strategy, check that

the emerging temporal structure has narrative properties (e.g. compare it against Ryan’s dimensions or against Aristotelian progression)

“Emergent narratives are not prestructured or preprogrammed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself.”

“Most players come away from spending time with The Sims with some degree of narrative satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative possibilities, where each design decision has been made with an eye towards increasing the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict.”

“Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck might describe some of what Wright accomplishes here as procedural authorship. Yet, I would argue that his choices go deeper than this, working not simply through the programming, but also through the design of the game space. For example, just as a dollhouse offers a streamlined representation that cuts out much of the clutter of an actual domestic space, the Sims' houses are stripped down to only a small number of artifacts, each of which perform specific kinds of narrative functions.”