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Limits of Story
By Corvus | February 24, 2006
At the advice of my editor (thanks, sweetie!) I’m breaking this post into sections, as it’s very long. Here’s are links to each section:
- Preface
- Response to First Post
- Response to Second Post
- Response to Third Post
- Links to Craig’s original Posts
My e-mail signature reads, “Only when you recognize your limitations, do you truly become limitless.” I like the quote because it sums up the dichotomous nature of existence. So, it is with the greatest respect that I both embrace and reject the point Craig has been trying to hammer home on his blog about the difference between Gameplay and Stories (I’ll provide links to his three key posts at the end of my ranting. I’ll also be pulling pertinent bits of his text in for a little down home, old timey, call and response).
Before I launch back into the fray, I’d like to remind you of my definitions for Plot, Narration, and Story. I crafted these definitions to include traditional narratives, yet accurately encompass newer media. Feel free to skip ahead a few paragraphs if you’re tired of hearing me re-hash these points.
Plot: The abstract summation of the driving events of a narration.
That’s pretty self explanatory and I don’t know that it requires any clarification, but a sample plot might read like, “A scientist tries to escape a top secret lab after inadvertently opening a rift to an alien world. Along the way he learns of the government’s involvement in the experiment and their desire to suppress the results… lethally.”
Narration: The intentional context of the presentational medium.
In traditional linear structures, this would be a book or movie, etc. For games, I tend to refer to two sorts of narrative devices, static (i.e. cut scenes, dialog, and the like) and dynamic (gameplay). The word intentional means that losing electricity, getting a phone call, or experiencing other narrative interrupting events are not a part of the narrative, even if they get worked into the receiver’s story. Craig suggests a third type of narrative element, but I’ll get into that later in the post.
Story: The intended and actual experiential and emotional progression of the audience while interacting with the narration.
This one is a little tricksier. I believe, given one transmitter, one receiver, and one repetition in a single session, that there are two stories in any given narration. There is the story intended by the transmitter, and the story experienced by the receiver. The definition of story is where I think Craig and I possibly differ.
Okay, I’m done reviewing, so those of you who were skipping ahead should pick back up here:
While Craig focuses on the difference between stories and gameplay, I feel he’s really discussing the difference in traditional, static narratives and participatory* narratives. The conflation of narrative and story is a huge part of why this discussion rages on.
Now, gameplay and story. Story is an idealized example in an idealized world. Gameplay is a concrete example in a concrete world.
In a story, the full rules are never spelled out or even internally represented. The story itself is not governed by strict metaphysics of progression or content. This is because we want to be able to say things like, “she killed the dragon” without mentioning the eighty thousand tons of dragon shit over in the corner. We want to skip the bad stuff in favor of the good stuff. Hence, idealized.
If we replace the word story in the above quote with the word narrative it makes quite a bit of sense; except… Some narratives are governed by a “strict metaphysics of progression or content.” It’s entirely up to the narrator. Not only that, if you wanted to impress on the receiver audience (receivers is too clinical) that the hero had to put up with some physical discomfort in her effort to slay the dragon, you certainly would mention the pile of fewments in the corner. Especially, if the story you were trying to convey was about overcoming unpleasant circumstances in an effort to achieve a goal.
In fact, I’d argue that Peter Carey’s novel, Tax Inspector, spent a great deal of time focusing on the figurative piles of dragon shit in the corners of the character’s lives and, through an expertly crafted narrative, still made you care for their internal dragons which produced it. This resulted in an experienced story which had a huge impact and still haunts me to this day.
In gameplay, the experience is governed by concrete rules which, even if not explicitly explained, are implicitly ingrained. IE, you cannot simply make a grenade go winging off into the sky and blow up the sun - unless the game’s rules specifically allow for it.
If I were to begin a traditional linear narrative about an investment banker in Boise and spent the majority of it in a modern, mundane world where nothing unusual happened and the character suddenly made a grenade that wound up blowing up the sun… I’d say I’d broken a rule of narration. I’d have suddenly fractured the world I was presenting. Now, like any art, if I did so consciously, and with great purpose, I can do so anyway. But it shouldn’t be an arbitrary decision on my part. I should make such a decision with all the precision and work that coding such an eventuality into a game would entail. In other words, in an effort to successfully tell a story, I need to present a narrative that isn’t so arbitrary that I lose or confuse my audience and thus fail to communicate my story. To sum up: Traditional narratives have rules and structure too.
Some designers seek to minimize this. They want every moment to be new and unique. They want to write a story that the player plays through.
Well, I think we’d agree that those designers are misguided. I feel that games are not a good storytelling medium for hose who wish complete control over their narrative. If your story is more important than the audience’s story, then you’d be better off using a more traditional narrative. Be warned, however, even when reading a novel, comic, or picture book, your audience is going to be experiencing their own version of the story, no matter how expertly you’ve crafted your narrative.
Craig seems to be saying that gameplay shouldn’t be confused with… well, he says story, but I think (again, using my definition) he means narrative because you’d never have your audience kill endless hordes of zombies in a non-game narrative. He’s right. But that’s because in a traditional narrative, that’d probably be counter productive to the communication of the intended story. In a game setting, unending waves of zombies is a perfectly valid, and often desirable narrative device.
I’m talking about the people who think that gameplay is fun because it is a story.
Gameplay is fun because it’s well crafted gameplay. Gameplay that is well integrated with all the other narrative elements makes for a damn good story.
More accurately, the rules are a mish-mash of whatever rules the author(s) have in their brains, and fade in and out as mood demands. It is not about manipulating a pattern using rules so much as manipulating a tide of vague pattern-like preferences using a lack of rules. That doesn’t make it inferior, but it does make it different from a game.
I think there are some authors that do work that way, but from this snippet in the second of Craig’s three posts, it’s becoming clear that he and I aren’t really arguing at all. We both feel that there are fundamentally important difference between crafting an enjoyable static narrative and an enjoyable dynamic narrative.
This second post of Craig’s is a response to a comment from Patrick on the first:
in any form of interactive entertainment you’ve got the system (rules) and resulting discourses (which can be remembered as stories).
“Remembered as stories” is completely off the track and only serves to muddy the waters, as far as I’m concerned. I believe that you experience a story while interacting with a narrative. Later, when you attempt to relate the story, you put together a new, most often linear and verbal, narrative by remembering the narrative elements you experienced at key points in the story.
Craig wraps up his second post by reiterating:
That is the difference! I hope I’m being clear, here: a story is an idealized example. The joy of a game is in the concrete. It’s on a wholly different level.
A story is an idealized experience of any narrative. The narrative is terribly concrete, no matter its medium. When reading a novel, there are a certain set of rules if you wish to experience the intended story as accurately as possible: A) You must be able to read and comprehend the language it is written in. B) You must read from start to finish. C) You must read it in a timely enough fashion to have not forgotten everything that you read previously. D) Some level of suspension of disbelief (for fiction) is in order.
Let’s compare that to playing a game: A) You must be able to interact with the game via a set of controls. B) You most often must play in order dictated by the narrator. C) You must play often enough that you don’t forget your objectives and/or control schemes. D) Some level of suspension of disbelief is in order.
I pointed out in the comments that: “If you equate story with myth and accept that myth is metaphor, than using that deeper, symbol based, portion of your brain can be expressed as experiencing a story.”
Well, sure, if you expand story to mean “any kind of information processed in any way”, then obviously gameplay is a story. And so is eating lunch.
I think that by this point, it’s clear that my definition of story, while expansive, isn’t so expansive as that. If, however, I craft a narrative about eating lunch that is engaging enough, or craft a visual narrative out of the act of eating lunch, it certainly can lead to a story. Whether or not it’s a story worth communicating is another issue entirely.
Static vs dynamic “narrative” elements is a good dissection to make, but I would (and, in fact, do) divide it into three: static, dynamic free, and dynamic concrete.
“Dynamic free” is something which allows players to inject anything they want into the game. For example, something which lets you program a doohickey or import a picture. These provide a very different experience from “dynamic concrete”, where the player is limited to expressing himself using in-game patterns defined by the designer.
I both like and dislike this distinction. Like, because I’m always in favor of clarification, dislike because ultimately all dynamic elements are “dynamic concrete” and the player is always limited to expressing themselves using in-game patterns defined by the designer. Now, the designer may chose to put in place such high level rules of interaction that the audience may feel that they’re free to inject anything they want, but even Second Life has a system that constrains the audience’s interaction with it to some degree. I’m going to chew on the distinction for a while before I decide whether to incorporate into my jargon.
Jeff, I agree, but I think it’s dangerous to call what happened in the play of a game a “story”. What happened was the learning of a skill. The mastery of a pattern.
I love a person who is willing to call an idea or concept dangerous. I wonder, in this case, why this is dangerous? Because inept designers may create crapulent games in an effort to turn them into stories?
The third post on this topic is what inspired me to write this:
Take a game. Strip out all the story elements, all the aesthetic tidbits. Everything with flavor.
I’m with you so far.
Let’s take, for example, Tetris. Tetris is pretty close to being without a story. The only thing we’d have to take out is the sound effects and the music. So let’s do that. Imagine playing a muted “Tetris”.
Now, here’s the hard bit. Instead of “blocks”, you’re simply moving and dropping “shapes”. These shapes have a distinct shape, but no distinct visual appearance. I don’t mean they’re flat white, or just an outline: those are visual appearances. I mean, they’re just shapes.
What you are left with is gameplay.
Okay, let’s take a Dick and Jane book. That’s pretty close to a narrative without much story. The only thing we have to take out are the pictures and the use of direct address.
Now, here’s the hard bit. Instead of Dick and Jane, you’re simply about “them”. They have no gender, no names, no age. Nor do they have specific actions, they just do… “stuff”.
What you are left with is text.
So, Craig is right when he says:
Those are the only “stories” gameplay contains. And those aren’t stories. They’re a linguistic spasm in response to a perceived reward or penalty. The only reason they exist is to hone our skill at dropping shapes into the right spot. They do not exist as stories, they do not have any aesthetic value. They are simply blurbs which vanish as quickly as they arrive.
You can build a story out of these. It’s easy: “Man, I was so close to losing, but I pulled it off in the end.”
But that is idealization after the fact. While you’re playing, all you’re doing is pattern management. Idealizing something afterwards is wholly besides the point. It has nothing to do with the gameplay, any more than telling a story about how you hit a tree with a stick has anything to do with the act of hitting a tree with a stick.
Now, if you’re insisting that the little blurbs of “oh, that’s not right” or “a little to the right” are “stories”, then I’m taking umbrage at your desecration of the English language. If those are stories, then literally everything is a story, including this very essay. This very sentence, standing alone.
But traditional narrative media has the same limitations. It’s the context that drives story. It’s the manner in which the elements are assembled, which give rise to narration, which attempts to communicate story. What I don’t understand why the two sides of the argument keep insisting that the two elements are somehow antithetical. Gameplay not story, story not gamplay, nose not face, face not nose, bathwater not baby, baby not bathwater.
I play because we want to get at the story. I enjoy playing because the narrative element of gameplay was well crafted.
Addendum: Stories are fantastically awesome. They touch the player. They drive a game. They drive gameplay. But that doesn’t make gameplay into stories.
And there, we are in agreement. Except for the last sentence which strikes me as irrelevant.
As promised, here are the three Project Perko posts which sparked this Story rehash:
Stories vs. Gameplay
Not Story
A-ha!
*It just hit me that participatory may be a better term than interactive . I’ll wait and focus on that in another post, though.
Tagged:storytelling. |
February 24th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Hi!
Looks like you and I are in agreement about most things. There are only two things we are approaching differently, as far as I can see.
One is that I view gameplay as being fun because it involves learning skills, not because it is a story. Stories are also fun, and gameplay stories can be fun. But when I’m playing Lumines, I’m not “playing” a “story”, I’m twitching a pattern. The fact that it can be thought of as a story is irrelevant.
I don’t think your definition of “story” really covers learning and adapting patterns, or gaining skill. If it does, I suppose we don’t technically have any disagreement… but such a twisting of the word “story” simply makes me nervous.
Make no mistake: story is extremely important. In fact, most of my games use gameplay designed to support the story/narrative, rather than the other way around. It’s just that the act of playing - the learning of skills and the tweaking of patterns - has nothing to do with being a story. It may advance a story, it may give you a story, but it could be replaced with “press A to continue” or “press B to make Ann kiss Bob, press C to make her kiss Charles”.
Gameplay not as good with that last example? That’s right - it’s not as good. Because there’s no pattern tweaking involved. No gameplay. Just an adaptive narrative.
…
The other thing we disagree on is what a “rule” is.
When I say rule, in this context, I mean a hard law of nature, something which simply cannot be broken. Also, I should have specified: when I say “rule set”, I really meant “complete rule set”. My lack of explanation is at fault, here.
An author does have a rule set. It says things like, “your media can’t have holographic projections popping off the page” and “your story can’t physically pull people in”. These are not a complete rule set, they are simply the limits of the media.
Gameplay is a complete ruleset. You can only switch two adjacent tiles. You can only buy these items. You can only shoot these weapons. Your choices are not infinite constrained in width, your choices are constrained in width, height, and depth.
The guidelines you establish in a story (or narrative, whichever you prefer) can be broken. Often with great effect. Such as the hilarious “Dirty Dick and Jane” books. In actual gameplay, this cannot be done without changing the rules permanently (IE, introducing a new weapon) - or else you’re simply hijacking the gameplay.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, it’s just not part of the gameplay. It’s part of the narrative.
You can probably understand what I’m trying to say easier if we touch on “dynamic free” vs “dynamic concrete”.
Dynamic concrete content includes only things which the game designer included. An example of this would be gaining power in World of Warcraft. You are given a little playground, and you are told to use the toys left there.
Dynamic free content, on the other hand, allows the player to import content from the outside world. An example of this is the way SecondLife allows you to make a building that looks however you want it to look. Another, smaller example is in naming a character: you can name your character “Wolverine”. Obviously, this is not content the designer put in.
It is governed by rules, of course. Names can be only so long, contain no swears, etc. But these are not a restrictive, complete rule set. They are an “open” rule set which allows players to adapt just about any content they please to this game world. They let you bring your own squirt guns into the sandbox.
Someone could argue that a player’s imagination turns dynamic concrete into dynamic free. I would argue this is fundamentally different from actually including that content in the game.
I hope I’m being clear.
My main point is that gameplay can be replaced with any other kind of gameplay, or even lack of gameplay… without harming the story. The story may need to be re-optimized due to the restrictions of the new game ruleset, but it can still be the same story, the same aesthetics, the same potency (re-calibrated for shorter or longer play times).
February 24th, 2006 at 11:37 am
I think we’re both running to catch the same bus here. I think you’re being clear but I’m, of course, running it all through my heavy filters. *nirg* I’ll bounce your words back to you at some point this weekend and see if I heard them correctly.
I’m tickled that you used the term ” ‘open’ rule set” as it feeds into my next post about participatory narratives, which is going to expand upon Eco’s theories of “open” texts.
I think my tendency when presented with two options, such as “dynamic free” and “dynamic concrete” is to try and turn it into a sliding scale. Players figure out, for example, methods of getting around the “dynamic concrete” elements in unexpected and creative ways, giving those elements a taint of “dynamic free”. “Dynamic free” elements have some hard coded limitations (file sizes, amount of space used, micro-payments for participation, etc) which give them a taint of “dynamic concrete.”
Would you concur with that assessment?
February 24th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
Stories evolved in human culture as a means of relating information, i.e. learning, so stories and games ultimately DO effect a cognitive re-patterning in the audience, though stories are 60% sequential thought (causation, structure
, words), 40% pattern (details, characters). Games are 60% pattern (dynamics) 40% sequence (rules). Maybe the ratio is a bit different but you get the idea. Implied aesthetics are something both have in common, though games tend to yield very different aesthetics than stories, and the inclusion of dynamic-open content in games is one of the big facilitators of this new sort of aesthetic (which is really hundreds of thousands of years old, but new in a cultural sense).
Craig, what you think of as “story” in a game is what I call metaplot in a game designed to be an interactive storytelling experience, and I think corvus would agree but call it “narrative-dynamics” or something like that, which is a fine term as well. A storyworld can have dynamic-concrete elements, in fact those are the default dynamics, though player created content with its own aesthetic rewards is something I’m interested in and it seems Corvus is gearing his whole engine towards.
Participatory vs. interactive narratives… well its interesting, Andrew Glassner concludes in his book on IS that interactive storytelling can’t happen, but participatory storytelling can. Crawford uses the prior word. I think its a sematic splitting of hairs, except maybe interactive implies that the computer is actually interpreting and responding intelligently to the user’s participation, rather than a blind paidia like sim city, which runs on automatic simulative processes instead of intentive metaplot structures. So I guess participatory storytelling means you have some concrete narrative-dynamics and thats it, theres no meta-dynamic, like a PAC engine geared to tailoring the immediate narrative to the player’s “character”, which would be more interactive.
All these terms are on continuums, they aren’t boolean, but granulated - I suspect this has to do with the underlying substrate of this medium, which no matter the computer, is the cognitive adaptivity of the user. Interactive just strikes me as more interactive than participatory, game strikes me as requiring more pattern recognition than story, ect. Which is why I agree with Corvus’ definition of story; we all learn through experience, whether that experience is of a story or of gameplay is a matter of cognitive style. I see interactive storytelling as exploring the confluence of the two styles more intensely.
Darius said something to me which treats this discussion well, I think.
(roughly paraphrased) “I’m more of a ludologist myself, but I think with the confluence of the two (game and story) you get the most mind-blowing work.”
Said purely and simply by the K man.
February 25th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Corvus: It’s a sliding scale, I agree. Usually, however, most systems fall pretty definitely to one side or the other.
Patrick: My opinions on interactive storytelling are kind of wonky, and this isn’t my blog, so I’ll just stay quiet.
February 25th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Craig: I appreciate the courtesy, but don’t hold back on my account!
February 26th, 2006 at 9:01 am
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