In Half Real, Juul distinguishes two types
of videogames: games of emergence and
games of progression, with emergence
games being the historically dominant form. Emergence games use ‘nominally
simple rules where it nevertheless requires immense amounts of effort to gain
proficiency in playing the game’. Tetris is a typical example of a game of
emergence; it is a puzzle game, ‘with the shapes each consisting of several
squares that are falling down the well. When playing a Tetris game, one turns them or moves left and right, trying to
arrange the shapes in a line. When a line of squares makes a line from edge to
edge, it disappears and all the pieces move down by a square. When the well is
filled up, the player loses (Absolutist 2013) ’. Similarly, Space Invaders (Pixeleye Interactive 2012) involves moving
the game avatar left and right across a fixed screen, firing missiles at moving
targets.
Narratively,
the title of Space Invaders suggests
that there are invaders from space and the player is charged with repelling
this invasion. Despite this suggestion,
the game is not a narrative driven game.
There is an inferred beginning (the invasion) and a middle (the action
of the game), but there is not an ending to this game, however; the invaders
move progressively quicker until the player succumbs to the space invaders and
the game ends. Incidentally, this
structure is also problematic for Juul’s six point classic game model, which
requires a game to have a variable outcome (as discussed in chapter 1), which
neither Tetris nor Space Invaders have, with the only conclusion
being the player losing the game.
Opposed to this,
narrative games are usually progression type games; games of progression are
those where the ‘game designer explicitly determines the possible ways in which
the game can progress’ (Juul 2005, 56) . Videogame walkthroughs can vary from being
explicitly instructional (‘Climb along the yellow rail to the left to reach the
underside of the train’ (Bradygames 2009, 24) ) to those resembling
works of fiction. Alan Wake has such a walkthrough, with the action of the game
presented as if it were a piece of textual narrative fiction:
Wake left the
car in a state of agitation. He
staggered forward toward a rough-hewn wood pole. He gazed up into the illuminating glow of a
lamp on the left side of the road. It
seemed comforting: like a Safe Haven subduing the creeping sensation of fear. (Hodgson 2010, 24)
The Walkthrough
is presented almost as a novelisation of the videogame, a third-person
retrospective narration of Alan Wake’s quest to save his wife.
Games of
progression more closely resemble traditional narrative structures in other
media. The structure of the
progressional game is, as its name suggests, a progression—from the beginning,
through a middle, to an end, a structure that has characterised traditional
media since Aristotle’s famous propounding of it as essential to theatre (Aristotle 2008) . Even videogame franchises that span numerous
games, such as Assassin’s Creed have
a progressional structure, with many game franchises developing sub-plots or
episodes that are self-contained as well as connected.[1] Generally, the player can assess the type of
game s/he is playing using the following test:
Search for a
guide to the game on the Internet. If
the game guide is a walkthrough (describing step by step what to do), it is
a game of progression. If the game guide is a strategy guide (describing rules
of thumb for how to play), it is a game of emergence. (Juul 2005, 71)
Whilst
the player may feel as though they are influencing the narrative, the ability
to create a walkthrough that encompasses all plays of the game refute the players
role as the author; instead reaffirming the designer as the authorial presence
in the narrative, and the predetermined status of videogame narratives.
Although most discussions of identification in narratives concern
identification with characters rather than authors, since videogames are
interactive—that is, the player influences the action taking place within the
game through play, and this play can change the outcome of the game, both
ludically and narratively—players do not simply identifiy with the characters
they control, they furthermore take on authorial roles,and videogame authorship
is an interactive rather than a dictatorial affair. Janet Murray makes the
distinction between the author and the interactor[2] of a
piece of electronic narrative (Murray 1997, 153) . In Hamlet
on the Holodeck, she considers ‘authorship in electronic media [to be]
procedural’, meaning that the designer is charged with
Writing the
rules by which the texts appear as well as writing the texts themselves. It means writing the rules for the
interactor’s involvement, that is, the conditions under which things will
happen in response to the participant’s action.
It means establishing the properties of the objects and potential
objects in the virtual world and the formulas for how they will relate to one
another. (Murray 1997, 152)
Whilst the player of a videogame can
put the pieces of the narrative together, sometimes in several different ways,
the constituent parts of the narrative are created by the game designer. It is possible to suggest that the player,
then, is a quasi-author, creating a variation of the narrative that may be
unique, but nevertheless formed from the game content provided by the game
designer. This is not to suggest this as a precursor to Murray’s
holodeck—each of the elements of a game must be created by the designer prior
to a game’s release meaning that a truly interactive game, which the player
authors as she play, is unlikely for the foreseeable future. However, there are a rising number of games
that use the veneer of choice to allow a player to feel as if she is
influencing the narrative, whilst retaining the core elements that all players
share. An example of this can be seen in
the Mass Effect franchise (Bioware 2007
- 2012) ,
a futuristic set of games that centres on the character Shepard, a soldier who
leads the defence of the Galaxy in a series of missions and quests. The core elements of the game are fixed; the
pursuit and destruction of the ‘Reapers’, a life form that aims to destroy all
other life in the galaxy; the player has the option of enlarging the game and
the narrative however, through the quests and missions, and through interaction
with non-player characters, allowing the player to enter into optional
relationships, for example, and to affect the personality of Shepard, and
therefore the reactions of other characters to Shepard.
Heavy Rain is another example of
the ability of the player to act as a quasi-author. Here, the ending of the game depends on the
choices that the player makes throughout play, such as whether the identity of the serial killer is discovered, and which
characters survive to the end; these combine to give a total of eighteen
possible conclusions to the game, ranging from the Origami killer going free,
and all other characters being killed, to everyone surviving and the killer
apprehended. These options, then, are not minor variations on a theme but
significantly contrasting. While the player is instrumental in selecting the
composite parts of the conclusion, and so plays an authorial role in the game,
even so, each of the endings are predetermined by the designer simply by the
fact they are already loaded into the software that is being played. Thus while the player is free to make
choices, s/he may only choose from among what has already been programmed.
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