CEA 2008 Presentation

This is my CEA 2008 Presentation concerning narrative in videogames.  I was only permitted about 15 minutes, and I showed a clip from Call of Duty 3 over one section discussing World War II based first-person shooters.  You can follow the link above for the Word document, or you can check out the cut/pasted version below.

Overall, the conference went well.  I sat through several presentations concerning contemporary fiction, particularly Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and White Noise.  I sometimes find it amazing that the latter novel (now 23 years old) still receives as much critical attention as it does, especially in the wake of 1998’s Underworld.  But, I also attended some panel discussions about modern technology in the classroom, and was a wee bit disappointed.  The presenters’ grand revelation was that students spend quite a bit of time using Facebook as a communication and networking application.  Uh-huh…

Then, believe it or not, there were two Harry Potter papers presented.  But, to give you a heads up on how aware academia seems to be at the moment about Harry Potter criticism, below are the titles:

• “Harry Potter and His Journey Into the Center of the Hero Myth”
• “Tests and Rites of Passage in Harry Potter”

Unfortunately, I was attending the aforementioned session concerning technology in the classroom instead of this one.  My wife attended the HP session, though.  To roughly paraphrase an observation made by her, both of us were somewhat shocked that the Hero’s Journey was the basis for an HP paper at this date for an English conference.  If I can nab a copy of the presentations, I’ll include them as part of a summary and synthesis.

My presentation below is part of a longer essay, I will try to publish in the CEA Critic.  I also have an HP essay I plan on submitting to The Lion and the Unicorn, a journal dedicated to children’s literature.

Narrative Refigured:  What Videogames are Doing to Storytelling 

 

Advances in technology have enabled audiences of stories to an incredible degree.  Simple votes online now allow audiences to dictate the outcomes of some of their favorite television programs, in turn altering the narrative arc established throughout a program’s seasonal run.  More importantly, real-time interactivity in the form of videogames that employ narrative design in simulational architectures is forcing English Studies to come to terms with new forms of rhetoric, grammar, and narrative design.  The previous worries by ludologists (those who study games as an independent discipline) concerning a potential colonization of games studies by established humanist disciplines seem unfounded, since many of those disciplines must now confront the prospects of interactive technology’s influence upon their disciplines.  In the last decade, the epic classic Beowulf has been popularized in four different forms.  Translations of the original poem were already placed in bookstores alongside multiple graphic novel adaptations, and the animated film with its videogame counterpart.  The importance of this multi-media blitz involves far more than the inherent marketing campaign.  Beowulf’s transfiguration over the last year into a minor pop culture touchstone fits well and good within a pop hero tradition, passing through tropes defined in everything from the Harry Potter series, the popularization of comic books and their film adaptations, the grand spectacles of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations, and the seemingly endless (though not always good) shelf-life of the Star Wars franchise.  Another commonality binds all of them together: stories are receiving multiple near simultaneous retellings that emphasize different components of a given narrative through the different rhetorical and grammatical devices afforded to each medium. 

Since it has received the least attention of these media forms, my focus today is on gaming as a storytelling device, particularly due to gaming’s transformation of its audience, of which we can identify at least two different roles:  gamer and viewer.  The move from “reader” to “gamer” points to two dramatic changes: 

1. “End-user” highlights this person’s role in constructing the text, and thus any other component associated with the text.  This calls into question long standing theoretical assumptions about narrative as static and fixed.  “Gamer” (a more specific term that I will use in this paper) points to some important functions needed within an ergodic simulated environment, whether electronic or otherwise. 
2. A paradoxical event takes place, as well: the reemergence of the creator of the text as an authoritative presence in its construction and expressiveness.  Because games develop meaning at least partly through what they allow a player to do, the rules a developer encodes into the simulation system recover at least some degree of authority from poststructural exile. 

Terms such as collaborative, discursive, interactive, immersive, ergodic, simulation, etc. are all descriptive terms enveloped under the umbrella of “virtual”, a term narrative theorist Marie-Laure Ryan defines as “any mental operation that leads from the here and now, the singular, the usable once-and-for-all, and the solidly embodied to the timeless, abstract, general, multiple, versatile, repeatable, ubiquitous, immaterial, and morphologically fluid” (37). The concept is then set into binary distinctions:  the “virtual as fake” and the “virtual as potential” (25-27).  The former is Ryan’s interpretation of Baudrillard’s simulacra and its attending theoretical discourse, an “optical sense” of virtualization “which carries the negative connotations of double and illusion”, and is thus not to be fully trusted.  Ryan’s latter formulation, “virtual as potential”, is “scholastic” in the sense it “suggests productivity, openness, and diversity”—something of a hopeful ideal (27).  Her treatise focuses on the virtualizing abilities of narrative formation, particularly due to language processes: 

Life is lived in real time, as a succession of presents, but through its ability to refer to physically absent objects, language puts consciousness in touch with the past and the future, metamorphoses time into a continuous spread that can be traveled in all directions, and transports the imagination to distant locations.  (38)

Thus, literary studies has always focused on texts that are “generator[s] of potential worlds, interpretations, uses, and experiences” (45).  Stephen Chatman uses this underlying warrant as a basis from which to argue:

Events and existents are single and discrete, but the narrative is a sequential composite.  Further, events in the narrative (as opposed to a chance compilation) tend to be related or mutually entailing.  If we were to extract randomly from cocktail chatter a set of events that happened at different times and different places to different persons, we would clearly not have a narrative.  […]  The events in a true narrative, on the other hand, “come on the scene as already ordered,” in Piaget’s phrase.  Unlike a random agglomerate of events, they manifest a discernible organization.  (Chatman 21)

The use of language to narrativize events places puts these events into a static moment, while language seems to focus the reader’s attention on the fact that these events happened then, not that they are happening.  The distinction between traditional literature and ergodic literature (whether games or hypertexts) rests in the role of the end-user, whether reader or gamer.  Reader’s can understand and interpret texts through different intellectual and phenomenological processes, but they cannot alter the textual artifact itself.  A reader’s interaction with a book, short story, or poem depends solely on her cognitive abilities in relationship to a given text, either interpretive or imaginative.  Reading is by no means passive, but the active components of reading are exclusively internal, only externally manifesting once the internalized information affects the reader psychologically, usually over time.  Even hypertext forms of literature still operate, at least primarily, in this fashion. 

On the other hand, a game, especially more sophisticated and technologically advanced examples, embed the gamer and/or her representative (an avatar) into a simulated space wherein she can effectively change the simulation, and thus alter narrative construction in real-time, something wholly at odds with Chatman’s assertion.  For this reason, ludology initially opposed the study of games through any theoretical framework dependent on narratological models.  Jesper Juul, Markku Eskelinen, Espen Aarseth, and Gonzalo Frasca have all at least questioned the use of narrative theory in this endeavor, reacting to assertions from Janet Murray, Henry Jenkins, and others that games certainly do tell stories.  Aarseth, especially, has remarked:

Simulation is the hermeneutic Other of narratives; the alternative mode of discourse, bottom up and emergent where stories are top-down and preplanned.  In simulations, knowledge and experience is created by the player’s actions and strategies, rather than recreated by a writer or moviemaker.  (52)

Of course, Aarseth seems to operate on the assumption that narrative is wholly an authorial construct, not a discursive relationship.  Both camps have backed away from the more hard-line positions taken within this debate.  The consensus seems to be that ludology and narratology both offer a great deal to the understanding of videogames.

As Gonzalo Frasca noted in 2003, a language barrier exists here.  Where Frasca’s “Ludologists Love Stories, Too” drops off in assessing the language barrier seems to be the most important segment, though.  The gamer role doesn’t so much allow the end-user to “read” and comprehend a story and any meaning one might ascribe to it.  Instead, a game lets the end-user live the story virtually, simultaneously embodying both of Ryan’s notions of virtuality: “fake” and “potential”.  The virtual world is not ontologically real, though some examples may be accurately modeled on real world settings.  Many popular games can serve as an example, but more interesting examples place the gamer into historical contexts.  One of the most popular settings for games is World War II, and for obvious reasons.  For starters, games from the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series are both morally safe and phenomenologically rich.  A developer can drop its audience into an intense battlefield full of action, draw upon the culturally established visual icons and metaphors adhering to the popularized history of the war (especially with Saving Private Ryan), and know that the game is safe from any assertions that it is teaching children violence.  In all the discussions and debates about violence in videogames, WWII first person shooters have never been questioned in the United States for their depictions of violence and bloodshed—and technological advances have made them quite intense on all these fronts.  In addition, games set in WWII often place the gamer into historically accurate areas of Europe to take part in major battles that actually did happen.  Developers even employ expert military advisors to help with the realism of everything from the look and sound of the weapons to tactics and movements of soldiers under fire. 

The war that gamers experience is not actual, and one can question its ontology, as well.  Yet, the phenomenology is the portion that matters because the gamer’s attention is focused into an area of the narrative’s construction that a book often cannot approach unless its reader has a particularly gifted imagination.  Placing its audience into a simulated environment establishes a rhetoric wherein the gamer must act because the narrative is constantly present; otherwise, the game is a wasted mode of expression.  A gamer’s attention is refocused on the here-and-now, to return to Ryan’s terminology, and the gamer is not phenomenologically distanced from the event.  In fact, the game demands the action be pushed forward by non-diegetic choices made by the gamer.  This exigence is often at least partially enforced by narrative driven cinematic scenes in which the gamer sometimes does not directly participate.  The story remains, but the end-user (at least one of them) is taking part and reshaping it as she goes.  Thus, games do not always foster immense sessions of reflection until well after the experience—a point that I think leads to fallacious assertions of games as only entertainment.  They can certainly be understood and interpreted, probably by using tools appropriate to gaming’s mode of expression.  But, the experience attending a gaming session is radically different, so the interpretive exercise is different, as well.  The story is present, experienced as if it is happening. 

Another consequence is that games do something English studies has considered, at least to a degree, to be paradoxical.  For all the empowerment that games can give to their end-users to reshape and reconstruct the virtual universes and narratives they are experiencing, games also go to great lengths to reestablish the authority of the originator that poststructuralism worked so hard to remove.  The “potential” portion of Ryan’s binary virtuality is both striking and illusive.  Only so much potential exists as is allowed by the developer.  Imaginative texts like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland work to place the reader alongside a particular character and experience a world through masterful use and reinterpretation of literary tools.  By leaving some of the rules of Carroll’s fictive world undefined, what one can accomplish in that world seems a series of limitless possibilities.  The opening chapter of Alice plays with this peculiar component of written discourse:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” (9)

Of course, the rest of the story plays with this very question.  Carroll establishes his own virtual world in which it seems anything can happen—Ryan’s virtual-as-potential writ large.  Later in the chapter, Alice quickly realizes the possibilities:  “‘Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.’  For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible” (13).  The narrator’s phrasing of the last independent clause indicates that Alice believes this to be the case anywhere, something for which she is quickly reprimanded when she constantly wishes to conflate what she knows from her world into Wonderland.  None of Wonderland’s inhabitants are particularly enthused at the prospect of Dinah, Alice’s cat; and Alice’s sense of decorum, learned at the hands of very proper Victorian culture, repeatedly fails her. 

            The text plays with rules as if they are malleable.  The only constant in Wonderland is that “the real world” just does not apply in any literal way.  The processor that drives this virtuality is the human brain; its simulation engine is nothing more nor less than human imagination in all its possibilities and faults, limited only by constraining abstractions that can be broken.  But, computer-based simulation depends on very concrete rules that are more than simple rhetorical or cultural constructs.  Rules established by the development team of a game are far more than notional; they are in fact actual, dictating action within the virtual space.  If the code of a game does not account for my desire to do a certain action, I simply cannot do that action.  Instead of hiding the original authority of a text, digital simulation in fact highlights it by making the gamer a subject to it.  Consequently, games have become more compelling for their audiences because they have sought to tie the gameplay experiences more coherently into the narrative’s structure.  Yet, if the game only allows a player to move in certain ways or perform certain actions, any thematic development important to the narrative is restricted, too.  Whereas, I can assume that Alice might decide to leave Wonderland at anytime of her choosing, I cannot force a videogame character to leave the ergodic space built for it.  And texts seem to afford a sense of the ontologically infinite because of the internal nature of reading.  Yet game environments demand limits because they are always already external expressions that demand an external interaction. 

The problem is not with anything inherent in the aesthetics of game design, but with the limits imposed by technology.  There just is no viable technology available yet that allows a game to readily react in real time to the gamer’s imagination, and there are serious questions concerning whether or not such a technology is really possible, or even ethical.  After all, do we really want the experience of a war game to create very real Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?  Games can be hacked and modded by talented players with the necessary knowledge and gear, but as yet this ability has not trickled down to the average user, thus privileging a growing but still only minority segment of the world’s population.  We are still terribly technologically illiterate—consuming technically created products with gusto, but unaware of how or why those products are created.  The ability of games and other interactive media to be incredible modes of expression is quite profound, but the audience needs to be aware, not just of the phenomenologically “here-and-now”, but of the underlying message within. 

And the messages are present.  Despite its current place in our culture as the paradoxical countercultural title du jour, the Grand Theft Auto franchise is nothing if not deeply cutting satire of American culture from the last twenty to twenty-five years.  Whether toying with stereotypes and cultural crises from the 1980s, exploring the upswing in cultural division and expression from the early 1990s, or deconstructing the popularity of the modern mob film, GTA levels back at its audience the ridiculous and self-contradictory messages popularized in our culture, while simultaneously poking fun at its own existence and the simulational tropes employed by itself and its videogame contemporaries. 

Surprisingly, one of the more prevalent messages in the GTA universe is the absurdity of violence as a method of solving anything.  While the gamer works through missions often involving intense violence, many of the surrounding audio and visual expressions ridicule similar themes as the diegetic action onscreen takes shake in a rather cartoonish fashion.  The most obvious satire pervading the simulation includes the radio stations that are a constant ridicule of public discourse through popular media.  “Talk Radio WCTR” from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas rips apart the AM radio talk show format with a show entitled “I Say, You Say”, drawing on two characters, one “liberal”, the other “conservative”, and ending with the show’s tagline: “When you mix an elephant and a donkey, you get a lot of shit!”  Both hosts are satirical presentations of the binary oversimplifications that reduce legitimate discourse into meaningless soundbites, just as the show’s title suggests.  Each call-in conversation ends without resolution for the caller, and the hosts often revert the point of the conversation back to their own issues, mediated through blatant sexual innuendo, “that sleeping with a liberal” is “dirty”.  Advertisements from the Vice City installment, set in the 1980s, constantly toy with fears of Cold War communist aggression.  One example involves a fictional gun store called Ammunation (the puns are obvious), whose radio commercial implores kids to convince their parents that children need firearms training, and that any parent who resists such a suggestion should be targeted as a “commie”.  That the advertisement uses the voice acting of children enjoying firing weapons adds a rhetorical layer skewering the pathological appeals common in American advertising.

Yet, the satirical component of the Grand Theft Auto universe has never, to my knowledge, entered into the discourse concerning its potential role as a “murder simulation”, to borrow Jack Thompson’s terminology.  I think, in part, this results from the games’ design, and their function as games.  Grand Theft Auto III  is often cited as the first critically and commercially successful attempt at a “sandbox” game, one that “change[s] our idea of what games are supposed to be” (Frasca para. 4). The gamer is placed not within a level, but within a functional four dimensional world accounting for both time and space where she can choose from so many different possibilities.  Thus, the end result is a focus on the here-and-now without a ton of critical interest in a coherent understanding of potential expressed meanings, either through narrative structures or otherwise.  Add to this the popular conception of games as nothing more than children’s entertainment and a technologically and theoretically challenging mode of expression and narrative transmission is getting short shrift.  Games are addressing what we teach, not just in the English classroom, but in humanities and liberal arts courses, as well.  More importantly, they are reshaping the very conception of some of the theoretical and aesthetic foundations of literature.

    

Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen.  “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.”  First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game.  Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. 45-55

Chatman, Seymour.  Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978.

DMA Design.  Grand Theft Auto 3.  Rockstar Games.  2001.

Frasca, Gonzalo. “Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Some Thoughts on a Debate That Never Took Place.” 25 March 2008. Digital Games Research Conference 2003 Proceedings. Reprinted at Ludology.org. <http://www.ludology.org/articles/Frasca_LevelUp2003.pdf>.

—. “Sim Sin City: Some Thoughts on Grand Theft Auto 3.”  Game Studies: an International Journal of Computer Games Research. 3.2 (December 2003).  Retrieved on 25 March 2008. <http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/>.

Rockstar North.  Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.  Rockstar Games.  2004.

—.  Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.  Rockstar Games.  2002.

Ryan, Marie-Laure.  Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.  Baltimore and London: The  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.