Do you suffer from “simulation fever”?

I have been slowly and purposefully plodding my way through Unit Operations: an Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost.  It was published in 2006, which means I’m a bit behind the times for a scholar.  But, in my defense, Bogost’s other book, Persuasive Games, has received more attention.

Unit Operations melds together a wide ranging set of technical concepts in mathematics and industrial design (the origins of the term “unit operation”) with a number of cultural/interpretive theories in the humanities.  His idea is to posit a way in which videogames can be approached critically without overtly privileging one form scholarly discourse over another (a debatable project on a number of levels).

“Narrative Multitasking”

If I am wrong, someone please correct me, but I’ve spent some time pondering soem things I haven’t found much mention of in the literature discussing narrative formation.  I’ve taken to the term “narrative multitasking” as at least a preliminary step to defining narrative phenomena that seem endemic to modern expressive cultures:

1. The ability to tell a story simultaneously across multiple media forms.  This isn’t remarkable in itself, except that these simultaneous retellings often alter elements of the narrative to fit the expressive capabilities of the different modes used.  Sometimes, this means simply emphasizing different aspects of the narrative, depending on whether the mode used is written, visual, or playable.  The distinctions between films and novels have been given a lot of attention now that it’s quite common for movies to be adapted from books (and vice versa).  Games have presented a different problem because the aesthetics, rhetoric, and semiotics of gaming have yet to be firmly established.  Just to taste the potential complexities, read Consalvo and Dutton’s article from Gamestudies (2006), or Stephen Malliet’s article from the same issue.   
2. Narratives are now also responsible for accomodating expectations from their audience that are new and constantly shifting. 

The easy contemporary example of this is the Harry Potter franchise. 

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…

Metal Gear Solid and Games as Social Commentary

In preparing for my presentation at the College English Association conference in St. Louis this week, I’ve been kicking around a lot of ideas of games as a brand of social commentary.  Specifically, I’ve been analyzing Grand Theft Auto as a combination pastiche/satire that lovingly mocks great pieces of American pop culture to point out the vices of that culture in general.  I’ll post that presentation up here after I give it (Thursday afternoon).

In a similar vein, I’ve always considered Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid games to be extremely good pieces of postmodern fiction set into game form.  Kojima lets the player work his way through different scenarious using whatever skills and hardware Snake is allowed, and ties those abilities thematically back to his story arc.  The character is a combination of stealth, intelligence, caution tempered with daring, and emotional reserve.  All those qualities are woven into both the cutscenes and the gameplay segments, turning them into something of a mutual metadiscourse continuously commenting on these themes and how they are addressed within different segments of the game.  One might justly criticize the series’ indulgence with cutscene length, especially given the way narrative components are more strongly tied into gameplay scenarios in current games.  But little of those cutscenes is wasted. 

The opus has always served as a warning of the very problems videogames so widely represent for modern culture: the potential that our reliance on and affinity for technological advancement might lead at least to our dehumanization, at worst to our collapse.  Touching on subjects like genetic manipulation, nuclear arms, political and cultural loyalties, individual identity in an increasingly networked world, and the simple perils of war without consequences often makes Kojima’s games seem like some of the more topical and relevant narrative discourse on modern life. 

The Narrativity Scene

Marie-Laure Ryan’s book, Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001), has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while, now.  Unfortunately, as a writing teacher spreading myself across eight sections each semester, I don’t often find much time to read for my own intentions.  And when I do, it’s often to the detriment of my classes.  But I finally made it around to her book over the last couple of days, and I’ve had some time to digest some thoughts in the Introduction.  I’m a gamer; thus I take particular interest in critical scholarship of gaming and “erogodic” domains, to borrow Espen Aarseth’s terminology.  For a few years now, I’ve been thinking my way through ludological problems with narrative as an active component in game design and simulational environments.  Major theorists on this matter debated the notion for a number of years, until recently a few significant opponents to narrative theory in game studies altered their positions on this. 

Ryan stakes out a position that I find appealing.  She establishes a look at the distinctions between “interactivity” and “immersion”. 

Reflections on Umberto Eco and Narrative

Read several of Umberto Eco’s essays over the weekend, including a couple that deal with postmodern literary techniques and the role(s) of literature.  He summarizes a couple of interesting ideas, including metanarrative and intertextual irony.  Metanarratives are literary devices and elements that comment on the construction of the story in which they are used.  Intertextual Irony is a reliance on allusional structures that are not always apparent to the reader.  Related to this is the notion of double coding, that the allusions can be read on different levels by different readers:  some will miss the allusions entirely; some will recognize the allusions, but do nothing to pursue their full texture; others will comprehend the references and take pains to comprehend their function(s) within the text and the contextual interpretative practices that the reader employ to make sense of them (historical, reader-response, objective correlative, etc.). 

What is important to me is “On Some Functions of Literature”:

Literary texts explicitly provide us with what we will never cast doubt on, but also, unlike the real world, they flag with supreme authority what we are to take as important in them, and what we must not take as a point of departure for freewheeling interpretations.  (5)