Ileana Vesa

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

illivesa@yahoo.com

 

 

The Future of Narrative between Folk-Tales and Video Games

 

 

Abstract: The rise of digital media has completely changed our idea of books and, in the process, almost replaced the printed book as the dominant form of texts in our culture. Although there is no doubt today that digital and printed literature can still coexist, the recent virtual environment to which we are accustomed, in itself a combination of both texts and images, leads to a series of interrogations about the place of images in written documents. Therefore, concepts like the reader, the author and the narrative have to be refashioned according to these new theoretical acquisitions in order to negotiate their importance in the new digital age. One of the key factors responsible for linking these concepts seems to be postmodern technology, mainly because it has turned the reader into an authoritative author and the text into an impermanent and unstable conglomerate of words and images. Various types of digital media, such as video games, seem to be useful for pointing out the limitations of literary theory and the need for a more complex, interdisciplinary approach to cybertexts.

Keywords: Cybertext; Video games; Game theory; Folk-tale; Narrative; Interactivity.

 

 

Digital media has changed our idea of books, rousing many rivalries that compete to replace the printed book and turn it into a historical artifact. Although we still consider books as the tangible embodiment of text, all of us credit the computers with comfortable, more flexible and accurate writing partly because, as inhabitants of a culture of images, we feel safer among texts where advertisings, photos or different graphics pop up at every second. Therefore, not only alphabetical writing was challenged, but also the place of images in written documents – a revolution that represents a great predicament for traditional theory of text. Concepts like reader, author and narrative have to be refashioned according to the new theoretical acquisitions in order to negotiate their importance in the new digital age. Postmodern technology helps to cut the distance between those notions by turning the reader into an authoritative author and the text into an impermanent and unstable floating of words and animations, subscribing to Umberto Eco’s definition of labyrinth as a multi-level network. Printed works were recast into television and film and recently, the computer games[1] refashioned the last two, combining audiovisual presentation with textual body in an unprecedented manner. It is obvious that our culture favors images at the expense of written words; however, it preserves writing and reading as more powerful acts as they have ever been before.

 

1. Remediation of books in hypertexts and cybertexts

 

Texts are now organized and recorded on CD-ROMs or DVDs, computer RAM or Internet, etc. replacing the traditional sheet of paper together with our sense of text’s palpability and the “abrupt changes of direction and tempo” superseded the linear and constant flow of words. But the electronic writing preserved some technical traits of the past, sharing with the typewriter its keyboard, with the tape-recorder its microphone and so on, and especially with books its main feature of storing written information. In addition, the computer is functioning as a device able to produce entertainment and conversation, refashioning visual arts and verbal communication. It seems that all new media try to remediate the older ones: “Computer games remediate film by styling themselves as interactive movies; virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting; digital photography remediates the analog photograph.” And the peak of remediation: “The World Wide Web absorbs and refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium, including television, film, radio, and print.” (Bolter 2001: 25) This final remediation makes easier our access to different information through links and related pages, building a network of interconnected issues known today as hypertext. In his book, Writing Spaces, J.D. Bolter gives as example the ancient rhetorical technique – ekphrasis (words can describe vivid images without paying any tribute to pictures) and extended its meaning to contemporary writing. He is very distrustful of the controlling power of words, written or spoken, to revive our postmodern imagination and proceeds to persuade us that we practice now a reverse of ekphrasis, that is, images are charged with explanation of words. Hypertexts practice thus the liberation of images from the constraints of words and the interrelated fluctuation of animated texts from page to page, from site to site, from link to link. As Bolter claims: “In short, electronic hypertext is not the end of print; it is instead the remediation of print.” (Bolter 2001:46), the hypertext is focused upon the reshaping of texts in the new electronic age.

On the other hand, all textual phenomena provided by hypertexts are under the scrutiny of cybertext, “a perspective on all forms of textuality”.

 

It focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. (Aarseth 1997:1)

 

Aarseth concentrated these ideas in three rules that share some similarities with other literary texts:

 

(1) all literature is to some extent indeterminate, nonlinear, and different for every reading, (2) the reader has to make choices in order to make sense of the text, and finally (3) a text cannot really be nonlinear because the reader can read it only one sequence at a time, anyway. (Aarseth 1997:2)

 

Apparently, he contradicts himself at some pages distance, as the theory of reader-response reflects these rules in its application to printed books. But what Aarseth brings more to solve this aporia is the “paraverbal dimension that is so hard to see. A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression.” While the literary theorists are concentrated upon the subject, he tries to focus on the machine, a crucial distinction that proves the inaccessibility of reader to perceive all opportunities to follow the paths and voices of a text. Besides the powerful metaphor of labyrinth, Aarseth improves the significance of cybertext with the idea of personal struggle, not merely for interpretative desire of a narrative, but also for manipulation of the text, forced to “tell my story”, a story in which the reader can make improvisations, but with the risk of being rejected or ending in a failure. If the sense of personalized story may be illusory, the coercive behavior is as real as the reader’s temper. Finally, it is necessary to notice that this struggle is perceived in terms of a game.

As they were defined above, hypertext and cybertext function as different notions at least at conceptual level, but we can discern some further differences when it comes to analyze them from the perspective of structure, interactivity and interpretation. The first is a pattern of links and pages while the second includes this pattern, but it cannot be reduced only to a structure. Cybertext means a fruitful interactivity between text and reader and also their postmodern refashioning; hypertext consists only of linear interaction among hundreds of texts regardless of their position in the network. And whether the hypertext preserves the traditional interpretation of a text, even if correlating it with another narratives, the cybertext is discussed in terms of personalization and coercion of a text, mostly because it was associated with computer games by the scholars caught in trouble by the answer for the question of narrative in computer games. Here, the existing narratives challenge to death the traditional concept and practice of texts.

Under these circumstances, the main objectives of this paper are: firstly, to explore the challenges posed to some pivotal elements of literary theory and how these challenges affected our sense of texts and narratives in computer games; secondly, to reveal some points of fusion and departure between literariness and playability of computer games; and thirdly, last but not least, to argue that literary theory is incomplete for describing cybertexts, so ludology – the most recent discipline – took the difficult task of approaching games from interdisciplinary perspective. The theoretical research is doubled by an applied study of folk-tales as the proximal literary genre of computer games, leading to the final transgression of the first to the second field and to ludologist terminology.[2] We must specify here that this paper is concerned only with adventure and action games, either TBS, RPG, or MUDs, MMORPGs,[3] etc. as they obviously share many traits with novels, movies and dramatic plays.

2. Literary theory applied to video games

 

The basic similarity between video games and novels or another literary prose is, according to Julian Kucklich in his essay Perspectives of Computer Game Philology, the possibility to see both of them as a form of semiosis. The combination of signs provides multiple interpretations of the same issue, but at a superficial level, because our perception is reduced to signs, so the interpretative process becomes gradually complex in quantitative aspects, not necessarily in quality. Following Charles S. Pierce’s theory of semiotics, Kucklich draws a parallel to the process of playing a computer game, which grows in complexity at surface, the deeper background staying the same regardless of player’s input:

 

This means that narrative is not an inherent feature of games, but something merely implemented in a game virtually, i.e. as a possibility. The actual construction of the narrative is always done by the player by taking the signs on the interface and interpreting them further.

 

But Kucklich fails in his attempt to demonstrate the viability of his arguments simply because he didn’t insert in his discourse the real support of narrative (the definition of the firm, deeper ground where it founds the proper soil to blossom) in order to balance its importance in a game: if the narrative is not an inherent feature of games, which are those features considered inherent, so that we can compare their structure of signs? And according to his syllogism, the narrative and the game are totally different, the first being implemented in the second “as a possibility”, but he didn’t take into account the fact that games actually need a story-line to be games, otherwise they lose their purpose and become chaotic. On the other hand, he reaches correct answers by using wrong methods. One of them is his statement of the vital significance of the player in a computer game.

Jesper Juul approaches video games from another point of view and he starts by examining some standard arguments worthy to take into account for further discussions: (1) humans use narratives for each aspect of their life; (2) most video games use traditional forms of narrative in introductions, back-stories and cut-scenes; (3) there are some common features shared by games and literature. (Juul 2001) He recognizes that (1) is an a priori argument and not “everything should be described in narrative terms”, but (2) and (3) are consistent with the problem of narrative in video games. For the second argument, he brings the classical theory of story rendered through a medium, assuming that, if a story needs a medium to leave its abstract clothing, then the medium is equally important in connection to the story, although the story can chooses a medium at the extent of other. The relation being established horizontally, the story “can be translated from one medium to another”: e.g., Star Wars was repackaged from movie to game, The Lord of the Rings from book to movie, then to game and less common, Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat and Tomb Raider were transferred from games to movies. Of course, they couldn’t preserve the whole story when they where translated, but our interest is in those narrative aspects which made possible the transfer from one medium to the other, that is, the cut-scenes, the back-story and the introduction. Some common traits – shared by games and novels – are the reader, the narrative time and the narrator, although games challenge to reevaluate their traditional meaning. We will start with these traits, approaching them theoretically, then practically, in a comprehensive case study.

 

2.1. Narrative, story or intrigue?

 

It is required, but also essential for this research, to define carefully our working terms, at first sight broad synonyms, in fact different concepts with specific connotations. Story is still neglected at its real extent of interpretation among theorists of video games, perhaps due to its ability to refer to variable things and to its abstract and seemingly unattainable nuances, prevailed by narrative – the overwhelming battlefield of literature – and recently, by intrigue, which competes to gain widespread presence in ludology. Voices of different researcher pointed at “colonization of fields” and “theoretical imperialism”, objecting that game theorists compelled notions from other disciplines to fit their interests. Therefore, the same notion was borrowed to different words in order to work for different domains and thus any interdisciplinary cooperation was obstructed. As a main result, games studies got an independent aesthetic place, “rather than a sub-discipline of literary studies”, states Julian Kucklich. Other scholars like Gonzalo Frasca, Espen Aarseth, Janet Murray, etc. disclosed and debunked those fetishist commitments to a field at a time and tried to successfully bring them again in interdisciplinary discourses. After all, story-narrative-intrigue should corroborate their well-known meaning of “a set of events chosen for their contribution to an unfolding plot with a beginning, middle and an end.” (Tavinor 2009:111)

Literary theory makes a clear distinction between the two textual levels: immediate level and mediated level, which correspond to the time of discourse and respectively, to the time of story and further, as Jesper Juul cited from Seymour Chatman; to “existents (actors and settings) and events (actions and happenings)”, divided finally in time of narrative and time of story. According to Gerard Genette, we can also talk about a third time: the reading or viewing time, present in movies – even though we are watching a movie now, we are conscious about the past tense of the actions performed on stage. This division among different times of narration must be erased in computer games, so that the player can feel free to proceed with game session. From Jesper Juul’s essay Games Telling Stories?, we deduce three types of reasons for merging times in computer games: chronological reasons – the games are always chronological, for the player tastes the gradual unfolding of events until the end of the game[4]; historical reasons – as agent of manipulation, the player cannot influence events that has already occurred, so the time of story must collapse under the pressure of interactivity; extra-textual reasons – a player is more than a viewer, her dual position, inside and outside the game, allows distinct times to merge permanently. It is necessary to add that Juul speaks here about certain genres of video games, like adventure and action games, where we meet narratives and stories comparable with novels, movies or dramatic plays.

Meanwhile the mediated level stays the same as in a traditional tale due to introductions, cut-scenes and back-stories characteristic to each adventure, action or strategy game, the immediate level instigates the scholars to strained debates, either for the player-game interactivity different from reader-text response, or for the “hybrid nature” (Kucklich 2003) of computer games narrativity which belongs to the same degree to literary studies, games tradition, but also to digital media. Striving to find parallel ways capable to reconcile interactivity and narrativity of computer games, Eddo Stern proposes a distinction between diegetic and extra-diegetic narrative elements, where the second category matches better to video games narrative. The diegetic elements deal with pre-technological features of a game: elements of conventional narrative – facets of traditional fiction such as characters, plot, chapters, etc. and metaphorically patched artifacts – residual aspects of technology are deployed in a metaphor with the purpose to hide them and keep the fiction unaltered by outside intruders. The extra-diegetic elements fall into three categories, each of them concerning some “anomalies that remain unexplained”: sanctioned artifacts – they belong to game design, but they don’t make sense in a plausible fiction; technological artifacts – anomalies belonging to technological effects in a game; gameplayer artifacts – they could appear as a result of an unexpected, unanticipated behavior of a player. (Stern 2002) This distinction seems feasible and correctly conceived, but it lacks a panoramic view of narrative in video games and it is focused, especially in the extra-diegetic elements, on some details considered incidents, not general rules. As the break with tradition is substantially in video games, some dissipated details, although set apart in an accurate way, are not convincing for other theorists.

In particular, gameplayer artifacts gained considerable attention among the literary theory defenders, even if it should not be regarded as an anomaly, but as a main feature that dissociates game from literary narrative, for computer games borrow selectively from literature. Reaching this conclusion, Diane Carr tries to explain about this phenomenon in her study entitled Games and Narrative. She considers that simultaneous narration of Gerard Genette resembles the position of a player in relation to the interface of a game. In spite of classical past tense, Genette proves the existence of a narration, which can occur at the same time with the action as in sports commentaries and now in computer games, where the player constructs the plot together with the play. Unfolding events and pulling strings, the player looks like a puppeteer in the rendition of a spectacle, half outside the performance, half involved in the progression of story. So far, he or she is more like an author than a reader, but what elucidates his or her position is the constraints of game until its final fulfillment, because – as Diane Carr recognizes in her analyze of Baldur’s Gate (1998) – “It is the game that decides the identity of the archvillain and the game that disallows the protagonist from saving Gorion or joining forces with Saravok.”[5] The player’s involvement, often called interactivity, depends thus on the rules of the game which guarantee a logical and plausible narrative only if they are respected, otherwise we deal with a schizophrenic, split discourse. In order to avoid such psychoanalytical matters, Espen Aarseth adapts Seymour Chatman’s model of narrator-narratee to his theory of narrative, replacing narration with intrigue. He inspired from drama “to suggest a secret plot in which the user is the innocent, but voluntary, target.” (Aarseth 1997:112), considering this notion more appropriate to the definition of cybertext. Things are more intricate than they seem, as the simultaneous narration and intrigue question the ontological nature of the player, whom destiny they are inherent linked to. The tension player-reader raises more debates rather than narrative, for the player still bewilders the adepts of literary theory.

 

2.2 When the reader becomes the narrator

 

“My claim is that the reader is part of the player, but the player is not limited to the reader.” – Torill Mortensen, a researcher in media theory, states these words in her essay Playing with Players and following her pattern of approaching the player through the reader-response theory, we distinguish among model reader, ideal reader, implicit reader and actual reader. Each reader indicates the position of a person when it comes to understand the purposes of a text and to interpret them adequately. On the other hand, the player creates her own text whose reader and author she completely is. The player comes dangerously closer to an author, but she[6] still preserves her privileged position of a reader, who is allowed to give each interpretation she wishes or to criticize the events and the characters’ development, in other words, the narrative flow. Consequently, she is neither a model reader, nor an ideal reader, nor an implicit reader, but she could share some features with the actual reader for her interactive abilities. As a postmodern reader, she is able to construct the meaning of the read work and equally, as a player, she builds through her actions the game session. Mortensen often argues for the clear distinction between reader and player: the second stays separate from the first due to her potential to manipulate the game and also includes the first, as a part of her postmodern acquisition of meanings. The player gains thus more experience and is superior to the reader. To be more persuasive, Mortensen proposes the phrase manipulating reader for the computer games, where the power of player is obvious: she can change, create and improvise like a “soloist in a large band”. She is more active in constructing the meaning of a work than a simple reader, has more control over the work, inwardly as an implied character and outwardly as agent of manipulation and she is limited only by the length of unfolding events, she can’t surpass the end of an action. The game programmers anticipate this limitation by adding different paths to follow and to turn back when one of them has been exhausted. The player’s status changes with her input; she can identify herself both with the villain and the hero due to multiple possibilities of joining actions, so she has more freedom to move inside the narrative than a reader. We would like to complete Mortensen’s descriptive analysis of a player with Jesper Juul’s words in his essay Games Telling Stories? :

 

The player is motivated to invest energy in the game because the game evaluates the player’s performance. And this is why a game can be much more abstract than a movie or a novel, because games involve the player in a direct way.

 

Before proceeding to a more structural framework, we can observe that Torill Mortensen pointed out four troublesome problems: the player doesn’t fall totally into any category of reader-response theory; the concept of player is superior to the reader, it involves the reader, but it’s not reduced to the reader; the player’s potential to manipulate the game dissociates her definitely from the reader; the player acts only at the superficial level of the game, following different paths, but she is not capable of deeper interpretation.

Espen Aarseth previously filtered the same matters through Seymour Chatman’s theory of implied author and implied reader. The implied author represents a structural entity, keeping the controlling position that establishes the rules in a story, but he is not taken either for the flesh-and-blood author, or for the narrator, an instance that instructs the reader and guides him or her through the whole story line. The receptor at the other end is called implied reader, also a structural entity that has to be differentiated from the real reader or the narratee, “one device by which the implied author informs the real reader how to perform as the implied reader”.(Chatman 1989:147-151) Aarseth took the sending and receiving position and associated them, in his seminal work Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature, with intrigant and intriguee, as combinations between Chatman’s implied author and narrator and, respectively, between implied reader and narratee. His contribution is not only etymological; he brings some new characteristics to improve the overall appearance of intrigue in computer games. The intrigant, rather than leading the reader, complicates the plot, he prevents the player to solve the puzzles too easily and this functions as a mutual pact between these two instances, resembling too much Umberto Eco’s narrative agreement between the author and the reader. But Aarseth moves out and reveals two differences: the competing relation between the intrigant and the intriguee and the main goal – to finish the game. (Aarseth 1997:113-114)

As we can notice, Mortensen departs from Aarseth’s firmly structured perspective and intermingles the reader and the author under the label of player. While Mortensen cuts the barrier between the narrative entities and seems to blur the concepts, Aarseth makes a clear-cut distinction and associates the intrigant more with the designer of the video game than with the player of the game, perhaps because his study was published in the beginning half of the video games’ age, when the usual references pointed at games like Super Mario, King’s Quest, Doom, Myst, etc. And, of course, he was right at that period, but this chapter of his study is considered now surpassed by other updated papers, less speculative due to the increasing interest and the academic involvement in game studies, although Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature still remains relevant for narratology versus ludology debate. Nevertheless, it is very interesting to see that at a decade distance, the same matters are still debatable, but from different points of view and also, it is very important to notice the migration, though denied and vehemently obliterated at that hour, of the concepts from literary field to game studies. Today, scholars are no more concerned with those interdisciplinary struggles; their focus now is to find the appropriate word or phrases – borrowed or not, coined or reused – to define the player’s status and the interactivity in adventure games. We are in danger now to reconsider the literature’s prominence and influence in games studies as historical addenda to a more powerful theory or to discharge literature as an exhausted domain, which could provide a conceptual framing and a living space to be colonized. The following chapter tries to demonstrate that there isn’t mere colonization; the literary theory seems incomplete, but not irrelevant and exhausted for game studies. Even the best animated games, with innovative and challenging playing techniques, with perfect balance between narrative and play, with excellent feed-back from players all over the world, are not divorced from literature as many theorists like to claim, instead they get high rating for their perfect narration, which usually looks like a good folk-tale: magic or supernatural events and powers, scary and legendary creatures, ruins, traps, labyrinths, etc.

 

3. Colonizing genres? Folk-tales rewritten in computer games

 

The mythological hero, setting forth from his common day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle, offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend into death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again – if the powers have remained unfriendly to him – his theft of boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return of threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir). (Campbell 1988:245)

 

This summary of a mythological narrative can be considered a pattern not only for folk-tales, but also for almost all computer games that fall into the category of adventure or action games. But from a wide range of tales, game programmers saved medieval and folk-tales to describe the major theme of certain games. If the subject matter is about sorcerers, gnomes, orcs, dragons, etc., besides the traditional categories of video games, there always appear medieval, as a further description of the game. If it goes around magical explorations, puzzles solving or challenging situations, we usually meet folk-tale as an additional characteristic of the game. Jocye Goggin considers in her essay Reading and Watching: Literature and Games that video games tells simple stories comparable to medieval tales and that Middle Ages is a “literary period” that “many videogames seek to remediate”.[7] Jesper Juul suggests that the simple structure of many video games is “a sequence often found in folk tales: An initial state, an overturning of this state, and a restoration of the state.”(Juul 2001) And Ernest Adams, in his article The Designer’s Notebook: Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers, recognizes that “adventure games, at least at present, tell only a limited kind of story: the mystery or quest”, expressing his deep discontent with thematic stereotype that saturated contemporary game industry. Many other theorists concentrate their attention on quest, protagonists or narrative techniques met in video games.

 

3.1. Narrative traditions in video games

 

The gameplay is by far the driving force in a video game; though, a smart plot can act as a powerful lure for the player to care more for her characters and to try harder to guide them correctly within the session. More than a plot, the character’s personality traits encourage the player to identify herself, at least emotionally, with the protagonist, sometimes leading to a perfect synchronization between player and her avatar. In addition, the narrative, non-interactive segments, be them back-stories or cut-scenes, are no more considered a waste of time in practitioner communities, mostly due to their crucial importance for game’s progression and partly because the players got used with increasingly extended cut-scenes in the last years.

The simple structure of video games noticed by Juul is related to the traditional duality of characters in video games: they can be merely good or bad – one of the restrictions imposed by game designers, but the technology plays also an important part in this facile split. Their trajectory starts with a challenge and if they prove courageous enough to fight and defeat it, they enter the magic realm, where impossible worlds become real and a fascinating reward lure in the margin, instigating them to further braveries until the final apotheosis. But if they choose to avoid that challenge, they enter the dark kingdom of villains and fight against the good forces until their annihilation, which stands for the final reward. This story is associated with multi-player games, where the players are allowed to choose whose world to belong; in single-player games, the player is limited to one possibility and she has to follow it, although she is surrounded by other beings conceived as internal agents and called non-characters. The deviating behaviors don’t enter the rules of the game, you either choose to do what you were supposed to do, or you simply condemn yourself to death. Game programmers redirected the frustration emerged from such a restriction to safer grooves of interaction with another characters, players, communities or situations. So, if the player wants to be a good fellow, she is given many opportunities to write her own story and customize the narrative, but she has to stay good until the end of the game. In other words, as in folktales, we have the eternal cyclic paradox: the character acts like that because he or she is inherently good or bad, however his/her actions make him/her a positive or negative figure throughout the game.

Different from literary narrative, as we stated at the beginning of this chapter, actions prevail over personality in game narrative. If we take into account the fact that a folk-tale stakes on the actions of the protagonist in order to render him or her ‘good’ and to reward him or her eventually, the video game can be considered its twin fellow. In her conference paper Ethical Criticism as a Means to Approach Computer Games[8], Kirsten Pohl agrees with action prevailing, but counts three types of narratives where actions are more or less restricted by personality. Kate Walker, the protagonist in Syberia (2002), has strong personality traits, so the player is reduced to Walker’s perspective and forced to act consequently. The player can perform thus as many deeds as she wants, but she is restricted to a narrow spectrum of choices. Another game, Fahrenheit (2005), accounts the history of a tragic hero also predefined by some typical reactions to difficult situations, but “Here the player is inspired to ask not so much what the avatar would do, but what he himself would do if he were in such a situation.” The player has to decide quickly what path to follow, his choices are freed from character’s traits, but they should transcend the world of the game and fuses with the real world of the player. The third example Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (2005) complicates the interpretation with an introductory sequence – “a framework that evaluates illegitimate actions as acts in self-defense and provides new moral schemata.” A wide range of actions is thus allowed, good or bad, and not all of them should be directly related to personality traits. (Pohl 2008:102-104) From this third example, we can draw the conclusion that non-interactive sequences of a game (introductions, back-stories or cut-scenes), far from obstructing the play, open it to large perspectives and interpretations.

A back-story functions as a framework for game actions and its subtle presence throughout the game raised many disputes around its significance for the player. There are voices, which argue for its elimination, as the player cannot be passive and active meantime and she gets bored with so many dead moments and loses her interest easily. Each time the game is interrupted by back-stories or cut-scenes, the player is deprived by her right to play and ends in giving up the session. Ernest Adams calls the other end of the back-story “the problem of amnesia”. In a game with back-story, the characters see the light of their first day accompanied by a story, they don’t need to discover the world, they are provided with a past and they will make use of this past in their future experiences. On the other hand, there are three types of narratives where the characters start empty-handed and they have to explore every detail of their new world: “mysteries, heroic quests, or new-kid-in-town scenarios”. Adams considers that amnesia limits the genre of adventure games, but he doesn’t take into account the emotional input of the player that urges her to advance in game session and her ideal freedom in building personal narration. The fault of both conceptions is the wrong reference to the player, the first exceeding her importance, the second minimizing it. We then suggest returning to literary perspective, which states the importance of the reader in relation to unfolding narrative and interpretation. Coupled with the conclusion of the above paragraph, this idea could balance the player’s position in a game.

The player can be active or passive in a game not because of the lack or presence of back-stories and cut-scenes, but because of her own choice to involve in the act of interpretation and building the game narrative. Richard Rouse (Rouse, after Newman 2004:94-95), a video game designer, distinguishes the shifting from “interactive, participatory play” to “passive, detached watching”, but his research ceases here. However, we can continue his ideas and discern between the etymological meaning of watching as participatory and looking as passive. If we speak in terms of reaction, watching in video games means a reverse, overturned reaction: e.g., when the player commands a certain movement to the character, the second one immediately responses; the same thing happens when the animated or written cut-scenes operates over the player’s mind and gets a response in her further actions, according to what she saw. In contrast with literature and movies, the player could give a practical response, not only at the interpretative level, but we concentrate our attention on such matters in the next chapter. Analyzing Soul Blade (1997) and Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), James Newman adds a new dimension to cut-scenes, too: they “do not simply furnish a story element, but appear to actually undermine engagement with the gameworld” and more than that, they “perform a number of roles, some of which are in tension and render various sequences problematic for the player.”(Newman 2004: 98) Therefore, the cut-scenes are not dead moments unnecessary to game progression because they simply look too much like literary or film narratives; they could perform an essential function of coagulating disparate pieces in a rational discourse. Even if the protagonists enter only two categories, their actions cover a wide range of possibilities and are interconnected by cut-scenes and carried until their final exhaustion by the player’s input. Together, these elements could colonize the literary prose, with a specific preference for popular tales. At the first sight, it seems true that we deal with imperialism, but there are some distinct phenomena that prevent us from such a mistake.

 

3.2. Breaking with tradition

 

In video games, the narrative flow doesn’t follow the same rules as in novels or films, because the player is outside every control, she can do whatever she wants and her decisions can take an eternity, so you can never know when her avatar is ready for the climax. Ernest Adams ironically advances three hypotheses to surpass this predicament: (1) to limit the interactivity, either by revoking it and the avatar will be trapped into the plot, or by exceeding it and the gameplay will be meaningless; (2) to create a living-like world, with days and nights, seasons and passage of time and the game will start over and over again as the protagonist will never be prepared for the climax; (3) to save the game every minute to prevent from disasters and the player will be taken out from the world she hardly tries to belong to. We have some objections to these advices. For example, in God of War (2005), the cut-scenes are prevailing, but the player enjoys them for their powerful influence on the further progression of game session. Or MMORPGs like EverQuest (1999) and Ultima Online (1997) are perfect copies of the real world with daily duties and many climaxes, but it is not necessary to start over again and again. Finally, a normal game has only one possibility to save the changes: at the end of the play session. If one saves the game, it has to be reopened and who is the player to reopen the game every five minutes? The narrative flow has no escape, neither theoretically, nor empirically, it stays different from the traditional narrative.

Another challenge for narrative – indicated by Grant Tavinor – is the character’s death (Tavinor 2009:118). Once the avatar dies, the player has to return to an earlier stage of the game in order to set right the avatar’s actions. Things get complicated in a game like Call of Duty (2003), where the protagonist’s death leads to a cluster of trajectories, where the player rarely is so lucky to follow the previous and thus known path. Moreover, if the player can act as a narrator, she has the control of her narration, but cut-scenes interfere as the main obstacles: there is neither a reader to limit her rights, nor the narrative techniques; it is about an unknown outsider – the game designer – that intrudes her world. On the other hand, the decisions made by the player belong to the real level, while the narrative and its characters are fiction. The narrator corresponds to the real author, so the game is in disagreement with literary theory. There’s no such a thing like a physical presence that influences the fictional realms. The interpretation is also different, the player is mainly interested in playing rather than in unfolding narrative whereas the literary theory gives more significance to narrative. Interpretation is interactive, a characteristic specific only to video games. Last but not least, the debate on the interactivity of games shows a clear-cut break with tradition.

 

4. Ludology and the limits of literary narrative

 

In his studies, Gonzalo Frasca often stresses the idea of reformation, as the debate cannot advance if it reasons in a circle and confuses different languages. He cites Marie-Laure Ryan, who also emphasizes the need for change:

 

The inability of literary narratology to account for the experience of games does not mean that we should throw away the concept of narrative in ludology; it rather means that we need to expand the catalog of narrative modalities beyond the diegetic and the dramatic, by adding a phenomenological category tailor-made for games. (Ryan, after Frasca 2003).

 

Frasca wants a fair debate, where both sides could agree to a given number of rules that firstly, speak the same language; secondly, minimize the theoretical approaches made at random; thirdly, provide clear definitions for common notions; fourthly, establish a fruitful relationship between narratology and ludology. He for one, for his part, helps this interdisciplinary discourse with two definitions for paidea and ludus and tries to expand them in relation to narrative settings and respectively, to narrative plot. In Ludology Meets Narratology (1999), Frasca defines paidea as an activity without specific objectives, whose only reason is to entertain. On the other hand, ludus is an activity depending on a system of rules and the specific goal of victory. As a result, he states that ludus can produce narrative, but is not narrative – they are two different things. The narrative has to accomplish many other tasks in order to be recognized as ludus. Nevertheless, the narrative is similar to ludus, as both of them are based on particular rules, follow a linear development and provide a goal for the whole activity. Paidea depends on the environment and the settings of a game, which allow the characters to carry out more actions than in a traditional narrative. They are driven by their own will, so they create a chaotic narrative that looks like a flow of consciousness in modern novels. Even if the goals are not compatible to the implied purposes of a model player, the rebellious behavior of a nonconformist player usually comes to an end when she decides to follow, even for a while, a certain path, and thus she is trapped in the narrative net. As Frasca hardly tries to persuade us that ludology brings a fresh breath for game theory, we can observe that his notions constantly make references to literary tradition in a conscious attempt to act in accordance with the objectives enumerated above. He offers definitions and highlights the relationship between narratives and games, but also he limits the likely pretenses of literature to the game studies. Ludus and paidea create a particular type of narrative that cannot be forced into the framework of the traditional literary narrative.

The second main feature, which restricts narratology is inherent to computer games and travels across connotations to functional territory – interactivity, a change of replies between the machine and the human partner, that is, a genuine cybertext. The interactivity woke up the scholars to reality, that the narrative of video games, generally accepted as narrative, couldn’t be pushed into the literary frame. As we stated in chapter 3, the player can be active or passive in a game, it’s her own choice to involve in the act of interpretation and building the game narrative. ”It’s about entering a world and changing that world by your presence. In most games the world is static and dead until the player arrives.” (Adams 1999) As if a novelist inhabits a fictive world with living humans or as if an artist takes some disparate stuff and fits them together coherently, with two major differences: the fictive world is ready inhabited and the stuff is ready assembled by a previous presence (the game programmer) and the living humans and coherence are dissociated from the actions of this previous presence and another person – the player – is charged with them. While the literary narrative stays under the control of a traditional writer, the interactive narrative of a game depends on the player. Returning to definitions, game theorists preserve intrigue in ludology as a clear distinction from literary narrative.

The pivotal, also elastic position of the player is the third point of departure. Ludology joins literature until the point where the player effectively takes the place of a narrator through her interactive power and builds the plot at her will. Different from intrigant, a concept suggested by Aarseth, Mortensen’s manipulating reader enriches the ludologist phraseology and catch literary theory in trouble with its paradox. A reader able to manipulate the text not through interpretation, but through an effective coercion is a particular characteristic of computer games. In other words, “the player has a formative role in the course of the narrative” (Tavinor 2009).

 

Conclusion

 

Adopting a formalist rather than functionalist approach, game studies are forging new concepts at the side of remediating traditional methods, a twofold research that sometimes ends in confusion and passionate debates. The literary connotations of reader, author, narrative, interpretation migrated to digital media, especially to video games, where they were altered and adjusted; then, they came in the interdisciplinary spotlight with new meanings and new synonyms. This paper tried to answer the questions of migration or its reverse, ironically called colonization, with an objective parallel between literary theory and ludology, stressing the similarities and the differences, the overwhelming conceptual influence of literature on game theory and its obvious empirical limitations sanctioned by ludology – a powerful movement of resistance. As we continually tried to demonstrate in this paper, resistance not always means a fierce struggle for eradication, the given study of computer games proves the constructive attempt to reify literary narrative.

 

 

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Notes