Julian K?cklich has posted a fairly grumpy review of First Person on Dichtung Digital.
I’ll just pick on one thing, K?cklich writes about Henry Jenkins’ Game Design as Narrative Architecture:
Jenkins should be lauded for his attempt to mediate between the two schools. He helpfully points out points of agreement between ludologists and narratologists, but he also identifies ludology’s “conceptual blind spots” in regard to narrative. Chief among these is ludology’s failure to understand that narratives can operate across different media and do not have to be self-contained. As Jenkins usefully points out in response to Jesper Juul: “The Star Wars game may not simply retell the story of Star Wars, but it doesn?t have to in order to enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga”.
Actually, I was pointing out that the old Star Wars arcade game did not reproduce the story of Star Wars (unlike what a Star Wars cartoon or novel might do). Jenkins writes that:
This is a pretty old fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy.
This is one place where I believe two different things are being discussed – I am discussing whether narratives move across media to games like they do to, say, novels. And I concluded that this wasn’t the case. This does not conflict with Jenkins’ observation that such a game still plays a role in our general understanding of the Star Wars universe. A battle of words, really.
(And of course, it’s pretty strange to be criticized (by K?cklich) for not understanding how narratives can operate across media when the whole original argument was based on an examination of transmedial storytelling and how narratives can (fail to) move across media to games. Oh well.)
I can’t remember who said it best (it might have been me, come to think of it, because I am just that awesome), but “Games are possibility spaces in fore-sight, and stories in hindsight”.
As a designer, one is able to co-erce game systems to produce degenerate occurances (i.e. one is able to create interesting conflict through the trickle-down nature of systemic emergence, without resorting to bottlenecking and set pieces) which mimick conventional, writer-driven narrative, but have the bonus of always being logical and internally consistant – no “unbelievable” deus ex machinas are possible.
If we can really say that there is a set way to adapt narratives into games, then, as with adaptations of ‘art’ from any medium to another, it’s best to choose the most salient ideas (not the actual occurances in the narrative) and re-produce them in the target medium’s own terms. And games’ own terms require that we allow the non deterministic outcome of a player interacting with a system (if we want to do more than crank-work theatre, that is). The concept of narrative IS the concept of control over occurances. In the case of games, we direct that control in the player’s direction – we still hold the reigns of the system and its rules. In a way, that is games’ narrative structure – a level of displacement from a fixed set of events into a freer construct: a “Freedom Bubble” or “Possibility Space” the shape of which we sculpt through game mechanics.
I am ranting!
The problem in part here is divergent meanings of the word “narrative”. I think your use of it, in the context Jenkins was replying to, was narrowly, meaning a discrete, particular, individual story. So there it’s true that most video games don’t “adapt” stories directly from some other medium–that there is something about the nature of a game that inhibits that particular form of transit, and that this is unlike other media. You can have a book which directly “adapts”, that it to say, translates, a film’s particular narrative structure and vice-versa. You can also have books that do what games do, which is to be “inspired by” some other narrative and go off in a different direction within the bounds of what Jason Craft calls “large-scale proprietary fictional universes”. Now Jenkins is right that there is “narratological” activity between a Star Wars game and the particular narrative of “Star Wars” the film.
I did like the review, though. I have to say that I find the whole narratologist-ludologist debate off-putting, like Kucklich, and I think it’s spurred partly by the need (somewhat evident in the essays in First Person) to make studying games academically respectable. Now as I’ve said before, I can afford to stand aside from that, because I don’t have any need to launder my own aggressvely middlebrow interests in games through the normative mechansms of scholarly credentialling, but I still think Kucklich has a point that the drive to disciplinarity that pops up is a drag on the field rather than an enhancement.
Aubrey: What you’re saying reminds me of Kierkegaard:
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards.”
So games are lived life, and stories are life in hindsight. Hmm, this is not at all stupid. At the end of the day, there just is a basic retrospective sense-making in narratives, and this does help understand why it’s hard to do “deep” content in games.
There are many story-game adaptation issues, but one of the hard ones relates to the system stuff you are talking about: It just isn’t easy to implement human behavior in systems, and this is no small problem…
Tim: I agree that there is not real disagreement between and Henry Jenkins on this issue – I even think he agrees too.
I do think the “ludology-narratology” thing has been genuinely useful in helping shaping the f?eld and getting people to consider their positions – additionally, it has been the interesting angle that mainstream journalists have latched on to.
But perhaps it is a bit tired by now. It also seems that some people really feel that the mood has been nasty at times.
But these loong discussion about how to study games is probably also a reasult of the feeling that game researchers have a lot in common – problem is that we also come from widely different backgrounds at the same time. But strangely, the famous ludology-narratology thing was originally fought very much between people from similar literary or film backgrounds, go figure.
But I have to say that the big picture discussions of method also _are_ really interesting to me, I can’t help it.
Perhaps we need an external enemy to improve group cohesion.
Aubrey, I also touch on this on pp. 94-5 of Cybertext, but I think the person who said it best is Ragnhild Tronstad, whose brilliant paper, had the great misfortune to be presented on the morning of a certain day in Sept. 2001. Here she makes the crucial observation that questgames are performative, while stories are constative, and that quests turn into stories after they are performed. The game/story confusion is due to the fact that we tend to describe game events in hindsight, and not as we perform them.
Tim, the problem of not having aproper field of game studies is (among other things) that groundbreaking achievements like Tronstad’s don’t get the recognition that they deserve. We don’t need a discipline (there is room, and need, for many), but we can always use more discipline, i.e. better scholarship. Unfortunately, I think just saying this irritates people and causes – at least in part – the “nasty” mood. There is no “easy” way to say this….
As for K?cklich, critics are supposed to be grumpy, and he does make some valid points: the dialog/excerpted/online responses thing doesn’t work well (they should have included it all in the book) and the book arrives way behind the current debate. Well, not surprisingly, since it was written three years ago, with no opportunity (for me at least) to update the essays, counter to K?cklich’s strange claim in the review. Funny thing is, K was informed about this in June, but polemisizes as if he didn’t know that the essays are actually old. Strange.
Even funnier – I wonder what I have done to annoy K so much that he tries to frame me with fictitious agruments as an old fogie who can’t bear to utter a “negative value judgement” about games. Was he asleep in the auditorium when I introduced W. Spector in Tampere in 2002? I have taken much flak from industry people for my second editorial in Game Studies, and spoken negatively about games in countless press and radio interviews (true, 10-15 a year and it gets boring after a while), but of course, why bother to find actual mistakes when it is so much easier to construct imagined ones? The attention is flattering, but I would be more inclined to take K seriously if he were able to focus on the essay at hand, and represent it reliably. It shouldn’t be that hard.
This topic also discussed at http://ludology.org/article.php?story=20040907012906704
Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for all the attention for my review of First Person. It’s reassuring to see that getting on the Queen’s balcony in a Batman costume isn’t the only way to get some attention.
Just a couple of things:
a) Jesper
“And of course, it?s pretty strange to be criticized (by K?cklich) for not understanding how narratives can operate across media when the whole original argument was based on an examination of transmedial storytelling and how narratives can (fail to) move across media to games.”
Sorry, Jesper, I was not criticizing you personally. The Star Wars example was Henry Jenkins’, and all I said was that ludology [fails] to understand that narratives can operate across different media.” As far as I understand – and I am not an expert, so correct me if I’m wrong – ludology is not very interested in narrative, so this should be like water off a duck’s back to you.
b) Espen
“We don?t need a discipline (there is room, and need, for many), but we can always use more discipline, i.e. better scholarship. Unfortunately, I think just saying this irritates people and causes – at least in part – the ?nasty? mood. There is no ?easy? way to say this…”
The thing that irritates people – it certainly irritates me – is possibly the fact that you fail to make clear who ‘we’ refers to. If this is supposed to mean ‘we can all use more discipline,’ I can only say, ‘Speak for yourself.’ I have enough discipline in my life, thank you very much, and I certainly don’t need more of it.
“[T]he book arrives way behind the current debate. Well, not surprisingly, since it was written three years ago, with no opportunity (for me at least) to update the essays, counter to K?cklich?s strange claim in the review. Funny thing is, K was informed about this in June, but polemisizes as if he didn?t know that the essays are actually old.”
Yes, I was informed of this early on, and I have discussed it at length with Noah Wardrip-Fruin. My argument in this discussion was (and still is) that as a reviewer my responsibility is primariliy to the reader, not the publisher, or the editor, or the contributors. That means I can only assess the book in terms of its value at the time of publication, because that is what will determine its reception. It would run counter to the idea of a review if I said “Well, the book is totally out of date, but since its not the editor’s fault, you should go and read it anyway.”
In any case, I have alluded to the fact that “academic publishing seems to constantly increase the gap between new media scholarship and its objects of study” in my introductory note to the review, which is meant as a reminder that the idea of publishing writing on new media in book form should maybe be reconsidered. As far as the possibility for updating the content is concerned, this refers to changes on the manuscript as well as the possibility to put updates on the EBR website. It’s a shame that the system does not work (otherwise, we would be having this discussion on EBR), but as far as I understand this was meant, among other things, to give the authors the opportunity to add to their original contribution.
“Even funnier – I wonder what I have done to annoy K so much that he tries to frame me with fictitious agruments as an old fogie who can?t bear to utter a ?negative value judgement? about games.”
There are a couple of things that annoy me about your and Markku Eskelinen’s contributions to First Person, and I think I made them pretty clear in my review. However, careful readers of the sentence the above quote is plucked from will notice that the whole sentence reads: “‘narratologists’ and ‘ludologists’ alike would rather be fragged to bits than make a negative value judgement.” I don’t see why you take this as an attempt to frame you as “an old fogie” (according to Bartleby.com, a fogie is “an old military pensioner,” which makes the whole thing even stranger), when in truth I was trying to make a point about how the whole narralogy-ludotology-debate is distracting us from more intersting issues, such as ideological criticism of games.
So maybe we should take up Jesper’s suggestion and talk methodology instead. That would be much more productive than lobbing insults at one another.
PS: Does the fact that I presented a paper on the afternoon of “a certain day in Sept. 2001” at the same conference as Ragnhild make mine brilliant as well? I admit mine was maybe not “groundbreaking,” but I am sure it had quite a lot of “impact”. Watch your metaphors, Espen, the Department for Homeland Security might be listening in…
So, Julian, you write stuff like (yesterday on ludology.org) “Espen Aarseth’s self-righteousness in pretending that [he has] a more ‘direct’ access to games than other people” and then you expect me to take you seriously? To engage in debate? Nah. Insult me, but not like this.
old fogie just means a (grumpy) person no longer in tune with the times (ie narrow minded), at least in my culture. Espen, as far as I am concerned, you used it correctly and with a wry sense of humour.
I think most “ludologists” are people with strong narratological backgrounds, so we/they/whatever do care about narrative.
[Speaking in a high-pitched nervous voice:]
Now, you all be nice to each other! You are offending each other.
Jesper, why not take this opportunity to think productively about what “offending” means? I think we should make a distinction between to offend and being offended.
Many academics are almost automatically offended by others’ negative comments and evaluations. In my experience, offense is a reaction that most depends on the offendee, not the offender. Seen from the offender’s perspective, it is usually a regrettably unavoidable side effect of their legitimate action. While we as academics may offend, it is not our professional intention. And while we may be offended, we should make an effort to resist and see through our emotional response, which is usually not a valid interpretation of the offender’s intention.
Since silently accepting arguments and statements we know to be wrong or suppressing those we know to be right is not an acceptable academic practice, offense is a normal part of our professional lives. Since eliminating it would inevitably lead to a stale, lifeless discourse, instead we need to learn not to take offense, whatever the intent, as part of our training. Because in the cases where the offense is intended, becoming offended certainly doesn’t help.
I just don’t think we can have professional academic debates without accepting the risk of offense. Hmm, maybe some sort of EULA is needed…
I once wrote an article on new media then realised maybe there should be something like a EULA about writing on new media using theorists from a past age. The very idea of vetting the future by using writers from the past should come with some methodological caveats.
On the other hand, and this is to the writer of the original article that inspired all this debate, I don’t find Aristotle an outdated or outmoded theorist on narrative. And I still like Nietzsche’s PhD thesis on a similar matter.
However, one thing to come out of the debate is a possible literary challenge: in the form of a conference or collection of papers or chapters:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?essay_id=eskelinen&command=view_essay
‘It should be self-evident that we can?t apply print narratology, hypertext theory, film or theater and drama studies directly to computer games, but it isn?t. … Obviously I need a strategy, and fortunately I have one: to use the theories of those would-be-colonizers against themselves. For example, as we shall soon see, if you actually know your narrative theory2 (instead of resorting to outdated notions of Aristotle, Propp, or Victorian novels) you won?t argue that games are (interactive or procedural) narratives or anything even remotely similar. Luckily, outside theory, people are usually excellent at distinguishing between narrative situations and gaming situations: if I throw a ball at you, I don?t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.’
If an activity is unique does it require unique methods to describe teach and communicate its strengths and weaknesses?
For we don’t typically desribe or criticise games by playing or designing other games (although that would be interesting cf http://www.jesperjuul.dk/gameliberation/ ). We describe the game, we give it cause and effect, we tell our stories or others in experiencing it.
It seems to me more accurate to say these ‘other’ theories CAN directly apply to games, the question is rather whether they are missing something (ludology?) or whether they are in fact becoming something else.
Another rather sly argument may be that film criticism can be related to games (image schemata and the way in film use experiential or phobic triggers to gain audience engagement and reaction RATHER than how they tell or imply narrative) but this in term suggests that film criticism is not or should be merely about narrative.
In short, does narrative include ludology? And is the reading of images an inconsequentual step from reading text? I spoke to someone with an art background, a PhD in literature and halfway through a PhD in visual recognition (in philosophy and psychology) on this matter and he said yes media studies people and psychologists diverge widely on this issue.
Dear all, forgive my audacity, but on reading and rereading Narrative Architecture after having studied cognitive mapping I am afraid I don’t agree with the esteemed author.
Reading human agency from environmental surfaces is not actually narrative architecture.
I also see a big distinction in 3D game spatial understanding from the spatial understanding from books and from films. The former requires proprioceptive movement through inter related spaces to create an understanding of architecture while the latter does not require the reader or viewer to move through linked spaces. Readers (and cameras) don?t cross thresholds and circumnavigate perimeters on a regular basis. Gamers do.
And I think we can test this by studying whether the hippocampus is activated during say DOOM or QUAKE compared to reading say the HOBBIT (even though it has a 2D map). Has this already been done to death or do I truly not understand? (Maybe both!)
Perhaps I am too biased by the paper NARRATIVE EXPLANATION* by J. David Velleman, it is from an analytical philosophical framework and may not sit well with media studies.
I have written more on this but also,on theatre and meaning in regards to Tronstad’s paper. I like the bifurcation of action from representation, but I have some experience with theatre and with IF design and I suspect the first section has conflated defining attributes of theatre with any metaphorically compressed medium. I wonder if anyone would be interested in reading 1) or 2)…