If you know your film history, you probably know that historically, many theorists and practitioners were strongly opposed to the use of sound in film as they felt it would detract from the special qualities of film.
Here is Paul Rotha in 1930:
No power of speech is comparable to the descriptive value of photographs. The attempted combination of speech and pictures is the direct opposition of two separate mediums, which appeal in two utterly different ways …
Immediately a voice begins to speak in a cinema, the sound apparatus takes precedence over the camera, thereby doing violence to natural instincts.
Why am I quoting this? It struck me how much I was replicating this in an early paper on games and narratives:
But computer games are not narratives. Obviously many computer games do include narration or narrative elements in some form. But first of all, the narrative part is not what makes them computer games, rather the narrative tends be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game.
Are these arguments similar?
- Yes – both arguments assume a core feature or core interest in a medium.
- No – you really can have sound and image at the same time, whereas especially early uses of narrative (cut-scenes) worked by taking control away from the player, making the game less of a game.
Please discuss.
about narration, let me stay away of the pack that says that games needs to be open-ended, no limits, borderless. on the contrary: people always want to see a good story unfold. the question is not if to narration kills the game, but how to add narratives to games. so far I haven’t seen anything good.
and about sound, imagine a game in black and white. why not? it’s a bit artisitic, isnt it? but imagine a silent game. naaa… so here’s an answer to the modern Paul Rotha
BTW, even if you dont have sound, it is created in the imagination of the players. see the individual noks at noks.com – only speech, no sound, and still a story is told by the text bubbles.
Keep in mind that early “silent” films weren’t experienced in silence; there was usually a soundtrack or live piano player giving accompaniment. Later people tried doing more complex and powerful things with sound in movies, and after a few hiccups, it served to strengthen the medium.
So it is with narrative and games. We’ve always had elements of narrative in games, even though they were rarely essential, much like the piano that came with the “silent” movie. God willing, soon we’ll figure out how to include narrative in a powerful way that strengthens the medium as a whole. As it is, narrative-focused games are like a silent film that’s built to fit around a soundtrack.
I do think it’s silly to claim that the core of games lies somewhere entirely apart from narrative.
By the way, I was heartbroken to hear that you’d be visiting Dartmouth College on the one term that I happened to take off in order to break into the games industry. Please come back some time in the spring or summer!
I agree, it seems much more natural to couple the moving image with sound than it does to couple game and narrative. But we are operating from the assumption that cinema should offer a “mimesis of the real” because that is what we have known for all of our lives (or “most” for some really old visitors, I suppose). Paul Rotha seems to be operating from the idea that cinema is like photography, which itself would be place somewhere along the ancestry line of painting or other visual arts. (Or that it is like theater, going from scene to scene, delimited by title cards and speeches that appear on screen) They would be self-fulfilling, and one would gaze at them to decipher the artistry. In this sense, when we will finally have found the supposed holy grail and moved on to “real” “interactive storytelling” in “games”, after a hundred years of seeing those new…”things”, I wonder if we would think that the coupling of game and story (or whatever we will call them then) were somehow a “natural fit” much as our ancestors of the late 20th/early 21st century thought moving image and sound were a natural pair.
I don’t think the two arguments are analogous at all. On the one hand you have two different media, on the other you have two different concepts: gameplay and story. The original argument is more akin to the one where many thought that games would never be as good in 3d as 2d.
But anyway, I disagree with your reasoning that gameplay and story are diametric opposites as well. In all but the most abstract of games, even things as fundamental as rules have aspects of story to them. Having a low attack value in d20 is part of the story that you are weak, and as you level up and get more powerful, that aspect of gameplay enhances the story that you are growing more powerful as a character. And vice-versa, story aspects such as ‘you got powerful enough to defeat the dreaded zergon of blerg’ give meaning to the gameplay of levelling up your attack value.
Even in something as abstract as Dicewars (http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice.html), your dice are still telling a basic story about your strength and that of your opponents. If all the story aspects were removed, maps, colours, etc, you arguably wouldn’t have any idea what you were supposed to do or why. Whereas even those simple elements make it immediately obvious what the game is about and what your objective is.
In a way, it’s almost impossible to have a game without any aspects of storytelling at all. Imagine you took the calculations of d20 and put them into a spreadsheet, removing all the story-related sugar-coating, your ‘attack’ value for example swapped for the variable ‘X’, it’s likely that you wouldn’t even understand what was happening, let alone have any fun.
I’m usually in the camp of those who believe that narrative and interactivity can play together but I’m personally debating whether this analogy is valid. Sound is really more a channel of expression where as narrative is something that really has no tangible form but it’s more of a construction that can be interfaced through these channels (sound, video, pictures, and text). A game is also a similar construct.
Perhaps I’m missing the point. Maybe this is about being skeptical on narrative and games, like early film-makers were as well. Nevertheless, I feel that we’re dealing with a more complex task.
Hi,
This is too tempting for me to ignore. There are many other commentators on cinema who disagree with this. Anyway, as far as the analogy with narrative and games is concerned, I believe they are supplementary in the Derridean sense. The so-called danger of the ‘violence to natural instincts’ can be ‘that dangerous supplement’ which Derrida refers to:
this foreign or dangerous supplement is ‘originarily’ at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and soul’. It is indeed at the heart of the heart. (Points, 244-5)
The very ‘originary’ existence of either game/narrative challenges any binary conceptions. As you yourself observe elsewhere, ‘In video game studies, the denial of fiction is an alluring position that I have also previously taken […] Though the conclusion is tempting, it is also false’. (Half-Real, 13). I agree wholeheartedly. Lifting this straight from my thesis – just defended it at the viva.
However, I end wondering how silent or noisy is the silent film – I’m thinking of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan d’Arc (cf. earlier comment by E. McNeill). My answer to your question is therefore that perhaps the two arguments (early-cinema and early-ludology) are similar.
Just curious as to why you revisit this. By the by, I guess it’s a bit late in the day but all the best for the new year (and more interesting posts on The Ludologist).
Cheers.
can one have narrative without words?
i would not be surprised to learn that Mr. Rotha would also be indifferent to the type of narrative that one might imagine is missing from games of today; it is very doubtful that he would have been ignorant of operas or stage plays, the importance of spoken word to their narratives, and the similarities they would have shared with the new medium of movies.
while his main argument may be directed at sound, i would not underestimate the consequences it would have had on narrative, what that says about his underlying vision of what movies should be, and how that compares to the similar position on games.
Thanks all for replying.
I guess it was a slightly mysterious post, and it wasn’t at all supposed to be about games and narratives.
What I found fascinating was that I realized that the kind of early argument about “games are destroyed by adding ingredient x” is in many way similar to arguments made about other media:
* Film: Film should not have sounds as it detracts from the core strength of film – images.
* Music: Music should not have lyrics as it detracts from the pure music.
* Painting: Painting should really about the flatness of the canvas.
… and so on.
Souvik, all these arguments are on some level similar in that they claim to know 1) what the medium _really_ is and also veer a little towards 2) protecting the “purity” of a given medium. 1) is better than 2), isn’t it?
They are dissimilar in that the _other_ that the medium is being protected from (sound, lyrics, representation, narratives) are also very different things.
Thanks Jesper. Yes, the dissimilarity lies in the media-specificity of the ‘other’ … but the medium itself is an emergent element as Kate Hayles says. To cut to the chase, I agree with you. May I suggest Deleuze’s Cinema 2 on another position that problematises the easy binarisms of the talkie vs silent movies. A google book search should take you to the relevant pages. Your comment made me dig it up again.
What happens when you reverse the argument? Ie, you can’t have a film WITHOUT sound?
Essentially, given that people argue that they KNOW what the medium is, they also protect its purity from substraction. Think of how many people who argue that X is not a game because it doesn’t have {a winning condition, score, goals} or {isn’t played on a console, doesn’t have a controller, etc.}. Yes, I know that you’re talking about intersecting media, yet the dissecting(?) question can also be productive. :-)
Definitely a nice challenge to various essentialist assumptions.
The analogy breaks down, I think, at the respective paradigm rifts. “Sound” and “moving image” are different media, while “narrative” and “system” are different patterns. The dynamics of merging media and merging patterns are in turn very different.
In modern games we have many cases where interactivity is suspended entirely while narrative is delivered. Even as sound and speech were reshaping film back in the 1920s and 30s, we never saw sections of films where the visuals would go black and audio would carry the drama for a while.
So I’d hesitate to say that the story-free, game-qua-game will ever become a thing of the past the way silent films have. The persistence of the former seems to demonstrate that interactivity has more of a separate existence from narrative.
Two points:
1) From the texts I’ve read out of the so-called silent era, it seems that the majority of critics and film practitioners looked at the possibility of mechanical sound synchronization to moving images as inevitable. While Bazin’s claim that sound film fulfils the prophecy of the cinema (“Myth of Total Cinema”) seems a bit overblown, if we look at many pre-cinematic optical devices we can see a deep history of sound accompaniment–phantasmagorias with glass harmonicas, chronophotography of speaking people with actors providing speech from behind the screen, etc. So this Paul Rotha quote (as well as others we could probably find from the avant-garde, cinephiles, etc) could be seen as an exception rather than the norm.
2) I’ve always found interesting the ways in which the establishment of sound film is elided with the establishment of classical hollywood narrative in a lot of film history. The coming of sound destroys the hope the avant-garde had for a revolutionary, non-narrative medium, it solidifies techniques of continuity between cuts, etc etc. So while sound raises questions about the specificity of cinema as a medium, narrative as such for both games and film seems to be less a question of apparatus specificity than one of modalities of these media, or how shifts in the apparatus effect on the “content” of the medium. So along these lines, we could think of something like the Wiimote–something which more fully projects the movements of the body into a game world. This seems to me to be a clear instance of a shift in the nature of the apparatus that has a direct effect on this troubled relationship between game and narrative–the vast majority of games I’ve played on the Wii have little to no narrative aspirations, and perhaps this is a product of the Wiimote. Though others may disagree?
If stories are really about people and how they interact, then a story without speaking seems unnatural. Sure, social interactions can be shown with just pictures, but that’s weird because that’s not how it happens in real life. In real life, people talk. The stories of life happen through talking.
Similarly, in games that have stories without cutscenes, your interactivity with the narrative is usually exploration. The story is fixed and you can explore it. But doesn’t that feel unnatural too? In real life, people make choices. The stories of life happen through your choices. And an interactive story without choice seems like a story without dialog. It can be done and done well, but doesn’t seem like how it happens in real life.
Or did I miss the point?
Looking at this analogy I would have to say that the arguments are dissimilar. My main argument is that cut-scenes as they are right now interrupt the game. This would be more like the breaks in a silent film where the dialogue was presented rather than the sound that was added later on.
If a new way to blend narrative and gameplay was to be used, and a cry of disapproval was made, then I would relate the two. That would be the sound that destroyed art of games. But to my knowledge such a blend is not yet realized. Personally I like sound in my movies; I would be welcome to a non-interrupting narrative in my game.