Getting into the debate...

This Week:

Simulation versus Narrative, Gonzalo Frasca
Interactive Storytelling, Chris Crawford
Gaming Literacy, Eric Zimmerman
The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form, David Myers

I consider myself on the fringe of the (Video) Games Studies “narratology” versus “ludology” debate, and generally critical of both argumentative fields, especially when authors declare that one notion is seriously superior to the other. I suppose the presupposition could be that we need to choose one method of analysis over the other to be more as opposed to less certain that the games are being thoroughly evaluated, but I can’t help but feel that much of what’s going on here is, “No, really, your way is wrong.” Maybe I’m reading too much into these argumentative threads, but the essential ‘stuff’ of both arguments seems at worst different flavors of the same elusive creature.

So, I’m going to ask a lot of questions and not give a lot answers. Hopefully over the coming weeks I’ll discover a more concrete method to view this debate and understand the discrete differences between the two arguments, but for now, it’s time to dive in.

Frasca’s article is by no means the quintessential document for ludological study, but I approached it as a sample of the kind of things one might hear in the “Seriously, it’s not a narrative” debate. Within the first few pages of this article, I had a kneejerk dislike of Frasca’s initial description of Ludology as one “who is against the common assumption that video games should be viewed as extensions of narrative.” This did little to assuage my concern that ludology exists for some reason other than to declare narratology a terrible approach to video games analysis. To his credit, the author clarifies that ludology does have an agenda besides poking holes in the narrative paradigm: “As a formalist discipline, it should focus on the understanding of its structure and elements - particularly its rules - as well as creating typologies and models for explaining the mechanics of games.” Fair enough, but does this definition really include a process for literary – narrative – analysis? And if it does, how does this approach preclude the arguments of the narratologists?

A shortcoming of the narrative, claims Frasca, is the mostly unshakable sequence of events that must occur for the resulting effects to have any sort of meaning. The author of a narrative must maintain executive control over the possibilities of their narrative to maintain story cohesion. This is certainly the case for modern notions of authorship (as opposed to the Medieval, which were not this way), but what of a situation like multi-user textual environments, where stories are co-written and the authors are plentiful, varied, and often itinerant? Well, one could argue that while there is active collaboration in these games, there is usually an administrator to adjudicate narrative incongruencies; said administrator would have executive control. Similarly, the narratives of the Final Fantasy series, or even popular MMOs, are most certainly under executive control of the author (or developers) and generally not subject to unplanned change.

Essentially, video games as narrative are representative – they show, and thus are not interactive, whereas video games as simulation are intrinsically interactive by merit of the simulation, which must respond to stimuli (the controller, keyboard, player input, etc.). However, I can’t shake a nagging concern that all games seem to be lumped together here with the assumption that they all must work the same way: Are Real Time Strategy games, for example, the best and most fair method of analyzing a narrative approach to gaming when many RTS games have, arguably, a vastly superfluous story or narrative? Does SimCity even have a narrative? Is it possible to consider a video game as a simulation with this separate thing that is a narrative, which should be evaluated with its own set of tools, but yet not be completely divorced from its medium (the simulation)?

More soon.