Post 9 : Invisible Strings

McGonigal’s paper was a very captivating read. I have never read 15 pages that quickly before. She raises 3 ideas from the puppet master gameplay which are as follows:

1. Different kinds of action & interaction can qualify as gameplay. ( I believe she is making a reference to people doing wild antics in public as well as the refusal of the PM to interact with the player during the game)

2. Dramatic Interpretation as a game mechanic. We have dice-rolling, play-acting as some of the many mechanics that we use in traditional games. McGonigal suggests that interpretation of the rules/instructions may also be a game mechanic in itself.

3. The importance of the dramaturgical perspective for pervasive game design. This really means seeing the players as actors who have a script announcing the director’s intentions. They are still able to and will bring in their own personality into the characters.

First up, I wouldn’t say McGonigal’s ideas are amazingly new and mind-blowing because they are not. I believe they have been used in game design for quite a while already and D&D as she mentioned is a prime example. I only think that no one has put it down in ink & paper as she has done.

I think the novelty factor and the feeling of being part of some larger organisation has a lot to with the success of the PM model of play. This is where the wild antics come in. You can watch the movie “Fight Club” where later in the story, an organised mob forms which does the most ridiculous things such as getting birds to poop on expensive cars. Basically you need group support to allow yourself to let go of your inhibitions such as conducting a séance in a crowded place. This game gives you a reason (of questionable validity) to do things that you won’t normally do. Thus her 1^st idea can only be used in limited scenarios and does not appear to have long term potential in terms of crafting interactive media systems.

I find her 2^nd and 3^rd idea more useful for developing media systems. I think rule interpretation is something we all do, but to make a game of it is quite a clever thing. It already exists, in word puzzles and such but it would be a good idea to integrate it more into the overall mechanic of the game. As for designing the game as a dramatic piece, attempts have been made in game design which involves people imbuing personality by changing the hair colour or look of the character. But it stops there. A more elaborate way of allowing players to bring in their own personality into the game would be the holy grail in future character design.

Post 8 : Games first, Narratives later

“Examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility” - Jenkins

One of the key points that stood out in Jenkin’s paper was his appeal that we examine games less as stories and more as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. Considering that throughout the course we have been racking our brains on how to input interactivity (a superset of the action referred to as play) into a narrative, I must admit that Jenkin seems to make a lot of sense to me. There is no need to force a story into a game and as shown, many popular games (such as tetris, snake & pac-man) exist without a story. The narrative portion comes in to enhance the game and in doing so becomes an inseparable part of it. Take for example games with sequels that are based on sci-fi settings. Without an accompanying narrative, it becomes impossible to publish a sequel. In the 1^st editions of Halo, all the talk was about its game play and interactivity by extension. Now when I looked up the Wikipedia entries for Halo 3, the article was mostly about its plot. Why do I point out all this?

I wish to get across the idea that narrative and play have intertwined fates. Just because at this moment it seems to be that narrative has more attention than the game play. It does not mean that we must try to fit game play into narratives. The basis of the game is the platform/engine/world on which it operates. What is possible and what is impossible is very much dependent on what the platform enables one to do. We are at a stage where we feel encumbered by the limitations of the platform. We are unable to express all forms of narrative adequately. Right now, and also in the near future, I believe the platform/engine/world will be the limitation to what sort of narratives can be expressed adequately in games and thus it makes loads more sense to examine games less as narratives and more as spaces that have the narrative potential instead.

Post 7 : GTA (Grand Text Adventrue)

I would choose “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” as game that aims to incorporate strong narrative elements. It is the 5^th game in the series which first started out with a nameless and faceless main character. It now has a very strong narrative element. The story has always been that you are a career criminal trying to make it rich throughout the series.

There is a large game world. And interactivity in the game comes through the variety of things one can do such as hit random people on the street, highjack cars, rob banks or enter race car competitions. Almost any vehicle can be operated and almost every object reacts to your actions (basically it can be destroyed).

This game would be a good counter argument to the supposition that narrative & interactivity can never co-exist. You are free to take on missions at any time and there are plenty of things that the player can do between missions. Eventually you get bored and decide to complete the mission. I think boredom and wanting to open up more portions of the game world is a big motivation to move along the narrative. The interactive nature enhances rather than limits narrative. Take for example an assassination mission. There are many way to complete it due to the interactive nature of the game and each leads to a variety of outcomes such how much your “wanted” rating goes up by. If you can do the job in a way that you are undetected, you may simply walk out on the street. Else, you may have to escape to a safe house and wait for things to cool down.

Of course when it comes to some points in the narrative, the user loses control. This is especially when it comes to cut scenes in which the character is forced to do a special move such as jump out of a plane and parachute to a location. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t say there is an very high tension or a trade-off between narrative and interactivity. There comes a point in games when sometimes all you want to do is watch the story unfold like a movie. I’m actually guilty of playing just to watch cut scenes especially when I was playing Warcraft 3 & Max Payne. Hence there may be a tension but I just don’t feel it’s that pronounced enough to conclude that narrative and interactivity cannot co-exist.

Post 6 : Contrived Differences

I somehow get the nagging feeling that differences between hypertext fiction and interactive fiction are purely contrived out of some inane human urge to always perpetuate an “us versus them” attitude. Allow me to state my case.

Montfort uses the following definition of hypertext fiction:

“[A] system of fictional interconnected texts traversed using links; an inter-connected text referred to as a lexia.”

According to Montfort, the key differences between hypertext fiction and interactive fiction are that, one is unable to respond by inputting text unlike in an interactive fiction, there is no maintenance of an intermediate, programmatic representation of the “world” in which the narrative activity takes place and that there is no method for the computer to understand natural language.

Firstly, it has to be said that Montfort has a rather limited appreciation for the multitude of ways in which interaction may take place other than via typed responses. His narrow view may arise as consequence of giving a great deal of attention to text-based games as the first forms of interactive fiction. Looking around, we now know we have transcended that era with World of Warcraft and other visual games. Interaction in these modern interactive fictions takes place on multiple levels with voice activated commands, hotkeys and clicks, none of which can be considered “natural language”. Which is why, I am very reluctant to accept arguments that revolve around text-based input as a differentiator between hypertext fiction and interactive fiction. If anything, this perceived difference is a result of having not pushed the boundaries of interactive and hypertext fiction. If I start using voice activated commands on my computer to navigate Ryman’s “253” novel, what does that mean?

With regards to hypertext narratives not maintaining an intermediate representation of the narrative world, I wonder if Montfort has read Ryman’s “253” novel which breaks down his argument entirely. There is a deliberate determined structure of moving between train carriages and moving from seat to seat, which I feel is similar to the feeling of intermediate world representation say, the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy gives me.

Something that I believe deserves mention level of technical ability required to create a work of interactive fiction as compared to a hypertext work. A lot of things Montfort mentions such as the program’s in-built ability to recognise text input in natural language stems from a having coding background to make such work possible in the first place. In that respect, hypertext fiction is more accessible and hence more widely accepted and studied.