The reading and writing of video games

The second query that popped up during my presentation was whether you could categories  video games as being either read or written by players. This is a pretty good query which I've looked at somewhat through my research, but for the most part it requires a bunch of methodologies in order to operate in a significant way. Or rather to be properly understood.

Thinking about this I can see some problems that can arise from this dichotomy of reading and writing, it sort of presupposes that you can't do both at the same time (or rather it's hard to think of doing both). But I'l raise these queries later after we've worked out what this theory can do.

First thing's first though, what does one mean by players reading and writing video games?

Reading can be taken as the player following on from what the game (or developer) expects them to do, running around, building things, shooting things, jumping, etc. More or less following the cues of the game. First person shooters and adventure games generally follow this method of audience interaction.

Writing can be taken as the player making their own meaning from the game, jumping when they shouldn't jump, shooting where they shouldn't, building what should not technically be built. It should be noted that I'm presenting writing as an adversarial counter point to what the game/developers encourage. The point to be made here is that these specific actions aren't necessary to occur for the game. They are actions that the player does of their own volition. A good example of this would be Super Mario Maker or The Sims - especially in consideration of how players have subverted the cues given in the game.

This is somewhat a relevant to the notion of active and passive interactions from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work (he's not just all about Flow theory). These active interactions are an ongoing process  that produces mental or physical exertion (or a combination of the two) to form an activity. Whereas passive is usually just a mental activity which can be thought of as traditional mediums (books, movies, tv shows).

The implementation of this theory would be to display that way that games can tell, or how games can provide the means for story. Though how both is encountered in games is a bit more mysterious.
This makes it so that games are either telling or providing the means for story - not a collaboration of both, which can be seen in a variety of video games. The story in Halo is based on the exploits of Master Chief (blowing up the Halo ring), but it also provides the means for the player to construct some of those exploits (defeating 5 elites with no ammo).

This means that games are telling and providing the means at the same time for story creation. And so the way that we discuss games should reflect this dual nature (but also be happy to mix them). So a distinct binary might not be the way to go, but at this early stage starts the discussion about what types of stories can come out of video games.

Travelling and presenting!

Recently I gave a talk on my proposed PhD concerning Narrative Structures within Videogames (which you can see the powerpoint slides here), which went very well at Gothenburg University. It seems strange to have a holiday and then be presenting, trying to write papers, fixing up PhD work, but I guess that's how things work out when you like your work.

Over the next week or two (before Christmas), I'll be attempting to write up further blog posts (since I should have more free time). This is mainly to highlight previous work, but to also discuss issues that have risen with my PhD.

Namely the all encompassing nature of frameworks, or rather why narrative isn't the end all of games.

In the presentation I left room to account for games that don't have a strictly defined narrative and pointed towards the nebulous (at least how I described it - I'm not trying to besmirch Juul) concept of emergent narratives. Here narratives are thought of as emerging out of the game from set pieces of content which the player could decide as being integral to their narrative (so a cardinal function), or purely circumstantial (a catalyst). A nice category, or so I thought.

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Could you account for platformers or simulations in this type of category?

Sure thing. (This type of easy applicability I was happy with)

Well what about games that have a strong bent towards the abstract - something like Angry Birds?

(Fair enough question, I think for a moment)

The thing to note here is that I'm not trying to make grand claims about how narrative controls or is everything within a game - there's other accounts for that. (Nodding heads are in the crowd). What this does is provide the possibility for those types of games to be analysed in a narrative manner - the effectiveness of this, is another matter entirely. Really these games should focus on the structure of their design, so the effect of their aesthetics, colour and sound, not purely this notion of text. I don't want to be Janet Murray making grand claims about puzzle games, but rather allowing for the possibility for those types of narratives to be there.

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I think I resolve the issues with using narrative structures for non-narrative games there. To make things simpler it would be far better to remove the category to prevent these sorts of grand statements about video games. But then I'd be removing a large portion of non-traditional narrative games (such as Crusader Kings II or FTL). To a large part I might have to just simply stick by my guns and reiterate that there are other methods of analysing the "story" of Angry Birds, or Solitaire that are better suited to design studies or aesthetic studies.

The next concern was the notion of how interpretation/storytelling works within videogames - how they can be read, but also written by the player (which can totally be a paper). But that is a query for another time.