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.

###

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.

###

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.