AmericanWiki: Cultural Practices: Women as Characters in Video Games: Narrative

Narrative

This is a sub-page of Women as Characters in Video Games

     The earliest games, such as Tennis for Two (or Pong, the title it was eventually developed and marketed under), were simply tests of skill and had no story elements to them at all. Today, games like this are still quite common, such as the massively successful Bejeweled franchise by “casual” game developer PopCap. But even many of these casual games come wrapped in a flimsy outline of a story, which is ostensibly supposed to make the game more “compelling” (to use an industry watch-word) and thus marketable, popular, and addictive. Even when no formal story elements are stated, games such as PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies have a rudimentary kind of narrative arc defined by the progress of the player through levels.

     It is in the “AAA” mainstream games that narrative story has come to be a crucially important part of making and marketing video games. Developers like Bioware boast of the number of full-time writers they have on staff and their “respect” for the “writing process”(Bissell 112). Written scripts for games can be as long as novels, running into the hundreds of thousands of words. In most cases, these stories are fixed, and the game-play is used to advance to those points where the story is revealed to the player, but in some games, the actions and choices of players actually contribute to and change the direction of the story that is revealed by the game. Even these multi-optioned stories are defined along set lines, though, much along the same lines as the “choose-your-own-adventure” books.

Formal Narrative

     Modern game narrative takes most of its cues from Hollywood story-telling. Major story elements are most frequently revealed to the player by cinematic-style “cut-scenes,” where the player loses control of the action in order to watch characters interacting along pre-scripted sequences, often in pre-rendered visuals (which means that the images were created ahead of time in the developers studios and don’t use the game’s “engine” to create the images “on the fly”). These are, in essence, short films set in the game’s world which advance player understanding of his or her character’s place and role in the events which surround the game. They can be a powerful tool, and came to prominence with an influx of Japanese games in the late 1990s with the introduction of the Playstation (and especially the Playstation 2), which used CD-ROM storage, allowing for more information to be sent to the player than ever before. CD-ROM games for the Personal Computer had been using pre-rendered and "full-motion video" for a few years by then, but the quality of the video and the games was generally very poor. Games like Square's Final Fantasy VII pushed the boundaries on what players expected from "cinematic" narratives in their video games.

Ludonarrative

     There is another kind of narrative at work in video games, though. The act of “playing” the game, interacting with the mechanics and game-play elements, often allows players to perform actions totally unrelated to, and often in contradiction of, the narrative elements provided by developers. This interaction is discussed by game developers and critics as “ludic” or “ludonarrative” elements, from the latin for “play.” For example, players often find interesting things to do with the physics of a game and create elaborate visual performances such as the “Warthog Jump” video from the first Halo, (see inset video) where someone stopped following the game’s directions in order to sit on the beach and fling the game’s vehicles high into the sky with grenades. He then recorded the results, added a sound-track taken from various films and songs, and uploaded it to the internet for others to enjoy. This created a “story” of sorts within the game that was completely unrelated to that which the developers intended. Halo proved popular for these sorts of actions, as the game was later used as the basis for creating a whole internet comedy show, called Red vs. Blue set in the game’s world and using the game’s characters in ways they were never intended.

     Ludonarrative is generally more personal, though. Tom Bissell discusses ludonarrative at length when writing aobut his experiences in Grand Theft Auto IV, wherein he tried very hard to keep his character’s actions in line with the characterization on display in the formal narrative elements, but couldn’t resist the occassional murderous rampage (though always in an un-saved game) because the mechanics of the game make it so easy and reward these player actions (174). Clint Hocking of game development house Ubisoft Montreal wrote a now-famous blog piece describing the “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock” in that the actions that the game requires of the player contradict exactly the moral and thematic elements of the story the developers wanted to tell. Thus, in any game, there are two narrative veins that can be tapped into by the player: one, that which the developers inserted as “story,” and which will be similar across all experiences of the game; two, that which the players create through the actions which the game allows (and some which were never intended, but are the result of mistakes in the programming) and which are always going to be unique to any play-through for any player.

Formal vs. Ludonarrative

     The question becomes, then, upon which group of narrative elements should a study of women’s roles in these games focus? Do formal narrative elements like cut-scenes and dialogue send stronger messages about women because of their cinematic techniques, or do the ludic elements have more force to the player since they represent actual choices that he or she has taken? In the end, both are important, because in theory both are included in the game by the developers, and both are interacted with by the players. Player-characters’ interactions with women in cut-scenes are just as important as their interactions when under player control.

Works Cited

Bissel, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon, 2010. Print.

Bungie Studios. Halo: Combat Evolved. Redmond, WA: Microsoft, 2001. Video Game.

Hocking, Clint. "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock." Click Nothing: Design From a Long Time Ago. Typepad, October 7, 2007. December 14, 2010. < http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html>

Square Co., Ltd. Final Fantasy VII. Tokyo, Japan: Square Co., Ltd., 1997. Video Game.

AmericanWiki: Cultural Practices: Women as Characters in Video Games: Narrative