Games and narrative: Conflicting definitions

I've tried to keep this installment on games and narrative shorter than the previous one, but I'm afraid I haven't been entirly successful. After all, this post dips into some pretty deep theoretical territory and you know how that goes. At any rate, this post starts with a conversation that happened on Google+ in a thread John Woodring started about gamification in education. At some point in the thread, Roger Travis and I drifted into a fairly theoretical conversation about games and narrative.

His quick and dirty definition of narrative in that thread was "Performance of an account of events real or imagined." One thing that occurred to me while turning Travis's definition over in my mind was this quote by Tolkien from his foreword to Lord of the Rings:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of the reader. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Tolkien is driving towards the purpose of a work here in a way that is deeply tied to the agency of the reader. We can see in his consideration of books and their readers a thought that applies very much to the narratives that are tied to games and their players. I'll be picking up on this a bit more in a later post, but for now it's worth noting that issues of player agency are deeply connected to questions about narrative.

Travis is also concerned with questions of agency, and towards this end he does something rather interesting, and arguably controversial, in theorizing games and narrative. Specifically he works through the concept of performance to bring the acts of gameplay and storytelling closer together. He's coined the term practomime for this purpose which he renders in short as, "playing pretend in a context where everyone agrees that playing pretend is what you do."* I don't want o jump all the way down the rabbit hole of practomimesis here, as this post would become inssuferably long if I did. I do however encourage you to read about it on his blog as the concept is at the very least provocative, and he's definitely getting some mileage out of it in his current design work.

For this post, it's enough to note that there's some distance between Antin's definition of narrative and Travis's. In our conversation on Google+ I attempted to reconcile the difference between the two definitions noting that:

If we table Antin's definition of narrative for now (as it's probably less useful at a pragmatic level), your definition of narrative isn't all that far from Antin's definition of story. The main differences is that he places transformation at the center of things, and you're using performance where he uses representation.

I should note that the pragmatic level I'm referring to there is the act of game design. I wouldn't have brought Antin's defintion of narrative up in the first place if I didn't think it's extremely useful for theorizing gameplay and understanding designer processes and player experiences. It's just a good distance out from an actionable design principle while his definition of story, like Travis's definition of narrative, actually puts us closer to an actionable principle of design. Needless to say, this is especially true for design cases where games are being used as story telling vehicles.

In this context, it's always worth remembering that the transformation of a character is the essential product of conflict in a story. Conflict is ultimately the key driver that makes a story compelling, and this is perhaps a more useful way of thinking about the part of Antin's definition of narrative that focuses on "the confrontation of a desiring subject" in the context of design.

As to the bit about representation, I noted in that thread that I see performance and artifact creation as the two essential modes of representation. Games are by definition artifacts, but unlike other artifacts they explicitly call upon the player to engage in a performative act. I believe this is a large part of what Travis is getting at in trying to bring narrative and game closer together, as ultimately all artifacts (and even all performances) call upon their user/audience to engage in a performative act. Games just do this forcefully.

Ultimately, I do believe that Travis's and Antin's definitions of narrative cannot be fully reconciled. However, I've found a very productive tension in looking at the disjunct between the two. If anything, it reinforces the need to maintain story and narrative as distinct terms when engaged in processes of game design and game studies (including player studies, designer studies, and artifact analysis). After all, story allows us to focus on a sequence or possible set of sequences, and sequences are ultimately useful for thinking about loops.**

* If this is reminding you of talk about magic circles, join the club. I'm not taking that particular issue up in this post either.

** Aah loops. Loops and narrative are definitely for another post. However, since I brought them up I will say that although I don't always find myself in agreement with Tadhg Kelly's theoretical approach to conceptualizing games (especially regarding win/lose states), I definitely agree with his statement from that post that, "The loop is the essential atom of gameplay."