Ludology vs. Narratology or those were the days Miguel Sicart Computer Game Theory Spring 2005

Today’s Menu A brief history of computer games Obviously, games are narratives As a matter of fact, games are games Why is all this relevant? Discussion

Once upon a time ...

Brookhave Atomic Research Tennis for Two 1958 William Higginbotham Brookhave Atomic Research Analog Multiplayer “Forgot” to patent it ...

Spacewar 1962 Created in the hacker environment of MIT Steve Russell, Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan Edwards Open Sourced Benchmark for new technologies: mouse, screens, arcade machines, ...

Hunt the Wumpus 1972 Gregory Yob’s game hit the mainframes in 1972 Written in Basic, predicts the explosion of Dungeon games, like ...

Adventure (a.k.a. Colossal Cave) 1972 - 1976 Will Crowther designed a cave exploration simulator, redesigned by David Woods into a D&D inspired game that started one, or maybe more genres

Space Invaders 1978 Taito created this extraordinary concept that generated many subgenres with very basic gameplay options

Asteroids 1979 Vector based shooter (advanced concept and design by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg) Huge economic success!

game industry almost died back then! Those were the days ... Thanks to Pong (1972) and other popular arcade machines, Atari controled the arcade market until its crack in 1984 ... game industry almost died back then!

... but there is more to this (hi)story ...

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1980 Bruce Artwick, SubLogic Started the technical simulators ... but is it a game? (oh, no, not that question again!)

Pac-Man 1980 Toru Iwanatu Time declared Pac-Man “man of the year” in 1982 (!) First computer game personality!

Root of Nintendo’s success Donkey-Kong 1981 Shigeru Miyamoto Root of Nintendo’s success Super Mario Bros (a spin-off the original game) used as a start title for the NES system in 1986

Classic MUD 1978-1980 Richard Bartle & Roy Trubshaw Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

It’s like Adventure, but with nice graphics ... Myst 1993 Rand & Robin Miller It’s like Adventure, but with nice graphics ... It saved the industry, but Robin miller left the company right after the sequel, and its online iteration was a commercial failure

Turn Based Strategy: Civilization 1991 Sid Meier

Doom need I say more?

Some other relevant names ... Richard Garriot: Akalabeth (1979), Ultima Series Star Raiders (1979) - 3D/2D, First Person Space game Maze War (c. 1975), perhaps the first death match FPS (developed at MIT)

Time is on our side: a chronology 50s - 60s: the beginning is the end is the beginning: Space War, Tennis for Two 70s: Pong, home consoles, industrialization, arcades, adventure games, RPGs, start of the 3D 80s: Better graphics, adventures die, new genres emerge (simulation), economic crack (1984) 90s: Technologically driven innovation, massive industrialization, the Internet, Hollywoodization Now: Portable, pervasive, open sourced, independent (?), ...

And now, for something completely different ... or not

Narratology vs. Ludology I Assault

What is a narration? What is narrative?

Arguments for the narrativeness of games Everything is a narrative Games have back-stories, and narrative introductions Games share techniques with narratives

Everything is a narrative well, maybe, but that doesn’t mean that everything is narrative!

Games have back- stories which are actually relevant for the gameplay

Games use narrative techniques even flashbacks!!

... so ... Games and stories actually share some traits, but that doesn’t legitimize their study as only stories The problem is how do we define narrative, and how do we apply narrative tools for analysis.

Narratology as the enemy Games can only be understood as narratives Long tradition, due to the influence of literary studies and hypertext studies Understimates notions of play, gameplay, and even game design

Ludology

the good guys? Games use narrative techniques, but gameplay and the game structure are more relevant. Games might simulational traits that narratives cannot have. Game shave a structure of their own that cannot be understood as narratives.

But games actually use stories ... Group work: Find now examples of how games tell stories (besides the back-stories, and what is written in the package)

Is there a convergence?

Quest games!

What are quest games? Quests are an overarching structure that applies also to narratives They can be solo or plural Narrative is after the fact (constative), while quests are performative (we make them, we experience them) Quests tend to have a reward/punish structure

or, in words more clever than mine ... A conflict between act and meaning is present in the activity of quest solving too. To do a quest is to search for the meaning of it. Having reached this meaning, the quest is solved. The paradox of questing is that as soon as meaning is reached, the quest stops functioning as quest. When meaning is found, the quest is history. It cannot be done again, as it is simply not the same experience to solve a puzzle quest for the second time. (Tronstad 2001, pt. 4.1)

Exercise

Take the narrative for the game of your dreams (existing or that you want to make), and then describe briefly how would you implement that narrative: what is back-story, what is cut-scene based, what are quests What kind of game would that be? Quest game, non narrative game (Tetris), Myst?