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

2. 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

3. Once upon a time ...

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

5. 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, ...

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

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

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

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

10. 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
game industry almost died back then!

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

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

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

14. 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

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

16. 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

17. Turn Based Strategy: Civilization 1991 Sid Meier

18. Doom need I say more?

19. 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)

20. 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 (?), ...

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

22. Narratology vs. Ludology I Assault

23. What is a narration? What is narrative?

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

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

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

27. Games use narrative techniques even flashbacks!!

28. ... 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.

29. 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

30. Ludology

31. 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.

32. 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)

33. Is there a convergence?

34. Quest games!

35. 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

36. 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)

37. Exercise

38. 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?