Oh, Nick, I am not sure how to react in these situations anymore. Surely, I’ll keep my cool and sense of humor and I do understand that it is important that we take these things lightly if we do not want to trigger another Princeton conference blog-pong game (from which, for the record, I stood aside and tried to argue for the sake of peace and understanding, as well for as academic standards).

Anyway, first things first. Gerald Prince is probably one of the narratologists that I respect the most. I have been using his materials (notably his extremely useful definition of narrative) for a bit less than a decade now. He does not look like a Doom boss to me. Actually, his definition of narrative is extremely useful when it comes to show why games and narrative are so different (I have published extensively on this). True, I cannot go as far as saying that Marie-Laure’s work has been to me as clear and useful as Prince’s, but I have spent great deals of time analyzing it and trying to understand the points were we disagree.

Secondly, I am growing really tired of the simplification that states that ludologists strip narrative out of games. I hate to have to remind you of my curriculum, but I guess I have no option. If I just cared about game mechanics, I wouldn’t be receiving so much hate mail for September 12th. If my games were abstract, candidates for President of the United States would not ask me (and Ian) to design their games. If that was the case, I wouldn’t have spent the last years writing about social problems as discrimination, child abuse or alcoholism and how to design games that dealt with those issues. Is this Tetris-like? Are these examples deprived of narrative elements? I believe this is a fair and simple question, and I challenge anybody to argue for the negative. I am afraid that so-called narrativists are making a straw man of us. And please, do not tell me, ok, sure, you are an exception, but there is this quote from Eskelinen saying that narrative elements are ornaments from “The Gaming Situation”, because I am tired of that quote and it seems it is the only bullet so-called narrativists have (btw, I use the term “so-called” because, as I showed on my Level Up article, the real narrativists have still to stand up). I am not going to defend Markku (not only I do not think he needs to be defended, but he does not need my help for doing it). Usually, when I argue this, I am told that I am an exception and therefore not a true ludologist. If that is the case, I guess it is the proof that people have totally misunderstood what ludology is about. Please take a good reading at my 1999 article where I introduced the concept (be warned, my English writing was even worse by then). Again, I hate to quote myself, but I am tired of people playing the academic game without going to the sources. What follows are the enraged words that started this debate:

“Our intention is not to replace the narratologic approach, but to complement it” (Frasca, 1999)

“Our main goal was to show how basic concepts of ludology could be used along with narratology to better understand videogames.” (Frasca, 1999)

Again, Nick, this post is not really aimed at you, it is my chance (once again) to try to set the record straight on these issues that keep haunting me again and again. Again, have no problem accepting jokes and making fun of myself (I hope that those of you who know me personally will agree on this), but, please also understand that you, me, the GTxA team and a few other researchers who have known each other since the beginning of this adventure do get the joke and have no problem and taking a good laugh at it. But this is the online world, and there are plenty of newcomers everyday (welcome, by the way :) and some of them may get the wrong impression and they may buy into the caricature (trust me, it has happened in the past). People love academic fights, but we should provide them with real ones, not with ones based on misunderstanding and misreadings.

So, to wrap this up, I would just like to say that I do not do “Tetris Studies”. It is not my call to defend Espen, Markku or Jesper, but I think it would be almost insulting to oversimplify their work in such way (again, Nick, I am fully aware that that was not your intention in any way). I can only imagine, as I said, why so many people argue against these inexistent hard-core ludologists that supposedly leave narrative elements out of the equation (I had this same conversation with Matteo Bittanti two days ago and I think he changed his opinion after talking with me). There are no such hard core ludologists, at least, not that I know them. What there are is people who started studying this discipline from a formal approach, that I am not ashamed to admit, as I have done several times. The reason? When you stumble upon a new field of research, you must start from a certain approach, since you cannot take all the possible approaches at the same time. As simple as that.

So, to anybody out there who really believes -not as part of a friendly joke, but for real- that we are hard-core ludologist who worship Tetris, here’s a piece of advice: you are fighting against the wind. There is so much to do in this field that you should not waste your time so concerned about imaginary scholars.

Last, but not least, I encourage anybody who disagrees with what I just said to discuss it in an academic way. Certainly, we can do it here in the comments thread, but even better face to face in a conference, or even better through a nice, long academic article.

Wow, this was a long comment. I guess the can of worms is officially open :) Btw, the Doom pics are cute :)

Anyway: Gonzalo, I’m sorry for trolling you. I wasn’t intending to seriously annoy you. You’re of course right that your socially engaged games connect with the world in ways that go beyond game mechanics, and they deserve praise for that. I don’t mean to seriously characterize you as anti-narrativist or anti-narratologist, but I do think that I have different opinions from you on two counts:

• I think the discussion around game and narrative is an example of a lot of serious and useful thought that people are putting into computer games, and instead of denying that a debate is occurring, I think we should be debating (or exploring, as I’d prefer to say) the topic even more. It even serves as a good advertisement to other fields that people are getting serious in game studies.
• I think blogs are one of several forums that are suitable for people who want to “discuss [topics] in an academic way,” and you seem to prefer that conferences and academic publications be used more or less exclusively for such serious discussions.

I am afraid that so-called narrativists are making a straw man of us.

It probably happens, as does the reverse. But again, instead of going around and prodding one person’s characterization of another person’s argument to see if it is made of straw, I think it’s better to come up with specifically useful theories, approaches, and actual games (or games/literary works). This is why I enjoyed your article in First Person much more than Espen’s or Markku’s. Of course, Espen has already made a mighty theoretical contribution, with Cybertext, and Marrku is someone who has the kindness to insult American scholars in our own language, so I can’t complain that much, but I did find your article much more useful for thinking about games and for making games. A Boalian perspective is likely to inform my practice of making games in the future, if I ever manage to get back into doing that.

“Tetris Studies” is meant as a caricature, more than a characterization, of an “extreme game studies” approach. Actually, I don’t see a lack of narrativist approach being the biggest problem with game studies as Espen seems to conceive of it. I think the biggest problem is a lack of deep consideration of pre-computer games. But anyway, I am trying to be helpful at the heart, in this case, and only crusty and mean on my outer layer.

I do hope that people who come to a blog that has the tongue-in-cheek name “Grand Text Auto” and read my description of Gonzalo as a marine in hell will recognize that I am practicing parody. And not specifically parody of Gonzalo! Rather, parody of the whole idea that academics are violently antagonistic – that Gonzalo would act like the Doom marine and that I would think that he would. I know that senses of humor vary internationally (Uraguyans ranking near the top, as far as I can tell) and that some people might not get it, but it would seem difficult for anyone to read a list of recaptioned Doom monsters as serious critique of ludology or serious insult of anyone. I didn’t mean it that way. I was presenting a good-natured parody of the whole “ludology versus narratology debate,” as I did in another form on here before. I think people in the academic community can afford to joke with each other about issues like this, because what we’re all really doing is struggling with an understanding of computer games, not fragging each other.

May all future discussions be both ludolicious and narratasty.

(terms coined in our drunken haze at GDC)

As I completed the paper I presented in Burlington, I read these sad news in a review of Grand Theft Auto 3 in Game Studies by Gonzalo Frasca: “Both GTA3 and Shenmue tell a story. Yes, here you have a ludologist publicly say that games do tell stories. Spread the news !”. Without competitors, how can I still play the theoretical game “ludology versus narratology” ? I just love arguing and the attacks by ludologists on the concept of narrative have greatly helped me form my own concept of narrative. But I must say that the most recent tendency among ludologists to pronounce the debate pointless (cf. Frasca, “Ludologists Love Stories Too”) seems to me a cheap way out, for who started the debate ???? As far as I am concerned it is the narrativists who are a straw man constructed by the ludologists; for I am not aware of anybody writing that games are the same thing as novels and movies. Yes, the debate is to some extent pointless because it concerns the meaning of narrative rather than the nature of games; it now seems that the term “fictional world” has been endorsed by the ludologists to avoid the “n” word. It’s not my intent to bring the ludologists to their feet and confess their sin, but I would like to have them recognize that video games speak to the imagination—through their rich fictional worlds and narrative design- as much as they appeal to the lovers of strategic thinking. The denial of the imaginative side of video games is what Nick has in mind with “Tetris studies.” For me, video games are a unique blend of imaginative experience and strategic action, a blend that is the true contribution of the computer to gaming, because in earlier days we had either imaginative games, such as children’s games of make-believe, or abstract strategic games, such as chess and go.

In response to Frasca I think that he has made very good use of narrative concepts in his early article “ludology meets narratology,” especially of Bremond’s theory, and I could never understand why he had to declare such a strict opposition between simulation and narrative. Why couldn’t a simulative engine produce stories ? That’s what James Meehan Talespin did: it not only produced narrative texts, it also simulated a world, and kept track of the changes of state that took place in the fictional world as the story was being produced. And the story was different every time, depending on the user’s input, just as in games.

By the way, Gerald Prince tells me that he has revised his definition of narrative in the newest edition of his Dictionary of Narratology, and that it cannot be used any longer to exclude drama, movies and games. Why don’t ludologists keep up with the development of narratology, rather than freezing it to its 1980s state ?

What is at stake really is to find a way to apply narrative concepts in game studies in a way that goes beyond studies of adaptation of games to movies and novels and vice-versa, and in a way that does not isolate narrative plot from rules. Though Jesper Juul would not be caught dead using the “n” word, I think that he has taken major step in this direction in his dissertation by studying how games rules relate to the fictional world.

Finally, I think that between the position “all games are narratives because they implement a competitive situation reminiscent of the rivalry between a hero and a villain” (Murray, Pearce in First Person) and “No games are narratives because they don’t operate like movies and novels” there is ample room for more a nuanced position that views the set of all games and of all narratives as intersecting.

Far from continuing in a downward spiral, inacceptant of other ideas, I’ve come to a new, happier understanding: So long as our approaches end up making sense, why worry what direction they come from?

I’m often having to correct people, but on the whole, it’s me being anal, and hopefully providing a stronger understanding of the point in hand by studying it more deeply. I’ve had countless arguements that revolved purely around terminology, while agreeing about the point in hand – and not just with people on the other side of the fence! I find that such arguements don’t really enhance my understanding at the speed I’d like, and it’s mainly due to each person’s ignorance of the other’s background. In an ideal world, right now, every ludologist would pcik up a book relating to the field they know least about. Lit crit guys: pick up a book on formal systems or HCI. Mech guys: read a book about… that, um, art shit. (:D)

If games are a subset of interactive systems, and we live in an interactive system, then there are countless legitimate perspectives to look at games – religion, gender, race, maths, literature, food, sex. None of them are wrong. It’s not pointless for me, as a trained software engineer, to try to see through a literary lens and identify sutre and metaphor. It’s not pointless for Marie-Laure to try to understand us mechanists’ obsession with soulless, deterministic rules.

It is becoming more and more pointless, however, to quarrel over who’s perspective is the best. Science deals with analysis, theories, hypotheses, and experimentation. These should be our only frontiers for debate, not all this “My School of Thought is better than yours” shit-flinging.

Let me end by quoting something superfluous, in perfect narratologist fashion :p

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.” – Rudyard Kipling

(He says “69″ because quoting people makes you sexxxy).

Translation for the mechanist guys: Narrative control isn’t a boolean. Its degree is a design/artistic choice.

You see what I mean, now? We’re saying the same thing, and have been for a long time, but we’ve been too busy shouting “If you poke your nose in the gears, you won’t be able to smell anymore” and “Goddamn! Go fucking papercut yourself to death” at each other to notice that both parties are gaining deeper insights into games than there have been in the history of thought. Come to think of it I still have yet to see a ludological vs. narratological debate that wasn’t in contention due to a misinterpretation of the other camp’s standing.

(Sorry for posting twice in a row. Just trying to quote some more, to improve my sexyness.)

Me, I’m a centrist, always have been — one of my first papers was called “A Hybrid Approach to Creating Lifelike Dogz and Catz”, which cherrypicked techniques from games, cartoons, drama and AI. Although lately I’ve noticed myself shifting towards the ludological end of the spectrum (if before Facade I considered myself 20% off-center on the N-side of the fence, I’m now comfortable 20% off-center on the L-side.)

Otherwise I may have to develop a “ludology purity test” (1500 point version) for a similar purpose.

First of all Marie-Laure, thanks for your praise on my Bremond article. I was very proud of it at the time, but I got very little feedback from it (I guess very few people know their narratology and even less know Claude Bremond). I started studying narratology in the mid-90′s since I thought it would be a great tool for understanding videogames. I was not totally satisfied with the results and that is why I called for a discipline that I suggested to call “ludology”, as a set of tools that complemented narratology (1999). From day 1, I never discarded narratology from game studies. Surely, I do believe its use is limited but, again, from day 1 I always stated that games and stories do have similarities (as also Aarseth and Juul have repeteadly claimed). So, I am not sure why you were so surprised at reading my 2003 GTA3 article in Game Studies.

Marie-Laure says that my Level Up paper is “the cheap way out”. My point was that it never took place in a serious way. By serious way, I mean quoting articles and arguing with references, not generalizations and assumptions. This is why I am so glad that we are having this conversation.

About the “who started” this debate, well, I am afraid Marie-Laure that the so-called ludologists do not deserve the credits. Issues of narrative versus mechanics have been around for decades in the D&D community. See, for example, Greg Costikyan’s 1994 “I have no words and I must design” (Interactive Fantasy, online version available at http://www.costik.com).

Marie-Laure dixit: “Why don’t ludologists keep up with the development of narratology, rather than freezing it to its 1980s state ? Are you really making an accusation of this magnitude just because I haven’t yet read a revised edition published just 5 months ago?

Surely, we could expand the definition of narrative to fit games on it, but the risk is that the broader the definition, the less concrete it becomes. Still, of course I would love to read Prince’s new edition and study his new definitions.

Marie-Laure continues “I could never understand why (Frasca) had to declare such a strict opposition between simulation and narrative. Why couldn’t a simulative engine produce stories ?”. I think that you cannot understand the reason simply because you simply did not read my writings carefully. Of course a simulative engine produces stories. This reference is from one of my articles: “for an external observer, the outcome of a simulation is a narration” (Frasca, Simulation 101, 2001). By the way, the quote was in bold typeface in the original text, since I hoped it would catch the reader’s attention.

“The attacks of ludologists on the concept of narrative”. As far as I am aware, nobody attacked the concept of narrative. If there were any attacks, they were against overbroad or antique definitions of narrative and uncritical, naïve applications of narratology (mostly Aristotle, not exactly the most up-to-date narratologist around). Again, nobody attacked the concept of narrative itself, that would make no sense.

“It’s not my intent to bring the ludologists to their feet and confess their sin, but I would like to have them recognize that video games speak to the imagination”. I can only imagine this is a joke. “Recognize that videogames speak to the imagination”? If I wasn’t able to recognize this, then I would have no idea of what games are about. So, you are implying that imagination is the same as narrative? This is why it is hard to take narrativists seriously.

I believe that one of the biggest problems in this debate is that it is too easy to make generalizations. A clear example is when Marie-Laure states: “it now seems that the term ‘fictional world’ has been endorsed by the ludologists to avoid the ‘n’ word”. That is a statement from Jesper Juul’s recent PhD Thesis, but arguing that this is what “ludologists” believe just does not make any sense. Juul speaks for himself. As far as I am aware, there is not official ludological point of view.

I sincerely hope that these remarks contribute to a better understanding on why I think this debate has been plagued by generalizations and misunderstandings.

Show me yours and I’ll show you mine. :) Last year I circulated a draft paper describing a Gallilean-style abstract game and an ideal-type player to observe while using it. The game has precisely two states and a single rule. If you can go more abstract than that, I’d suggest your game may actually be a stick! :)

But I am confused how “narrative” is being redefined. Are we now adopting something akin to Grodal’s “story” as described in “Stories for Eyes, Ears, and Muscles” to broadly refer to “narrative?” It seems horribly disingenuous if this is the case; he-said-she-said. Removing linguistic context from and adding an absurd “everything in an environment goes” definition to narrative gains us what, precisely? I would no sooner want to do this than be forced to adopt equally absurd semiotics-everywhere rhetoric.

Narrative, as it is more classically known, is vital to many game forms. Do we need to express an obtuse definition (“…story as a world that had characters and objects undertaking meaningful actions, actions that had consequences in a system with rules and laws…”) just so that we can ensure games are as broadly submissible to semiotics as possible? This strikes me as jejune and ineffectual. Why scramble to misappropriate narrative “in a way that does not isolate narrative plot from rules”? Frankly, I think it’s a better understanding of the domains of rules and mechanics that will reveal this isolation is often impossible; broadening the definition of “narrative” to forcibly include rules is not only unecessary, I think its harmful.

Sorry if I am jumping to conclusions, but I fear my hero narrative might be forced to play patsy for overzealous semioticians; insecure for lack of TeXtris.

The game I’m working on is primarily abstract in its theme – you absolutely beat me on the mechanics side :). My hypothesis is that, without a realistic theme, or any hinting at direct simulation, the design of your mechanics are not led so much by preconcieved models, opening up new areas of possibility. You’re no longer simulating real world systems, and in making non-referential ones, your freedom to design is a lot wider. Also, the player is able to come into the game and does not feel like the game is “wrong” when it creates non sequitors by not reacting the way the system it refers to does. If it doesn’t *look* like anything, it’s free to act *any* way it likes without upsetting preconceptions. Hopefully hopefully players will accept it on its own terms, rather than feeling jilted about it not acting as expected. My friend, JP, is trying something similar in an FPS game. He gave the approach a nice term: “Naked Games”, which is kind of ironic, because we’re having to sell the clothes off our backs to have the freedom to attempt these trite little experiments.

God knows if I have enough time to finish it, though.

About simulation: Gonzalo says that in a 2001 paper he wrote “For an external observer the outcome of a simulation is a narrative.” Well, I fully agree; and to me the player of a game is both an agent and an observer—as she takes action she looks at the picture on the screen, just as an “external observer does,” so she must be aware of the story that unfolds through this picture. I must admit I haven’t read this paper. But Gonzalo has also published statements that clearly suggest a radical opposition between narrative and simulation. For instance the title of a 2003 essay by him reads: “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology” ? (In The Video Game Reader). Maybe my semantics are all screwed up, but the words versus suggests an exclusive relation: a semiotic object is either a simulation or a narrative. This is confirmed by other passages, for instance: “There is an alternative to representation and narrative: simulation…Traditional media are representational, not simulational. They excel at producing both descriptions of traits and sequences of events (narratives)” (223). While it is true that traditional media are representational, while games are simulatives, all this statement says is that games are not traditional media. It does not prove that they cannot suggest stories.

About: “who started the debate” between narrativism and ludology. Gonzalo thinks t never took place. May I refer him to the following articles ?

Aarseth, Espen. “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.” Waldrip-Fruin and Harrigan, First Person, 45-55.

Aarseth, Espen. “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis.” Papers of the 2003 DAC conference, Melbourne. hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Aarseth.pdf

Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1.1 (2001). http:///www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/

Frasca, Gonzalo. “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Difference between (Video)games and Narrative.” http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm

Frasca, Gonzalo. “”Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” Wolf and Perron, Video Game Theory Reader, 221-35.

Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling Stories: A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1.1 (2001). http:///www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/

Is there a comparable list of “narrativists” essays claiming that the study of games is nothing more than a branch of narratology ? (I certainly would not say that !)

The articles listed above demonstrate very eloquently that games have different properties than novels, movies, and oral storytelling, and I cannot argue with that. But they eschew the central question, which is whether narrativity is an exclusive property of these genres, or a cognitive template that transcends disciplines and media. The ludologists love Prince’s original definition because it limits narrative to verbal artifacts, and thus serves their purpose. They reject cognitivist definitions because, supposedly, these definitions turn every form of thought into a narrative, but a rigorous cognitive approach would define narrative as one specific form of thought among others. (Sorry to publicize my work, but I have a few things to say about this in the introduction to my forthcoming (June 2004) book “Narrative Across Media.”)

Finally, Gonzalo asks: “Are you implying that imagination is the same as narrative” ? No, but I think that in the vast majority of cases imagination takes narrative shape. Imagination is the formation of mental images of concrete objects; you can picture a horse in your mind but you cannot picture eternity. When these mental images picture objects and worlds that evolve in time, then indeed, imagination creates a narrative.

The only use of bickering about the label that games will forevermore have is in disciplinary claim-staking. Who was ‘first’ to use the word ludology, to claim that games were storytelling engines, to take the goddamn red pill? Who cares? What we have is a ‘field of study’ that’s still small enough to have clear queens and kings of the mountain, and those people seem quite concerned about making sure that their names get attached to one or another position.

But if the positions aren’t mutually exclusive – if games tell stories and games do other things, both of which are true as any idiot can see by now – then shouldn’t people just go on with their work, leaving the question of Who Got It All Just Right to posterity? I suppose tenure considerations come in there somewhere, but beyond that, it’s possible that one analysis of how games work will be better than another, perhaps better than all others, because it will give a fuller account of What’s Going On When Someone Plays A Game.

Looking over this thread in reverse order, I see a ‘description’ of mental activity that has nothing at all to do with brain science; a bit of nattering about the wording of a politically motivated article title; a sensible pointing-up of linguistic malfeasance in redefining ‘narrative’; the repeated mention of various posters’ involvement (and stake) in the ‘founding’ of a field of study, in good-old-boys fashion; some sensible pointing-up of the chest-pounding that accompanies these debates, along with some sexiness; some unjustified finger-pointing; some well-justified finger-pointing; and yet another person declaring the ‘can of worms’ to be open, as if everyone needed permission to be upset.

Oh, and NickM being, as always, solid and entertaining.

We now have several rather simplistic viewpoints on ‘what games are’ and how they work, along with a slowly-growing number of more nuanced theories (e.g. Zimmerman’s lengthy treatment in Rules of Play). Yet invariably games scholars spend as much time talking about one another as they do about the theories themselves. If anything, this is worse than literary studies, because at least on a lit faculty you can hide out somewhere and just go about the business of advancing the state of the field without rehashing summary judgments all the time. [Admittedly the youthfulness of the field has something to do with that. It'll change.]

I didn’t set out to be ill-tempered when I started posting this. But it’s unavoidable, I’m afraid, when people are so territorial.

O most excellent Aubrey, why must you be one of “them”? ;-) This is an interactive system, yes, but also a game. It’s got a rule that doesn’t reveal function beyond play and everything!

Yeah, I’m teasing but only slightly. This is why I’ve been unable to finish my paper, having to defend the model (against you troublemakers) by way of ontological argument. I spent the last year studying from brain science to animal behavior that I may develop grounds that games cannot, successfully, be more precisely defined than (synoptic) “a set of actions, patterned by rules, engaged for the purpose of stimulating emotions.” To do so is to begin needing clumsy allowances for exceptional “boundary cases” and, I argue, we should classify games as play objects based upon qualities rather than striking arbitrary distinctions between those we will call games and those we relegate to play.

A huge stumbling block to this field is our attempt to define the salient aspect of games while remaining preoccupied with good games or, another worse, taxonomical study of real (read: previously invented) games. This is partly why I began looking to abstract model systems (ideal-type action figure included!) for analysis. Wally brought up Rules of Play which is typical in the above respect; it assembles a faulty definition of games generally but a practical framework of “effective” games. (This would seem to be the intent and I recommend it to friends interested in the practice.) In my opinion, however, the problem exists that truly effectual critical or generative analysis cannot be done if we only construct definitions of good games, the reasons for which are obvious.

And good luck on the player acceptance! :)

I understand that you did not read my 2001 paper, so it is perfectly understandable that you missed that quote. However, I am a bit puzzled since you admit reading my 2003 article “Simulation versus Narrative” and you missed the paragraphs where I extend the exact same idea: “To an external observer, the sequence of signs produced by both the film and the simulation could look exactly the same.” (page 224). It would seem, Marie-Laure, as if you drew your conclusions by reading just the -admittedly provocative- title of my article.

What is more, you certainly missed this footnote in the conclusion -admittedly, a footnote but, as it says, this is not the first time that I argued this-: “Actually, I have suggested in my work Videogames of the Oppressed (following Aarseth’s ideas) that simulation and representation only differ in a matter of degree. But for the sake of clarity during these early days of ludology, it may be safer to consider them as different.” (p 235)

Looking at your extensive list of “ludological” articles, I am surprised that you continue to argue that I think that the debate never took place after I made clear to you on my previous post, let me repeat it, that “My point was that it never took place in a serious way. By serious way, I mean quoting articles and arguing with references, not generalizations and assumptions.” What is even more curious is that after I sent you a reference from 1994 that beyond any reasonable doubt shows that this argument has been taking place before any “ludologist” wrote about it, you still insist on trying to give Aarseth, Juul, Eskelinen and myself a credit that clearly we do not deserve.

By the way, of course there is no similar list of articles claiming that games are nothing more than a branch of narratology, you are simply caricaturizing my points and the ones of my colleagues. Still, there are many articles about games as narratives, starting with Niesz and Holland (1984).

Anyway, the main point argued on the extense list of ludological articles that you posted is that narratology’s limitations do not allow it to be the dominant approach for understanding games. And when I mean “narratology” is am describing the set of tools and theories available at the time of the writing. The interesting thing is that on your post you blame us for correctly quoting Prince, one of the most respected narratolgists alive! What is more, you admit that according to his published work at that time, narratology clearly could not efficiently deal with videogames! That, Marie-Laure, was exactly the point that Aarseth, Eskelinen, Juul and myself were trying to make when we wrote those articles!

But you go even further than trying to blame us for the limitations of narratology. I was perplexed at your first comment about the relationship between narrative and imagination, but now I am even more surprised that, after you clarified yourself, you keep clearly stating that you see narrative everywhere. While narrative plays an essential role in our culture, it is not as pervasive as you suggest. Plenty of creative disciplines can “speak to the imagination” without being narrative. This is exactly the mistake that most narrativists make: trying to adapt their narratological tools to phenomena that is not, or at least go beyond, narrative. The failure to understand this fact while arguing that narrative stands behind most creative works, including games, shows a clear lack of understanding not only of what games are, but also of what human creativity is about. No, Marie-Laure, narrative is not everywhere, not even almost everywhere. Still, you argue that “[…] in the vast majority of cases imagination takes narrative shape”. Try explaining that to thousands of musicians, sculptors, scientists, designers, poets, architects, painters and –may I?- game designers.

My current interest in the debate is whether the sort of stories that games can tell, is fundamentally limited by their status as games. I suspect that this is the case, and is due to the fact that all games, no matter how rich their imaginative or fictional element, operate from a core of mathematically based rules (pace Salen and Zimmerman).

Consequently the activities of game characters need to be able to be reduced to a digitally defined set of states – which means that game characters, unlike characters in novels, films, or indeed any other sort of narrative, are always rigidly determined in what they may do, say or think (or, more accurately, ‘be thinking’).

I think this is why we are never going to have game characters that display the psychological richness or ambiguity of Molly Bloom, Anna Karenina, or Achilles, no matter how sophisticated computer game technology may eventually become. The best we can hope for is jumping from ‘open’ characters in cut-scenes back and forth to digital characters in games. (And when I say ‘digital’, I don’t mean in terms of technology, but mathematically defined by the game’s formal rules). This is, for example, what I think Metal Gear Solid games try to do: have their psychologically indeterminate character cake and eat it.

So the danger from approaching games from a narrative point of view, is that games will never be able to have the same sort of psychological richness as other narratives. Game narratives are peculiar in this way, and if we don’t recognise this we’ll always be criticising them as unsophisticated when compared to all other forms of narrative.

Many apologies if this post has been uninformed or covers previously well-trodden ground!

game characters, unlike characters in novels, films, or indeed any other sort of narrative, are always rigidly determined in what they may do, say or think (or, more accurately, ‘be thinking’).

Novels are sequences of words, and films are sequences of images with synchronized sound. They have their own rigid rules, rules that are in many ways much more rigid. Just as Rudolf Arnheim understood that the limitations and rules of film make it possible for film to be an artistic medium, Salen and Zimmerman understand that rules are what allow the creative possibilties of games. The idea that rules prohibit games from doing interesting things is a mischaracterization, really a reversal, of the way rules are discussed in Rules of Play – I think it’s wrong, too, but it certainly doesn’t represent their approach to games.

I invite you to make your claim “games will never be able to have the same sort of psychological richness as other narratives” into something specific, even testable. Why not state something that you think a game cannot do? We may be able to point you to a game that does it or we may have an interesting discussion about that aspect of art. Otherwise, it’s just a sort of troll, like someone saying “people will never be able to express complex thoughts in Swahili.”

When (single-user) games can compete in psychological depth with novels and film, it may be time to deem John’s argument a troll, but before that, the burden of evidence rests on the optimists, those who believe in the tired old trope that someone someday soon will become the Toni Morrison or W.G.Sebald of “interactive narratives”. (But why is nobody wondering who is going to become the Will Wright of Literature?)

As far as I know, Swahili (and occasionally, English) is actually used for complex thoughts, but, as Marie-Laure has asked, who wants to play Anna Karenina committing suicide in a game? Of course, the Anna K. game can be made (and hey, no IP licencing fees!) but I rather fear it would prove, rather than disprove, John’s point.

Of course rules in themselves do not “prohibit” interesting storytelling (but John’s more specific point as I understand it was rather that rules don’t help with the psychology of characterization, but rather the opposite: you can’t simulate believable psychology, it has to be canned). This is more a question of why we enjoy good, psychological characterization, and why this characterization by all observable cases seems to need simulation rules like a fish needs a bicycle.

Max Payne 2 – “a film noir love story” [sic]- is perhaps the most lavish and successful story-game hybrid out there. I absolutely enjoyed playing it, yet it left me completely cold in terms of its psychology, and I cared about the main “characters” much less than I care about an individual ant in my garden.

And MP2 didn’t even try to simulate the inner lives of Max and Mona, but left it to canned voices and cut scenes. Would it have been better if they did? As I pointed out in Cybertext, the simulated people inhabiting computer games appear to be only half-living. Perhaps instead of the misleading term “characters” we should call them, simply, bots.

I think with The Sims we see a stripped-down realization of the subject-as-a-system that is appropriate to a culture on our side of the cognitive revolution. I think we see it also in Facade. When trying to naively (as opposed to knowingly) remediate the internal/novelistic or surface-image/cinematic structures of character subjectivity, games do poorly (with a caveat – as cartoonish as the characters in a Japanese RPG like Final Fantasy may seem, there is a sort of cathexis that accompanies the work of play that gives them real emotional impact – maybe it’s the result of that play-investment.)

I’m look forward to your essay in Narrative Across Media, Espen, and to the rest of that book. I hope you agree that a simple contest for psychological depth between novels, film, and games is not the most productive direction. I don’t think any of us here are interested in simply reproducing the things novels or films can do in a computer game.

the burden of evidence rests on the optimists, those who believe in the tired old trope that someone someday soon will become the Toni Morrison or W.G. Sebald of “interactive narratives.”

Although I’m not sure where the trope of which you speak is currently lounging, the more interesting question seems to me to be whether there can be new media objects that combine certain enjoyable qualities of games with certain powerful, resonant qualities of literature. Not so that we can put a fish on a bicycle, but in order to develop a new art.

As exhibit A (in this particular court case) I’ve submitted Adam Cadre’s Varicella, and Stuart Moulthrop and I have written in some detail about how this game – I assume some people think it’s a game, since it won the 1999 Best Game XYZZY Award – uses both literary and ludic techniques to accomplish something new and interesting. Although psychological depth per se wasn’t the idea of Varicella or of our analysis, we did write specifically about how the literary concept of character and the computer-game concept of “NPC” worked together. If there is a better explanation for Varicella that involves Tetris or bots but not Titus Andronicus, I haven’t yet heard it.

I would hate to characterize video game scholars as being people who, if you throw them a story, begin to dribble, but there has been great neglect of some of the recent interesting computer game work that relates to literature – probably because it has happened mostly in a slew of innovative non-commercial games. Restricting your attention to commercial games is a reasonable (and perhaps financially sustainable) policy, but making claims about what all computer games can’t do, based on such studies, is really rather tenuous. I don’t own a Windows computer or a current-generation console, so my own gaming experiences are far from typical, and do not include Max Payne 2, for instance. But then, I prefer to focus on the qualities of games that do interest me greatly – IF, classic console games, abstract shooters – and not draw too many conclusions about about what is unattainable.

On the other hand, I’m not opposed to looking for special qualities and abilities of a certain form or medium, as William is doing, because you can do this by looking for positive examples.

1. Narrative is not necessarily an aesthetic phenomenon. We use stories for practical purposes too—in medicine, law, business, and everyday conversation. So, claiming that game stories do not match the masterwpieces of literature is not a valid argument against their capability to be interpreted in narrative terms.

2. in response to Gonzalo.

True, he says in “Ludology vs. Narratology” (224) that “to the external observer the sequence of signs produced by both the film and the simulation could look exactly he same.” But the next sentence reads: “This is what many supporters of the narrative paradigm fail to understand: their semiotic sequences might be identical, but the simulation cannot be understood just through the output.”

So, what is Gonzalo’s trying to say ?

If he is saying here that simulation can indeed produce a narrative output, he is contradicting himself, since the point of the essay is to say that simulations are not narratives. (“There is an alternative to narrative and representation: simulation”.) On the other hand, if he saying that we cannot trust the output (simulations only “look like” films), all he has shown is that simulations (=games) are not films.

I think it’s a mistake to equate the state of the game as it is represented within the program with the way that that state is presented to the player. It seems to me that the latter is where the psychological depth, or lack thereof, would appear; it doesn’t (in my opinion) matter that the program states do not fully express what’s revealed by the dialogue, voice acting, etc. of the implementation. In order to have a psychologically interesting character, you don’t need to have an artificial intelligence capable of taking on all the possible mental and emotional states of that character, and building the expressions of those states from scratch. All you need is a state machine capable of taking on all the states that are going to be interesting in this particular situation, and of selecting and presenting an expression of those states (probably pre-written or assembled-from-pre-written-components). While I can’t think of any interactive fiction that approaches Anna Karenina, I can think of a number of IF characters who possess memorable and unique voices and attitudes.

So, while I agree with Nick in thinking that there doesn’t need to be a contest between games and novels and films, I do think that this comment is a bit off-base. And, for what it’s worth, IF has taken on stories about (among other things) suicidal NPCs or protagonists — some are dreadful, but some are not, and the fact that the experiment has been tried several times is itself interesting, I think.

My point on the article was simply that while any game could be viewed as a story does not mean that games should be understood just as stories. An external observer watching, say, a film about a live action role playing game will get an idea of what the game is about, but will miss the phenomenological experience that goes on within the group of players (and that is leaving out an essential part of the object of study).

I am sorry to hear that the previous was your final post, I was under the impression that this conversation was being highly illustrative. By the way, I never had the impression that you sounded like an academic in search of tenure. For the record, I am neither on tenure track and I wouldn’t like to be either.

Anyway, I hope this conversation between Marie-Laure and myself has been helpful and clarified some of the issues that have been haunting the “ludology versus narratology” debate. Many colleagues and readers have asked why is the point of insisting on this issue. Certainly, as I have said before, I would rather been doing other things. But my chore problem is that this debate has generated a lot of unfair and unfounded remarks against my colleagues and myself (of course, in this case I can just talk for myself). I am tired of being accused on groundless basis (I want to be accused for things that I have actually claimed, that is the fun part of academics!). It is as simple as that. Tired of having people (even personal friends) caricaturizing”ludologists” of mainly focusing on Tetris or Pong (not only Nick on this thread, but also Michael Mateas on the recent First Person (“The ludologists commonly use examples such as chess, Tetris, or Space Invaders in their analyses”). That is simply not true. As I said, I have been working for the last 5 years on political games: it doesn’t get less un-Tetris than that. Maybe this means that I am not a real ludolgist anymore (bummer! I will have to get a new domain name now :(

Still, the myth of the radical, Tetris-worshipper ludologist is so strong, that people will insist in believing it even when confronted with hard evidence against the contrary.

So, every time I hear these accusations, I have no problem in engaging in a good discussion. I will do my best, as I think I did in this case, to do it providing facts and references to published materials. That is the way that, I believe, this game should be played.

I realise this point is not exactly fresh or original, and depends on whether you believe that all games must have some sort of goal, or preferred outcome (as I do).

I certainly didn’t want to claim that game stories shouldn’t be interpreted in narrative terms. What I think is that there is a particular sort of narrative that suits computer games, and this sort of narrative is not psychological, but spatial. In fact, digital IF and games specifically are able to narrativise 3-D space in a way that no other medium can do; in this respect Half-Life (for example) is an extraordinary work of art.

I absolutely agree that “a simple contest for psychological depth between novels, film, and games is not the most productive direction”; that was what I was trying to argue in my first post. Profuse apologies if I came across as a troll; that was not my intention.

Like everyone else, I’m also looking forward to Espen’s article and Marie’s book. It’s a sign of a vibrant and relevant field when there’s always a groundbreaking work in press.