BA4 Contextual Studies: Creating Coherent Worlds #02

Games Telling Stories?

By Jesper Juul

We were asked to read an article by Jesper Juul on the narrative structure and rules for games. I will paste certain parts of the article that I find interesting or helpful and I will try to make some notes on them. 

CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE 

• 1)We use narratives for everything. 2) Most games feature narrative introductions and back-stories. 3) Games share some traits with narratives.
  Without narrative, there wouldn’t be any flow or  drive to pursue the game.
  
• 1) Games are not part of the narrative media ecology formed by movies, novels, and theatre. 2) Time in games works differently than in narratives. 3) The relation between the reader/viewer and the story world is different than the relation between the player and the game world.
  I believe this stems from the view of non players of games who believe it that you can never be as fully immersed in a game story/world as opposed to a book or film almost as if they aren’t even a form of legit storytelling.
  
• The primary thing that encourages the player to connect game and movie is the title "Star Wars" on the machine and on the screen. If we imagine the title removed from the game, the connection would not be at all obvious.
  There needs to be a strong correlation between a film narrative structure and a video game narrative structure (and vice versa) for the player/viewer to understand and follow the narrative itself.
  
• Now, not just in the sense that the viewer witnesses events now, but in the sense that the events are happening now, and that what comes next is not yet determined.
  Narrative in film, novels and other non game related media has a sense of “now” to its tense where as a game often does not, or can at least drastically change the tense in ways other media does not.
  
• […]you cannot have interactivity and narration at the same time. And this means in practice that games almost never perform basic narrative operations like flashback and flash forward. Games are almost always chronological.
  Flashbacks/forwards and cut scenes in games are set up for the player and almost give away no narrative elements. They are always chronological with the events that unfold and they can not be interpreted in another way.
  
• The reader/viewer need an emotional motivation for investing energy in the movie or book; we need a human actant to identify with. This is probably also true for the computer game, only this actant is always present - it is the player.
  The viewer needs something to become emotionally invested in to feel the full effects of narrative.
  
• The difference between the now in narratives and the now in games is that first now concerns the situation where the reader's effort in interpreting obscures the story - the text becomes all discourse, and consequently the temporal tensions ease. The now of the game means that story time converge with playing time, without the story/game world disappearing.
  I picked this out because I thought it  made sense when I read it but now I am not so sure. I think it means that in game, the player controls time throughout the narrative structure and that this in itself is NOT narrative structure because it is being controlled by the player whereas in books the reader is given a tense and time frame to grasp when reading the story so the narrative unfolds itself. I am probably very wrong –sad face-.
  
• Narratives are basically interpretative, whereas games are formal.
  I think this means that games force the player down a formal narrative path whereas the reader/viewer of other media is interpreted from the material given under strict narrative structure.