Reading the Fiction of Video Games

chapter 5 Reading the Fiction of Video Games

Mary McMenomy

Mythological Reception in a Half-Real Medium

…video games are two different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules with which players actually interact, and in that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.1

So Jesper Juul begins Half-real, his seminal work on the relationship between game mechanics and game fiction. Unlike almost every other medium in which classical reception is traditionally studied – unlike novels, poems, short stories, drama, and films – games are partly made of rules, the system by which the player may interact, the means of winning or losing or affecting the state of the game. A game’s rules contribute to the construction of the game’s meaning just as much as do game’s art, dialogue, or narrative structure. For instance, Paolo Pedercini’s protest work McDonald’s Video Game (Molleindustria, 2006) is a simulation in which the player directs the operations of the fast food cor- poration. The art and presentation are cheerful and upbeat, and the narrative text never overtly speaks against McDonald’s. However, a cutting critique emerges from the rules of the game: it is hard for the player to attain game- winning profits without growing high volumes of feed in environmentally damaging ways, treating employees unethically, and lobbying for special treat- ment from the government. The rule-fiction split is at the core of many debates, among both scholars and practitioners, about the nature of games. Game studies in the early 2000s saw scholarship split between ludologists who thought that games should be analyzed primarily as formal systems and narratologists who thought that

1 Jesper Juul, Half-real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (The mit Press, Cambridge ma, 2005) 1. Juul’s distinction between mechanics and fiction will be used through the rest of this article.

106 McMenomy games could be considered as new forms of narrative. Game critics speak of ludonarrative dissonance, the aesthetic distancing that arises from a game whose narrative meaning is at odds with the meaning suggested by its rule systems:

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all.2

Nonetheless, having some fictional content speaks to the game designer’s need to make a legible system. To play a game, the player must understand (even if imperfectly) how his actions will affect the state of the game. If the relation between the player’s actions and the game’s responses remains opaque, the player is doomed to frustration and may soon stop playing. The craft of game design offers many solutions to this issue: tutorials that train the player in the game controls; level progressions that gradually introduce new mechanics of play; scoring and achievement systems that reward successful player behavior; death and replay systems that punish unsuccessful behavior. Much of the craft of game design is pedagogical. A well-chosen fiction can support this communication as well. If the player has a choice of two weapons, one slower to use but dealing much more damage than the other, presenting one as a cannon and the other as a pistol is an easy way to make the distinction both clear and memorable. As Juul writes:

Even though fiction and rules are formally separable, the player’s experi- ence is shaped by both. The fictional world of a game can cue the player into making assumptions about game rules: In a game with a first-person perspective, the player facing evil-looking monsters is likely to assume that the monsters are to be avoided or possibly destroyed. If the images of the monsters were replaced by something benign, perhaps large flowers, the player will likely make different assumptions about the rules of the game.3

2 The term “ludonarrative dissonance” was first introduced by designer Clint Hocking in a blog post about the game Bioshock, from which this excerpt is taken. The post could be retrieved from as of 17:28 gmt, February 15, 2014. 3 Juul (2005) 177.