Narrative Pleasure in Single-Player Video Games
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Wesleyan University The Honors College Plot, Participation, and Playing Pretend: Narrative Pleasure in Single-Player Video Games by Ari Polgar Class of 2018 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors from the College of Film and the Moving Image Middletown, Connecticut April, 2018 Acknowledgements The whole of this wonderful, exhausting project would not have been possible without a great deal of help from a great number of people, to whom I am infinitely grateful: Thank you first to my advisor, Scott Higgins, for taking this leap with me into the wild world of video games. None of this would be possible without your guidance, considerate advice, unflagging support, and all those discussions about what your kids are playing. Can I borrow Breath of the Wild when they’re done? Thank you to the Wesleyan College of Film and the Moving Image for teaching me everything I know about film and rolling with it when I said I wanted to write about video games instead. Thank you especially to Lea Carlson for being a rock-solid support and an open ear when I needed them most. And thank you to Logan Ludwig for coming to my rescue when technology failed me. Thank you to Jason Haas and Chris Foster for taking the time to talk with an enthusiastic film student with minimal knowledge about video game scholarship. Your recommendations, feedback, and advice have been more of a help than I can say. Thank you to Robyn Hope for your recs, suggestions, and unfailing positivity when I had no idea what I was doing, and even when I did. You’ve been an inspiration from the very beginning. Thanks to all my friends who have listened to me talk endlessly about how cool video games are as still like me. You’ve been the best sounding boards and sources of encouragement I could ask for. Special thanks (and congratulations) to my co-thesis- er Graham, who understands. We did it! More than anything, thank you to my family. Mom, Dad, Kait, Didi; thank you so much for the edits, and the support, and putting up with me when I spent all break locked in my room. I wouldn’t be here without you. 2 Table of Contents It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.1 PRESS START: AN INTRODUCTION TO GAME NARRATIVE ............................................... 4 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF GAMES AND GAME STUDY .......................................................................... 5 1. STEP BY STEP: TELLING STORY THROUGH SPACE, STRUCTURE, AND CINEMATICS ............................................................................................................................... 15 BRAVE NEW GAME WORLDS ........................................................................................................ 18 LIGHTS, CAMERA, CUTSCENE ....................................................................................................... 25 HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO PROCEED ........................................................................................... 38 2. LIVING THE STORY: ENGAGEMENT, EMPATHY, AND THE AVATAR STATE ........... 45 WHAT’S IN A NAME ..................................................................................................................... 46 BE A PART OF THE NARRATIVE ..................................................................................................... 61 3. WANDERING THE WASTELANDS: PLAYER AGENCY AND THE OPEN WORLD GAME ............................................................................................................................................ 68 PUZZLING THROUGH SPACE .......................................................................................................... 71 LAST STOP TO EVERYWHERE........................................................................................................ 80 4. NARRATIVE IN GAMEPLAY: CHARTING NEW HORIZONS WITH UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF’S END ................................................................................................................................ 91 O BROTHER WHERE WERE THOU ................................................................................................. 94 MIRROR MIRROR........................................................................................................................ 106 PUSHING BOUNDARIES: WHAT COMES NEXT .................................................................. 112 SELECTED GAMEOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 118 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 120 1 Takashi Tezuka. The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo, 1986. Famicom. 3 Press Start: An Introduction to Game Narrative A square of light and a rickety ladder point the way forward. It’s a short climb out of the dusty room, full of chests and papers even after hundreds of years, a faded remnant of a city lost to time. The ladder creaks as someone climbs, light streaming in from above, and then Nathan Drake emerges into the open air, standing atop a domed roof and blinking in the sun. He joins his brother Sam at the roof’s edge, an old iron railing the only thing between them and hundreds of feet of empty space. Before them stretches Libertalia, a lost pirate city, rediscovered after so long. Its streets and buildings are overgrown, skeletal reminders of those who once lived, once-neat roads and houses overrun with green beneath the blue sky. Mountains rise around them, and wide waterfalls cascade down them as a river threads its way out to the sea. Far in the distance, tucked between two green peaks, lies New Devon, a jewel set in the island’s crown. As Nate and Sam marvel at the view the camera cranes back, drifting away until Sam and Nate are tiny figures atop the roof with the whole of the island spread around them, beautiful and enormous and untouched for the past two hundred years. The scene only lasts a moment––there is treasure hunting to get to––but the sensation lingers, the feeling of standing at the top of some brave new world, its people gone but their echoes left in their wake. It’s a world made of memory and dust, out of time and larger than life, and as Nate and Sam push on the awe remains, transcending time and space and screen, and in that moment the world of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End could be as real as the game controller and the blinking PS4 in the corner. 4 The power of this scene––barely a minute among hours and hours of gameplay––speaks to the impressions video games leave with their players, those that stick long after the computer is turned off or the controller put away. Players hold on to their favorite moments: clever moves in the final fight, conversations had with beloved NPCs, ridiculous solutions to simple problems, hilarious failures, beautiful environments, haunting soundscapes, instances of connection and joy found in play and in participation. Video games, with their emotional depth and narrative involvement, hold as much possibility for storytelling as books or films or radio or television or theatre or any other media one can imagine do. Like all media, they are positioned to tell a unique kind of story––just as there are tales better suited to novels than film, or theatre than radio, video games have their own set of tools and conventions that foster a new narrative experience. By mirroring story and gameplay, games can balance narrative and play pleasures. Through fostering an empathetic relationship between a player and their avatar, and an imaginative relationship between a player and the game world, games invite players in and embed them in their narratives. Altering the relationship between player, avatar, and game space allows developers to tell a variety of stories. It is this triad, and the empathy and imagination that unifies it, that allows for resonant, absorptive stories, producing the participation and presence that character-driven narrative games strive to achieve. A Brief Overview of Games and Game Study Games have been around as long as people have thought to play, but video games are an invention of the twentieth century. What began as the digitization of 5 pre-existing games has since grown into a unique media, one predicated upon player interaction and participation. The most rudimentary video games first emerged in the 1940s and ’50s in universities and labs, places where people had access to the computers of the day. Popular gaming arose in the ’70s and ’80s with the boom of arcades, which offered joystick and pushbutton games. Home consoles began to appear in the ’70s, with the famous Pong (Atari 1972) and other simple games. Through the end of the ’80s, as technology continued to advance, arcades declined in popularity while handheld and 16-bit computer games rose. The ’90s marked the introduction of 3-D game graphics, which in turn allowed for new forms of video games, those that relied on depth rather than lateral movement across a screen. Chief among these new game forms were the first-person shooter, the real-time strategy game, and the massive multiplayer online (MMO) game, which grew out of the more rudimentary Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Arcades faded as home gaming consoles became more popular; gamers stayed in to play rather than going out. Among the games of the ’90s was Myst (Cyan 1993), a puzzle adventure game that members of the community lauded as an early example of the