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Playing the Story: the Emergence of Narrative Through the Interaction Between Players, Game

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Playing the Story: the Emergence of Narrative Through the Interaction Between Players, Game Playing the Story: The Emergence of Narrative through the Interaction between Players, Game Mechanics, and Participatory Fan Communities. by Ryan Clement A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2017 © Ryan Clement 2017 Examining Committee Membership The following served on the Examining Committee for this thesis. The decision of the Examining Committee is by majority vote. External Examiner Astrid Ennslin Professor, University of Alberta Co-supervisor(s) Karen Collins Associate Professor Neil Randall Associate Professor Internal Member(s) Andrew McMurry Associate Professor Michael MacDonald Associate Professor Internal-external Member Kristina Llewellyn Associate Professor ii AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. iii ABSTRACT If all games are understood as ultimately driven by the operation of their mechanics, then that operation cannot fully exist without the interaction of a player, and by extension the participatory fan community in which that player is situated. This interaction, in turn, can often produce a form of constructed reality known as emergent narrative, leading to this dissertation’s primary question: Do game mechanics inherently produce emergent narrative? Throughout this dissertation, I will argue that game mechanics produce an emergent narrative as an inherent consequence of their interaction with players and the surrounding community. In answering how emergent narrative comes out of the interaction between players, games, and ultimately the surrounding community, I will examine five key issues: player agency, the actual production of emergent narrative, narrative in non-narrative games, the role of participatory fan communities, and the potential use of emergent narrative in applied game design. Each of these areas in turn will be investigated through the lens of a case study on a relevant game. The main underlying idea that this dissertation adds to ongoing research is that the production of emergent narrative is an unavoidable consequence of playing a game. While the degree and direction of emergent narrative may vary considerably depending on the interaction itself, the very act of interacting between the player, their surrounding participatory community, and the game itself always produces some form of emergent narrative. This distinction makes any play experience potentially meaningful, and helps move the academic discussion of narrative in games beyond outdated ludology-versus-narratology models towards a more fluid and accurate theory of emergent narrative in games. This should allow for better iv games scholarship, better game design, and better application of game elements in applied contexts. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my thanks for the support of my supervisors. Dr. Karen Collins was instrumental in providing consistent and detailed feedback throughout my work on this dissertation. Dr. Neil Randall and The University of Waterloo Games Institute provided support as well as funding, space, and equipment for the “Use of Persuasive Games to Promote Empathy for Persons with Food Allergies” study and the development of the Kitchen Table game. This project also received support from Dr. Susan Elliott and The University of Waterloo GET-FACTS project. vi DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my supportive family who made it possible for me to study an area of passionate interest, even if they did not always understand it. It also dedicated to those who still believe in the power of story in games. vii PREFACE “Come play with me, Uncle Ry” my young niece calls to me during a visit to my parent’s house back in Brandon, Manitoba. This refrain is a familiar one whenever my niece is around, and curious to see what kind of answer I will receive, I ask her laughingly, “why do you always want to play?” Without missing a beat, or worrying about deconstruction, semiotics, or any other form of analysis, she simply responds “because playing’s fun.” I find myself spending time with a four-year-old niece who knows I “know a lot about” games and wants to learn how to play the wooden snakes and ladders tabletop game she received for Christmas. This particular game has quite a long history behind it, dating as it does back to the ancient Indian game of gyan chauper (Toppsfield 13). Gyan chauper, which bears a strikingly little changed resemblance to its modern descendent, was part of a family of Indian games whose dice-roll and token movement mechanics would eventually inspire some of the “classic” board games of the modern era, including commercial titles such as Sorry!, Parcheesi, and Monopoly.1 In ancient India, as in modern-day Canada, the main purpose of playing snakes and ladders was to amuse young children, but it also carried with it a mythological and culturally- infused model of the life that lay before them. Landing on a ladder or sliding down a snake were actions that, particularly in ancient Indian religious contexts, echoed the never-ending conflict between virtue and vice that sometimes moved one forward in life and sometimes moved one back. While the game mechanics themselves are primarily rooted in chance rather than in skill—although there are variants on the rules that allow players for example to elect 1 Please note that for purposes of this dissertation, I will only be capitalizing and italicizing games published under a proper name. For example, Monopoly and Tetris would receive italics and capitalization, but neither would be afforded to soccer, snakes and ladders, chess, or go. viii not to climb a ladder if they so choose—they are intrinsically intended by design to mechanically model and reflect the various decisions one might make over a lifetime. The up and down, back and forth, fortunes of the individual player not only mimic the struggle between vice and virtue, but create an emergent narrative of winning and losing in the community of players and spectators. In the end, this model has proven resilient enough not only to survive in India from ancient times to the present day but to spread to popular adoption in cultures around the world. For my young niece, however, she just wants to know how to play—or rather, more importantly, she wants to know how to win. It quickly becomes evident that if the rules of the game make it more difficult for her to do so, she will happily edit them on the fly—normally without seeing the need to first discuss such revisions with her opponent. One might think with such an open-ended understanding of the game system that the exercise of playing the game itself is effectively rendered redundant. My niece, after all, could simply declare herself to be the winner just as easily as modifying the rules to ensure she wins. Yet she does not. Such an action does not appear to even merit consideration. If she is to achieve satisfaction through defeating me at the game, my niece must allow some modicum of an opportunity for victory for her opponent, even if it is only a semblance of one. This is more than simply a chance to prove that she is better than me at the game. It is an opportunity for her to assert her skills, her success with her cultural development, and her progress towards maturation. It is also an opportunity for her to assert her social identity and her individual worth, even if she has not quite yet learned how to count all one hundred squares on the board or to sit still for an entire game. Like her token, however, she is taking steps in that direction. ix Like her understanding of the rules of snakes and ladders, my niece’s understanding of terms like “play” and “games” is fluid, but it is not without limitations. While playing together, we embody a manifestation of Huizinga’s magic circle2 (8), although it is one whose boundaries are constantly changing and are permeable. The real world, and the underlying issues my niece and I respectively experience within are not absent in the game world, they are reflected. By interacting with the game mechanics, we enact our own thoughts, desires, and ambitions, establishing a sense of self through player identity. In interaction with the game mechanics, our own narrative emerges. 2 Huizinga’s magic circle refers to the idea that the world created by a game is separate from the external world and ultimately an artificial abstract. x TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF IMAGES Pg. xii LIST OF TABLES Pg. xiii INTRODUCTION Pg. 1 CHAPTER_ONE: EMERGENT NARRATIVE AND PLAYER AGENCY Pg. 46 CHAPTER_TWO: HOW GAME MECHANICS GENERATE STORYTELLING Pg. 103 CHAPTER_THREE: NARRATIVE IN NON-NARRATIVE GAMES Pg. 151 CHAPTER_FOUR: PARTICIPATORY FAN CULTURE Pg. 197 CHAPTER_FIVE: EMERGENT NARRATIVE AND APPLIED GAMING Pg. 248 CONCLUSION Pg. 291 BIBLIOGRAPHY Pg. 306 APPENDIX Pg. 324 xi LIST OF IMAGES Image 2.1-Tetris screenshot Pg. 143 xii LIST OF TABLES A.1-Section One-Demographic Information Pg. 353 A.2-Section Two-Perspective on Food Allergies Pg. 354 A.3-Section Three-Perspective on Persuasive Games Pg. 361 A.4-Section Four-Playtest Feedback Pg. 368 xiii INTRODUCTION While humans are not the only animals that play, the human obsession with games remains a globally widespread if not universal attribute of human social organization. While not everyone plays, engagement with a game in one form or another remains indisputably popular with a full range of age groups and ethnic backgrounds. Games represent, not only a form of entertainment, but a means of both challenging and invigorating the human psyche in the individual while forging the bonds of either teamwork or competition in the group.
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