Digital Games As Interactive Narrative and Their Eversion
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DIGITAL GAMES AS INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE AND THEIR EVERSION: THE ADVENT OF FUTURE NARRATIVE A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, SPEECH, AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BY DAEHYUN WON, B.A. DENTON, TEXAS AUGUST 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Daehyun Won ABSTRACT DAEHYUN WON DIGITAL GAMES AS INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE AND THEIR EVERSION: THE ADVENT OF FUTURE NARRATIVE AUGUST 2019 In the field of studying digital mediums (hypertext, social media, digital games, electronic literature, et cetera), digital games’ narrativity is lively being discussed by ludologists and narratologists, focusing on whether digital games have certain narrative or not. Ludologists mainly argue that digital games do not have a certain narrative structure. However, narratologists insist digital games are a new medium to convey narrative. To the narratologists, digital games’ unique narrative structure is named interactive narrative. Interactive narrative is different from traditional narrative’s linear time structure in that interactive narrative has non-linearity and conveys storytelling through players’ intentions and interactions with digital games’ various elements. Also, through digital devices’ technological and graphical developments, interactive narrative faces a great transformation, called eversion. In the age of eversion, digital games’ cyberspaces and reality colonize each other, and players’ body actions are directly altered to virtual actions in digital games. Thus, players can directly manipulate digital games’ narrative. This transformation of the interactive narrative is called everted narrative. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. ii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: LOADING… ........................................................................................ 1 II. DEFINITIONS AND DISCUSSIONS ON DIGITAL GAMES ............................................... 16 What Are Digital Games? ............................................................................... 16 A Brief History of “Game Studies” .................................................................................. 19 “The Great Debates:” Narratologists Versus Ludologists ...................................... 21 Ludology’s Academic Independency and Narratological Interdisciplinarity .. 28 An Eclectic Choice: To Begin a Journey Toward Digital Games Narrativity ... 32 III. INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE: A JOURNEY TO PROVE THE POSSIBILITY OF DIGITAL GAMES’ NARRATIVITY ................................................................................................ 34 What is “Interactive Narrative?:” The Relationship Between Interactivity and Narrativity in Digital games ...................................................................................... 34 Interactive Paradox .............................................................................................................. 38 From Players’ Choices to “Meaning-Effects” Experiences .................................... 44 Narrating Position in Abstract Games ........................................................................... 53 The Road from Interactivity to Narrativity: Filling Narrative Gaps in Digital Games ........................................................................................................................................ 57 Non-Linearity .......................................................................................................................... 62 Narrators and Player Agents, Avatar in Modern Games ....................................... 64 IV. ANALYZING INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE IN ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM AND EVERTED NARRATIVE ........................................................ 69 The Journey is not the End: An Expected Journey to Role-Playing Games .. 69 Why Role-Playing Games? ................................................................................................. 70 iii The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as Playable Stories or Narrative Games.................. 73 Narrators of Skyrim: Deictic Shift and Focalizations in Skyrim ............................ 74 Analyzing Skyrim by Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian Theories ....................... 76 Eversion of Space, Players’ Actions, and Player Agents: Everted Narrative ... 79 V. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 82 The Future, the Age of Eversion, is Nearly Here ....................................................... 82 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................... 86 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: LOADING… Storytelling is an inherent instinct in human nature. Our life is full of stories, and people love stories containing both life’s sadness and delightfulness. Despite this, there is still an indeterminable debate whether the appetite for storytelling is nurtured or naturally innate (Abbott 3). As Janine Utell says, “we are storytelling creatures…, a small child learns to tell a story even before she learns how to read” (2). We fundamentally have an ability and internal desire to represent our stories in order to be linked with others and share our life experiences.1 Thus, the invention of printed storytelling mediums was derived from humankind’s basic desire to possess effective storytelling tools to tell and share stories. One might think the digital revolution and new media declares the deaths of paper-based printed mediums and traditional storytelling methods;2 however, as Janet 1 Bakhtin and Ricoeur explain the essentiality of communicational storytelling mediums and literary texts for human existence. Bakhtin says that to be a human being “is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate” and “looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (287). Ricoeur mentions, “writing opens up a which is much more comprehensive than the relationship of dialogue which remains locked up in the I-thou communication…, A text opens up an audience, which is unlimited…, everyone…, in order to give a new actuality” (442). 2 The difference between traditional and digital storytelling methods is their forms. According to Miller’s Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment, “the content of traditional narratives is in an analog form,” and digital storytelling is in “a digitalized form” (4), and through the analog form, which is “bound” in printed “numbered pages” as Hamlet on the Holodeck explains (9), “a continual stream of information” is delivered (Miller 4). I would argue that traditional storytelling methods’ continual stream of information is similar to the chronological and linear time-based narrative on printed mediums. 1 Murray says in Hamlet on the Holodeck, “the computer is not the enemy of the book. It is the child of print culture, a result of five centuries of organized, collective inquiry and invention that the printing press made possible” (9). The digital narrative delivered by digital mediums is an heir of the printing revolution and traditional storytelling methods. Therefore, digital narrative can also be regarded as a devised tool to fulfill the human instinct to deliver stories to each other. However, unlike traditional storytelling methods, digital mediums are not limited by the printed textual format on actual printed papers. Digital narrative is made of visual graphics, digitalized audio technology, digital images, moving pictures, and three-dimensional computer graphics (Murray 7). This is to say, today’s digital narratives are not the death of printed narrative mediums but rather an extension of narrative methods. However, the degree of narrativity of digital narratives (including interactive drama, interactive cinema, interactive fiction, hypertext literature, electronic literature, digital games’ narrative, et cetera) is still a controversial issue. For scholars in diverse academic fields, the central point of a fierce debate is, in fact, digital games’ narrativity.3 Mainly, according to Jesper Juul’s The Clash Between Game and Narrative: A Thesis on 3 In terms of definition what is narrativity, Suzzanne Keen mentions that narrativity is “the set of qualities marking narrative” (qtd. in Abbott 25), and Abbott argues that narrativity is “a matter of degree” and the degree relys on “the feeling that now we are reading a story” (25). Much like Keen and Abbott’s definitions, Neitzel says, if digital games have narrative elements (actions, events, characters, and a setting) that “are arranged in a story-like order,” they “possess narrativity” in various degrees (Neitzel n.p.). 2 Computer Games and Interactive Fiction, this controversy is driven by the dispute over whether digital games have narrative or not (27). Commonly and traditionally, narrative is regarded as having a linear structure formed by the time-sequence. In The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Abbott quotes Seymour Chatman, who describes the traditional view of narrative as, “chrono- logic,” made of the external and internal time logics, which is called “doubly temporal logic” (qtd. in Abbott 16). The external movement through time is “the duration of the presentation of the novel, film, and play” as narrative discourse (qtd.