Playing with Meaning: the Role of Fiction in The

PLAYING WITH MEANING: THE ROLE OF FICTION

IN THE PROCESSES OF MEANING-MAKING

IN VIDEO GAMES

RYAN NICHOLAS HOUSE

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English

MAY 2015

To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the thesis of RYAN NICHOLAS HOUSE find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.

______Jon Hegglund, Ph.D., Chair

______Roger Whitson, Ph.D.

______Mike Edwards, Ph.D.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the whole of the English Department at Washington State University for

providing a fertile place to grow new ideas. Thank you to Dr. Mike Edwards, whose Critical

Theory of Technology seminar got me thinking about video games as an academic endeavor in the first place, and Dr. Roger Whitson, whose seminar on 19th Century Media Studies pushed me to consider the broader implications of my research. I want to especially thank Dr. Jon Hegglund

for giving me invaluable guidance and support without which this thesis would not have been possible, for the insight provided by his New Theories of Narratology seminar, and for listening to me ramble endlessly about games he’s never played. Finally, I want to thank Amber Strother

for her encouragement, understanding, and baked goods.

Thank you all very much.

iii

PLAYING WITH MEANING: THE ROLE OF FICTION

IN THE PROCESSES OF MEANING-MAKING

IN VIDEO GAMES

Abstract

by Ryan Nicholas House, M.A. Washington State University May 2015

Chair: Jon Hegglund

The importance of fiction has been contested in video games studies since the field’s inception – scholars often argue that, at most, fiction serves a secondary, marginal role in the processes of a game. I argue, however, that a game’s ontology is just as dependent on its fictional elements (metaphors, representations, narratives, etc.) as it is on the procedural rules that govern its systems. To do this, I employ the lenses of narratology and ludology to examine the ways that games from various genres use fiction to engage players in the process of meaning-making. My first chapter looks at the way that The Old City: Leviathan, an entry into the genre of story- games, affords its players agency by allowing them to construct the narrative of the game on a discursive level. Although the game does not allow players to invent narratives, players are able to control the method of their telling. In chapter two, I turn to Minecraft to explore the ways that games without overt narrative elements still employ fiction to guide the player’s experience. I argue that the representational aspects of Minecraft relay to the player the behavioral operations of the game’s code and that this allows players to achieve a phenomenological presence in the gameworld. Finally, in the third chapter, I discuss the concept of ludo-narrative dissonance and

iv its negative effect on player engagement through an examination of The Stanley Parable’s commentary on the problematic relationship between a game’s story and a player’s choices. I argue that ludo-narrative dissonance is a corruption of Espen Aarseth’s concept of the textual machine, rendering the informational loop between player and game incomplete and, therefore, innately meaningless. Thus, just as a bug highlights the significance of a game’s code, ludo- narrative dissonance underlines the importance of a game’s fiction. I conclude by arguing that game designers should consider the fiction of a game to be just as procedural as its code.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... iv-vi

LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2. PLAYING THE NARRATIVE ...... 18

3. BEING-IN-THE-GAME ...... 33

4. “THE STORY NEEDS YOU” ...... 48

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 61

GAMES REFERENCED ...... 65

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Figure 1; Dynamism of Narrative Architecture in The Old City: Leviathan ...... 25

2. Figure 2; Narrative Information in Mise-en-Scene from The Old City: Leviathan ...... 29

3. Figure 3; User-made Automatic Cow Harvester in Minecraft ...... 39

4. Figure 4; Ludo-narrative Dissonant Door in Fallout 3 ...... 52

5. Figure 5; Aftermath of “Narrative Contradiction” in The Stanley Parable ...... 53

6. Figure 6; The Moment of Choice in The Stanley Parable ...... 54

7. Figure 7; Third-Person Stanley in The Stanley Parable ...... 54

vii

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

At the 2014 Hello Tomorrow conference, Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of

DeepMind Technologies, presented the company’s research into artificial intelligence by sharing footage of a computational algorithm playing video games for the Atari 2600 console. Although computers have been playing games for decades1, DeepMind’s work is unique because the AI was not pre-programed; it learns from experience. It learns not only how to play a variety of games, but develops its own strategies to improve its performance. For the presentation,

DeepMind’s AI displayed noticeable improvements over incremental time frames. For instance, in the first 100 games of the Pong-like game Breakout, the computer often missed the ball. After about two hours, however, the computer surpasses most human players in its ability to keep the ball in play. Remarkably, the computer then surprised even its programmers: at the four hour mark, it exhibited autonomous, strategic reasoning by breaking blocks along the side and sending the ball to the back of the game field to break the blocks more quickly. This ability to learn is a major breakthrough in the field artificial intelligence, and Google, DeepMind’s parent corporation, are already devising ways in which to integrate these learning computers into everyday life, from improving text-to-speech functions to the ability to complete complex tasks like planning a vacation.

1 IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson competed against human players in chess and Jeopardy, respectively.

While this is an exciting milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence, I’m curious about the underlying assumptions it makes about computer games. DeepMind’s AI is able to learn the actions it needs to take in relation to a game’s rules, but it is incapable of contextualizing those movements. In abstract games, such as Breakout or Tetris, the rules of the game may be context enough. However, in more representational games, the actions of players gain meaning through the fictional aspects of the game. In Activison’s River Raid2, another game that the AI learns, players take on the role of a fighter pilot as he shoots down enemies and destroys bridges to proceed. In order for this game to have any meaning, it relies on its players to engage with the fiction of the game — the representations of aircraft, waterways, and bridges — and relate them back to the game’s rules — shooting and dodging to advance. A player may then adopt a style of gameplay that is a reflection of that fiction (perhaps avoiding enemies rather than killing them), rather than engaging only with the game’s rules, such as playing for the high score.

This kind of player-generated goal is made possible through the discourse between the game and a contextualized player, one that is immersed in the cultural significance of the representations of the game. DeepMind’s AI is an uncontextualized player and, thus, the game it plays lacks meaning.

This is also a concern I have with the recent trend of gamification, or the utilization of game mechanics and design in non-game applications. The trend is a systematic separation of a game’s mechanics from its fictional and contextual accoutrement, such as when a corporation employs leaderboards or distributes badges in an attempt to drive consumer activity with their products. In essence, it’s a method for making real life feel like a game. Some believe that this

2 River Raid is one of the many games that DeepMind’s AI is shown playing in the presentation.

movement has the potential to save to world. Jane McGonigal, for instance, believes that games bring out the best in people, whether through inspiration to collaborate, dedication to solving difficult problems, or motivation to reach goals, and provide the means through which we can solve global problems like world hunger, obesity, and even climate change (McGonigal 14).

Gamification operates on an assumption that real world issues aren’t engaging enough in their own right and that they need help from game-like activities to get people interested. It does this by attempting to reduce the idea of “games” into individual parts, taking what works and leaving what doesn’t. This ignores the defining characteristic of games as systems — groups of parts that work in harmony to produce a certain outcome — and that the fiction of a game is part of this system.

This thesis will address the role of fiction in games by examining the ways in which it interacts with the procedural rules of the game to situate and motivate players in the gameworld.

This work serves as an initial probe into the subject and is not meant to be taken as an exhaustive examination. I believe that the storytelling potential of games has only begun to unfold, and the medium may one day overtake even the motion picture as the preeminent form of narrative entertainment for mass audiences. However, my argument should not be taken as a statement that video games should put the narrative above all else. To the contrary, I believe that engaging gameplay is the most essential element to a successful game, but it is my contention that the fictitious elements of a game allow its players to co-create meaning within the parameters of play and grant the game a significance it would otherwise lack. To begin, I want to clarify the terms ludology, fiction, and narrative and how they will be used in this paper before I attempt to briefly summarize the relationship of these concepts in the field of video game studies.

Ludology is a methodological approach for the study of games and game structures that privileges the unique, technical aspects of games over the elements that games may share with other media. In other words, strict ludologists would prefer to discuss a game’s procedural rules and algorithms than its use of narrative tropes or cinematography. Espen Aarseth identifies three critical interventions of ludology’s approach to video game studies: “the viability of storytelling via games […] the applicability of narratological terminology and concepts to game phenomena

[… and] the hermeneutic link between memetic and mechanical aspects in gameplay”

(“Ludology” 186). The first position questions the medium’s ability to convey narratives and is skeptical of any theory that attempts to unify the two. The second point is concerned with academic attempts to theorize games using established methodologies, such as narratology or film studies. Aarseth calls this position a misconception of ludology’s privileging of the medium’s unique form, though, and not an outright rejection of narratology or any other methodology that might offer new perspectives on games. Thirdly, and most relevant to the discussion at hand, is the aspect of ludology that is interested in the relationship between the player and the game as it is “defined by the gameplay and mechanics, and only intermittently by the player’s observations of the mimetic, representational aspects of the game” (“Ludology”

188). In this paper, I will discuss the significance of these intermittent observations and how they facilitate a player’s interaction with the game mechanics.

Furthermore, those mimetic and representational aspects are exactly what I am referring to when I mention the fiction of a game. However, the status of fiction in games has been contested by scholars that deem those elements as either ancillary to the game’s rules or non- fictive all together. Aarseth claims that because the objects in a game may be acted upon, they are fundamentally different than fictitious objects in traditionally printed narrative (“Doors and

Perception” 2007). He prefers the term ‘virtual’ to describe these objects and argues that because they are comprised of more than just signs they are ontologically separate from fiction. I believe, though, that the priority that Aarseth affords to things like digital 3D models in the construction of these virtual objects ignores that they are still grounded in language, albeit computer code in this instance. They are still comprised of only signs. Moreover, I feel the distinction between the virtual and the fictional is a difference of degree and not of kind. There does seem to be a usefulness in distinguishing the dynamic fiction from the static, but it remains that both kinds of objects are of an imagined nature.

The claim that any fiction in a game remains categorically subsidiary to its procedural elements is likewise a misinterpretation of the important function of a game’s fiction. Critics such as Jesper Juul argue that a video game’s rules are its defining characteristic and that any fiction that accompanies those rules are entirely incidental or even arbitrary (Half Real). Grant

Tavinor argues, however, that a video game cannot be ontologically identified specifically by only its rules. Unlike traditional games, such as chess, where the rules that define it may be transmedial without a loss of information1, the identity of a video game is predicated on the

“material interpretation of the game algorithm” 439). Tavinor illustrates his point with three games produced by the studio Bethseda (Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Elder Scrolls

V: Skyrim) that share many core gameplay elements, such as a leveling system, an open-world map, perks, and so on. When Fallout 3 was released, it was commonly referred to as “Oblivion with guns”. Ironically, when Skyrim was released, the common reception was that it was

1 For example, chess can be written out in shorthand (e.g. d4xc6) or played with miniature bottles of alcohol instead of chess pieces. In both instances, the game remains the same.

“Fallout with swords.” That these games have very similar algorithms underlines that “what differentiates these [three] games is their art, a significant component of which is their fictions”

(440). Thus, fiction is an ontological foundation.

To state that a game has fictional elements is not the same as stating that it has a narrative, nor does the narrative of a game encompass all of its fictional elements. This is to say that fiction and narrative are not the same thing. Fiction, of course, is the portrayal of an imagined event, character, or setting while a narrative is the portrayal of a series of imagined events that usually includes characters, settings, and so on. So while a game may have fiction, it may not have narrative. However, a player enacting imagined events with an imagined character in an imagined setting could be said, therefore, to be enacting a narrative. This may be accomplished even if the game has a very limited (or even absent) story. In this sense, we can think of video game narratives as one of two of Andre Gaudreault’s modes of narrative: extrinsic, or concerned with the narrative content of the game, or intrinsic, concerned with the means of expression (31). Studying the intrinsic narrative of games allows scholars to think about the techniques unique to video games that allow that narrative to unfold. In chapter two, I will examine how some games integrate the intrinsic narrative into the gameplay itself, so that players are tasked with constructing the discourse of the narrative as they move through the game.

Fiction, in its various forms, has been a part of games studies since the field’s inception.

Scholars in favor of games as fictive artifacts tend to view the medium through the lens of narratology. Janet Murray, in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in

Cyberspace, coins the term cyberdrama to encompass the whole of the “reinvention of storytelling itself for the new digital medium” (271). Her interest lies in new media’s influence

on traditional modes of narrative, and she speculates about the possible ways in which they will intersect. Murray feels that computer games are an ideal space for telling stories because they are

“procedural (generating behavior based on rules) and participatory (allowing the player as well as creator [to] move things around)” (“From Game-Story”), and stories and games share two common structures: the contest and the puzzle. In narratives, the contest takes the form of the conflict that the protagonist must overcome and the puzzle may take the form of something like a murder mystery with clues scattered throughout for the reader to find. Likewise, the player of a game must often overcome rival players or programmed opponents and solve spatial, logical, or word puzzles to advance in a level. Despite the reverberation and controversy that Hamlet on the

Holodeck created throughout the ludologistic community, its purpose was to envision the future of narrative, not to claim all new media as its vehicle.

While Jesper Juul concedes that some games may utilize narrative devices, he insists that the two remain irreconcilably distinct. Juul posits that because Narrative is an entity independent of its medium, it must remain intact when transitioned between different media. Juul asserts that this flawless transition is impossible in computer games by comparing the plots of the movie

Star Wars and the Atari game of the same name, the “plot” of which is comprised of only a few key action scenes from the film loosely translated into playable scenarios and one “scene” that is completely fabricated (“Games Telling Stories?”). I believe that Juul is asking for the impossible by asking a medium in its infancy to translate a film considered to be the apex of filmmaking at the time of its release. Furthermore, and this is to his point, who would want to play that game?

Why not just watch the movie? For a work – even a narrative – to be successfully adapted to a new medium, the adaptation must work to the strengths of the new mode of storytelling, and

“there is no reason to assume that adaptation of narrative works would necessarily seek to

reproduce narrative coherence” (Bogost, Unit Operations 68). Take for example the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which substantial creative liberties were taken with characters, locations, and romantic subplots to heighten its success as a film. Despite these structural divergences, however, critics and fans alike laud the film for maintaining the spirit of the novels. Likewise, Activision’s computer game adaptation of Spider-Man 2 for the Playstation

2 is highly praised for capturing the feeling of swinging through the Manhattan skyline as the web-slinging superhero that immerses the player into the plot points transferred from the movie.

In this adaptation, the player isn’t simply observing the narrative as she would while watching the movie, but she becomes engrossed in it through the sensations gained through the game mechanics. Both examples provide evidence that rehashing plot point after plot point is unnecessary in successful adaptations.

Next, Juul moves to ultimately disprove narrative’s existence in games by drawing an interesting and useful distinction between temporalities in games and time in stories. If narration is the telling of events after they have occurred, he argues, then “game-time” renders narration impossible. Juul explains that time in narratives is double faceted. There is the time that the events occurred and the time in which those events are relayed: for example, when a character’s childhood is summed up in a paragraph. On the other hand, in game-time the time of the action is simultaneous with the time of viewing. In a game, a player receives information in real-time and is able to exact his/her agency on the game world. A player can change how events unfold, and according to Juul, “it is impossible to influence something that has already happened. This means that you cannot have interactivity and narration at the same time” (“Games Telling Stories?”).

However, some games defy the idea that interactivity and narration are mutually exclusive. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a prequel to the series’ first two games, therefore

its plot has been necessarily predetermined to allow for the events of Metal Gear Solid and its first sequel to take place. Despite this fact, the player is still free to express a measure of agency by, for instance, choosing to kill or to spare enemy guards throughout the game. In other words, the player has choice in how she achieves the unfolding of the narrative. In one notable moment, if a player kills a NPC (non-player character) who appears in earlier (read: later) games, she will be presented with a “Game Over” screen citing a “Time Paradox” for the cause of failure since the game’s storyline no longer corresponds to those of its predecessors. This game’s clever manipulations of and justifications for the perimeters for success allow the player to interact with an environment within a scripted narrative.

Similarly, game-time is highly variable from game to game. There is no single “game- time.” A game play mechanic in Mass Effect illustrates this while complicating Juul’s theory of game-time singularity by allowing players to disturb the real-time information reception that the theory hinges upon by combining real-time and turn-based combat. A player may issue basic commands to her squad members in real-time by pressing the corresponding button on the controller’s directional pad. For instance, she may order a squad member to move to a specific point to take cover by selecting the area she choose with her aiming reticule and pressing the

[Up] button. The squad member would then immediately carry out those orders. However, to issue more specific orders, such as the designation of specific weapons or the employment of character-specific abilities, the player presses a different button that momentarily pauses the game to bring up a menu of commands. The player chooses her commands, taking as much time as needed, and then resumes combat with her team acting on their updated orders. In effect, the ability gives a player the time to make decisions much like a turn-based strategy game would, however its uniqueness stems from its inclusion in an action game. The result is that span of

halted time, a player’s cognition of the gaming situation continues in the process of selecting the tactic she deems best. She plays through that option in the nanosecond it takes to select it, which is then enacted a second time once the action is resumed. This idea, of course, transfers the gaming situation from the computer to the mind of the player.

Bogost thinks that the unit operation, “a general conceptual frame for discrete, compressed elements of fungible meaning” (Unit Operations xiii), of the player’s understanding of the game, “where instantiated code enters the material world via human players’ faculty of reason […] is the most important moment in the study of a videogame” (Unit Operations 99).

The act of solving puzzles best illustrates this idea because it is a mix of diegetic and non- diegetic. The process of logically working to a solution of the puzzle occurs within the player's mind (and may even take place while the player is not playing). The player then performs these solutions through interaction with her avatar by pushing blocks, hitting switches, etc. Thus, as

Bogost suggests, the game situation exists neither in the game or the mind, but in a third space – a combination of both.

Bogost also makes strides to bridge the gap between narratology and “the gaming situation”. Commenting on both Murray’s interpretation of Tetris as “a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s” (Hamlet 143-144) and Markku Eskelinen’s response to that interpretation as Murray trying “to interpret [Tetris’] supposed content, or better yet, project her favourite [sic] content on it; consequently we don’t learn anything of the features that make Tetris a game” (“The Gaming Situation”), Ian Bogost claims that:

[i]f Murray’s interpretation is “horrid” because it is determined to find a story at

any cost, perhaps Eskelinen’s is horrid because it is determined to conceal

worldly reference at any cost. In both interpretations, something is lacking.

Eskelinen is interested in formal categories that will advance the formal analysis

of games. Murray is interested in interpretation and content analysis, to be sure,

but she is also interested in rules, since her interpretation is grounded in rules.

(Unit Operations 100-101)

Bogost seems to channel Frasca’s sentiment in his bridging of the two schools of thought: “One thing is not favoring narratology as a preferred tool for understanding games and a whole different one is to completely discard it” (“Ludologists Love Stories, Too” 4). To claim that one may write game criticism without attending to “what makes [a game] a game” (Eskelinen, “The

Gaming Situation”) makes as much sense as insisting that film critics remember to include the unique technical aspects of that medium as if it was not a given.

In his book Cybertext, Espen Aarseth worked to reconcile traditional literary formats and an emerging computer-generated literature by introducing the concept of ergodic literature, defined as a text that requires nontrivial effort by the reader to traverse it. Examples include hypertexts such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story and the multi-player text adventure game

MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) in which players rely on “purely textual strategies . . . [that] provides a unique laboratory for the study of textual self-expression and self-creation, themes that are far from marginal in the practice of literary theory” (Cybertext 13). Aarseth suggests that this form of literature moves beyond narrative to “dialogic improvisation and free play between the cyborgs that today’s literate computer users (and their programs) have become” (Cybertext

141). He adds that achieving this requires the creation of immersive simulated worlds with compelling characters in which players are willing to invest time and creative energy.

In Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, Mark J.P. Wolf attributes the term of “subcreation” to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “word for the making of imaginary

worlds, [with] the “sub” prefix designating a specific kind of creation distinct from God’s ex nihilo [from nothing] creation, and reliant upon it” (6). By examining the worlds of Star Wars,

Lord of the Rings, L. Frank Baum’s Oz and others, Wolf focuses on narrative as the most common structure in the building of these worlds, but also indicates the importance that maps, histories, and multimodality have in subcreation. He states that the transmodality, or presence in various forms of media, of a world “suggests that we are vicariously experiencing something which lies beyond the media windows through which we see and hear it” (247). This vicarious experience makes the world seem independent from the mode of mediated engagement and infers a continuous existence, creating a greater “illusion of ontological weight” (Wolf 247) and allowing for greater immersion. Wolf also argues that interaction with an imaginary world, such as in computer games, can greatly enhance a player’s immersion and appreciation of that world, yet he wonders if today’s technology is sufficiently advanced to allow for the level of interactivity necessary to achieve this immersion.

The imaginary world of Mass Effect series, for instance, has expanded into multiple series of comics and novels that expand on the storyline of the core trilogy of games, thus creating a more fully realized, interesting, and intricate universe. As a whole, they comprise a work of literature that requires significant effort to navigate. The chronology of each individual work is staggered with some books taking place before, during, and after each other and the games. In order to ingest the work in its chronological order, one would need to read the prequel book and comic, play the first game, read the books & comics that take place after the first game but before the second, then play the second game, and so on. One may even need to read a novel and play a game concurrently, if events happen within the same time frame. Yet, a player need not invest in any other work to take part in and appreciate the plot of the games. Wolf believes

narrative is the most common structure of imaginary worlds, typically when numerous narratives come together. Usually, subcreation begins when superfluous elements of a world start to fill in the background around the main narrative. When these details are sufficiently fleshed out enough to relay a series of events, they form narrative threads that parallel the main plot. When enough of these narrative threads begin to run concurrently, they form a narrative braid that “share the same diegetic materials, themes, or events” (Wolf 199).

Matthew Kirschenbaum’s study of new media digs deeper than the screen level of digital objects to explore what he identifies as their forensic and formal materiality. His investigation of

Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel Afternoon: A Story uncovers a unique feature of the authoring software Storyspace called “guard fields, which can control access to a particular portion of the text based on what the reader has or hasn’t already read” (Kirschenbaum 168). Guard fields are utilized by the author to guide readers through the hypertext, ensuring that they cannot reach certain context sensitive passages before necessary information has been received. Computer games often employ perimeters that function similarly, usually in order to teach players about the game mechanics. In the text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, players cannot enter the cave until they have acquired the key. By acquiring the key, the player demonstrates that she understands how to maneuver the game world, pick up items, and examine them. These actions are important for success in the game, so the designer of Colossal Cave Adventure mandates that they player learn them early, before they may even begin the game.

Despite the inclusion of MUD in his definition of cybertext, Aarseth remains steadfast in his conviction that games are not textual since, he argues, one cannot find the “text” of a game of chess and even if, by a broad definition, the rules could be considered “the text”, they would not enter into the actual game. Nor would they recount the actions of the players. Aarseth defines the

three central aspects to any game as “(1) rules, (2) a material / semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld)” (“Genre

Trouble” 47-48). Of these aspects, the gameworld is the least essential component as the royal theme of chess may be easily substituted for any number of other themes, yet the game would remain the same. He also contends that a computer game’s character – he uses Tomb Raider’s

Lara Croft as an example – is interchangeable with any other avatar; therefore, the character is inessential to the game. Thus, the game is lacking an important aspect of narrative (character) and should not be considered one.

Ludologist Stuart Moulthrop suggests, however, that Aarseth’s interpretation “embargoes all cultural implications” (47) by stripping Chess of its “allegory of feudalism” and submits that no matter what we call the pieces, the game “does assert a logic of territorial domination and unequal privilege” (Moulthrop 47). He goes on to question if a Tomb Raider with Mr. Bean standing in for Lara Croft is really the same game. It is not. In an interview for the online Game

Studies journal, Tim Schafer, game designer and founder of Double Fine Productions, professes the motivational importance of computer game characters: “I know I go through games a lot of times because I want to see the characters through, to solve their problems, find that character who was kidnapped and see them through to the end” (“Game Noir”).

No matter how transparent a character becomes during the course of a game, its presence during the initial stages of the game sets a player’s expectations and shapes her interaction with it throughout. This is especially true in instances where a game allows for the creation or customization of a character. This level of co-authorship can typically lead to greater immersion in the gaming situation due to a player creating a facsimile of herself or achieving greater wish fulfillment by creating what she perceives to be the most appropriate avatar for the way she

wishes to play the game. In MMOs (the shorthand for massively multi-player online games) such as World of Warcraft, character customization allows a player to personalize an avatar and perhaps, even if in her own mind, stand apart from the crowd. Even if the process of customization is simply selecting features from a predetermined and finite list, the player’s choice will come through in her combination of the features selected.

Markku Eskelinen argues that any computer game character is “entirely functional and combinatorial (a means to an end); instead of any intrinsic values, they have only use and exchange values to them. These entities are definitely not acting or behaving like traditional narrators, characters, directors, and actors, their supposed counterparts in literature, film, and the stage” (“Towards Computer Game Studies” 37). I think Eskelinen is undervaluing the emotional attachment that players develop for characters that they may spend anywhere from 60 to 100 hours – or more – with in a computer game, especially characters created by the player and RPG

(role-playing game) characters. For example, the game World of Warcraft reserves servers (or game worlds) specifically for a play-type called role-playing, in which players act out stories with their in-game avatar. A player can create back-stories, personalities, alliances, prejudices, and so on which function as behavioral perimeters for her characters. She then interacts with the world and other characters through the role she has specified. These entities are transcended beyond mere combinatorial functioning by the vicarious agency of the player.

Marie-Laure Ryan distinguishes between internal and external modes of agency. The internal mode places the player as a character within the action of the plot or game; he is a part of the virtual environment. The external mode, then, situates the player in a god-like position outside of the virtual world where he can manipulate it. This agency, Ryan argues, is constructive to the narrative in computer games. The player authors the narrative by performing

“actions which, were he to reflect upon them, would form a dramatic plot […] games thus embody a virtualized or potential dramatic narrativity, which itself hinges on the virtual diegetic narrativity of a retelling that may never take place” (“Beyond Myth and Metaphor”). Some ludologists argue that while it is possible to retell or narrate a specific play session of a game, the narrative would only be of a single instance of play and not of the whole game itself. Of course, one could counter that this is only one reading of a given game with thousands of others available to other players and that no single reading of anything can ever speak for the whole of the text from which it came. It is the same principle we us to discount an author’s intended meaning. Ryan’s argument of the distinction between the two types of agency inserts the matter of diegesis into the theory of computer games. If a player is both inside and outside of the gaming situation, how do diegetic and non-diegetic elements interact to influence her experience?

Diegesis can manifest differently in computer games than it would in movies. Interactive elements of a game are diegetic because the player is interacting within via the in-game avatar.

Sound effects resulting from these interactions, such as explosions, dialogue, or power-ups (think

Mario becoming Super Mario) are diegetic, whereas sounds such as background music, tutorial instruction, or voice-over narration are non-diegetic. Unlike film, where diegesis is largely only discussed in relation to sound, computer games offer varied opportunities for diegetic distinctions. For example, player actions can fall into either category of diegesis. Actions happening within the game time, such as shooting, jumping, and saving the princess are all diegetic, while actions such as navigating the pause screen, or pause menu, take place outside of game time and are therefore non-diegetic. However, sometimes these modes of diegesis can be combined.

In chapter one, I discuss the ways that story-games utilize their procedural rules to enhance a player’s experience of the story through theories of both narrative and game design.

To do this, I compare PostMod Softworks’ The Old City: Leviathan’s use of embedded narrative, architectural narrative, and dynamism to other games in the genre: Fullbright Games’ Gone

Home and Benjamin River’s Home. I conclude by showing that despite the criticism often directed at story-games for lacking opportunities for players to express their agency, these games allow players to affect the intrinsic narrative of the game by shaping the discourse of the story.

That is, rather than changing the events of the story, players may effectively change the manner of its telling.

Chapter two is focused on the ways in which Mojang’s Minecraft spatially situates players within the gameworld through the game’s representations of culturally contextualized objects and the imaginative immersion of the player as he fills in the narrative gaps left by the game. Although Minecraft lacks any traditional narrative, the game still employs fiction via what

Miguel Sicart dubs the “semiotic domain”, or the metaphors and representations that the game utilizes to communicate its rules. This guides a player’s experience and ability to make meaning, and because of this, a player’s interaction with the objects in the gameworld encourages a phenomenological presence in the game that leads to a sort of Heideggerian Being that I call

“being-in-the-game”. Thus, the importance of fiction in video games surpasses just the story that the game tells and encompasses how a player makes sense of the gameworld.

I conclude by looking at the phenomenon of ludonarrative dissonance and its effects on the player’s experience of meaning-making. Ludonarrative dissonance occurs when the fiction of a game and its gameplay are misaligned, resulting in the player’s increased awareness of the mediation at hand. To illustrate this, I examine Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley Parable, a game that

offers insightful commentary of narrative tropes in video games and manipulates ludonarrative dissonance in several instances to explore the nature of stories in games. I argue that this dissonance is a breakdown of Espen Aarseth’s cybertext — a tripartite, textual machine consisting of the user, the medium, and the linguistic sign — and disallows a player to draw meaning from his actions.

CHAPTER TWO

PLAYING THE NARRATIVE:

STORY-GAMES, CYBERTEXTS, AND PLAYER AGENCY

Recently, a genre of computer games has been slowly regaining a foothold in the study of games: the interactive story-game. These are games that privilege storytelling and narrative over many of the traditional hallmarks of the medium, often sacrificing interactivity and player agency for the sake of narrative complexity. These games, sometimes called "walking simulators"2, allow players to explore a storyworld by entering into the protagonist's viewpoint to experience the story as the character, usually doing little more than navigating the space and observing the environment. In doing so, these games blur the already thinning line between storyworlds and gameworlds.

David Herman defines storyworlds as "mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate-- or make a deictic shift-- as they work to comprehend a narrative" (9). Narrative, then, is the fundamental building block for storyworlds as "narrative can also be thought of as systems of verbal or visual cues prompting their readers to spatialize storyworlds into evolving configurations of participants, objects, and places" (Herman 263). In other words, a storyworld is the brain space where a reader holds all of the information of a narrative as he is receiving it. The reader is free to interpret this information as he would like, but his imagination must remain within the narrative’s specific parameters. Gameworlds, on the other hand, are systems outside of

2 And often, derisively so.

the player’s mind in which he may interact with the game's rules. He is still subjected to those rules, but he may actively search out their limits and even break them. The most important aspect of the gameworld is the spatiality required; even simple 2-D Atari games utilize space as the field with which to interact with the game's mechanics. Space Invaders, for instance, can be conceived of entirely through the space that it creates. Players navigate their ship to the left and right of the screen as hordes of enemy ships zigzag down the screen to kill them. The trick to the game is timing shots to the movement of enemies through the game's space.

Interactive story-games complicate the relationship between the two types of worlds by combining them. When a player is exploring the Greenbriar's home in Gone Home, he is experiencing the storyworld by navigating the gameworld. Moreover, it complicates the role of the player / reader. Can you read a game or play a story? Reading and playing both require one to submit to a set of rules, however, reading only allows for the acceptance or rejection of the information presented,3 but to play is to engage with the given information (i.e. the rules) in such a way as to generate more information than initially contained in the text. Reading a game would only reveal its structural rules, but to play a story would be to also construct that story. Players of

Gone Home, then, must always roam the empty Greenbriar house, yet the narrative they construct through their interactions within it are largely of their own production.

This idea is at odds with the third tenement of ludology as it is outlined in the introduction: that the relationship between the player and the game is defined by the gameplay and game mechanics rather than the player’s interpretation of the mimetic or representational

3 To read critically is another matter. For the purpose of this argument, I am assuming the reader is reading for pleasure, just as the player is playing for pleasure.

elements of the game (Aarseth, Cybertext 188). If the player is constructing a narrative, these fictional elements are just as relevant to the act of playing if not even more so. Therefore, how does one reconcile this discrepancy and play a narrative? To answer this question (and hopefully raise more), I will examine the ways interactive story-games overcome this dilemma through theories of narratology, ergodic literature, and ludology. My argument will focus mostly on

PostMod Softworks' The Old City: Leviathan because of the title’s emphasis on narrative, but will reference other games, such as Fullbright's Gone Home and Benjamin Rivers' Home.

The Old City: Leviathan, a recent entry into the somewhat-niche genre of story-games, is an attempt at something different in computer games. The game blurs the lines between storyworld and gameworld through atmospheric, dream-like level design and compelling, thoughtful narrative; it's an environmental story-game. PostMod Softworks, the game's small developer, chooses to forego "the esoteric puzzles and repetitive gameplay loops of traditional games in favor of a pure narrative experience" (Postmodsoftworks.com) by building the game around two simple mechanics: walking and looking.

Players inhabit the unstable mind of the game's protagonist as he travels from his isolated, subterranean home towards the post-apocalyptic Old City. The story unfolds through various levels of narration: the player character narrates his thoughts as the player wanders through the catacomb-esque levels, where he may also find notes that fill in some of the socio- political history of the storyworld. Thirdly, the player may uncover hidden journals of a man named Solomon, who has proceeded the player in this journey to the Old City. As the game progresses, the player's goal becomes less about getting to the end than it is about creating a cohesive narrative thread by mentally shuffling all of these intertwining bits of story, continuously rearranging previous interpretations of the characters and their motivations to

account for new textual evidence. This emphasis on the journey over the destination relates thematically to the game as well, as evidenced by the lack of resolution to the narrative at the end of the game. Instead, a chapter select option becomes available on the start menu after a player has completed the final level, recognizing the desire that most players will have to repeat levels to weigh against new interpretations.

Each area in the game tells as much of the story as the words found there. The environment, seemingly a character in its own right, plays a role in the narration as well -- at one point even angrily quaking as the player walks down a forbidden path. This method of storytelling through level design is an example of Henry Jenkins’ game design as narrative architecture, in which an environment can create “the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience [through] its ability to map our preexisting […] fantasies” (123). As such,

Leviathan’s levels engender the desire to explore via the picturesque nature of the abandoned industrial aesthetic while simultaneously creating narrative gaps to be filled in by the player.

Leviathan also differs from other story-games like Gone Home in that it completely does away with any semblance of puzzles, other than the narrative itself. While the two games share a nearly identical control scheme,4 Gone Home requires more interaction from the player.

Although it's still very much focused on telling a story, Gone Home often employs a method of gatekeeping5 that requires the player to find keys to unlock doors or hunt down combinations in

4 The games use only six buttons: W, S, A, D keys for movement; left mouse button to interact with objects, and right mouse button to zoom in on the environment. The mouse also controls the direction of the camera. Leviathan differs slightly in that it allows a player to hold shift to move slightly faster. 5 A means of controlling a player’s progress, such as the guard fields of the software Storyspace.

order to open safes. This can stop the narrative dead in its tracks as the player combs a room for the puzzle piece before advancing. The game's environment is also littered with objects to be interacted with, such as family photos, postcards, and cassette tapes. Yet most do nothing to move the game's story forward; they only exist to fill out the cast of absent characters.

Contrasted with this, Leviathan's scarcity of interactive objects reinforces the importance of observation. Key narrative elements don't shine when the player scrolls his mouse across the screen, but rather blend into their environment: a work order lying on a desk, a child's stuffed whale on a dingy mattress, dinner place settings at a table for two. One could argue that this points to a lack of player agency in Leviathan, but I would disagree6: Leviathan allows a player to roam freely in its gameworld, whereas Gone Home mandates that a player jump through hoops before continuing the story. A player could, after all, walk right through every chapter of

Leviathan and receive some idea of the story -- it is his choice to linger in each chapter to suss out the details. This difference actually highlights the biggest distinction between the games: whereas Gone Home utilizes pathos as the motivating factor for the player by filling in narrative gaps with characterization through the objects, Leviathan uses the gaps in its narrative and storyworld to motivate players to explore its gameworld in order to uncover the game's story. It is this participation on the discursive level where Leviathan is unique.

This participation of the player in the process of creating meaning is at the heart of what

Espen Aarseth calls the “textual machine.” In Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature,

Aarseth's aim is to develop a new theoretical approach to emerging textual media with distinct

6 A caveat: The nature of story-games requires a limit on the degree of player agency since the narrative is usually unicursal. My position is that, starting from that commonality, Leviathan still allows more agency than Gone Home.

formal properties that traditional literary theories fail to encompass. He proposes the concept of the cybertext to define a "broad textual media category"(5) with an emphasis on the "mechanical organization of the text [and the] intricacies of the medium [that are an] integral part of the literary exchange" (1). The study of cybertexts is in essence a study of the users of those texts, who, unlike readers of traditional texts, preform extranoematic7 effort to traverse the text.

Aarseth calls these efforts ergodic, a term that refers to the physical construction of an affected semiotic sequence, such as the selection of one narrative path over another, that is fundamentally different from the work of the mind, i.e. interpretation. To illustrate the diversity of mediums that cybertext can inhabit, Aarseth provides examples such as hypertexts, adventure games, and the I

Ching 8, all of which require input from the reader to "read".

Dynamism, or a text’s ability to be altered, is another defining feature of the cybertext.

To analyze a text's dynamism, Aarseth breaks down the information being transmitted into the information as it exists in the text independent of interpretation – or textons – and the information as it is perceived by the reader – scriptons. In static texts, textons do not change and the story is presented in the same way every time.9 In dynamic texts, however, textons may be added, deleted, or rearranged to create dependent scriptons. Dynamism, according to Aarseth, is the ability to alter the relationship between these units of meaning, either through reader manipulation or authorial design.

Hypertext theory often praises the medium for offsetting the balance of power inherent in

7 Outside of the mind, in a physical sense. Beyond mental effort. 8 A Chinese divination book interpreted by cleromancy. 9 A reader may have changing interpretations of the text, but this is not due to the dynamism of the text, but rather the extra-textual change of perspective in the reader.

the author-reader relationship by allowing readers to become co-creators of a text. When a reader selects which node to follow in a story, they are enacting a semiotic sequence that could differ from any other given reader's. However, this is not to say that a reader becomes the author.10

Hypertext authors not only construct the story with words, but also delineate the specific sequences of the text that are available to the reader at any given time. Whereas a traditional author may only hope that a reader reads his book sequentially from beginning to end, a hypertext author can mandate that specific prerequisites be met before the reader may advance the story. Ultimately, a reader may be given the agency to choose which path to go down, but they are not afforded the power to modify the text into anything outside of the author's intention.

In this way, texts that are unicursal11 may appear to be multicursal,12 since a reader may perceive his choices as affecting the outcome of the story when in reality he is simply traversing one winding path that will eventually lead to a singular destination. That is not to confuse these terms with linear and non-linear narratives, as it is possible for a narrative to be both unicursal and non- linear in, for instance, a role-playing game with optional side-quests. The player may choose to

10 On the other hand, authorship can also be hard to pin down. Just as with film, most new media texts are the result of production teams with varying degrees of authorship but that still contribute to the final product. Furthermore, these texts are often authored using programs that were written by others. For instance, Leviathan was developed using the game authoring software package Unreal Engine 4 created by a development team at Epic Games. To what degree can the developers at Epic Games be thought of as authors of The Old City: Leviathan? The authorship of most digital media in particular follows this hierarchical pattern. 11 Aarseth uses Penelope Reed Doob’s discussion of medieval labyrinths to illustrate the unicursal narrative, “where there is only one path, winding and turning, usually toward a center” (6). There may be branching paths, but they lead to a dead-end and the reader eventually returns to the main path until the end. Returning to the text after reading this footnote illustrates this nicely. 12 Multicursal, on the other hand, has many branches with many paths. Or at least more than one.

play (or not play) any of these optional story-lines in any order, yet they do not affect the outcome of the overarching narrative.

A major criticism against Aarseth's work is his failure to pin down concrete definitions for many of the neologisms and otherwise obtuse terminology that he throws around. Indeed,

"trivial effort" can be interpreted into nearly anything. Jeffery Bryan, in his article "Ergodic

Effort: Dynamism and Auto-Generated Path Making", provides a more nuanced delineation of the ergodic by reconstructing the term into two states (explicit / implicit) with three classifications (dynamic / relative / arbitrary). These distinctions are not only helpful in the discussion of a specific instance of ergodic effort in any given text, but also in differentiating between the levels of participation required of the reader.

Bryan's dual states of ergodic effort are concerned with the player's knowledge that a chain of events will result in path-generation: explicit refers to events in which users are aware that their actions will affect the outcome, while implicit refers to those events in which a player may be unaware that a choice will be meaningful or even that he’s making one at all. The three classifications identify the level of effect any given ergodic event has on a text's scriptons and/or textons; dynamic having significant effects, relative having limited effects, and arbitrary only implying dynamism or having no effect in the least (Bryan 21-

22). This creates a scale that's useful in discussing a reader's ability to affect the overall narrative of a text. For instance, games such as TellTale Game's The Walking Dead where players are presented with the choice to save one of two characters and thus shaping the rest of the game's narrative, employ explicitly Figure 1: Dynamism of Embedded Narrative in The dynamic ergodic events – players know when they are making a Old City: Leviathan

decision that will alter the story. In somewhat of a contrast, The Old City: Leviathan's story unfolds with a series of implicitly dynamic ergodic events when, say, the player revisits an area to find added textons (dead bodies, messages on the walls) that were not previously present. It isn't necessary for the player to actively choose to see more of the story for the game's procedural environment to give its programmed response. So if the player has already satisfied some unknown prerequisite before visiting the room in the first place, he may be unaware that there was a change at all.

This raises another interesting question concerning the ergodicism of computer games in general. If Aarseth defines the physical act of reading (eyes scanning a page, turning pages) as trivial effort and not in the realm of the cybertext, we must imagine that simply looking at a screen and pressing buttons are similarly trivial. Navigating Mario to the end of a level seemingly requires nothing more than pushing buttons in tandem to the recognition of stimuli on the screen. But, on the other hand, it is possible to play Super Mario Bros. both well and poorly.

Players must develop coordination of the hand and eye in order to successfully meet the challenges of the game. Yet this may be developed from experience with another title and the skill simply transferred to the Mushroom Kingdom; thus the effort is not intrinsic to the game itself. However, there is something that can only be gained by the direct experience of playing

Super Mario Bros. – a knowledge of the gameworld and the rules that govern it. There is a physics of Super Mario Bros. that one must understand in order to successfully traverse the game. Mario's jumps are affected by momentum, meaning a player must distinguish (usually on the fly) how to manipulate the gameworld's physics for a given situation. But is this skill extranoematic or outside of the mind, and does it count as non-trivial effort according to

Aarseth?

Because Aarseth's theory gives privilege to a text's medium, we can make the argument that the player's interaction with the procedural elements of Super Mario Bros, i.e. the game's rules, follow the tenets of explicitly dynamic events -- the player is making informed choices to advance in the game, and the game is distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful attempts -- and, thus, can be considered extranoematic. However, the lack of impact this series of events has on the scriptons and textons of the game precludes it from being ergodic since the player isn't affecting a semiotic sequence. In Leviathan, though, the player's interaction with the procedural rules of the game does alter the game's information. Depending on his choice of paths, the player is either met with piles of corpses or he is not, thus providing a variance in the game's textons.

This answers one of the most prevalent criticisms of Leviathan – that the game doesn't afford the player a sense of agency. It's true that the game doesn't allow a player to affect the events that make up the story: Belle will always die, Solomon will always leave journals lying about, and Jonah will always jump. As I mentioned previously, however, the implicit dynamic ergodic events of the game allow the player to effect the way the story is told: its sjuzhet, or discourse. A player controls the actual transmission or re-telling of the events of the story through the choices he makes in play – going down this hallway instead of that, skipping narration events, reading the journals in descending order – enacting a Rashomon effect of sorts.

Each player's perception of the story will differ based simply by how they interact with the storytelling machine. For example, in chapter 6 a hallway becomes littered with the bodies of soldiers from some unknown army only if the player first visits another area of the map. A player could forgo all of these story elements by simply rushing towards the end point, thus changing his perspective of the story. Likewise, in Chapter 1, a corpse appears in a previously

visited room as the player backtracks to the main path. The sudden appearance of a lone dead body along with the game's unreliable narrator raises questions for the player: Is my character responsible for this? If he is, is he aware of these actions? This points not only to the ergodic nature of these procedural events, but the unique space that the medium of the story-game occupies. In any non-visual medium, this corpse would need to be explicitly referenced in order to even be considered part of the story. In films or graphic novels, it would have to enter into the frame at some point in the scene; there would never be a screening where the corpse did not appear on-screen. But, in the story-game, where the player/reader is ultimately responsible for his own exploration of the storyworld, this sort of detail may go unnoticed. Rather than making certain that the information is transmitted, the story-game simply affords the player the opportunity to pick up on this element of the story or miss it completely.

The theory of ergodic literature helps put these story-games into a context with other forms of narrative. It also allows us to consider how this genre of computer games complicates our understanding of narrative modes and functions, such as the cognitive processes we undergo as we read or play a story. Sanford and Garrod's narrative scenario-mapping, for instance, provides another way to consider the relationship between the textons and scriptons of a cybertext. Textons produce meaning when they are aligned with what a reader may represent mentally from a situation that he is already familiar with. Scriptons, then, become "an unbroken sequence of one or more textons" (Sanford and Garrod 767) that a reader can map to situation- specific knowledge. Games also complicate some aspects of narrative theory, though. Jesper Juul posits that the inherent present-tense of games precludes them from narration. Since narrative implies a telling of an event that has already happened, a player would not be able to influence those stories (“Game Time” 132). As we've seen, though, story-games often get around this

hurdle by allowing the player to directly influence the discourse of the story (the sjuzhet) even while the events (the fabula) may remain unchanged. The game Home does this in an interesting way. When a player interacts with an object such as a ladder, adventure games typically ask the player to input a yes or no command in response to a question like "Do you wish to use the ladder?” Home, however, phrases the question in such a way as to acknowledge the discrepancy between story and discourse times: it asks, "Did I use the ladder?,” implying that not even the narrator is sure how the story unfolds until the player decides. At another time, the game suggests that the narrator is completely under the control of the player. When the player is given the option of picking up a handgun, the narrator voices his objection: "I hated guns. I didn't take it, did I?,” yet the player is still free to do so. These instances create a sense of power over the game since the player feels that he can do what he wishes despite the narrator's hesitation13, but this is not to mistake the narrator with the author of the game. After all, it is the author that designed this exchange.

The developers of Leviathan have subverted many formal elements of traditional narrative forms through the game's mechanics and presentation. For instance, the game's main narration level is focalized through Jonah through a first-person point of view. However, the only information a player receives about this character is that they are about to "enter a broken mind", thus placing the information he receives through this focalization into question. So when the player is greeted with voice-over dialog in the second-person: "Hello, again. I guess it's time for us to chat,” he cannot be sure who is speaking or to whom. Is it the Figure 2: Narrative Information in Mise-en- Scene from The Old City: Leviathan

13 This is also an important theme in The Stanley Parable, which I discuss in chapter four.

player character or a disembodied voice addressing the player character? The first puzzle of the game is figuring out who the player is playing. The letters tacked to the walls in that first room give clues, but the player remains unaware of just where he fits into the story until more has been uncovered. This slippage between player and player character aligns with a theme of the game that reality and sanity are not stable. Leviathan's protagonist is not simply an avatar that embodies player presence, but a character in his own right from whose perspective the world is mediated to the player. Because of this fact, the game's level design is also an important factor in the focalization of the character. Since the player knows that this character is unreliable, the narrative elements embedded in the mise-en-scene must be taken as a reflection of the character more so than of the environment. Thus, the situatedness of the narrative is also directly tied into characterization. In this way, the environment becomes a narrator in its own right as it provides the reader with an account of the protagonist's internalized anguish through embedded narrative when, for instance, a door in an industrial water treatment plant opens into a child's bedroom.

This instance of narrative architecture relays information to the player about the protagonist that the character himself may not know and frees the dialogue of the responsibility of transmitting this information so that the character can instead narrate his internal thoughts. The game’s levels focalize the story through the protagonist by portraying his psychotic breaks from reality through environmental stimuli.

Level design, then, plays an important role in the narrative of the game. Each chapter of the game corresponds to its own game space or level which is designed to allow a player to explore and disclose narrative information. Levels are unicursal in that there is only one exit, yet there are multiple paths that lead there. Often the environment will clue players in on the path to the exit, such as providing exit signs that would not be out of place in a department store, but it

also highlights the optional paths available to the player where story events are often uncovered.

This provides a bit of agency for the player as they can choose to go straight to the exit or wander around the level before making their way to the end. The player is allowed to develop a causal network that "represents the relationship between the causes and consequences of events in a story" (Gerrig and Egidi 44) as they work to unravel it. Thus, player agency is manifested in the player's navigation as he works to satisfy one (or more) narrative explanations at a time.

Player movement also relates thematically to the story where the focus is on the journey, not the destination, and the player's slow movement is one way the game gets this across. It slows the pace of the game and invites the player to absorb his surroundings. This can be seen as a unique way that games approach Sanford and Emmott's rhetorical focusing principle, or how a writer's style controls a reader's focus. In Leviathan, the reduced speed and limited control options literally mandate how quickly the player traverses a level. Giving the player only the ability to zoom the camera in on objects of interest relays to the player that he should be focused on surveying his surroundings. The restricted actions afforded to the player, likewise, reinforce the narrative sequence of events of the game and relegate the player to the passive role of the observer, even as he navigates around the gameworld.

Leviathan's manipulation of game time also blurs the lines of narrative focalization.

Within the primary level of narration, play time and event time14 happen simultaneously – the player sees what the protagonist sees at the moment it appears on the screen. Thus, a coherent focalization is developed between player and character. However, this union of play time and

14 Play time describes the time taken to play the game. Event time refers to the time of events in the game.

event time is split by allowing access to Solomon's journal only through the pause menu. Event time becomes stagnate while play time is expended while reading – the player is aware that he is no longer engaged with the player character. Furthermore, the author of the journal, Solomon, directly addresses his reader as homodiegetic by referencing the player’s survival of the "fall".

The result is that one full discursive level is extradiegetic in terms of play time, yet diegetic in event time.

At the beginning of this chapter, I questioned whether one could play a narrative. As we've seen, The Old City: Leviathan allows its player to construct the story through the discourse that shapes it, but remains steadfast in the events that make up the story. By affecting the discourse, the player plays a part in the transmission of the story. If we define narrative as someone telling someone else about something that happened, Leviathan's player is both the someone and the someone else, the narrator and the narratee, the author and the audience. But this isn't to say they are in complete control. After all, the game was designed with the express purpose of employing this mode of storytelling. So, then, where do we situate the player in terms of the production of meaning?

In interactive story-games, we've seen the ways that storyworlds and gameworlds can come together to facilitate a fiction co-created by the player themselves. Yet, in order to stay within that fiction, the player's agency is severely limited. In the next chapter, I will turn the discussion towards a game in which fiction plays a much less overt role in order to examine the ways in which fiction drives a player's motivation to complete goals.

CHAPTER THREE

BEING-IN-THE-GAME:

HEIDEGGER, MINECRAFT, AND IMAGINATIVE IMMERSION

In the last chapter, I examined how story-games such as The Old City: Leviathan utilize their gameworlds to immerse players in their storyworlds. The fictions of these games usually unfold through the environment as the player navigates the levels of the game, motivating the player to reach the end by equating his agency with the act of narration. These games typically have very rich, layered stories but scant, shallow gameplay due to the restrictions that the act of narration has on player choice. But, how do games with little to no story use fiction in their gameworld? In this chapter, I will look at how Minecraft engages players in a conversation of semiotic meaning-making through the game’s representations of culturally contextualized objects and the imaginative immersion of the player as he fills in the narrative gaps left by the game.

Minecraft15 is the award-winning, open-world, sandbox video game in which players gather resources, craft items, and construct buildings in order to survive in a procedurally- generated world. First released for the PC in 2009, Minecraft has expanded into a gaming phenomenon, selling nearly 54 million copies across all current platforms from personal computers to mobile phones. The sheer scope of its success bears witness to the game’s cultural significance. The game has, of course, spawned countless imitators attempting to capitalize on its success, but perhaps a greater measure of its importance can be seen in the amount of user-

15 In this thesis, I will be referring to Minecraft ver. 1.8.2.

created content. These range from simple ‘skins’ that change the appearance of objects in the game world to ‘mods’ which can significantly modify the very mechanics of the game.

As a video game, Minecraft is relatively unique insofar as it allows players the freedom not only to interpret the game’s task deployment strategies, but also to reconfigure the game space. Often, the terms “open-world” and “sandbox” are mistakenly used interchangeably to describe games with large game worlds and non-linear play structures. While Minecraft certainly fits these broad connotations, the game also suits the true definition of each. Minecraft is an open-world game in that its entire world is open to the player to explore; there are no invisible barriers to prevent a player from crossing any mountain or traversing any ocean.

Likewise, a player is free to modify this world, either by destruction or creation, and is not held to any predetermined goals that govern play – much like a child in a sandbox, a player can do whatever he likes within the confines of the game.

Being free to go anywhere or change anything is only the beginning of what makes

Minecraft so open to players. The fact that Minecraft has no narrative at all allows players the opportunity to do anything; they aren’t held to any predefined sequence of events or relegated to a predetermined story. Gameplay is free to unfold as it will, but this isn’t to say that Minecraft lacks fiction. Rather, the game situates the player within the gameworld with metaphors and representations: what Miguel Sicart calls the semiotic domain (45). He posits that games use metaphors to communicate various states to the player, such as when Super Mario Bros. conveys the number of attempts a player has remaining to complete the game as the number of lives the player character has left. The game expresses the integer of a line of code into a representation that a player can easily understand (Sicart 43).

Similarly, Minecraft communicates its mechanics and code to players through trees, dirt, water, or lava. These representations are largely how a player learns how to play because the game includes very little in the way of formal instructions. So when a player comes across a line of code represented as a tree, she is able to intuit the properties of these units — the code that makes up the base of this tree will act as wood would act. Furthermore, she can infer which tools would be best suited for the act of cutting down trees. When she crafts an ax, it is not by accident or chance, but rather because the player has extended the metaphor of the tree to other aspects of the game. Metaphor is also useful in communicating complex game mechanics at a glance. For example, a player can easily understand that the code for one weapon has a lower integer for the maximum number of hits it can take before it breaks than another weapon simply because the game represents one with wood and another with steel. Thus, the player need not even be cognizant of the discrepancy in code because she understands clearly that steel is a stronger material than wood. In this way, the fictitious elements of the game restrict the player’s agency only so far as to suggest to her what is possible. As Sicart puts it, a player’s experience is

“mediated by the semiotic level but conditioned by the procedural level. Players play by the rules that are explained to them by the semiotic elements” (51). The semiotic level provides context to the gameworld so that a player may make meaning from it.

This contextual relationship between an entity and the world around it can be best understood in terms of Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world, in which he insists that our “understanding of Being pertains with equal primordiality both to an understanding of something like a ‘world’, and to the understanding of the Being of those entities which become accessible within the world” (Being and Time 33). In other words, it is impossible to understand being without recognizing that which it is being in and that which it is being with. Can we be in

a game the same way we can be on the Earth? In his seminal work Being and Time, Heidegger sets out to differentiate the essence of being from the subjective/objective tradition that he sees as informing the majority of Western philosophy. He believes that when philosophers think about being, they actually only think about beings; when asking “what is a table?,” they think only of tables. They forget to ask what is means. Heidegger calls this essential element of being that exists in context with and for all other beings as Dasein. Much like the player of Minecraft,

Dasein discloses its significance only so far as its contextual surroundings allow. Heidegger argues that a major problem of modern society is that people have become so absorbed in their everyday lives – our being-in-the-world – that they have lost sight of the significance of Being, or why things exist as they do and why the world is the way it is. To confront this is to also confront the opposite of being, what Heidegger calls das nichts: the nothing. Questioning why I am what I am is to also reflect on how easily I could be something else or not be at all.

Heidegger believes we escape this realization of the haphazardness of our existence by immersing ourselves in the egoism of das Gerede, or ‘idle talk’, of everyday life (Being and

Time 211). He believes the task of philosophy should be to decenter our perception from das

Gerede and to allow us to encounter the universal connectedness that is Dasein.

An important aspect of Heidegger’s phenomenology is how a Dasein relates to and interprets the world around him. We know, of course, that we are not in control of the circumstances that we are born into. Heidegger refers to this as throwness – Dasein is thrown into a set of conditions that will comprise the das Gerede of its world. How a being relates to its surroundings is its disposedness, or mood. For Heidegger, a mood is more akin to an ambiance or disposition than an internal set of emotions. He states that:

Moods are not side-effects, but are something which in advance determine our

being with one another. It seems as though a mood is in each case already there,

so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case

and which then attunes us through and through. (Heidegger, Concepts of

Metaphysics 66-67)

Like Dasein, a Minecraft player finds himself thrown into a procedurally-generated world that is randomly created as he begins a game. Of course, unlike Dasein, a player has quite a bit of agency as to what game he is being in, but he brings with him a mood that governs the style of play he engages in. Sometimes, this mood may be prescribed by the game. For instance, when a player begins a game of Minecraft, he is presented with different modes of play: Survival and

Creative. Selecting “Survival” positions a player in a mood of cautiousness and alertness that will inform their gameplay, while selecting “Creative” invites the player to adopt an air of nonchalance since the more unforgiving elements of survival mode are absent. These modes of play are the only explicit directions given by the game as to how to play the game. When a player chooses “Survival Mode””, she is thrown into a world with only that direction: survive.

This is the only bit of task deployment the game explicitly provides, leaving the player to discover her own goals as she interacts with the rules of the gameworld.

This sort of free-form play within a rules-based system is called emergent play or emergence, where such a system consists of “relative simple, interacting parts, creating rich, unforeseen patterns of behavior after being set into motion” (Dormans 427). Through its very design, Minecraft gently urges the player into emergent play. An impatient player may begin a game of Minecraft by immediately killing mobs indiscriminately, while a more thoughtful player may be content to gaze at the surrounding landscapes. As I mentioned earlier, a player begins

Minecraft by interpreting his surroundings – the blocky graphics and somewhat other worldliness of the landscape allows a player to interpret the game space – and this interpretation informs her play style. For instance, the procedurally generated world coincides in several ways with many ideas about wilderness: untouched, unknowable, and dangerous. In his PhD dissertation

“Alternative Wildernesses: Finding Wildness in 21st Century America,” Ben Bunting writes of a player’s ability “to become a spatial practitioner inside a virtual wilderness” (148) and the player’s movement from exploring wilderness to dwelling via the game’s building mechanics.

He argues that a player’s “meaning-making is achieved through a series of place-discoveries and ensuing place-construction” (Bunting 163), thus it is the player’s movement through and interpretation of the game world that constitutes the game’s meaning for that player. Although the player isn’t playing the game in a way unforeseen by the developer, she is reappropriating the gamespace through the act of personalized place-making. The player reconstructs the gameworld to fit his needs for continued play.

This process of meaning-making coincides with what Robert Marzec calls the “Robinson

Crusoe syndrome” which he defines as the need of the colonialist to enclose unknown, wild space that exemplifies to him a “meaningless presence that bewilders [the player’s] sensibilities, and by extension the socio-symbolic order … that he carries on his back” (Marzec 130). The enclosure of the land transforms it into a mastered object and restructures it to more closely resemble the order desired by the one who encloses it, thus imbuing it with meaning. The narrative of a player’s time in the game may be seen in the progression of his space — from a rushed, temporary shelter and stash of foraged food into a fortified compound complete with a functional garden and livestock pen. Moreover, this is the start of a player’s own choices beginning to restrict the freedom afforded to him by the game. As a player’s shelter becomes

more advanced, it gradually guides his gameplay as he must now tend to his garden, breed and slaughter his livestock, and never stray too far from this locale due to the risk of never finding it again. The player has traded the dangerous freedom of the wilderness for the routine safeness of civilized life.

Of course, the innate freedom afforded by the game’s minimal rules does provide a player many options for going about these tasks. Players may tackle the problem of gathering

food in some pretty clever ways. As illustrated in Figure 3, a player

has devised a semi-automatic steak harvesting machine through

which he has reduced the act of slaughtering livestock to the pulling

of a switch.16 This industrial method of play reflects on the player’s Figure 3: User-made Automatic Cow Harvester in Minecraft own disposedness in the game world. His solution to the problem of food production corresponds to his interpretation of the game’s semiotic domain. From there, it is possible that we can interpret his management of virtual cows to possible attitudes towards the signified thing of the real world through the way the player interacts with the game’s rules as he understands them. By representing as living creatures these units of code that produce other units of code used to satisfy game conditions, the developers have implemented an informal morality- based game mechanic that Sicart calls “ethical gameplay17.” He explains that “the player who experiences ethical gameplay will interact with a system that is explained through the fictional element and experienced in full through the combination of both rules and fiction. Ethical

16 Although this machine was constructed in the “Creative” game-type, it is still very possible to build something very much like it in the survival mode, depending on a player’s determination to gather the resources. 17 Sicart states that “ethical gameplay requires thinking about play as a moral activity, accounting for the wiggle space between rules and interpretation” (9).

gameplay is a process of ethical interpretation of the game [through] inserting the self into a system that is experienced as and through a world” (Sicart 27). The world of Minecraft is particularly well positioned for this sort of player immersion because it enables players to express their agency over every object that comprises the gameworld.

Immersion is a term that gets tossed around in video game circles quite often, yet its definition is somewhat hard to pin down. Game critics believe that immersion occurs when

“media contents are perceived as ‘real’ in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment” (Wissmath 114). To the video game player, it’s a feeling of spatial presence one undergoes while engaging with a congruous gameworld; a way of being in the game. There is no quantifiable element that marks a game as immersive, but rather it’s the product of a conglomerate of elements. During Frans Mäyrä and Laura Ermi’s research to define fundamental elements of the gameplay experience, they develop a model to classify three modes of immersion that can occur: sensory, challenge-based, and imaginative immersion. While these modes are not exclusive to video games, the medium is unique in its ability to engage all three simultaneously where other media may only engage one or two. For instance, sensory immersion may come more easily while watching an IMAX film because the sensory stimuli are more intense than when reading a book, while a novel may provide a more imaginative immersion due to the emphasis of narratology in situating a reader in the story.

Meanwhile, an intense game of chess may keep a player absorbed in challenged-based and imaginative immersion while he plots future moves, yet it lacks in the sensory immersion of audiovisual media.

By applying this model to Minecraft, we can see how the game’s formal properties enable and induce immersion for the player. Obviously, the audiovisual component is inherent to

the medium of the video game, but Minecraft’s aesthetic is far from the photo-realistic verisimilitude of games even a decade older. Because of this, the game’s sensory mode of immersion is weakened due to its reliance on illusion. The player experiences a cognitive removal from even the most realistic visuals because of an absence of any consequential agency within the illusion. Imagine staring at a photographic mural; it may appear to be a wall-sized window into a lush forest setting, but the viewer could not be said to be immersed in this image because there is nothing beyond looking to do there. Transforming this two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional plane allows the viewer to express his agency by means of navigating the gameworld, yet, again, such a game space is hardly unique to Minecraft. The types of experiences a player has within Minecraft, though, are just as unique to it as a reading experience is unique to any particular novel. Challenge-based immersion, then, may arise from not only exploring this three-dimensional space, but also in fighting enemy mobs, building intricate structures, or even simply discovering the rules that govern this world, i.e. the things that make this particular game Minecraft. Thus, this mode both enriches the player’s sensory immersion and is contextualized by it so that the player is able to make sense of his actions, or achieve imaginative immersion. In a game such as Minecraft with little diegetic fiction, any meaning- making that occurs as a by-product of enacting agency in an image can be expressed as imaginative immersion – an overlaying of fiction on the game space –– which, in turn, feeds back in to the prior modes as the setting and actions are interpreted by the player. So, the blocky graphics of Minecraft can be immersive, not because of an illusion of reality, but through the player’s co-creation of the semiotic domain that informs his interactions with the game’s mechanics of play.

Minecraft’s game mechanics are built around a player’s relationship with the objects of the game world, and because Minecraft is a sandbox game, a player may interact with nearly every element in the game world: trees, bodies of water, NPCs, mountains. Every part of the landscape is comprised of units (called blocks) with which a player may interact. The player may use, move, destroy, or even create nearly all of the objects in this world, and this design element is crucial to the gameplay. The most fundamental component of gameplay is the ability to craft items from the basic blocks of materials gathered from the world, and crafting one item leads to obtaining new materials to craft new items and so on. Advancement in the game is measured phenomenologically18 — a player evaluates his position and the state of the game in terms of how he relates to the things around him. Due to the sandbox nature of the game, every inch of the gameworld is included in and essential to this phenomenological relationship that positions a player’s being inside the game.

Players reorganize the blocks of the gameworld to create shelter, combine them to create tools, or restructure them to make new objects. In Heidegger’s terms, these objects are in a constant state of flux – transitioning from states of obstinacy to presence-at-hand to readiness- to-hand to obtrusiveness in any given order – that is initiated by and contingent on the player’s actions or purpose. Early in the game, a player may craft a wooden pick-axe with the intention of mining stone in order to craft stronger tools. The player selects the wooden pick-axe simply because of its ability to break the stone blocks; it has transitioned from an object into a tool, from something present-at-hand to a thing ready-to-hand. The stone blocks, too, are ready-to-hand in that the player recognizes them as necessary in fulfilling his purpose. Sometime later, after the

18 Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology.”

player has crafted a new pick-axe from stone, he may begin mining for another necessity: coal.

As he searches for the coal blocks, the stone blocks have transitioned back to a state of obstinacy because, in this context, they only disclose themselves to the player as blocks that are not coal.

They are simply obstacles that the player must maneuver past in order to achieve his goal of obtaining coal. Heideggerian scholar William Blattner says that, for Heidegger, this type of relationship is what “make[s] up the structure of the context in which we operate, the structure of the world” (Blattner 61). It is the abundance of these relationships between player and objects in

Minecraft that makes the gameworld appropriate for this discussion of “being-in-the-game.”

This mode of “being-in-the-game” is in contrast to the way players relate to the worlds of more traditionally designed gameworlds. In, for example, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a player is free to traverse the gameworld insofar as there is no formal gating system that disallows a player’s progress outside of the linear storyline. However, the terrain of this world often acts as an informal barrier, blocking a player’s access through a range of mountains or corralling him into a particular pass. The player’s inability to interact with and manipulate the game’s landscape counteracts the immersion she may feel when first navigating the photorealistic landscape. In such a game, not only is the landscape static, but the player’s relationship to the world is fixed as well, and this prevents him from becoming fully immersed in the world’s phenomenological context.

This context can also be seen in the correlation between a player and the physical equipment used to play a computer game. A novice computer game player may need to actively think along the lines of, “I need to hold down the W key in order to move forward” or “In order to interact with this object, I must align the cursor to it by moving my mouse to the left and clicking the left button.” To this player, the input devices that allow interaction with the game are

not yet equipment. The player’s experience in the game is still heavily mediated by the accoutrements on the medium, and he feels removed from the action because of his unfamiliarity with the keyboard and mouse; he is not immersed in the gameworld. However, as the player becomes more accustomed to the equipment19, he instead begins to think of his actions as simply

“walking to” or “picking up” an object. The level of mediation recedes and his immersion in the gameworld is facilitated rather than hindered by this method of input. Mäyrä and Ermi see this sort periphery element of playing video games as being just as essential as the elements of code that make up the game:

Human experiences in virtual environments and games are made of the same

elements that all other experiences consist of, and the gameplay experience can be

defined as an ensemble made up of the player’s sensations, thoughts, feelings,

actions and meaning-making in a gameplay setting. Thus it is not a property or a

direct cause of certain elements of a game but something that emerges in a unique

interaction process between the game and the player. (2)

Ultimately, a player cannot be distinguished from the actions he takes within a game world, just as Heidegger’s Dasein cannot be disentangled from its relationship with the paraphernalia of the world. The player is immersed in the world and, as such, can be thought of as “being-in-the- game”.

Minecraft’s greatest strength may be the freedom it affords players through its open, sandbox gameworld as well as its sparse fictional constraints. Not only may a player go anywhere or do anything, but he may also provide his own reasons for doing so. This freedom

19 Through muscle memory, for example.

stands in stark contrast to the affordances that story-games such as The Old City: Leviathan present to players. In those games, players are largely confined to experiencing the story of the game while it unfolds around them. Even in games with multicursal stories, players express their agency only by means of choosing how the story is told rather than affecting the contents of the story. Minecraft, on the other hand, nearly demands that players fill in the gaps of its semiotic domain with narratives of their own. Its method of communication is dialectic rather than didactic, engaging players in a dialog to determine meaning that is “communicated through semiotic elements that engage players by invoking their cultural being in the context of play”

(Sicart 60). Thus, the burden of meaning making falls to the player as he attempts to makes sense of, and maybe even justify, his actions.

This freedom to tell one’s own story makes Minecraft’s meaning inherently personal to each player. Since the game affords players a nearly infinite amount of choices, no two games are the same, and the amount of meaning created is likewise nearly infinite. In fact, the origin of this chapter lies in a uniquely meaningful experience I had in a recent play-through of the game.

Perhaps somewhat serendipitously, I spawned20 right outside of a village21. What better way to survive than to utilize the shelter and food of the village, right? For the first few day cycles, I remained in the village harvesting crops and fighting off the occasional zombie that wandered in at night. However, I soon grew bored of the safety of the village and began venturing out to the surrounding areas during the daylight, gathering materials and generally exploring, but always

20 Upon starting a new game, players are “spawned” at a randomly chosen point on the map. 21 Villages are somewhat rare in Minecraft. Although the current version of the game allows players to customize maps by increasing or decreasing the number of villages spawned, it is not uncommon for players to never come across one in a game with default settings. I was playing with default settings.

returning to the village at night. After a while, I noticed more enemy mobs began assailing the village at night, and it eventually got the point where a villager or two were killed each night. I felt responsible! The village had provided me with shelter, food, and materials, and I drew these zombies right to it every night. In an effort to rectify this, I began construction on a giant stone wall that enclosed the village and would prevent attacks from enemies. I would make the village safe again! After a few days of meticulously stacking stone blocks around the village, I congratulated myself for protecting the city and all was well for a few days. However, I soon noticed that the villagers, who would normally roam the village during the day time, were no longer interacting with one another and instead walking along the walls, seemingly in search of a way out.22 I had unknowingly gone from the protector of the village to its captor. I realized that the only way I could protect this village was to leave it, so I tore down the wall and made my way into the wilderness.

Sicart uses the phrase “wicked problem” to describe the sort of situation I faced. In games, wicked problems manifest as:

formulations of conceptual frameworks that can be used to generate situations in

which players are teased into playing using their ethical imaginations, stepping

outside of the pleasures of instrumental play through a moment of pause. The

response to wicked problems is player complicity. Wicked problems make players

complicit in the experience of the game. (106)

Although the game designers may not have intended for me to have this experience, it arose from the dialectic intersection of the game’s semiotic domain and my own imaginative immersion to

22 Of course, this was probably not what they were actually doing, but it was the meaning my brain intuitively made of their actions.

force me into making an ethical decision. I felt I owed the villagers safety from the zombies and the freedom to leave their village, so I had to leave myself. The fiction that I projected onto the game guided and restricted my gameplay just as much as any procedural rule of the game. This is achieved in part by the logical cohesion between the algorithms that comprise the game’s code and the fictional representations that express them to the player.

Minecraft is not only a system that enables emergent, player-driven gameplay, but one that also provides a space in which a player may co-author an individualized and personally meaningful narrative through the dialectic nature of the game’s semiotic domain and the player’s own imaginative immersion in the gameworld. In this way, Minecraft more closely resembles

Aarseth’s cybertext that then story-games of the first chapter because the player is able to reappropriate the space of the game in ways not expressly intended by the game’s designers.

CHAPTER FOUR

“THE STORY NEEDS YOU”:

LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE AND FICTION AS PROCEDURAL RULE

IN THE STANLEY PARABLE

So far, I have examined the ways in which game designers use game spaces to draw players into a storyworld in order to convey a narrative that the player helps to construct. I’ve also discussed how game designers can employ fictional elements of a gameworld to situate players within a particular mood of play and to illustrate the relationship that the player can expect with objects within that gameworld. In both cases, it is essential that the fictional elements and the procedural rules of the game complement each other — that is, one flows logically and naturally out of the other and vice versa — and this is referred to as ludo-narrative resonance.

Ludo-narrative resonance strengthens the ludic contract by allowing a player to more easily slip into a feeling of presence within a gameworld. Recall the discussion of Minecraft’s wooden blocks from the previous chapter; a player is able to intuit how one of these blocks will react to a range of situations because the code that governs its behavior and its representational metaphor are logically consistent. If the rules of the game disallowed the wooden blocks to burn, the player would be understandably confused. Ian Bogost’s argues that the capacity of computer processes to express an ideology relies on the unity of that process and its rhetorical representation to convey its intended message (Persuasive Games 5). An example of this can be

found in Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please23, in which players are put in the position of a low-level bureaucrat within a totalitarian regime. The play area consists entirely of the border checkpoint booth that players inhabit as they screen arrivals to the fictitious country Arstotzka. NPCs are seen only through a tiny window and, later, through the x-ray scanners. The main conflict of the game is between performing the job correctly to care for your family back home and bending the rules to express empathy with certain NPCs. Thus, the gameplay — cross-checking passports with official documents and performing uncomfortable and ethically questionable searches — and the fiction — the authoritarian government and the player-character’s struggling family — are rhetorically presented to place players in thought-provoking, ethical dilemmas. Accepting the ludic contract does not exclude the player from accepting that of the narrative, nor is the opposite true. In fact, the two contracts are mutually inclusive; to accept one is to accept the other.

Contrasting this, ludo-narrative dissonance occurs when the actions that a player is afforded through gameplay are not logically contextualized through the game’s fiction. The result is a violation of aesthetic distance, or an increase in the level of mediation that the player perceives, which causes a breakdown of the player’s presence within the game. The term was first coined by game designer and critic Clint Hocking in a blog post about Irrational Games’

Bioshock, a game thematically concerned with Randian Objectivism. Hocking argues that while the gameplay allows for player choice in the adoption or rejection of Objectivism through the mechanic of harvesting or saving the “Little Sisters”, the narrative mandates that players reject

Objectivism by constructing the story in such a way that there is no choice but to altruistically

23 Awards include "Excellence in Narrative” and "Excellence in Design" at the 2014 Independent Games Festival Awards, among many others.

assist the character Atlas. He sees this as a negation of the ludic contract through that of the narrative:

In the game’s mechanics, I am offered the freedom to choose to adopt an

Objectivist approach, but I also have the freedom to reject that approach and to

rescue the Little Sisters, even though it is not in my own (net) best interest to do

so […] Yet in the game’s fiction on the other hand, I do not have that freedom to

choose between helping Atlas or not. Under the ludic contract, if I accept to adopt

an Objectivist approach, I can harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can

rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas

and oppose Ryan, and if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too

bad… I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it. (Ludo-narrative Dissonance

in Bioshock)

Thus, players wishing to adopt Objectivism are met with inability to do so and the renunciation of any meaning derived from instances where that choice is allowed. Rather than enriching a player’s experience of the gameplay, the fiction magnifies the discrepancies between the narrative and the rules.

On the other hand, ludo-narrative dissonance is not simply a side-effect of developers shoehorning narrative into games. It can often occur when game designers who wish to tell a particular story fail to consider the meanings that players may derive from different genres of the medium, such as when game characters endure a duplicity of characterization: the story paints them as one thing and the game mechanics another. For instance, Daniel Sims writes about the incongruence between the two Nathan Drakes in the best-selling Uncharted series. On one hand, the character is presented through cut-scenes as a friendly, amiable fellow cracking jokes and

looking for treasure, but within the gameplay itself, he is a hardened and well-trained killer; more Rambo than Indiana Jones. Sims argues that the fiction isn’t to blame in this instance, rather it was a poor choice of design to tell this particular story through the genre of the shooter

(Sims). This argument refocuses the search for potential solutions to ludo-narrative dissonance back to the conceptualization of the medium itself, rather than problematizing the role of fiction in it. It asks designers to allow a story to flow from the mechanics of the game rather than forcing narrative into incompatible gameplay.

At this point, some may argue that this argument is simply picking nits over the sorts of conventions that have been a part of the medium of video games since its inception, or that I’m simply not suspending my disbelief to the extent that I would for, say, a blockbuster film filled with plot holes. Some may argue that these games still serve their primary purpose — to be fun to play. This last claim is true, of course — ludo-narrative dissonance rarely, if ever, renders a game unplayable and or even unenjoyable from a strictly ludic standpoint. Abstract games, such as Tetris, are proof that games do not require cohesive fictions (or any fiction) in order to be understood and enjoyed. However, games that do present a narrative contract to the player should be designed so that it does not compete with the ludic contract.

There is a fine line between common gamisms and ludo-narrative dissonance. Gamisms, as the term is used by Tom Bissell, refer to common conventions in video games that players overlook as per the ludic contract. They are typically manifested through the game’s mechanics, such as when a simple weapon (like a knife) requires a player to be at a certain level to use.

While lacking a sort of real-world logic, this gamism is consistent with the logic of the game — in this case, it could be to keep combat balanced for an intended experience. Other gamisms may

be aesthetic choices, such as the trope often seen in JRPGs24 of an entire party of characters collapsing into one controllable avatar while the player navigates the map. The effect is that a player may more easily interact with the interface because it isn’t cluttered with umpteen character models. The event isn’t even mentioned in the game’s narrative because it’s simply a design technique that benefits the player by making the game easier to interpret.

While gamisms may remind players of the mediation they face in order to better serve the purposes of the game, ludo-narrative dissonance disrupts a player’s experience through an interruption of the thematic balance between a game’s ludic elements and its fiction. An infamous example of this Figure 4: Ludo-narrative Dissonant can be found in Bethseda Softworks’ Fallout 3, when Door in Fallout 3 players encounter the locked door in Figure 4. The game’s mechanics dictate to the player that they must be very skilled in lock-picking to get through, but the appearance of the door suggests otherwise. A player experiencing presence in this gameworld may feel betrayed due to the inconsistency of her ability to interact with the objects there. If she is able to reach into a broken glass case to retrieve a weapon, why would she not be able to reach through this door to unlock it? In this instance, the player is presented with opposing possibilities through the game’s fiction and its mechanics of play, breaching the ludic contract due to the inconsistent logic of the gameworld. The result is that the player’s level of presence in the gameworld is depleted because of the increased attention to the mediation that occurs.

24 Japanese Role-Playing Games — it’s largely an aesthetic subgenre today more than a game with a precise geographic development site.

Ludo-narrative dissonance is one of the many

tropes cleverly exploited in Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley

Parable, a game that reflects on the inherent paradox

between predetermined stories and a player’s freedom

of choice in games. It centers on the conflict between

the disembodied narrator’s attempt to guide the player Figure 5: Aftermath of "Narrative Contradiction" in The Stanley Parable. through the game’s “main” storyline and the multiple affordances provided by the game that allows a player to deviate from it. Depending on the path chosen, the player may uncover up to eighteen endings; from the thwarting of a mind-control plot of the narrator’s story to a complete structural breakdown of the game due to “narrative contradiction.” I want to conclude this thesis by discussing three of these endings through the lens of Aarseth’s tripartite textual machine25 to draw out the game’s underlying statement about the power relationship between the player, the rules, and the narrative.

At the beginning of the The Stanley Parable, the power lies entirely with the narrator.

The game opens with a narrative voice-over that introduces Stanley as a corporate drone whose sole responsibility is to push buttons on a keyboard according to the orders that come to him through a monitor on his desk. The orders tell him “what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order” (Stanley). It’s clear, then, that Stanley represents the ideal player of the narrator; he accepts what is presented and allows the narrative to unfold as it has been designed to do. The linear level design also reflects this; although a player may roam around within the rooms of the office building, there is initially only one path through. Yet, this passivity goes

25 “A mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs” that consists of the verbal sign, the medium, and the operator (Cybertext 21).

against the very premise of the computer game as interactive media. A player must be allowed to react and have those reactions produce perceivable consequences, and The Stanley

Parable’s rules eventually allow for this very thing. The game can be seen in microcosm through the very first opportunity for Figure 6: "When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door to his left." divergence: does the player choose to go Or did he? through the left door as the narrator dictates, or does he choose to explore what’s behind the door to the right? By choosing the door on the right, the player willingly initiates ludo-narrative dissonance and either exacerbates or rectifies it with each subsequent decision. Going left means resigning from any agency that the game may provide.

The game’s driving conflict, then, is between the narration and the rules of the game: the former attempting to control the player’s experience and the latter affording him opportunities to make choices. However, both lack meaning within themselves, and it is only through player interaction that each may gain it. This is perhaps most evident through the game’s “Real Person” ending, in which the narrator recognizes the player as a separate entity from Stanley — one able to make meaningful choices. In light of this, the narrator corrals the player into retracing his

steps and choosing the left door, but the damage of

“narrative contradiction” has already been done and

the game’s structure begins to break down.

Eventually, as though through a glitch in the game,

Figure 7: Stanley from a 3rd person perspective. the player’s perspective shifts to the third-person,

looking down at the motionless Stanley who is no longer under the player’s control. The narrator, as always, states that Stanley takes the door to the left, but this time the voice seems to come from a greater distance than before. After a beat, the voice adopts a tone of concern that transitions quickly to despair and then defeat, begging the player to make a choice:

“The story needs you. It needs you to make a decision. It cannot exist without

you. Do you understand me? Whatever choice you make is just fine; they’re both

correct. You can’t be wrong here. We can work together. I’ll accept whatever you

do. I simply need you to take that step forward. Please? Choose? Do something?

Anything? This is more important than you can ever know. I need this. The story

needs it. So? You hear me? Are you there? Are you listening to this? Okay. It’s

okay. You need time to decide. Time to make sure your choice is correct. That is

the best choice. It’s all right. I’ll wait for you to decide what’s the right thing to

do. Take as much time as you need.” (Stanley)

This ending emphasizes the role of the operator (i.e. the player) as more than just a receiver of information; he also generates the information of the text through interaction with the medium and verbal signs. Here, the game’s ludo-narrative dissonance results in the player’s inability to maintain presence in the game by literally removing his perspective from it. He is an outside observer, no longer able to influence the game’s progress and rendering it forever incomplete.

This also underlines the power dynamic between the player and the game. The narrator comes to recognize this, just as he comes to recognize that his insistence to force a linear story onto a non- linear system is the cause and concedes to go along with whatever the player wishes to do.

Without the player, both the game and the story are inert and meaningless. This echoes my argument about player agency in story-games like The Old City: Leviathan where the player is

tasked with constructing the story’s discourse as he traverses the gameworld. His movement through and interaction with the game’s procedural system produces the semiotic processes of the textual machine, thus creating the text of the game.

However, another of the game’s endings complicates this resolution by questioning whether a player has any agency at all within the game. Upon straying from the narrator’s path yet again, Stanley faces an imminent death as he is slowly inched toward a giant crushing machine. Right before the end comes, however, an unfamiliar voice picks up the narration — not only narrating Stanley’s gruesome death, but also the words of the original narrator. The meta- narration continues:

And yet it would be a few minutes before Stanley would restart the game back in

his office, alive as ever. What exactly did the narrator think he was going to

accomplish? When every path you can walk has been created for you long in

advance, death becomes meaningless making life the same. Do you see now? Do

you see that Stanley was already dead from the moment he hit start? Oh, look at

these two. How they wish to destroy one another. How they wish to control one

another. How they both wish to be free. Can you see? Can you see how much they

need one another? No, perhaps not. Sometimes these things cannot be seen.

(Stanley)

This new narrator acknowledges that the choices available to the player are all just as predetermined as the narration. The choice between the two doors is meaningless in terms of player agency, because he is still subordinate to the will of the implied designer. Even when a player seemingly exploits a glitch to fall out of the map, the narrator remarks that it’s all a part of the game. This event illustrates to the player that there isn’t a single action to be taken that has

not been planned for during the game’s development. The meta-voice then discusses the narrative and the ludic aspects of the game. Each exists to accomplish opposing ends — one to impose a singular experience and the other to allow for a multiplicity of possibilities — and yet it is a balance of the two that allows for the player’s individual experience to emerge. However, within that narrow individual experience, the player is unable to comprehend the system as a whole. In a well-designed game, it is impossible for him to distinguish where the story ends and the game begins. Likewise, the ludic and narrative contracts are similarly entangled. The Stanley

Parable asks players to continuously consider how each level of the game — the narrative, the rules, and the player himself — interacts with and plays off of the others. Similarly, the three elements of Aarseth’s machine have undefined boundaries and “each part can be defined only in terms of the other two. Furthermore, the functional possibilities of each element combine with those of the two others” to create meaning (Cybertext 21). Thus the player is not only unable to distinguish between the story and the game, he is unable to identify himself as separate from the game’s system.

Lastly, a third ending reinforces the power of fiction by suggesting that the game lacks any meaning when the narrative is completely ignored. When players continually make choices that contradict the narrator, they find themselves at a dead-end in an unfinished portion of the map. The narrator becomes agitated, saying:

You want to know so badly what’s out there? You want to find out what lies at

the end of this road you’ve chosen? Well, don’t let me stop you. You see, there’s

nothing here. I haven’t even finished building this section of the map because you

were never supposed to be here in the first place. Broken rooms, exposed

developer textures. Is this what you wanted? Was it worth ruining the entire story

I had written out specifically for you? Do you not think I put a lot of time into

that? Because I did. And in the end it was all for nothing, because this is what you

wanted to see. (Stanley)

Exasperated, the narrator snidely suggests ways of making the game better, such as adding a third option to the original two doors to give the player more choice. Eventually, the narrator suggests that the player should perhaps play another game, and the player suddenly finds himself in a mock-up of Minecraft. The narrator, still present, proceeds to build a small house of dirt, poking fun at the sort of self-directed goals of that game, before sending the player off to find diamonds. But as the player ventures into a nearby cave, he is presented with a nearly limitless choice of direction, and the narrator changes his mind, stating that it’s “far more open-ended than

I had in mind” (Stanley). The player is then dropped into the darkened hallways of the original

Stanley Parable mod before the screen cuts to black and the narrator’s voice can be heard again:

I wonder what he found. If what he wanted was to be the leading man in his own

story, well perhaps he’s gotten it. Down in where ever he is right now. I wonder if

he’s happy with his choice and if he’s learned the heavy cost that comes with it.

He’ll understand soon what I was trying to tell him. He needs me. Someone

who’ll wrap everything up at the end, to make sense out of the chaos and the fear

and the confusion. That’s who I am. That is what I mean to this world. Oh, yes.

Yes, I’ll be back. There’s no other way. Once this ends, after it all comes to a

close, then I’ll be back. (Stanley)

This ending accentuates the important role of the semiotic domain in games by illustrating how the actions taken by a player in the gameworld are contextualized through metaphor and representation in order to have meaning. Without the narrator, the choices in The Stanley Parable

would simply be a collection of doors and corridors. By narrating that Stanley chose the left door, the narrator is also lending significance to the door on the right as an option to be explored.

So, the problem of ludo-narrative dissonance cannot be resolved by completely removing the narrative from the game; without it, there is only a virtual space. This is exactly why the narrator is intimidated by the freedom afforded by Minecraft. There is no place for narration in that world, nor is there a need. The player of that game is the “leading man in his own story”

(Stanley) and the “heavy cost” is that the responsibility for meaning-making rests entirely on the player. However, the textual machine is still dependent on its verbal signs to communicate the medium to the operator. In other words, that game employs metaphors and representations to convey to the player the relationships between the various lines of code and himself.

I began this thesis by questioning the assumptions behind the idea of an artificial intelligence learning to play video games. I asserted that it takes for granted the context provided by a game’s fictional elements; elements that a non-human player would not be able to interpret.

I see this as a major flaw of gamification, as well, because the trend separates the processes of games from the context that situates them for the player. Both DeepMind’s AI and gamification attempt to disrupt the textual machine, either by removing the verbal signs or automating the role of the operator. In both cases, the text is rendered incomplete.

The phenomena of ludo-narrative dissonance underlines the importance of not only cohesion between the three parts of the textual machine, but of a balance between them as well.

When a player is not contextualized within the parameters of the gameworld that he is participating in, he becomes like Stanley -- simply pressing buttons that correspond to instructions on a screen. Likewise, instances when a player is simply enacting a predetermined narrative are no different. Meaning-making may only arise when the player or user of the textual

machine is afforded the ability to influence the other two components just as much as they guide and restrict him. Ludo-narrative dissonance is a corruption of the textual machine, rendering the informational loop between player and game incomplete and, therefore, innately meaningless.

My intention in highlighting the importance of fiction in games is not to suggest that game developers forgo gameplay in order to craft airtight narratives, but rather that they reconsider the usefulness of the fictive elements of their games. The issue is that a common conception in video game design is that fictionality is simply a game’s window dressing, something external that adds only a hint of flavor to the gameplay’s already rich profile. And as we’ve seen in the first two chapters, this just isn’t the case. The fiction of a well-designed game functions in a manner very similar to the game’s procedural rules by shaping a players’ behavior in the gameworld. It does this by contextualizing the rules of the game so that a player understands how she might operate within the confines of that game. To my mind, ludo-narrative dissonance is analogous to a bug in the code — it isn’t often game-breaking, but it does hinder the game’s ability to be meaningful. When the semiotic and the ludic are incompatible, the player is jarred out of the experience that the game aims to create and any possible meaning- making is severely restricted.

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