DIEGETIC STANCE AND ITS ROLE IN ROLE PLAYING GAMES: AN EXAMINATION OF SCHEMA DEVELOPMENT AND NARRATIVE APPLICATION IN DIGITAL INTERACTIVE FICTION By HENRY JAMES BUTLER A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2003 TABLE OF CONTENTS page LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................... iii ABSTRACT............................................................v INTRODUCTION .......................................................1 HISTORY OF THE DIEGETIC STANCE ....................................4 DIEGETIC STANCE AND THE RPG .......................................7 CONCLUSION ........................................................22 WORKS CONSULTED .................................................25 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ..............................................29 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 1 Classic stage......................................................4 2 Classic stage enlarged ..............................................4 3 These three images of “Lucy” ........................................6 4 Manny, imposing ..................................................9 5 Manny kicking off stilts .............................................9 6 Eva, the stereotypic ...............................................10 7 Pickup scene ....................................................12 8 Meche..........................................................12 9 Manny watches Meche ............................................13 10 “Anna” .........................................................13 11 Anna in black and white ...........................................14 12 Even before Cath meets Schmidt.....................................14 13 The Croatian girl .................................................15 14 In the midst of her grandfather’s seizure ...............................15 15 As her grandfather calms down ......................................16 16 Smethalls .......................................................17 17 Note the elevated position ..........................................17 18 Note the stance and posture .........................................17 iii 19 Agent Wilmore deadpans...........................................19 20 Detective Astradourian ............................................19 21 Wilmore puts taper on his nose ......................................19 iv Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts DIEGETIC STANCE AND ITS ROLE IN ROLE PLAYING GAMES: AN EXAMINATION OF SCHEMA DEVELOPMENT AND NARRATIVE APPLICATION IN DIGITAL INTERACTIVE FICTION By Henry James Butler May 2003 Chair: J. Yellowlees Douglas Major Department: English New media develop from pre-existing media, adapting and adopting those tropes and structures which can be applied from the old form to the new. As new narrative structures coalesce within that new media, narrative schemas–and the scripts used to implement them–are subliminally applied as templates to the new form, creating a cognitive foundation that allows the reader to comprehend and project the action of the diegesis. The process of transplantation provides a unique vantage to examine established paradigms anew in the light of the new media, and to occasionally discover other paradigms either overlooked or trivialized in their previous utilization. One such transplant is the use of stance–physical gesture, spatial position, or carriage–in juxtaposition to the environment to convey intent, effect, purpose or emotion to the reader of a narrative and to contribute to the progression of the diegesis. This v diegetically motivated stance is not new, but has been uniformly overlooked or disregarded in established media. Easily misidentified as verisimilar mimetic representation and nearly transparent when executed effectively, diegetic stance presents the reader with subliminal information scripted within a given schema to advance the narrative arc. Subtly used, it provides the author a tool to provide the user/reader/player information by means of which the overt surface action of the narrative can be subliminally reinforced, amplified, or contravened. How this schema of stance has been adapted to the new digital media, specifically the fictional narrative needs of the graphic digital Role Playing Game (RPG), will be the focus of this thesis. Following a brief discussion of the evolution of the diegetic stance, from identifiable historical roots in ancient Greece theatre through adaptations to a variety of media, four specimens of RPG will be evaluated in terms of their utilization of stance. LucasArts’ Grim Fandango, Smoking Car Productions’ The Last Express, Cyberflix’s Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, and Fox Interactive’s X-Files will be examined to explore how effective implementation of the diegetic stance can be vital to the successful execution of the scripts within a narrative schema, and how failed implementation can fatally undermine the diegesis. vi INTRODUCTION All new media must establish their own operational paradigms, borrowing from prior media those concepts that apply and struggle to adapt or create those that differ or are unique to its narrative modality.1 In “The Pleasure of Immersion and Interaction: Schema’s, Scripts, and the Fifth Business,” J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon argue that readers port existing schemas and scripts2 from existing media as a template for the new and a fundamental tool of cognitive functionality. (6) Therefore, any successful implementation of the media must, of necessity, mine schemas of prior media which can be scripted onto the new paradigm. 1This borrowing and adaptation process is examined in detail by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media. Bolter and Grusin argue that new media consist of “networks or hybrids . expressed in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms” which are borrowed and adapted from existing media. “New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media.” (19) Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media, specifically endorses this dynamic in computer based media, directly citing Bolter and Grusin before noting that “the history of the human- computer interface is that of borrowing and reformulating . reformatting other media, both past and present.” (89) 2In The End of Books–or Books Without End?, Douglas gives a cogent one page summation of schema and script and how they function “like the hermeneutic circle,” where the “overarching schema we would call a genre” serves as a cognitive scaffold upon which the scripted behavior of the individuals within the narrative can be mapped by the reader–a cognitive aid that enables the reader to “flesh out,” project, and interpret the action. Douglas notes if the script for a given schema is violated the reader tends to become frustrated at what is seen as the growing opacity of the text. (33) 1 2 Computer media are not exempt from this cross-grafting of scripts. One such transplanted schema is the use of stance–physical gesture, spatial position, or carriage–in juxtaposition to the environment to convey intent, effect, purpose or emotion to the reader of a narrative contributing to the progression of the diegesis. Utilized as a narrative device, this diegetically motivated stance is one of the oldest narrative schemas, arguably pre-dating language itself. (Lust 19) Although often visually indistinguishable from verisimilar mimetic representations and nearly transparent when used effectively, diegetic stance presents the reader with subliminal information scripted within a “naturally” occurring and culturally influenced schema generated (as Bob Hughes describes it in Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design) “a real world [that] is full of movement information . we can interpret . consciously as we learn to read the signs.” (185) Subtly used, it provides the author a tool to provide the user/reader/player information by means of which the overt surface action of the narrative can be subliminally reinforced, amplified, or contravened. How this schema of stance has been adapted to the new digital media, specifically the fictional narrative needs of the graphic digital Role Playing Game (RPG), will be the focus of this thesis. Precisely what an RPG is continues to be heatedly debated. Stephen Poole–in his exploration of the videogame form, Trigger Happy–traces the genesis of the form to both text based games and the 1970s era Dungeons and Dragons board games which evolved through the computer into a narrative experience “offer(ing) the player a chance to be fully individual in a world where an individual has real power . where actions always have deterministic consequences for character or events. (40" While Poole’s definition 3 would be hotly debated by many, he argues that to some extent this separation of the RPG from videogames as a whole could be needlessly reductive since “on a basic level, nearly every videogame ever made is a role-playing game” as RPG elements “are creeping crabwise into any number of other (videogame) genre,” (41) a phenomenon which makes the specific study of the RPG applicable to the general understanding of videogames as a whole. For purposes of this paper it is useful to apply his template of the “generic”