Game-Playing-Role the Suspension of Disbelief in Videogames

Game-playing-role The suspension of disbelief in videogames A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Douglas William Brown School of Arts, Brunel University August 2012 Abstract: This thesis explores the ways in which suspension of disbelief works in digital games. Primarily concerned with how players relate imaginatively to the often major dissonance between gameplay and narrative in digital games, this thesis questions how the literate players of games reconcile these complex texts imaginatively. Proposing that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of suspension of disbelief is a complicated process often cited rhetorically rather than given its theoretical due, this thesis aims to rehabilitate the term and turn it into a useful, sharpened tool for games studies. Digital games themselves are also seen to be an intense new realm of possibilities for the suspension of disbelief, and textual analysis of games which approach the fourth wall or the suspension of disbelief on their own terms helps to make this clear. Beginning by defining the differences of games compared to other media, the thesis goes on to define suspension of disbelief in both its historical and modern contexts and see how it fits with games, isolating three key problems with uniting the concept with the medium. The three chapters which follow looked in more depth at the problems of the skilled reader, fundamental activity and dissonance through investigations into games’ textual construction, the mindsets they engender in players and their reformulation of the fourth wall. The final section looks at the conclusions working together to achieve the dual aims of proposing a new model for game reading which centres around a willed disavowal of presence on the part of the gamer combined with the gamer's taking up of a role offered by the game-text, and rehabilitating both the term and the concept of suspension of disbelief. Table of Contents: Acknowledgements....................................................................................................1 Dedication.....................................................................................................................2 Introduction.................................................................................................................3 Chapter 1 - Making a case for the medium........................................................19 Chapter 2 - Defining suspension of disbelief....................................................57 Chapter 3 - What sets games apart? ....................................................................90 Approaching the problem of the 'skilled' reader. Chapter 4 - Approaching the problem of fundamental activity..................135 Chapter 5 - The fourth wall and the game-playing-role: ..............................159 Approaching the problem of dissonance Conclusions...................................................................................................................213 Bibliography.................................................................................................................235 Acknowledgements: This thesis was made possible via a full Isambard Scholarship awarded by Brunel University. I am extremely grateful to the University for its support of my work. I am indebted to my supervisor Professor Tanya Krzywinska who has provided a great deal of guidance, direction and proof-reading as well as infinite understanding and patience. My tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Professor Lucy Newlyn introduced me to Coleridge and the Romantics, and that grounding gave me the confidence to approach this subject. My colleagues in the Screen Media department and at the School of Arts here at Brunel have been the source of many fruitful conversations, as have the many Games Theory and Design students it has been my privilege to teach and work with at Brunel since I began writing this thesis. Rebecca Shillaker, Richard Mitchell, Richard Murrian and David Thomas have all helped direct me to and played along with the gaming that inspired this thesis. Games are nothing without players, and they are the best! Last but not least I would also like to thank my wife Sharim and little daughter Miranda, as well as the rest of my family; this work would not have been possible without their help, encouragement and support. 1 For Mum, who saves me from myself and Dad, who reads it very well. 2 Introduction This is a thesis about suspension of disbelief: a difficult term with rhetorical weight, poetic construction and something at its core which seems at once highly amorphous and very true. This thesis looks at applying suspension of disbelief in videogames. It’s not the first time the term has been mentioned or explicitly turned on this medium, and often those writing about it don’t even realise that it’s key to what they’re writing about. Suspension of disbelief and how it works in games had seemed to me the elephant in the room in the discourse of games studies for some time when I first began writing this thesis. The temperature of the discussions then were a result of many arguments regarding the dissonance that exists between gameplay and narrative. Videogames are an evolution of a primal urge to play within defined structures of rules. They are also a narrative form gradually growing into the dramatic potential which the medium holds. They often overextend themselves or experiment with new narrative approaches. Jesper Juul (2005) is right to define videogames as a space of interplay between ‘real rules and fictional worlds’, and his work builds on early games theorists’ perspectives in establishing the boundaries and intersections of these two distinct spheres. Espen Aarseth’s early ‘ludologist’ contention If these texts redefine literature by expanding our notion of it--and I believe that they do--then they must also redefine what is literary, and therefore they cannot be measured by an old, unmodified aesthetics. (1997, p.22) was met by Janet Murray’s assertion that Games are always stories, even abstract games such as checkers or Tetris, which are about winning and losing, casting the player as the opponent-battling or environment-battling hero. (1998, p.2) 3 This sentiment came alongside her famous reading of Tetris as a metaphor for the harassed lives of 1990’s Americans. In his developing of the ludologist perspective, Juul took Aarseth’s work on games as a starting point: Computer games are not narratives....Rather the narrative tends to be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game. (Juul 1998, p.1) Having to use terms like ‘computer-game-ness’ is a common problem faced by the games academic who suddenly realises their theorising has reached the point where scaffolding still needs to be built. The compound word acts as a placeholder for work still to be done regarding the nature of computer games and their position relative to other texts. It over- generalises computer game form and skips over many subtleties that make up how it feels to engage with one. The specific relationship that makes up the feeling of ‘computer game- ness’ exists between the person interacting with the text and the text itself. It takes up the link in the chain between text and reader that we’d usually fill with the term ‘suspension of disbelief’. Juul evolves his position, and begins building some of these foundations when later in his work he accepts that games construct fictional worlds simultaneously alongside rules structures. Caveats are attached to this observation; that the fictive and the narrative are distinct from one another, narrative being procedural, and “rules and fiction are attractive for opposite reasons” (2005, p.121) leading to the argument that “most videogames are ruled and make-believe.”(ibid, p.13). Juul’s eventual refined take on the fictive potential of videogames is less all-encompassing, but still maintains the primacy of games as separate from traditional media: Video games project incomplete and sometimes incoherent worlds. Game fiction is ambiguous, optional and imagined by the player in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways, but the emphasis on fictional worlds may be the strongest innovation of the video game. (2005, p.163) Although ‘computer-game-ness’ is now happily absent, there is still a lot of chaos and difficulty in this definition of the fictive side of videogames as ambiguous, optional and imagined. Further observation of these models needs to be done in order to bring into focus 4 what truly separates games from other media. Juul’s major contribution to the debate so far was to frame games as spaces where rules and fiction interact and intermingle, rather than battlegrounds where one aspect dominates or struggles with the other. My intention in this thesis is to illuminate the interactive process that transmits these textual features to the player, and interprets their actions in its turn. Specifically, my focus is on rhetorics of suspension of disbelief, a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When I began work on this thesis, my hypothesis was that suspension of disbelief was a lens through which we could better understand the player/text relationship. Over the course of writing and looking at suspension of disbelief more generally, my perspective has shifted somewhat. Suspension of disbelief was a good way of looking at discourse of the time, polarised as it was between those who saw games as a new literary form and those who wanted to defend their unique qualities. Even now

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