Video games tell stories differently

I’m a sometime player but definite outsider to video game culture. Nevertheless, I find the possibilities of the form – not to mention the narrative potential – to be incredibly interesting, so I went along to the Stories and Systems panel (Saturday 1 Sept, 11:30am) to hear what Paul Callaghan, Christy Dena, Alison Croggon and Dan Golding had to say about it.

Golding opened the proceedings with a seemingly innocuous proposition for the rest of the panel to consider: Video games can tell stories like novels, like films, like art. To many in the audience and certainly to the panel, I think, it was self-evident that yes, of course video games can tell stories. But, as Paul Callaghan proceeded to explain, video games have a ‘unique texture’ as a narrative medium. The narrative structures are the same – story arcs still exist, characters develop, plot unfolds – but the crucial point is that the medium is different. The tools for communicating the story are different, and the art is in using those tools to best effect.

Christy Dena, also a video game developer, took this a bit further, explaining how despite the principles of the narrative being the same, the interactive nature of gaming often meant that particular parts of the narrative – often, for example, the opening act – sometimes had to be extended or further detailed in order to take into account the active learning of the player. There is also, Alison Croggon suggested, the possibility of narrative multiplicity in games that doesn’t exist for novels or films. The player is inserted into the action in a different way, triggering the narrative progress in a different way, and controlling, to a certain extent, which direction the story takes.

From here the dicussion moved into questions of the narrative politics of video games and the industrialisation driving their production. In this way, the panel suggested, perhaps there was a parallel to be drawn between Hollywood and video game production. Mass culture and market forces dictate more than anything the kinds of narratives that are produced and therefore those that saturate the field. Thus the prevalence of ultra-violence, sexism and racism in games themselves.

The most interesting part of the discussion began, I think, when Callaghan suggested that the notion of choice in video games is entirely illusory. Player agency is a common myth in some games, he said, but the world in which the player inhabits is entirely authored, and so, therefore, are their choices. It’s obviously true, I think, that the potential choices a player can make within a game are restricted by the world that has been created for them. However, within that, surely there is the possibility for independent variation? I’m thinking most specifically of those games of ‘emergent narrative’ (Golding’s term) in which the player is effectively given a blank canvas and asked to create a world from scratch. One is required to play by the rules, of course, but within those rules there’s scope for choice.

Then again, perhaps it throws into question our understanding of the notion of choice more generally. There is a reason, after all, why the video game itself is a recurring entity in conundrums posed in philosophy classes. Quite apart from being excellent fun to play, they have a very great capacity for encouraging us to reconsider our notion of reality and our understanding of our own agency.