Digital Library Keyword Archives

narrative

- 36 articles or papers

 

Computer Games / Cinema / Interfaces

King Geoff Krzywinska Tanya
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

What is the relationship between computer games and cinema? Spin-off games based on major film franchises are common, especially in genres such as science fiction, action-adventure and horror. Some games have also made the transition to the big screen, none more prominently than the Tomb Raider series in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). The potential benefits of such tieins are apparent at the industrial level, in a global media economy in which games and cinema often exist in the orbit of the same corporate giants. To what extent, though, is it useful to look at games more closely in the light of cinema? The aim of this paper is to explore points of contact between computer games and aspects of cinema, but also to highlight important differences and distinctions. The main focus is on the formal/textual qualities of games in relation to cinema, although reference is also made to aspects of industrial and broader cultural context. The paper also considers some more general questions raised by the use of paradigms from one media form in relation to another.

 

In Defense of Cutscenes

Klevjer Rune
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

The technique of cutscenes, as typically found in story-based action games, is placed within a wider discursive problematic, focusing on the role of pre-written narratives in general. Within a theoretical framework raised by Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen and Marie-Laure Ryan, I discuss the relations between the ergodic and the representational, and between play and narration. I argue that any game event is also a representational event, a part of a typical and familiar symbolic action, in which cutscenes often play a crucial part. Through cutscenes, the ergodic effort acquires typical meanings from the generic worlds of popular culture.

 

Textuality in video games

Carr Diane Burn Andrew Schott Gareth Buckingham David
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

In this article the participants report on a two year research project titled Textuality and Videogames; Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play that ran from September 2001, until late 2003 at the Institute of Education, University of London. After presenting an overview of the project, including the methodologies we have adopted, and the questions we have sought to address, we outline two sample case studies, one that relates to player agency, the other that considers role-play, social semiotics and sign making in an MMORPG.

 

‘What sort of Fish was it?’ How Players Understand their Narrative in Online Games

MacCallum-Stewart Esther
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Online worlds have become a fundamental element of the virtual landscape. The development of MMORPGs has helped give credence to the idea that online spaces can support valid social communities. Having proved that these communities exist, scholars must now decide whether these communities are different to those in the 'real' world. What makes gaming communities stand out? This paper looks at how players contextualise their behaviour within game narratives. In particular, the ways that players manipulate the divergent narratives of each game, and the paradoxes that these structures create is investigated. MMORPGs are rife with social tension. Players appear to use a series of different social codes when they justify their behaviour, borrowing from different rules sets dictated by circumstances in the game according to their need. To contextualise this, this paper examines how players express and argue their ideas through their understanding of the game world and narrative. Like fan communities , players appropriate the MMORPG text for themselves, reinscribing it according to their own conceptions. However, whereas fans must do this away from their key source, in MMORPGs, players discuss the text as they enact it. Narratives are deliberately dynamic – purporting to give players agency to move at their own pace or to chose the routes and standpoints they take throughout each game. Thus fans actively work upon the text in a much broader context, and their discussions are often visible to large amounts of people within the game. If all players consider themselves as fans, then how does this affect the perception of the text itself?

 

Teleporters, Tunnels & Time: Understanding Warp Devices In Videogames

Gazzard Alison
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The warp is a device that reframes notions of time and space. It is a common cultural artefact, one that audiences have come to recognise and believe in through various media. We accept the bed in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the Tardis in Doctor Who, the supralight speed engines of science fiction, as time/space travel devices in order to get characters from A to B, to advance their progress along the story path. The warp as a path device can also be seen in board games such as Snakes and Ladders, where both the snake and ladder sections break the linearity of moving the character piece from square to square regularly up and down the game-board. It is therefore natural that such a time/space device has continued and been reconstructed within videogames. The virtual gameworld is itself a place able to reconstruct time and space; both Juul and Atkins discuss how players’ perceptions of time and narrative elements within the videogame can be rearranged, but the warp, a significant ‘re-arranger’, is rarely discussed further or in detail. The warp is used as a common device within videogames to transport the player from their location to somewhere else within the gamespace. Although commonly acknowledged through the hidden tunnels within Super Mario Bros, the warp is not a straightforward device, and can manifest itself in various ways during gameplay. It may be found in deliberately installed puzzles, and by the ‘aberrant player’. It may be a way of avoiding danger, of ‘jumping’ over sections previously achieved, or even of cheating. It may be the punishment for straying from a ‘good path’, or the reward for a particular act. Whatever its use or function, the warp exists within the virtual world as a means of managing time, space and narrative. The warp turns paths experienced by the player into fixed ‘tracks’, where navigational control is removed whilst in the warp sequence, and understanding the warp in this way allows us to further understand the player’s relationship with the game paths they are moving along, the stories they move within. This paper discusses the multiple characteristics of the warp by identifying its use in contrasting videogame genres. These characteristics open up ways of discussing the aesthetics of the warp experience for the player and how its use affects path structures as well as time and narrative elements within videogames. The discussion will include both the built in, deliberately installed ‘puzzle-based’ warps and the ‘inadvertent warps’ sought by those seeking to discover more of the games ‘algorithm’.

 

Gaming DNA: On Narrative and Gameplay Gestalts

Brown Douglas
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper takes the concept of the ‘Gameplay Gestalt’ as advanced by Craig Lindley[7] as a basis for a fresh look at how games are read and designed. Disagreeing with Lindley’s assertion of gameplay over narrative, it puts forward a model of the game as a construct of authored gestalt interplay, and concentrates on the links between the physical process of playing the game and the interpretative process of ‘reading’ it. A wide variety of games are put forward as examples, and some analyses of major ‘moments’ in classic games are deconstructed. The concept of the ‘sublime’ as applicable to games is examined as is the use of gameplay and narrative to generate ‘illusory agency’, which can make a game more than the sum of its parts.

 

Narrating machines and interactive matrices: a semiotic common ground for game studies

Ferri Gabriele
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Between playing a game and enjoying a narration there is a semiotic and semantic common ground: interpretation and meaning-making. A semiotic methodology to describe situated gaming practices will be presented in three phases. At first, the intuitive concept of "meaning" will be discussed and substituted by the generative semiotic notion of "content". Then the structuralist semiotic notion of "text" will be criticized and substituted by the the concept of "interactive matrix" and "game-text", referring also to Rastier's differential semantics, Peirce's diagrams and other recent proposals in semantics of perception. Situated gaming practices will be the focal point of the last part of this paper, showing how these practices and the game-text mutually influence and modify each other during interpretation and meaning-making.

 

The attack of the backstories (and why they won’t win)

Myers David
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

This essay adopts a formal model of play as semiosis [18] to explore the often dysfunctional role of backstories within computer game design and play. Within this model, backstories indicate an extended play of contextualization. This definition raises questions concerning the appropriateness of backstories as currently implemented within many computer game designs. For instance, backstories are clearly not critical to all computer game play. And, even when limiting analysis solely to role-playing games, the use of backstories as design tools (as opposed to marketing devices or play supplements) remains problematic. Conclusions concern "pre-narrative" aspects of play--particularly when narrative is defined (e. g., within narrative psychology) as a folk theory of causes.

 

The Diverse Worlds of Computer Games: A Content Analysis of Spaces, Populations, Styles and Narratives

Brand Jeffrey E. Knight Scott Majewski Jakub
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

The Diverse Worlds Project analysed 130 computer and video games (CVGs) to understand their textual landscape. Titles were sampled from the five gaming platforms dominant in 2002. Blending the quantitative content analytic tradition and the Bordwellian approach to formal film analysis, characters, settings, narrative and stylistic factors were studied in four units of analysis including box, handbook, opening cinematic sequences, and game-play. “Diverse Worlds” contradicts the popular stereotypes about CVGs presenting exaggerated, violent characters in simplistic, formulaic, worlds lacking in aesthetic nuance and texture. Games are painted using a vast array of visible features and locations. Narrative structure and progression varies depending on genre and goes beyond “shoot the bad guy.” Graphic stylisation tends toward a mid-point between animation and photo-realism with the latter more often used for rendering environments and the former for characters. Limitations of character representation include the use of stereotypes found in traditional mainstream media. An earlier version of this work was presented at the International Ratings Conference in Sydney, Australia, September 2003.

 

Women and Productivity [Abstracts]

Wirman Hanna Chess Shira Albrechtslund Anne-Mette Enevold Jessica
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The following abstracts: Playing, Dashing, and Working: Simulated Productive Play in the Dash games Shira Chess Gender Stories: Identity Construction in an Online Gaming Community Anne-Mette Albrechtslund: Playing Productive: Pragmatic Uses of Gaming Jessica Enevold The Silent Work of The Sims 2 Bedroom(s) Hanna Wirman