Storytelling Balls: Problems and Opportunities of Narratological Concepts in Video Games

Sebastian Domsch

Ludwig Maximilians Universität München

Introduction: Games telling Stories?

Most if not all video games today contain at least some and often a large amount of narrative elements, yet one of the founding (and still ongoing) debates of the emerging scholarly discipline of game studies is whether, or how far, these elements are part of the games' nature as games. Are narrative elements only added to a game, or can a game be a narrative? As Markku Eskelinen polemically put it: "If I throw a ball at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories." This essay wants to investigate the usefulness of applying narratological concepts to games and their differentia specifica, reader/player agency. In order to come to a narratological understanding of what happens when a player engages in a game, the concept of narrative will have to be enlarged. The narrative elements of video games, because they are contained in a game, are to be differentiated from all other narrative forms. That means: video games might not necessarily contain narrative elements, but when they do, these elements are necessarily different, part of a new form of narrative that incorporates choice and potentiality into its basic structure.

The merest glance at the contemporary state of video games will show that narrative is an almost ubiquitous and very visible presence. A closer look will reveal that the storyworlds developed by and experienced through video games are highly elaborate, complex, and deep - though not necessarily original. A large part of this presence of narrative in video games - and the part that is most visible to an outside perspective, a perspective that is looking at games instead of through them - is constituted by elements that cannot be interacted with by the player. These are textual narratives (written and spoken, such as logbooks, letters or audiotapes) and, even more importantly, the cinematic narratives that are called cut scenes. A cut scene is a filmic sequence in a video game that unfolds without the interaction of the player. Usually, the player has no control whatsoever over the game while the cut scene is playing. As such, they are not part of the gameplay, but rather an interruption to it. The player plays the game until a certain point - usually the completion of a specific task -, then the gameplay is paused and a short video sequence is being shown, most often detailing the consequences of the player's previous actions. The purpose of these video sequences is usually to show pre-scripted events, present characters in characteristic actions, present dialogues, or give background information on the storyworld; in other words: to provide narrative content.

Cut scenes are a big element in video games. Their production takes up a large part of the development budget of so-called AAA games, their quality is approaching photorealism, and their length is often even surpassing that of feature films. The video game Dragon Age II contains at least 103 minutes of cut scenes, and the game Yakuza 4 features a total of 384 minutes of cut scenes. Video game trailers routinely consist of a montage from the cut scenes emphasizing the story that is conveyed through them, making them the most visible element from these games to the outside world. And yet, cut scenes are hardly helpful in establishing a specific narratology of video games.

Because, while these elements are obviously very effective in creating narrative, they at the same time rather heighten the divide between narrative and gameplay.[1] The player either plays a game, or is watching a cut scene. The existence and predominance of cut scenes, together with their clear separation from gameplay, is therefore often taken as proof that narrative and gameplay are completely distinct elements. If that were true, and the narrative content of games were restricted to these non-interactive elements, we would hardly need to adjust narratology at all, since cut scenes could be analyzed like any other filmic narrative.

Gameplay and Narrative

But it would be far too short-sighted to uphold this clear distinction between non-interactive narrative and interactive gameplay elements in video games. On the contrary, video games are also heavily narrative while the player is playing. In so many games, narrative unfolds through the act of playing, through the experience and the decisions of the player, and it is for these narratives that we need to broaden our concept of narrative. Thus, in the following, I will be ignoring all those elements of video games that convey narrative in a traditional, non-interactive way, and concentrate instead on the narrative content and potential of the gameplay itself. This is the field where heated debates are still ongoing in the field of game studies.

In order to understand the way that narrative is created through gameplay, one needs to define narrative as something that happens in the minds of those who experience, rather than concrete properties of an artefact. If we, as narratologists, restrict our understanding of narrative to concrete representations of a sequence of events, we will remain blind to the way that the player of a video game experiences and performs narrative. As humans, we experience life - our presence and agency within it -, and we make sense of it by casting it in the form of narratives. Now, it is the magic of fiction to make us narratively experience something that is not us. While classic narrative media like prose or cinema tend to de-emphasize our own presence and to substitute it with the presence of some Other, interactive media like computer games or role-playing stress our presence and agency, but they still retain the element of (fictional) otherness: the player experiences her presence within the navigable space of a computer game, but this space is not identical to her own space, just as her avatar is not identical to her. She can make decisions and perform actions, but they will be at the same time the decisions and actions of an agent within the game world, and their full consequence will only affect the gameworld. The difference between the two levels, the level of the player and that of the avatar, the pressing of a real button and the downfall of a galactic empire, is narratively relevant fiction.

In its most abstract form, a game is a set of rules and (possibly) goals. The rules describe a range of options that the player has at a specific point in the game, and the player can choose among these options, with other rules prescribing the outcomes of the player's possible choices. These rules are often mathematical in their precision and unambiguity, and they can be described sufficiently in mathematical terms. One might think of the rule describing how a knight in a chess came is allowed to move or the rule stating that the soccer team that scores more goals than the other wins.

Games can be played successfully in such a purely abstract way, but one thing that almost inevitably happens when human beings play games is that they will start to invest the elements of the game and the game's structure - and consequently their own actions and decisions within the game system - with meaning. They are starting to create a frame of reference for the game that is distinct from their own world (it is one of the main properties of a game that it happens within what Roger Caillois has called a "magic circle") yet who's understanding is modelled on our own world. In other words, players start to create a fictional world within which the game's actions happen, because it is only in this world set apart from ours that they have relevance. The physical movement of a chess piece on a board is happening in the world of the player, but the meaning of that move - for example the fact that, although physically possible, no two pieces can remain on the same field at the same time - is happening in the world of the game, in which this rule is a fixed property.

So already the creation of rules (or necessities) not identical to the rules/necessities that are properties of our own world sets the imaginary world created by and for the game apart in the same way that a fictional world is set apart. But the almost automatic semantization of games hardly stops there, it is rather the starting point for continued further investments with specific meaning. One might just think about the fact that the pieces in a chess game are usually not referred to by their mathematical properties or any other abstract term, but by terms with distinct meaning such as "pawn", "knight" or "king". It makes the game easier to understand, because we can understand it as a story.

It is clear that this progressive investment with meaning is nothing that is necessary to the playing of a game. It is unimportant to successful gameplay whether we refer to the chess piece as "the king" or "the piece that is allowed to move for one field in each direction". It is unimportant, and yet it constantly happens when we play, and it happens with no type of games more thoroughly than with video games. Video games are the epitome of this tendency to invest the activity of playing with a fictional frame of reference, to imagine our decisions within a rule-bound system as narratively relevant events in a fictional world and to understand the performance of a game as the gradual development of a narrative story. Video games are the triumph of fiction in gaming, or as Jesper Juul has put it, "the emphasis on fictional worlds may be the strongest innovation of the video game." (162)

So fictional storyworlds are of major importance to video games and their cultural impact, but that doesn't mean that they are identical to the storyworlds of prose fiction or motion pictures. Nor can they be evaluated according to the same criteria. Because in video games, story worlds can be interacted with - to a degree, the player has an influence on these storyworlds that far surpasses the usual mental activity of imagining it and filling occasional interpretive gaps. Whereas filling gaps in conventional narratives is an activity of deduction, in interactive narratives it is much more an activity of deliberate choice and creation. Every fictional world has blank spots, but they cannot be filled in a concrete way without violating the integrity of the fictional world. In a game that creates a fictional world both through its existents and the interactions of the player, though, this world is unfinished by design and can only be completed through the active involvement of the player. In order to understand the way that narrative fiction works in video games, we therefore need a narratology that takes into account the player's agency.

Player Agency

Human agency is the capacity of human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. When it comes to the narrative potential and structure of video games, agency is an important term that should, for clarification's sake, be clearly distinguished from interactivity. While interactivity merely marks the ability to influence something on whatever level, the question of agency as it is here understood weighs on the potential narrative consequence of a player's decisions. Janet Murray has used the term agency in this sense in her concept of interactive storytelling. For her, "[a]gency is the satisfying power to make meaningful action and to see the results of our decisions and choices." (Murray 2001: 126) The important term here is of course "meaningful". The pure existence of interactivity does tell us nothing about the significance or meaning of the actions that it entails. It is therefore a much too broad concept to give an adequate description of what video games are capable of as a ludic narrative medium. As Murray writes: "Because of the vague and pervasive use of the term interactivity, the pleasure of agency in electronic environments is often confused with the mere ability to move a joystick or click on a mouse. But activity alone is not agency." (128) When dealing with the narratological implications of player choice, we will therefore need to investigate which choices exist and how they are experienced by the player as meaningful in relation to the fictional world of the game, and thereby as narratively relevant.

Many player choices in video games can be fully explained in gameplay terms, that is, by merely referring to the rules of the game. These could be objective aspects of the game such as numerical values (for example the effectiveness of one weapon over another or the player's physical position within the game space) and should theoretically be engaged by applying what one could term gameplay rationality. But other choices cannot be understood but by referring to the specific semantics that a game creates, its fiction and narrative. Such choices could be called "semantic choices", as they largely depend on the meaning of the options available to the player. They are not actually a different type of choice, but rather a way in which a choice is perceived by the player. Semantic choices are those that are most clearly narratively relevant. In order to be understood as narrative choices, all of the following criteria need to apply:

In order to be perceived as a narrative choice, it must be understood as a meaningful action that can be described with the semantics of the storyworld. This presupposes, first of all, that a storyworld exists, and that agents and actions can be described as part of that storyworld. This means that it is not enough to describe a choice in the terms of player interaction, for example by referring to the interface that the player interacts with, but that is not a part of the storyworld: Contrast the choices "Press button x or y" and "Fight the monster (by pressing x) or flee (by pressing y)". Both choices might be identical when looking at the gameplay mechanics, but the latter is perceived as narratively relevant by referring to elements that exist exclusively in the storyworld.

As the last example already shows, a choice made in a game that is perceived as narratively relevant is double-coded in that it refers both to the storyworld (the monster) and to the player or the game mechanics (the pressing of a button). It is one of the characteristics of narrative choices in games that they also have a doubled form of agency. While, in order to be a player choice, the player is the agent of the choice, it is at the same time understood and experienced by the player as the choice and action of an agent that is part of the storyworld, usually called the avatar.

And lastly, in order to be a narrative choice in the sense here discussed (that is, pertaining to the experience of the game's diegesis) the choice has to have consequences on the internal development of a storyworld, in contrast to choices that have consequences on the external shape of the storyworld, i.e. change the storyworlds nature, such as choosing the type of landscape, or choosing whether the protagonist is male or female, or returning the storyworld to an earlier stage of existence by loading a previous savegame.

As an illustration, I would like to show one example where the narrative and the gameplay significance of a choice get into an interesting conflict, where narrativitiy is striving to overrule rationality, or, more specifically, gameplay rationality. Gameplay rationality refers to the fact that from the position of gameplay, player choice will either have a clearly preferable option or be irrelevant. In both cases it means that the choice is not truly a choice. To fully work, gameplay rationality must presuppose that 1) there is full information and that 2) the fictionality of a game is of no concern.

As it happens, in actual game performances, gameplay rationality often clashes with the fictionality of a game. Especially all choices that are experienced as moral choices are strongly influenced by fictionality. Let's look at what is probably the most famous example of a moral choice in video games, the so-called "Little Sisters" in the game Bioshock. In Bioshock, the player navigates the protagonist through a dystopian city built under the sea, a very hostile environment with many enemy encounters. The so-called Little Sisters are non-player characters in the game. Their gameplay function is to provide the player with an in-game currency (called ADAM) that can be used to buy improvements to the character's attributes. These improvements will make it easier for the character to succeed against the numerous enemies, and therefore to proceed through the game. In the game's storyworld, the Little Sisters are genetically manipulated and mentally conditioned children that collect ADAM from corpses. Their presentation is likely to evoke a mixture of fear, disgust, and pity in the player. Before interacting with the first of these characters, the player character gets conflicting information about them from two non-player characters, a character called Atlas and one Brigid Tennenbaum. Atlas tells the protagonist that the Little Sisters have lost their humanity and are beyond redemption, and that it is his moral duty to use all of the Adam that they provide in order to be better able to help him and his family, trapped somewhere in the city. Tennenbaum, on the other hand, who created the Little Sisters, asks the player not to kill them but to rescue them instead (meaning that he will receive less ADAM) and promises an unspecified compensation and reward for this. When the player then moves in on the Little Sister, the game will pause and a prompt will appear on the screen:

"CHOOSE whether to RESCUE the Little Sister or HARVEST her. If you harvest her, you get MAXIMUM ADAM to spend on plasmids, but she will NOT SURVIVE the process. If you rescue her, you get LESS ADAM, but Tennenbaum has promised to make it WORTH YOUR WHILE"

The note stays completely on the diegetic level. It makes gameplay consequences implicit (more Adam will make the character stronger, which will make it easier for the player to succeed) and in-game consequences explicit ("she will NOT SURVIVE the process"). It refrains from making gameplay consequences concrete, for example by giving the exact amount of ADAM received or lost through the decision (it is 160 for harvesting and 80 for rescuing). And it is even more vague on the compensation offered by the non-player character ("Tennenbaum has promised to make it WORTH YOUR WHILE"). As one user has found out, while there actually is a short term advantage to killing the Little Sisters, this is counterbalanced by the rewards provided by Tennenbaum for rescuing them.[2]

In this example, gameplay rationality and the player's perception of the game as a narrative fiction are clashing. The decision to "HARVEST" or "RESCUE" has, for the game mechanics, no meaning beyond the gameplay consequences (and these even turn out to be roughly equal in the long run). It is merely the difference between pressing two different buttons that will lead to different values in the character's possession of ADAM. After the display of the (purely diegetic) prompt, the specific buttons are indicated on the screen in brackets behind the diegetic terms. But for the player who is immersed in the fiction of the gameworld, who is willing to play the additional game of fictionality and who considers her decisions as doubled by an agent within that fiction, that is: as part of a meaningful story, the decision takes on additional meanings and values.

Agency Narratives

It can be considered as one of the triumphs of narrative fictionality within video games when they manage to create situations in which players will decide against gameplay rationality for the sake of acting in an in-game ethical (or even unethical) way, since this means that they will consider their own agency as players as an agency within an unfolding narrative, as part of the story, and not just as logical consequences of a system of rules. But because of the player's agency, this narrative is radically different from traditional forms.

Many video games contain player choices that are experienced by the players as narratively relevant - as is exemplified by the suspension of gameplay rationality for the sake of the fiction. These games constantly create situations that are completely unknown to narratology but that are specific to the way that games tell stories as games: where conventional narratives have a linear sequence of causally connected events that are represented after they happened in this and no other way, these games create a present situation in which more than one event could happen, depending on the player's decision. They are moments of narrative potentiality that create a new kind of functional openness for these kinds of narrative. They can therefore be understood as the diametrical opposite of traditional notions of plot: according to Paul Ricoeur, plot is "an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents, [.] that transforms this variety into a unified and complete story". (3) Through their specific structure, games offer more than that, instead of giving the outcome of a unification of variety, they hand the moment of selection over to the player. It is up to narratology to investigate how this new form of narrative has developed, through which media it can be conveyed, and how it actually works in media such as video games.

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