Wk 10: Grand Finale - Dramaturgs in Pervasive Play

In order to create the sense of performance, one needs to create the thrill of being watched. Without an audience, the interaction between the player and the viewer is lost. In IMS, platforms where audience can watch others ‘perform’ include MMORPG & simulations like Second Life. Another characteristic of pervasive games is the strong sense of community identity. Users of these IMS platforms are also characterized by a great sense of community (i.e. players who ‘mourn’ for death of a World of Warcraft player by gathering at his favourite haunt) thus making it a good match.

The advantage of IMS is the greater manipulability than real-life environments which provide authors with greater room for imagination and creation. This is effective for enhancing the narrative because it allows the author to make use of the space to tell the story. Injecting a strong narrative into the game can also increase the sense of immersion of the gamer.

However, the narrative in this case would have to be realistic and tangible, meaning that grand quests to save their beloved princesses are a no-no. Something that players can relate to reality i.e. alien watching, matrix explorations would be more tangible. In other words, the narrative has to connect to reality and this can be enahnced by out-of-game-world applications like blogs, emails and even internet telephony.

The narrative should also not be too prescriptive and left slightly ambiguous to allow for interpretation bythe player. This is easily achievable and perhaps possible to make more interesting in IMS where clues can be given in ways otherwise restricted in a realistic environment.

'Dramaturgs' should constantly monitor the feedback from the participants such that the design of the game is within the zone of proximal expectation. Players like a sense of unexpectability but if it were too unexpectable, players might not feel the sense of self-efficacy as when it were just one or two notches above their expectations. By keeping it so, players will be able to feel that their expectations (in the form of the guesses) are within the ballpark but there is still a sense of unexpectability that will keep them motivated to think of more possibilities and thus forward the game. This principle can also be integrated with the crafting of the narrative.

Also, it is important to ensure that whatever players do in the games, it has to be convention-breaking, which is the thrill that players seek. In a game like World of Warcraft this could take the form of a demonstration to protect the monsters and prevent their mindless slaying. This will create the same kind of desire to be surprised that gets players involved in real-life pervasive games experience.

Q9: Who is right? Eskelinen or Jenkins?

Personally, I feel that Eskelinen may have interpreted Jenkins’ intentions inaccurately because it is clear that he downplays neither the importance of sjuzet and fabula nor that of the distinction between games and narratives. In fact, his description of embedded narratives, Jenkins describes how the use of the game-specific element of freedom of exploration within a defined space can be employed towards the discovery of the sjuzet leading to the construction of the fabula.

Eskelinen, however, has a valid point in suggesting that ludology should not be centred entirely around narratives because gameplayers do not play games solely for the sake of narratives. Personally, I prefer racing games for the bite-sized pieces of action that give me that bit of an emotional ‘high’ within a short period of time so that my life does not get too disrupted by the game that I have little time for anything else (like writing this blog entry).

Perhaps, this also explains the proliferation of flash game websites featuring short games with relatively simple gameplay. The emphasis of these games is in the attraction offered by the process of the gameplay and in no way would be able to sustain the attention of gamers for more than a short while, which might just suit the interests of the players of these games (think office workers).

Despite these claims, it is still hard to disregard the importance of narratives in games because if we look merely at game types, there aren’t exactly too many genres that we can choose from. What drives gamers to purchase Half-life and Counter-strike and even though they already own half a dozen FPS games is more than just the slight variations in the gameplay itself. What attracts them to the new games is the different narrative that provides the framework for the new game. When the same type of gameplay is framed by different narratives, they take on different meanings and it is this new type of meaning that some gamers seek. In a way, it is much like Commedia Dell’arte players who are highly familiar with the gameplay but continue to play for the sake of seeking different narratives.

To sum it all up, it may not be too bad a thing that ludology is taking leaves out of narrative theory books at this early stage of its development. Just as game designers who make use of cut-scenes to tell their story have not fully realized the full potential of spatial exploration in story-telling, ludologists may not have sufficiently developed their ideas and concepts to make a complete break from the established theories of the narrative scholars. Narrative theories would thus provide a good basis from which ludology can grow and progress.

Q8: Are games of progression purely computer-based?

In my opinion, narratives and games of progression are a match made in heaven, considering the fact that narratives achieve the best effects when revealed in the manner intended by the author, which goes down very well with the stage by stage revelation in games of progression. To turn such a combination into a non-computer game would also not be much difficulty since non-computer games offer greater flexibility in terms of stimulus and response. As an example, just think of project 1 by Achu & co. except that it’s modified such that each piece of evidence is revealed in a stage-by-stage manner upon completion of a certain challenge i.e. solving an anagram, piecing torn pieces of paper to form a letter etc. by the player at each stage.

The reason why it is hard to name a non computer-based version of such a game is that games of such kinds can be informal in nature and may take many forms such that there is no standardised way of playing or a standard narrative used to give the game the form of prominence that can earn it a name or even a genre that it can call its own. There are others, however, that have managed to circumvent these limitations, which we shall find out below.

Interactive fiction of the Choose Your Own Adventure kind is a good example of such a combination. These textual adventures have a strong sense of structure, such that they would pass the ‘walkthrough’ test with flying colours. Structurally, they resemble text adventures of the likes of Zork & Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although books do not allow for a word-parsing component. The challenge in such adventures is to select the right options that will lead to a progression towards the desired ending. Choosing a wrong option will lead to less desirable endings, which can be constituted as a ‘lose’ state in terms of quantifiable outcomes. With much of the control maintained by the author, the adventures maintain a well-formed narrative arch regardless of its endings. Recently, DVD editions of the series have also been released, thus providing another example of a non-computer game of progression.

Despite the rigidity and specificity of the rules in such progression games, there seems to exist, possibilities still, for the development of emergent behaviours. Readers can choose to ignore the rules and read through the entire narrative thus moving in a direction not prescribed by the author. In this sense, the rules do not have full regulation on the player and points out the fact that emergence is an aspect that is hard to avoid in games because there are always game players who seek a varied experience. That probably explains why cheat codes, trainers and walkthroughs (sometimes provided by game developers themselves) exist as forms of meta-emergence even for the purest examples of computer-based games of progression.