What stood out to me the most in reading the “Narrative” excerpt from the Nielsen text was the ongoing struggles that were illustrated as existing between video games and narrative. More specifically, “the perceived difficulties of combining a playing experience that feels free with the necessary constraints of the narrative structure: in other words, the problem of letting players act freely while ensuring that their actions produce an interesting story” (p.174). Ironically, many of the most popular games in the market today approach this challenge with a solution of simplification: eliminating options and possibilities while making the choices made available seem like the only logical, desired, or even plausible choices. For example, in the Grand Theft Auto series, commonly hailed as revolutionary for its gameplay blending narrative with an extremely high level of freedom, there is, in actuality, very little freedom. When in control of the main character of the game, players are limited to a small set of options as to what they can do: they can “travel” from one spot to another, act violently towards computer controlled characters, and “earn” money (this list is not exhaustive). However, by providing numerous ways of performing these activities (ie. car or helicopter, with a weapon or vehicle, by stealing or by “working,” etc.) players are immersed in a game with seemingly endless possibilities as our imaginations scurry to catalog page after page of diegetic material. The end result is a player-constructed narrative that has no choice but to fall in line with, and become a part of, the actual narrative of the game from which it was produced.
If you’ve managed to keep up with me thus far, in what I have to admit is a wordy and somewhat confusing blog post, you’ll understand when I say that I believe good videogames to be a result of 20% developer efforts and 80% player “efforts.” It is the game’s capacity to emotionally and psychologically engage a player that will determine how good the narrative, and oftentimes the game overall, is. Although I would love to rant for another few pages worth of text (honestly, I could but nobody would want to read a term paper-esque blog…) I’ll leave you all with a few more quotes and points from the excerpt that I found to be effective in formulating my mess of an argument:
-“the stronger the personality of a character, the easier it is for a player to feel alienated from it… In fact, when a minor dramatic character possesses only one or two actionable traits, audience members will imbue elaborate histories and motivations as needed to make it believable” (p.180). In other words, vague and simple characters have a stronger effect on players than do original and unique characters.
-In emergence games, a “dominant narrative structure” where “there is more active artificial intelligence [and] where each object has behaviors,” the goal is to make the options with narrative potential available to the player without forcing it on them as the only option. More simply put, emergence games provide “a starting position with narrative potential but without direction” (p.183). These games are effective because they essentially allow every single player to create a true, highly individualized narrative, different in enough ways from the next player to result in a different gaming experience altogether.
this is a very thoughtful and provocative blog post. It's true that even "open world" games like GTA offer very little interactivity compared to multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, where much of the interaction occurs between live human beings who can act in a huge variety of ways, rather than AI's (artificial intelligence) agents or NPC's that can only behave in a limited number of ways. But this does allow for a coherent story experience that people can share in common!
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