For February 4th we will be discussing Marie-Laure Ryan’s Avatars of Story. Most of our class will focus on “Part II: Narrative in New Media,” so focus your reading on this part of the book. However, it is certainly useful to read the introduction and the first two chapters of Part I, which lay out her terminology. Chapters 3 and 4 while interesting are less germane to our discussion so you might want to read those less rigorously.
Post your comments here when you have done the reading.
I came across this story and thought it was interesting…
Latin American writer Paulo Coelho pirates his own work:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/01/how_to_get_rich_as_an_author_g.html
Ok, I feel a little better for me it seemed that the author really didn’t go into enough detail about how the applications she choose to write about like frames, flash, director, etc. really have not assisted humans when interacting with machines and many cases have not lended themselves (yet) to better reading (literary) alternatives. It is like she talked about the applications and their usage but not really how they are consumed and the major pitfalls they each have. Being in the usability profession and working with many of these applications over the years frames died because humans became highly frustrated with the divisions (frames) it created. Director is off the table as it is mainly relegated to the world of CD-ROM’s. Flash is finally starting to come into its own but much more due to its application of interactivity as a platform to help people navigate and shop. It is still used inappropriately by marketing groups and still hasn’t found its place just yet.
You know I keep going back to the analogy of the type writer. Better type writers have been produced over the years. They make us more efficient and work better, but we haven’t’ used them. Why? Sometimes (in my opinion from my experiences) we like certain things that just get the job done. It may not be pretty, or the best but we know it and learning something takes time and effort. The computer age if you will has brought us wires, cables, and a plethora of manuals to read so we can try to work with the machine (how many of us read the manuals?). If it becomes to difficult we just give up trying to figure it out.
I get that we are changing, but you know books just work. Technological advancement and the advent of new forms of literary mechanisms doesn’t have mean to me that one is better than another. I like the experience of a book. Online reading is still difficult for a myriad of reasons. The hyperlinks, the rabbit holes, the endless windows, sometimes create information overload and confusion. With a book I understand and I have made meaning for myself of how it works in my world and for me that is a reality I am ok with. For me when the holideck age arrives I still hope I can have a shelf full of books and I can spend time on the holideck creating my version of fictional make-believe.
I will admit I got pretty tied to chapter 2 and the entire philosophical debate of panfictionality, but I thought I would save this for class discussion. What is reality fact or fiction…that is TBD by the player
I’m diggin’ some Marie-Laure Ryan. Since this is a big area of my interest (game development) I found the reading very intriguing. In point of fact, it is hard for me to pick a specific topic to blog about. One of the most prominent areas I would like to focus on is on page 195 under the title, The Aesthetic and Functional Question. The sentence that caught my attention the most starts with, “A game does not need to tell stories …” Before reading this passage I had never given very much deep thought to how character development is achieved differently in games as opposed to other forms of media. It got me thinking about all the things I overlook in game development that add to the experience of playing a game. Do I really take that many things for granted when playing a game? I think I do. Maybe that is a bit of a nod to the game developers. Or, maybe there is much more to think about with games if I can just focus my attention away from comparing them with literature. Is this not what Ryan is trying get us to realize?
In addition I was surprised to read just how much debate surrounds the idea that games are not narratives because of this or that reason. The last sentence on page 180 really struck a chord. I wonder many times if games and digital narratives receive a disgruntle reputation by the literary community simply just because they involve the user interacting with the computer. Is it because we play games and learn to use a computer at the ages before we become “scholarly” and therefore we associate a sort of trivial quality to the idea of something being a game or being played/read on the computer? Whatever the case may be kudos to Ryan for the encouragement to look at digital narratives with an unbiased mind.
Where to begin While Ryan makes some interesting points, I have trouble trusting anyone who confuses EverQuest’s online world, Norrath with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Norad. To get back into EQ speak, /bonk Ryan.
That said, I’ll set my trust issues aside and look at Chapter 6, in which Ryan discusses some of the Storyspace produced hypertexts. At first, I was confused (and probably still am to some degree) about how she can equate a hypertext in which one link leads to another, pre-determined page or text item and an interactive text in which a reader/player types text and hopes it fits into the parser’s programming. Having dealt with the old TI keyboard and cassettes for text adventure games, I can honestly say they were frustrating. Trying to guess what phrase in the paragraph would make it through the system was only fun for the first two hundred or so tries. Past that, it was reason to move on to something else.
But, Ryan’s move into the Storyspace structure, particularly the maps, appeared to bring more interactivity in the discussion. While the older interactive fiction works made attempting to interact tough, the new hypertext worked in a way that inspired interactivity from the beginning. Ryan mentions Victory Garden’s map as a geographical representation of a garden and Patchwork Girl’s map as an “anatomical drawing of the brain.” If these maps are in any way clickable, and I admit I’ve yet to read/encounter either of the texts, don’t they give the reader control over the story from the first frame? If we go into patchwork girl late in the day, are we more likely to click the “sleep” circle by the ear to star of? Maybe if we are curious about the characters we’ll go to Agatha, Tabitha or Mary first. The point is it seems that a shaped, geographical, interactive map gives the user more control than just clicking the next targeted word. And having the map, and the choices it offers, alters the story sequence and experience for the reader. This level of interactivity also seems as though it would offer a completely different reading each time the reader returned to the text – one that goes beyond simply noticing a word previously taken for granted.
This level of interactivity, while not up to the level of casting spells in Norrath (or coming to a multinational defense agreement), adds a dimension to storytelling that increases the writer’s responsibility and the reader’s expectation.
During the first class session, we discussed whether a video game could be a narrative. I was one of those who remained on the fence. Though I felt that some video games had narrative qualities, I rejected the idea that they were full-blown narratives. I had hoped that the chapter Marie-Laure Ryan penned on “Computer Game as Narrative” would solidify my thinking one way or the other, but I find myself in the exact same place.
I’m going to date myself here, but the games I’m most familiar with are Tetris, Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and the Legend of Zelda. While I could make an argument that both Super Mario Brothers and the Legend of Zelda aren’t narratives, I could make just as strong an argument that they are. Others might be able to argue, as Murray does, that even Tetris is a narrative.
I happen to agree with Ryan that Murray’s concept of Tetris as a narrative has less to do with the game itself than a subjective interpretation of the game. Rather than see Tetris as it is—a game where the player places blocks in an attempt to keep the screen clear–Murray turned Tetris into a discourse on society.
Ryan seems to face a similar quandary. She provides ample evidence that video games can be narratives, but just as much that they aren’t. So where does one draw the line? What makes the Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Brothers a narrative and Tetris or Pac-Man something else entirely? I imagine that we’ll be debating and discussing throughout the semester, but at this I think the question can be answered by determining whether there’s an underlying plotline. If there is, it’s a narrative. If not, it’s just a game—nothing more, nothing less.
I think it would be interesting to explore metalepsis as a game-feature that results from time-travel. While discussing myths of digital narratives, Ryan states that narrative relies on sequence (p124.) Later in her discussion of AI and Storyspace she explores the computational difficulties of managing “guard fields” if temporal sequence was not maintained (p140.) The dimension of time could be malleable in a fictional world and lead to great variety in game-play. An avatar could have the ability to be move temporally backwards and effect changes that will be accounted for in the narrative that has already taken place.
Borrowing concepts from object oriented programming, a player’s avatar can be internally represented in the game system as an object with distinct properties. The other entities an avatar interacts with in the game space can operate in a parameter driven way based on the current state of these properties.
The sited example is “x” arrives at “y’s” house. If they are friends “y” greets “x” and offers food and shelter. If “x” changes previous circumstances so that “x” is now an enemy of “y” the offer of food and shelter should be replaced with an appropriate response. If the story is based on parameter driven algorithms, the exact sequence of game play need not be remembered by the system, only the current state of the character as “x” relates to “y.” The avatar can jump to any point on the time-line of the fictional world and the current state of the relationship should guide the activities of any x-and-y encounter.
The idea is the player should be able to travel in time and directly modify the attributes of his previous avatar by participating in the development of his character in the story. The player can augment any previous scenario by cloning the current avatar and revisiting the action as an additional agent. This is a gamble for the player. Attempting to assist the avatar may be detrimental, end the game or it might help. The jumps in time could be regulated by the game designer as to when and how often. The cloned avatar will reunite with the main character at certain points. The properties that result from any temporal interference can be incorporated during recalculations that occur at intersections of beats in the narrative, perhaps using a flowchart architecture (p104).
In chapter 5 Ryan dispels some common myths about digital narrative. The myth that caught my eye was about choice. She examines this paradox of choice and dismisses the notion that providing the user more choices will create a more aesthetically valuable textual experience.
I don’t think that writers of interactive narrative intentionally try to trick or alienate their users. (Unless that’s part of the experience they are attempting to create.) This would inevitably cause them to lose readership. Is that what some authors of interactive fiction end up doing?
I had a conversation with Eloy just this week about this same concept of choice in the virtual world. He said he logged in to Second Life for the first time and felt confused about what he was supposed to do. He was given no clear instruction on what to do, and most likely gave up after some serious head-scratching.
As technology evolves and the structure of the narrative evolves along with it, does the structure of the latter become more sophisticated and refined? I can see that this is possibly happening in the construction or creation of the narrative but what about the experience of the reader? Where is the literary and the concept of literariness? Where is the beauty of language in the written word? Is there no room in this digital world for these? It seems to me that the early attempts at digital narrative were in fact, to some degree, literary (Zork, Mindwheel), however as the technology has continued to evolve it appears to be moving away from the textual or the literary and toward the visual (Juvenate) and gaming (there are plenty of these). Thus, perhaps all the effort is going into the spatial and temporal areas of development of narrative and little is going toward developing the “storiness” and the literary. The plots and storylines of the narratives described in this text seem to me to not have much depth, finesse, or nuance. Weak tea and milque toast.
All the above is what was going through my head as I read, becoming increasingly frustrated. I was wondering if the digital narrative had nothing to offer those of us who find great pleasure in reading books. I think I found her answer on page 180 where Marie-Laure Ryan says that: “Digital texts should not be expected to be enhanced versions of the novel… Digital narrative is only a failure if we judge it by the criteria of the literary canon, this is to say, by the criteria of another medium.” Sounds like a NO to me. I’m not thrilled with that answer. Of course, I know there are now many online literary journals and blogs, both steps in the “right” direction and maybe this might be another step in that direction:
Three Percent – article 1/30/08 7:56 AM cwp book tv titlepage
This sounds rather promising:
Daniel Menaker, former Random House executive editor and fiction editor at the New Yorker, will host a new online book show called Titlepage, the first of which appears on March 3 [. . .] Menaker will lead a group of authors in discussions that are modeled in part after Apostrophes, the popular French book discussion TV show, Charlie Rose and others. [via Shelf Awareness
I’ve ranted about this before, but a real, smart, good televised book program is one of the things this country is sorely missing. Menaker is brilliant, so I have high hopes for this . . . And hopefully he won’t have a prejudice against authors with an accent . . .
And I am still hopeful that someday it will somehow be possible to have good, interesting, well-written interactive literature (maybe there’s something now I don’t know about?). It is a very intriguing and exciting concept. Ryan’s argument that “Proust’s novels have nothing to gain by offering multiple choices…” seems a bit facile and dismissive to me. Surely, someone can write something of quality that could lend itself to interactivity and multiple choices.
*I was also getting carried away with the whole reality, fiction, non-fiction, panfictionality discussion in Chapter 2.
I got to say that many times in my life I am shallow and goofy. And I compare situations or ideas to other shallow and goofy situations. I can use Boy Meets World to explain almost any of life’s issues. But the one that comes to my mind the most is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The first example that came to my mind when describing the idea of Metalepsis, in particular, rhetorical metalepsis. If any fictional character from movie opened up a passage between his world and ours it was Ferris. My favorite part of the movie, is when he drops off the Ferrari at the garage and he asked the attendant, a questionable, shady non-desrcript ethic man, if he speaks English. The attendant, quickly and smoothly replies, “what country do you think this is?”. Ferris, with camera pointing on him, looks at it, the camera and then to us and nods in simpleton agreement, then looks back at the attendant and hands him the keys and some money. It’s interesting that the idea of metalepsis is as old as literature, but was only hesitantly accepted early movies. It was not believed that the audience would be able to follow any break in a story’s linearity. Obviously those that were concerned, had their doubts alleviated, and since then, it is the exception to have a movie follow a story line linearly without breaking to another scene or story.
On a side note, what is extremely interesting, to me, is the use of literature, especially that of science-fiction, to describe our reality. By that I mean, we used to use other characters as avatars for something in the real world, such as such as Captain Kirk as the “humanoid earthling.” Now we use images of ourselves to describe our fictional self, such as our character in Second Life. In the next game for Star Wars (Star Wars: Force Unleashed), the visuals of a character or not manifested directly from imagination, an actor was digitized and put into a game to represent the hero.
I tell you one thing, reading this book was a whole lot easier then reading Cybertext and since Avatars of Story is more up to date with the times, I really was immersed with the chapters and the examples that Marie offers as samples for her arguments.After reading Chapter 7, designing a web-based narrative or interactive drama is something that I wish to explore with Flash.
In Chapter 8, there is this question that captured my attention, “are video games capable of developing narratives?” I like the the fact that on page 189 “games may not be stories, but they can be machines for generating stories.” The state of video games has evolved tremendously from the utilization of technology, stories, and game play. I read an article awhile back saying that alot of movie directors and writers are turning towards video games because of lack of opportunities in Hollywood. They contribute tremendously to the narratives of video games and I believe that what Marie Ryan argues applies to this occurrence.
If anyone has ever played the Final Fantasy series, the stories are beautifully written much like novels and hollwood movies. For me, the purpose of the gameplay is to move on to the next storyline which are truly captivating. The writers structurally build these stories to entice you to play further on but it is the videogame that generate the stories with the combination of the gameplay.
Once again, with the advent of avatars and the popularity of first person games, the narratives in video games allow more user interaction with the ability to control the narrative. One excellent example is the new video game that just came out called Mass Effect, a futuristic sci-fi game that allows the user to customize his or her characters and make the decisions that will affect the story line in various ways much like a complicated interactive architecture where a path twists and turns. But in Mass Effect, the story is almost never ending because the game allows the user to be fully immersed in the narrative and the character.
I found Marie-Laurie Ryan to be both verbose and dense. Case in point, page 202, the full paragraph, also the last paragraph on the chapter about computer games as narratives. My English professors would have slapped a big red F on her paper for overuse of punctuation and lack of clarity. I only bring this up to relate to her book and that her overall ideas, while interesting, it feels as though she doesn’t quite get the point of it all and leaves the reader wondering what her position is and asking more questions.
My attention was focused on games as narratives as my work is moving more and more into video game based story telling and bringing that vision to a film environment. Ryan is one of the few authors who splits the situation into pro’s and con’s on an equal playing field. Though I get the sense she’s more towards the con’s, games are not narratives, but that there is an exchange on ideas made this book a greater read.
Here’s the part that irked me. Her discussion on the aesthetic and function question.
“If designers had truly fascinating stories to tell, they would write novels and film scripts rather than games.” (pg 198)
While you can argue both ways on this statement, it really felt that Ryan was voting against game’s as narrative because games don’t follow the typical narrative structure. A structure set up by an intuition whom decided what is a narrative and what is not. I think a criticism to Ryan is that she failed to mention the ability for narratives to morph, and doesn’t take into consideration the institutionalization of the narrative structure. We’re stuck in a pattern of cause and effect, going flashfoward or flashbackward. We expect certain things out of a narrative. When the story doesn’t fit, then it’s not a narrative. The issue is that we need to rethink the way we look at a narrative. Look at the framing of the game to understand the story; a big issue I have been struggling with for my interactive narrative project.
Side-note: Ryan has never played The Sims. If she did, she would have known that while Sims don’t have to restock the fridge (Sims 1 not Sims 2 where restocking is required), everytime you open the door you are paying Simolians for the food. There is no infinite food system without cracking the game. The example of the fridge tends to fall flat.
Of particular interest to me was Ryan’s take on the “are games narratives?” question. Her arguments were clear, but I tend to go with the ludologists in many of the counterpoints mentioned. Ryan makes a great deal of effort to classify different game types, and yet she seeks some form of unity in understanding them all. The overwhelming feeling I had while reading was this: why can’t some games be narrative and others be simulation? And why can’t some games be representations? Why does the study of narratology of games require that we have to define all (not some) games as narratives or not as narratives, particularly in light of the diverse typology of games given by both Ryan and Aarseth? I have a hard time wrapping my head around the universality of “game-is-narrative.” Jesper Juul’s quote seemed to echo the same thought on page 200.
On the other hand, I disagree with the argument of games being like life. Most of the games I see (guitar hero, star wars, etc) have little to do with real life. It seems to me that games take us places outside of ourselves and our lives. Caesar was mentioned in the text, and I think that is a good example of a game that doesn’t really mimic life. I doubt that I will ever have the chance to build an empire. So another question is “how are games like life?” Yes, they have spatiaiity and objects are manipulated through a tactile controller and some of the problems could be seen as symbolic of life’s problems, but do they reflect “real” life beyond the symbology?
And then I wonder, to take it one step further, is life a narrative? It certainly has the ability to jump tracks while moving in a multilinear fashion. A person’s identity is, to be believed by some, made of many different smaller identities. We have biographies in the libraries and the Biography Channel on the tube which chronicle lives of people in narrative form. I feel like I have more questions than answers after reading the text. But it was a very good text.
[second posting --- first was 5 hours ago, if received this posting may be deleted]
I think it would be interesting to explore metalepsis as a game-feature that results from time-travel. While discussing myths of digital narratives, Ryan states that narrative relies on sequence (p124.) Later in her discussion of AI and Storyspace she explores the computational difficulties of managing “guard fields” if temporal sequence was not maintained (p140.) The dimension of time could be malleable in a fictional world and lead to great variety in game-play. An avatar could have the ability to be move temporally backwards and effect changes that will be accounted for in the narrative that has already taken place.
Borrowing concepts from object oriented programming, a player’s avatar can be internally represented in the game system as an object with distinct properties. The other entities an avatar interacts with in the game space can operate in a parameter driven way based on the current state of these properties.
The sited example is “x” arrives at “y’s” house. If they are friends “y” greets “x” and offers food and shelter. If “x” changes previous circumstances so that “x” is now an enemy of “y” the offer of food and shelter should be replaced with an appropriate response. If the story is based on parameter driven algorithms, the exact sequence of game play need not be remembered by the system, only the current state of the character as “x” relates to “y.” The avatar can jump to any point on the time-line of the fictional world and the current state of the relationship should guide the activities of any x-and-y encounter.
The idea is the player should be able to travel in time and directly modify the attributes of his previous avatar by participating in the development of his character in the story. The player can augment any previous scenario by cloning the current avatar and revisiting the action as an additional agent. This is a gamble for the player. Attempting to assist the avatar may be detrimental, end the game or it might help. The jumps in time could be regulated by the game designer as to when and how often. The cloned avatar will reunite with the main character at certain points. The properties that result from any temporal interference can be incorporated during recalculations that occur at intersections of beats in the narrative, perhaps using a flowchart architecture (p104).
Regarding Metaleptic Machines.
I believe that the reason why this particular chapter caught my interest, besides being an interesting overview of the applications, implications, and possibilities of metalepsis in literature as well as in print, in video games, alternate reality gaming, computer science, etc; it is also because this sort of artifices bring awareness of different and simultaneous levels of “reality” (and I’m hesitant to use the word reality here, but for lack of a better one I will use it) that are experienced by the reader/viewer/user. Is it important or necessary for works of fiction to bring such awareness? Probably not. Is it amusing? To me it is, perhaps some people might find these intrusions irrelevant or annoying. Ultimately, it could be argued that the use of an artifice like metalepsis could pose a threat to the “veracity” of the fictional world depicted in the work, just as much as it could reinforce it by making a direct reference to the “real” world outside of the work in question. But I guess that I’m partial to the use of this kind of tricks because they appeal to my imagination, by implying that I as reader/viewer/user could also be a fictional entity. Now, why does the prospect of being an imaginary creation entertain my thoughts? That’s a good question, and one that I’m not quite sure I could answer.
To comment further on Ben’s comment about the paradox of choice, it seems true that “…an overabundance of choices is more likely to lead to confusion, frustration, and obsession with the missed opportunities…” (as in his Second Life example), however it seems that games like Grand Theft Auto really have a niche in this area: the player has the choice to follow the assignments given (which gives direction and purpose), or the player may choose to take free reign in the world and just drive around doing whatever they please. Maybe this is something that would make Second Life a little more user-friendly, is simply the choice to either follow a “game plan,” or for the user to discover their own interests. After a few months of fooling around in Second Life, it seems that the vast amount of choices are too many to even decide what to do, and therefore, I have become bored with my own indecision! Maybe a game plan is just what I need to reel me back in…
On page 198 is a rather abrupt blanket statement:
“If designers had truly fascinating stories to tell, they would write novels and film scripts rather than games.”
Firstly, it is easy to see why this is true in some cases, and the author gives the example of psychological stories not being good gaming material (I would argue even this claim, if spaces afforded it). However, there are surely some types of narrative that are equally (or even best) told within the gaming environment, giving the viewer a participating role in the action. It is easy to see how participating in the action of a story–even in a small way–can leave a much deeper mark on an individual than simply seeing it or reading it, and gaming often includes both of those things as well.
The author goes on to say:
“But a stereotyped story can be redeemed by interesting player action, while a game without originality on the level of rules can be improved by narrative packaging. In the design of games, gameplay and narrative remediate each other’s deficiency.”
The first claim is easy for me to validate. Look at Super Mario Bros. or Tetris. These games have very, very little story associated with them, yet are endlessly entertaining. On the other hand, a game that doesn’t play well can be much like a book that has torn pages, with some stuck together, or a scratched DVD that skips a lot while playing. Most gamers will not suffer through bad gameplay in order to behold a gripping story. (But video gaming is still new and “gaming” is a new concept. Surely providing a good “gaming” experience will mature much like storytelling has matured.) My qualification is that it is possible that there simply has not been a game that has a story gripping enough to supercede bad gameplay.
Just a quick thought past deadline. Eloy’s reference to Ferris Bueller reminded me of “The Big Lebowski” where the narrator played by Sam Elliott actually meets up with Lebowski (the Dude) in a bowling alley on a couple of occasions and has a conversation. This throws off the viewer, with such a big stack of storytelling going on, and makes the plot even crazier and harder to digest.