narrative spaces – Understand. Think. Then write.

PAB Entry #6: “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project”

Barab, Sasha, Patrick Pettyjohn, Melissa Gresalfi, and Maria Solomou. “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project.” In Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age, edited by Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and Sasha Barab, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp 306-326.

In “Game-Based Curricula, Personal Engagement, and the Modern Prometheus Design Project,” authors Barab, Pettyjohn, Gresalfi, and Solomou explore the possibility of basing an entire curriculum around games. Their ideal curriculum “involves trajectories or missions that include rich storylines, multiple tasks, …and interactive objects…that require the player to make conceptually informed choices” (307). The game that they created is a single player exploration of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the player is exploring the world of the novel, and must solve problems make both practical and ethical choices that have persistent impacts on the game world.

Key terms they establish early on include intentionality (player choices impact meaningful goals), legitimacy (methods utilized are relevant beyond the context of the game), and consequentiality (player actions have a meaningful impact on the game world). When all these elements are present, they term this kind of participation transactive engagement. This term captures an important element in any immersive experience – the notion of the transaction, which makes the player an active participant and not merely a spectator.

Intentionality is important, because without a context, goals are not meaningful; busy work is work for the sake of work, without a purpose. Legitimacy is something that is gaining widespread attention in education, because if students do not see a real world application for a skill, if it seems like something abstract that just has to be learned because there will be a test, they will not engage with the skill as deeply. If they see transferrable applications, and have the opportunity to use the skill in context, there is a greater potential for deep learning. Consequentiality is something that requires extremely responsive game design, which means time and money on the development side. For that reason, many games do not have persistent environments – but setting a game in a persistent world where player actions can have meaningful, lasting impacts on the environment and the responses from other characters increases immersion and engagement.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the basis for the — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the basis for the “Modern Prometheus” game

While much of the article understandably deals with the specifics of their Modern Prometheus project, it’s iterations and why they made the choices they did in its creation, the part that is the most interesting to me is the way that they establish the educational value of immersion and engagement. They state that “supporting transactive engagement involves fostering a deep sense of immersion in which the learner enters into a situation conceptually and perceptually, has a goal, has a legitimate role, and engages in actions that have a consequence – whereby both the learner and the situation with which he or she is engaged become transformed” (307). By getting the player to buy in to the game setting, rather than remaining detached from it, their choices have context and meaning.

There are many techniques that can be used to create that sense of the game world having meaning and consequences (some of which are also addressed in Extra Credits’ “What Makes Us Roleplay” below), but this feeling can also be fostered by everything from the interface design to the soundscape players hear, and the art style they are seeing. The game’s mechanics also play into this, although these elements are not explicitly addressed by Barab, et al. Ideally, these elements are all so seamlessly integrated into the game experience that they are not consciously perceived, because to do so brings the player out of the experience and makes them aware of the artificiality of the environment. For players, and students, to feel that their choices have meaning, they need to be invested in the game world.

Additional Watching and Reading
The Extra Credits episode “What Makes Us Roleplay” deals with immersion and how games make the player’s choices matter. Roleplaying (taking on the personality of a character that may or may not make the same choices that they would in a real world situation) can be a distraction from learning in some situations, but the design choices dealing with it also create an immersive environment in which the decisions you make impact the game world – the consequentiality described by Barab, et al.

Marshal G. Jones’ (apparently?) unpublished paper, “Creating Engagement in Computer-Based Learning Environments” is what it says on the tin – an exploration of how designers get players engaged and invested in learning games. Jones explains that in this case, engagement refers to “the notion that the program makes the learner want to be there.”

The Education Business Blog has an article on an early iteration of the Modern Prometheus game.

Paper #2: Big Questions

The field of computer game studies is a relative newcomer to the scholarly landscape, but it is not without controversies. Even the words used to define the field have been challenged, defined and redefined – is “computer game” the best term, when many of these games are played on game consoles and phones? Is “game” accurate, if no skill or agency is involved?

If we trace the formal study of game studies to the late 90s, as established in my previous paper, one of the earliest conflicts with the field was between the camps of Narratology and Ludology. Jasper Juul, writing in 2001, laid out the differences between games and stories, which essentially came down to the idea of interactivity. A story is something you consume passively, while a game is something in which the player (no longer just a reader) is a co-creator of meaning. He allows that there is a role for the study of narrative in games, but states that, “relying too heavily on existing theories will make us forget what makes games games: such as rules, goals, player activity, the projection of the player’s actions into the game world, the way the game defines the possible actions of the player. It is the unique parts that we need to study now”. When combined with Aarseth’s statement that games are “too important” to be left to the scholars of other areas, the ludologists staked out their territory. Leave narrative, an inessential part of games, to the literature and film studies people. They were going to address the more important aspects of games – the structural elements that helped to define something as a game.

Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace focused on the evolving role of narrative, though at that time the struggle between narratologists and ludologists was in full swing. Her title is important, though – she was examining the future of narrative, and already in 1997 allowed for not only the possibility but the necessity of it becoming interactive. Rather than the “game” elements being the main point and any narrative elements merely providing a context or pretense for the gameplay, Murray, although limited by the technology at the time when explaining what was possible at the time, incorporated science fiction elements into her prediction of the future direction of narrative. Cyberspace was a far cry from virtual reality, and further still from Star Trek’s holodeck, and Murray’s book dealt explicitly with interactive stories, which need not necessarily be games. Given the definitions they were working with at the time, the two camps’ positions make sense. But in the nearly two decades since then, our definition of what a narrative is has shifted.

Certainly, there are still people who take an arguably formalist approach and focus on games-for-games-sake, but as the role of storytelling is acknowledged in fields far beyond games – marketing , health literacy, and education – denying the value of storytelling in games becomes more difficult. In the years since ludology was first established in contrast to narratology in the study of games, fewer and fewer articles have been published. The initial conflict – whether or not games had stories – is less of a focus, because the definition of narrative has expanded. While Juul explained some fifteen years ago that games were not simply narratives, because narratives lacked interactive elements, the goalposts have been moved. It is generally accepted that narratives can be interactive. That doesn’t mean that things like mechanics and gameplay do not matter – on the contrary, they have been subsumed as part of the overall definition, and now are the vehicle through which stories are made interactive. Even in Henry Jenkins’ 2006 article “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” the line has blurred, and game elements are pressed into service to create narrative spaces, in which a non-linear narrative can be uncovered by players as they move through the game space.

Carolyn Handler Miller's Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment — Carolyn Handler Miller’s Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment

Carolyn Handler Miller’s book, Digital Storytelling is subtitled A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. Storytelling is now interactive. Narratives can allow for agency on the part of the reader/player/end user. Rather than focusing on games, the book explores the nature of interactive stories, with a primary focus on what you can do with them, and how they can be applied to the burgeoning field of transmedia storytelling.

The more pertinent question now seems to be not whether or not games have stories, but how stories can be used in combination with other game elements to create an immersive experience, in which the player (for lack of a better word) is invested in the outcome. Not only does this deepen the player’s connection to the game’s outcome, this can be transferred to apply to a consumer’s connection to a brand, a student’s desire to master a skill, or countless other interactions that apply to games, but also beyond them. In spite of some early game theorists’ desire to stake out their own territory separate from that of other fields, the floodgates are open, and computer games – which always incorporated multiple disciplines in their creation – now are a part of countless other industries. There is certainly still a role for game theorists, but meaningful contributions can now come from many fields, and the work of game studies scholars has implications far beyond that of entertainment. Game elements and story elements are both pressed into service into the creation of interactive narratives, of which traditional computer games are one among several forms that they can take.

Sources and Further Reading

Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies – Year One.” Game Studies, vol. 1, issue 1, 2001. http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. Accessed 20 September 2016.

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT P, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

Miller, Carolyn Handler. Digital Storytelling (3^rd ed.). Focal Press: New York, 2014.

Juul, Jesper. “Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies, vol. 1, Issue 1, 2001. http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/ Accessed 5 October 2016.

PAB Entry #4: “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT P, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

In the introduction to “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Henry Jenkins states that when first presented at a conference, the essay, “provoked strong reactions from the so-called Ludologists and resulted in my being falsely (in my opinion) identified as a Narratologist.” He goes on to explain that his ideas are more centered on game spaces, “ripe with narrative possibility,” while story itself can be deconstructed as “less a temporal structure than a body of information.”

While he devotes considerable time to finding common ground between Narratologists and Ludologists, his primary point is that games are spaces. This is true whether it is the board of Monopoly, which he alludes to, or the vast outer space reaches of the 2016 release No Man’s Sky, with it’s 18 quintillion planets to be explored. While he says that he was “falsely” lumped in with Narratologists, the main gist of his article does deal with narrative – but not necessarily linear narrative. His description of games, or perhaps ideal games, allows for a great deal of player agency to discover a narrative and piece it together on their own, rather than being forced on rails to live the narrative themselves, along a linear path that the author/designer wants them to follow. He explains the game world as “a kind of information space, a memory palace,” if the designer intends a more linear path, or a space in which the player can “explore the game space and unlock its secrets”. Either way, it is about discovery of an existing story, rather than the player character’s own heroic journey.

Screen shot of — Screen shot from “No Man’s Sky” (2016) showing one of the many alien planets that players can discover and explore.

He cites the work of Don Carson, who has written on the lessons game designers can take from the work of theme park designers, observing that “the art of game design comes in finding artful ways of embedding narrative information into the environment without destroying its immersiveness and without giving the player a sensation of being drug around by the neck.” This single sentence encapsulates what is perhaps the most important concept in this article as a whole – the importance of immersion in the experience of a game, the need for player agency in

Image from interior of Disney's — Part of the physical space that Guests walk through in line for Disney’s “Expedition Everest,” demonstrating the storytelling power of detailed space design.

exploring an environment and uncovering the story for themselves, and the reason why standard models of narrative borrowed from literary and film studies are of limited use when applied to (some) game stories. And while some resist (and others embrace) the idea of games as “art”, in a traditional sense, Jenkins is speaking more of artful design – the creation of something functional in a way that is seamlessly integrated into its environment, as opposed to something that stands out as unique within its own context.

Interior of Disney's — Another interior image from Disney’s “Expedition Everest” ride, creating an immersive environment for Guests waiting for the ride.

While some games do have linear stories, and some have no stories at all, if a designer wants to tell a story that is unique to the medium of game design, it is necessary to do so using a framework that goes beyond that of traditional print and motion media.

So while Jenkins seemingly bristled at the idea of being called a Narratologist, his perspective is an interesting middle ground, seemingly doing exactly what Aarseth calls for in his essay “Computer Game Studies, Year One”. While Jenkins is interested in the idea of narrative (with a small “n”), which would cause some to place him in with the Narratologist camp, his concept is decidedly non-linear and as such goes beyond what traditional scholars of narrative could apply existing models to. Just as Aarseth has challenged game scholars to carve out their own niche, independent of existing fields, Jenkins has done just that.

The article situates the field of game design studies as being separate from, but arguably both complimentary and adjacent to that of English studies. While his concept of narrative spaces is unlike the linear narrative structure familiar to scholars of literature, and even that of nonlinear hypertext narrative, English scholars who are open minded enough to look beyond existing theoretical models will find fertile ground in analysis of these narrative spaces. Within the bounds Jenkins sets in this article, he defines a theoretical space between Narratologists and Ludologists, outside of the domains of literary and cinema studies scholars, but also scholars of computer science, animation, and art. His notion of narrative space works equally well to imagine a flag being planted in a new domain belonging to computer game theorists.

Additional Reading
The ubiquitous Extra Credits video I’ve paired with this deals with “Negative Possibility Space” – dealing with player agency and how that relates to the physical space being explored by characters.

Jenkins mentions The Image of the City, a book dealing with city planning and urban design, as being useful for designers in understanding how people live, work, and play in designed spaces.