Narrative systems

The relation of digital games to narrative and storytelling has been the subject of considerable back-and-forth among academics, who sometimes seek to draw hard lines between putatively linear media such as novels, film or TV, and the multilinear structures of digital games. Conversely, other writers have noted the presence of many literary and rhetorical figures in digital games, leading to useful analyses of paratextuality (following Genette), metafiction, Goffmannian frame analysis, Bakhtinian chronotopes, that link playful and literary contexts.

For those who insist on the novelty of digital games, in reading a book our activity is constrained to turning pages and interpreting text. In games, we do any number of different things. There are sound reasons to explore the differences between play and reading, the ludic engagement of video games and the fictional engagement we have with books, cinema and so on.

One example of this thinking is Ian Bogost’s ‘Video Games are better without stories’. The title is provocative, but the piece has the tenor of a thought experiment asking us to consider the potentials of games and a reminder of the scope of what storytellers have achieved. In this view, assumptions deriving from thinking on cinema or literature – a drive to storytelling – can distract from the systemic qualities that could be further developed in digital games. For Bogost, this opens onto the ‘unexpected’ potentials of computational playful systems. With regard to stories, ‘Film, television and literature all tell them better’.

Certainly, game developers and players seem to often draw such distinctions between the ludic and the fictional. Players tend to speak of games having a story rather than being a story. Famously, developer John Carmack compared game stories to those of adult films: not really what the audience is here for. Narrative designer Ross Berger, in his introductory guide to game and transmedia writing, identifies story as a ‘non-core game feature’. Matthew Burns and Tom Bissell’s short game ‘The Writer Will Do Something’ humorously paints a picture of a discipline far down in a game studio’s totem pole.

This said, being overly doctrinaire about the distinction between games and narrative fiction can prevent us from other important lines of inquiry. This is not a zero-sum game, and there is a wide range of storytelling phenomena to take stock of in and related to digital games. Many games do feature fascinating narrative designs and employ professional writers and narrative designers. Art and audio departments are charged with creating fascinating and arresting fictional characters and virtual worlds. Anthologies of narrative scenes stitched together on streaming platforms such as YouTube can garner millions of views – even without the drawcard of gameplay systems, people still want to know how things turn out. Volumes of fan fiction and wiki material is penned about game characters and worlds. Games can be banned from app stores due to representational or fictional content that has nothing to do with their other systems.

There are also significant issues with overstating the novelty of video games’s nonlinear form even within the scope of the Western canon, if we consider experimental works by Burroughs, Perec, Oulipo, or Fluxus, to more recent works such as Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl. Perspectives that emphasise the novelty of video games also risk simplifying how we interface with so-called ‘linear’ media, and the range of uses to which such media are used – universalising a particular cultural context that is in fact quite delimited in time and space. The codex format, for example, functions very differently in many ritual contexts where the text is accessed in a nonlinear fashion (say, according to a liturgical calendar), or in divinatory uses (such as the Homeric and Virgilian lotteries in Gargantua & Pantagruel). The same is true of academic texts with their many footnotes and citation strategies. The process of interfacing with so-called linear media is complex, as can be seen in research examining the cognitive differences in reading a paper book as opposed to e-readers or screens.

One element of Bogost’s argument against game stories is to read back into the provenance of digital games’ 3D worlds in the marquee FPS games such as Doom or Duke Nukem. Technical limitations of the time meant that the 3D virtual space had to be empty, save for the minimal interactions of the shooter game with its monsters and macho heroes. Trying to fill this endemic emptiness with more and more virtual objects can’t aspire to the fullness of story: at best we end up with ‘animatronics’ and ‘Potemkin villages’. Certainly, Berlin’s subordination of story elements to gameplay in the contemporary Battlefield FPS would support this.

However, Berlin’s stance has a history: it comes in the wake of the reception of the previous game in the series, Battlefield V, which prominently featured women soldiers in it gameplay, marketing and storyline. This led to backlash from players who questioned the role of women in the game’s World War II scenario. The ‘empty’ space of the FPS, then, can very much be interpreted in terms of whose story is being told (not least, in the uncredited domestic labour that was the condition of possibility for the FPS technology and culture to come to be coded as a ‘male’ space in the first place).

We should be careful about identifying video games with 3D worlds (as striking as they are). BMML is clearly telling a story, and at least according to its winning of the 2017 Google Play Indie Games Contest. In its RTM, where the precarity of the refugee journey is most powerfully conveyed, BMML incorporates the powers of both story and play: its notifications and social media updates are both game interface elements, and epistolary exchange between two fictional characters.