Print Screen: Narrative Ludology in Three Somewhat Easy Steps

4/9/2009 7:00 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

2007's "Second Person: Roleplaying and Story in Games and Playable Media" has a cumbersome title, but a more welcoming structure for newcomers to the discipline. The emphasis on what it means to play a role means that all gamers and most people who remember their childhood have an entrée to the text. "Second Person" moves beyond role-playing for players, as fruitful as that topic is, to address the creation of games that ask players to assume new roles or identities, including Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) like I Love Bees and interactive fiction. The book is a 400-page series of meditations on the relationship between the designer/game master/puppet master and those who choose to play in their world.

The opening section is specifically dedicated to tabletop gaming, and "Second Person" is at its best when it makes connections between this "real-life" role-playing world and game design. The book includes three light RPGs as appendices, including a Baron Munchausen-themed game that seems designed to encourage drunkenness and broken friendships. It, too, draws on the game design world for contributions, including Jordan Mechner and Chris Crawford (again), but still has ludologists and other scholars doing the heavy lifting with in-depth game analysis.

Notable essays:
Kenneth Hite, "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu"
Jordan Mechner, "The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story"
Steve Meretzky, "The Creation of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall"
Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship"
Jane McGonigal, "The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real World, Mission-Based Gaming"
Tim Uren, "Finding the Game in Improvised Theater"

The new volume, "Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives" moves well beyond the game world and tries to integrate some game narrative into a larger concept of "vast narrative" -- stories that are larger than your typical novel, and are typified by different media types and encouraging fan interaction with the material. This definition requires working with television and literature, as well as games, so the newer digital media is situated within a big world of nerd culture. "Third Person" has essays on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Doctor Who" as well as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy.

Casting this wide a net has the potential to do games a disservice, since other media tell better and more varied stories in more elaborate ways. Seeing the game narrative work integrated with the more established media, however, goes a long way to putting narrative ludology firmly in the literary criticism canon. It is a little worrying that so much of the other media discussed are your typical nerd/geek fare ("Buffy," "Lost," "Watchmen," "Star Trek," "Doctor Who"), but this is emblematic of the subjects they discuss. Though "All My Children," for example, would probably qualify as a vast narrative, there is (to my knowledge) no fan fiction about it or multiple levels of meaning seen through different approaches to the story.

The other media essays do tend to drown out a lot of the game material, sadly. Over half of the articles are not about games at all, and those that are about games are, for the most part, less satisfying than the four (!) articles about "Doctor Who." With ludology in a stronger place now than it was when "First Person" came out, you can understand the editors' willingness to put games side-by-side with more mature media. But if you came to this series looking for game discussion, the essays on novelizations and series "bibles" may be unwelcome digressions.