Print Screen: Narrative Ludology in Three Somewhat Easy Steps

4/9/2009 7:00 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

It's a little odd that gamers and game journalists complain that games aren't taken seriously. In fact, games have proven to be a fertile, if still nascent, subject for Ivory Tower analysis. Ludology -- the study of games from an academic perspective, using tools from other disciplines -- is now fairly well established as serious business, even if some gamers would rather mock it than understand it.

Narrative ludology is one of the most established parts of the game studies business. Approaching games as storytelling devices has a couple of advantages over other approaches. First, the literary analysis of text, film and television (primarily storytelling mediums) is already well established, so the terminology and basic analytic concepts are in place. Second, the storytelling approach allows comparison across genres and more familiar mediums, giving the reader a hook on which to follow the analysis.

Over the last five years, Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have edited a trilogy of anthologies devoted to narrative ludology. The final book, "Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives," was just released. The series provides an excellent opportunity for lay readers to familiarize themselves with the state-of-the-art, and see how far game studies has come in the last decade. The editors have been very involved in both game and technological media for a long time, and the series has attracted some very interesting contributors and contributions.

All three books suffer from small word counts; this is especially an issue in "Third Person." Many of the articles just begin to get interesting when the conclusion sneaks up on you. Though the variety of articles is great, each volume would be stronger with longer essays, even if this would mean chopping a few pieces.

The first book in the series is easily the weakest in the lot. 2005's "First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game" is organized as a series of brief conversations, with original articles and responses to those articles. The replies begin on the same pages as the main articles, though, so following the conversation from beginning to end is more work than it should be. A lot of the book is taken up with the question of how game narrative should be approached. Star contributors like Will Wright, Greg Costikyan, Chris Crawford and Henry Jenkins all make important points about the problems and potential of games as narrative devices, but the subject is so broad, and beginning from such a basic level, that there is little real progress in understanding the medium as a medium.

"First Person" does ask some very important questions. Some of the authors doubt the very rationale of using narrative analysis for interactive media. Some genres of games ignore story altogether, and others use it merely as a framing device for the game action. But most of "First Person" is closer to the literary theory world than it is to the game world, so there are references to things like synergistics, tensegrity structures and the difficulties of mapping large-scale conversations. Though there is much to admire in "First Person," readers would be better off starting with one of the other two books.

Notable essays:

Ken Perlin, "Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?"
Gonzalo Frasca, "Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and Other Trivial Issues"
Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture"