Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Another Portion of a Paper Draft!

In order to have an effective conversation about this subject, we’re going to have to define two nebulous, seemingly concrete, oft overused terms. First and foremost, what is a video game? And second, what is a post-structural narrative?

A video game is, for the purpose of our discussion, any game that utilizes multimedia components in order to convey a story or sense of action. These multimedia components are usually arbitrated through a single processing entity, a “computer” or “console.” This entity can be reserved for another purpose: it can be a phone or a home computer utilized for word processing and email. Or it can be a dedicated device, such as an X-Box or, as older individuals might recall, a Nintendo Entertainment System. The platform is simply a means to an end: whether it is built towards one purpose or towards multiple purposes the games themselves are usually best experienced when they’re engaged with without distractions.

Video games normally have narrative elements within them, sometimes strong, sometimes weak. These elements vary dramatically in prominence, however. Linerunner, for example, invents the simplest of narratives: there is a line, and a man rides it. However Bastion, an independently developed title with a relatively modest time commitment attached to it, invents a pair of warring societies with identity crises and immigration disputes between them, a cold war parable nested within a game. There is no actual ruleset, simply a concept of interactivity which demands the insertion of a player figure who can, in more conventional literary senses, be seen as a reader.

And that brings us to the concept of post-structural narrative. In literature, this term is used to define narrative modes that attempt to redefine or defy conventional ideas about narrative, effectively refuting conventional narrative structure in order to reinvent the means by which a story is told. Hence the term. In video games, this term can be applied in a considerably broader fashion. If we observe post-structural narrative as the norm, and not the exception, for video games, we see that games are not simply piddling attempts at storytelling, but rather a unique means of conveying a narrative experience which relies on the input from players.

This is indeed what sets them aside from other narrative forms: no other narrative form relies on user input in the fashion that video games do. Books require the participation of an active reader figure who, while somewhat active, remains less active than the player in video games, a truly active “reader figure” who re-defines narrative as it emerges. This is what distinguishes games from film, given film’s heavy reliance on passive reader figures (a factor which games embrace and utilize with unnerving regularity in cutscenes). In order to tell a story effectively in a game, you must involve your player, and failure to do so will make a game boring or tedious.

We need look no further than examples like Final Fantasy XIII and Clive Barker’s (bless his heart) Undying to witness this: these are games which decouple passive narrative from active involvement in order to couple a conventional narrative with a post-structural medium, and they suffer for the effort. Players lack influence over the events of the game, and the events which they have influence over (that is, overcoming the obstacles that face them) are so non-narrative and, all too often, monolithic in their established goals that players would find themselves hard pressed to find a place to insert themselves as readers or even active participants in the narrative, spare as the meagerest of facilitators for a writer’s vision.

It should be said, then, that video games do not represent a factotum which permits the effective facilitation of post-structural storytelling. Rather, they are a tool which enable this end. They do not necessarily fulfill this goal. Some games tell stories with such loose structures that they are totally invalid as narratives (man shoots gun, man dies, man reloads gun and walks on) but this is not the ultimate potential of the medium. Instead it rests within this medium to express narrative stories that permit the active insertion of reader figures as never before, as is the case in games such as Bastion.

Bastion, for the uninitiated, is on its surface an action game with a top down view and freeform story that showcases this dynamic wonderfully. Let me explain.

In Bastion players are given verbal and visual feedback based on their actions: that is, the story adjusts to their actions. They learn new things about the world around them as a result of their explorations. And while there is an existing story that the player must engage, a story with immutable elements as dramatic as the apocalypse of the player’s world, there are smaller events within that storyline that require the player’s action for actualization. These events vary in gravity from deciding the fate of a major character to simply uncovering details of characters lives through drug induced hallucinations.

Through Bastion we can see that there is more to games than simple a recounting of an existing narrative. Rather, narrative is collaboratively shaped between players (readers) and designers (authors). In this respect, games represent not only a medium of entertainment but also an extreme example of a certain vein of literary thought.