Ludology vs.

Narratology

or those

were the days

Miguel SicartComputer Game Theory

Spring 2005

Today’s Menu

•A brief history of computer games

•Obviously, games are narratives

•As a matter of fact, games are games

•Why is all this relevant?

•Discussion

Once upon a time ...

Tennis for Two

1958

William HigginbothamBrookhave Atomic Research

AnalogMultiplayer

“Forgot” to patent it ...

Spacewar1962

Created in the hacker environment of MIT

Steve Russell, Alan Kotok, Peter Samson and Dan

Edwards

Open Sourced

Benchmark for new technologies: mouse,

screens, arcade machines, ...

Hunt the Wumpus1972

•Gregory Yob’s game hit the mainframes in 1972

•Written in Basic, predicts the explosion of Dungeon games, like ...

Adventure (a.k.a. Colossal Cave)

•1972 - 1976

•Will Crowther designed a cave exploration simulator,

•redesigned by David Woods into a D&D inspired game that started one, or maybe more genres

Space Invaders

•1978

•Taito created this extraordinary concept that generated many subgenres with very basic gameplay options

Asteroids1979

Vector based shooter (advanced concept and design by Lyle Rains and

Ed Logg)Huge economic success!

Those were the days ...

Thanks to Pong (1972) and other popular arcade

machines, Atari controled the arcade market until its

crack in 1984 ...game industry almost died

back then!

... but there is more to this (hi)story ...

Microsoft Flight

Simulator1980

Bruce Artwick, SubLogicStarted the technical

simulators ...but is it a game?

(oh, no, not that question again!)

Pac-Man

1980Toru Iwanatu

Time declared Pac-Man “man of the year” in 1982

(!)First computer game

personality!

Donkey-Kong

1981Shigeru Miyamoto

Root of Nintendo’s successSuper Mario Bros (a spin-off the original game) used as a start title for the NES system

in 1986

Classic MUD1978-1980

Richard Bartle & Roy TrubshawMultiplayer Online Role Playing Game

Myst

1993Rand & Robin Miller

It’s like Adventure, but with nice graphics ...

It saved the industry, but Robin miller left the

company right after the sequel, and its online

iteration was a commercial failure

Turn Based Strategy: Civilization1991

Sid Meier

Doomneed I say more?

Some other relevant names ...

•Richard Garriot: Akalabeth (1979), Ultima Series

•Star Raiders (1979) - 3D/2D, First Person Space game

•Maze War (c. 1975), perhaps the first death match FPS (developed at MIT)

Time is on our side: a chronology•50s - 60s: the beginning is the end is the beginning:

Space War, Tennis for Two

•70s: Pong, home consoles, industrialization, arcades, adventure games, RPGs, start of the 3D

•80s: Better graphics, adventures die, new genres emerge (simulation), economic crack (1984)

•90s: Technologically driven innovation, massive industrialization, the Internet, Hollywoodization

•Now: Portable, pervasive, open sourced, independent (?), ...

And now, for something completely different ... or not

Narratology vs. Ludology

I Assault

What is a narration?

What is narrative?

Arguments for the narrativeness of

games•Everything is a narrative

•Games have back-stories, and narrative introductions

•Games share techniques with narratives

Everything is a narrative

well, maybe, but that doesn’t mean that everything is narrative!

Games have back-stories

which are actually relevant for the gameplay

Games use narrative

techniqueseven flashbacks!!

... so ...

•Games and stories actually share some traits,

•but that doesn’t legitimize their study as only stories

•The problem is how do we define narrative, and how do we apply narrative tools for analysis.

Narratology as the enemy

•Games can only be understood as narratives

•Long tradition, due to the influence of literary studies and hypertext studies

•Understimates notions of play, gameplay, and even game design

Ludology

the good guys?

•Games use narrative techniques, but gameplay and the game structure are more relevant.

•Games might simulational traits that narratives cannot have.

•Game shave a structure of their own that cannot be understood as narratives.

But games actually use

stories ...•Group work:

•Find now examples of how games tell stories (besides the back-stories, and what is written in the package)

Is there a convergence?

Quest games!

What are quest games?

• Quests are an overarching structure that applies also to narratives

• They can be solo or plural

• Narrative is after the fact (constative), while quests are performative (we make them, we experience them)

• Quests tend to have a reward/punish structure

or, in words more clever than

mine ...• A conflict between act and meaning is present in the activity of quest

solving too. To do a quest is to search for the meaning of it. Having

reached this meaning, the quest is solved. The paradox of questing is

that as soon as meaning is reached, the quest stops functioning as quest.

When meaning is found, the quest is history. It cannot be done again, as

it is simply not the same experience to solve a puzzle quest for the

second time. (Tronstad 2001, pt. 4.1)

Exercise

•Take the narrative for the game of your dreams (existing or that you want to make),

•and then describe briefly how would you implement that narrative: what is back-story, what is cut-scene based, what are quests

•What kind of game would that be? Quest game, non narrative game (Tetris), Myst?