narrative vs architecture

Earlier this month, I griped a bit about the impulse to make [video]games better narratives. The gist of my gripe, for those of you just tuning in, more or less revolves around the point that some of the features that make videogames entertaining as play don't generally make for compelling narrative, and attempts to constrain the play-element to enhance the narrative element seem to be understanding the point of playing a game almost exactly backwards.

I can't take credit for inventing this argument: it's basically a recap of some of James Paul Gee's ideas about "probing" in videogames, ideas which I was exposed to through Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You, which I read this summer. So it didn't come as too much of a surprise when Steven Johnson said the following in the "Literacy in the Age of Video Games" roundtable in the September issue of Harper's:

"[O]ne of the problems we have in understanding games is that we see them as being driven by their narratives. In fact, I think the narratives tend to be a vestigial part of games that has been carried over from earlier forms. When people play games, they aren't playing them for the story. They aren't playing them for a narrative arc of any kind. In fact, if you're looking for an analogy, I would say that game design is closer to architecture than it is to novel writing. The designers do create certain resistances to certain types of behavior and encourage other types of behavior within the space, but first and foremost, they're creating a space that can be explored and occupied in multiple ways."

That puts it pretty well, I think...

Labels: game_commentary, narrative

Thursday, August 24, 2006
5:20 PM
0 comments

roadtrip! mix 2006

It's perhaps getting a bit close to autumn, but I still thought I might put my annual "summer roadtrip" mix out there in the Mix Exchange for people to enjoy. I test-drove this mix on the way down to Texas and obsessively tweaked it right up until this morning.

Here's the listing:

"I've Been Everywhere" by Johnny Cash

"Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" by Minutemen

"Mirror In The Bathroom" by the English Beat

"Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" by LCD Soundsystem

"The New Pollution" by Mansfield (feauturing Yukari Fresh)

"Boogie On Reggae Woman" by Stevie Wonder

"Laugh, Love, Fuck" by the Coup

"Gone Daddy Gone" by Gnarls Barkley

"Let's Make Love And Listen to Death From Above [Spank Rock Remix]" by Cansei de Ser Sexy

"Let The Good Times Roll" by the Cars

"The Rat" by Walkmen

"An Honest MIA" by MIA vs. Bravery

"Bounce That" by Girl Talk

"Tryin' to Stay Alive" by Wyclef Jean

"Love Me or Hate Me" by Lady Sovereign

"Slow Jam" by Four Tet

It's the usual mix of shameless pop favorites and hipster flavors-of-the-week (Cansei de Ser Sexy, I'm looking at you); those of you looking for something a little more avant will probably be happier with the weirdo tracks in yesterday's post.

Friday, August 18, 2006
9:38 AM
0 comments

seven songs for summer III

Ok, enough with the pop, time for some good old-fashioned weirdness.

5) Growing, "Fancy Period"

This inspired number starts off by cultivating a field of acid-trip patterns into an impossibly ornate tangle which threatens to blot out everything behind its whirling calligraphic streamers. Like all barriers, though, this one is illusory, and around minute four you slip through into a totally different landscape, where pseudo-Zimbabwean filligrees float beatifically over funky bionic stutter. Ambitious!

6) Vulture Club, "Untitled"

I don't know much about Vulture Club other than the fact that it has released an album full of heavy guitar drones in their most concentrated form: no riffs, no melody, no Julian Cope poetry, just sweet sweet room-shaking low-end, with the tiniest bit of occasional modulation serving to hold interest. This track is for anyone who finds unadorned amplifier hum to be strangely lulling and comforting.

7) Vampire Belt, "Snake Out"

Mixtape-makers take note that that Vulture Club track flows nicely into this piece, which commences with a few seconds of grimy hum before busting out into some of the finest splattering skronk I've ever heard. Chris Corsano has been earning so much praise for his inventive improv drumming that people forget that he can also do straight-up hardcore pounding when paired with a player who demands it: Bill Nace is that player here, providing inspirational art-damaged guitar-work that is very finely mangled indeed.

Labels: audio, mp3s

Thursday, August 17, 2006
3:31 PM
0 comments

seven songs for summer II

Two more.

3) The Coup, "Laugh, Love, Fuck"

This song features a refrain that goes: "I'm here to laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor / and help the damn revolution come quicker." What more do I really need to say? Will it help if I say it also features a cheesy clap machine?

4) DJ Drama and Lil' Wayne, "Georgia... Bush" [edit]

Chuck D once famously referred to hip hop as "black America's CNN," an assertion that was questionable then and remains questionable now. But the statement feels relevant in reference to this song, a chilling little bit of post-Katrina reportage from 23-year-old New Orleans native Lil' Wayne. Anger and sorrow tangle here with conspiracy-theorizing and good old-fashioned Bush-hammering (although it's worth noting that Ray Nagin takes a solid hit as well).

Three more to come.

Labels: audio, mp3s

Sunday, August 13, 2006
1:06 PM
0 comments

seven songs for summer I

So LJM / unscrambled tagged me to do a "seven songs you're listening to" blog-post. I enjoyed her list but thought that the whole "seven songs" game might be improved with the addition of some MP3s.

So:

1) Ladytron, "Destroy Everything You Touch"

A better summer would not have featured this song playing over and over again in my head. But instead of the better summer, I am having the one in which I am blundering through the landscape like a grief-maddened Godzilla, leaving a trail of bent wreckage and disappointed people behind me. The gap between this song's upbeat bent and the bleakness of its lyrical content conveys a certain fuckheaded resoluteness: that desire to confirm one's own worst suspicions about oneself, and the feelings of idiotic satisfaction and cynical glee when this dubious goal is achieved.

2) Kimya Dawson, "My Rollercoaster"

I'm not sure who brought the Kimya Dawson tunes to Spring this year, but I stood in the kitchen by myself on the final night and listened to this song and it brought tears to my eyes. This song is goofy and dorky and exuberant and tender: these are the ways I like to think of myself when I'm not thinking of myself as a maddened Godzilla, v. sup.

Five more later?

Labels: audio, mp3s

Friday, August 11, 2006
9:05 AM
0 comments

probing worlds made of words

Sometimes I'm not sure about the merits of the term "electronic literature." I've used it loads of times, including spending some labor in this very blog working on an unfinished taxonomy of "forms of electronic literature." Although even perusing that list will reveal some instances where I refer to certain types of electronic literature as really being more akin to "toys" or "films" then as "literature" per se.

I think about this a lot in relation to the term "interactive fiction" or "interactive narrative," a category which encapsulates what used to be known as the more lowly "text adventure." "Interactive fiction" (IF) seems to have become the commonly-accepted term for these sorts of creative works, and I've stated some of the things I like about the term on record, but I wonder sometimes if it doesn't distort the way people think about the end product. Specifically, I wonder if it's useful to assess IF using the critical tools one would use to assess a piece of literature: I wonder if IF wouldn't be better assessed using the critical tools one would use to assess a video game.

This came up for me recently when I was reading the transcript of "Interactive Narratives Reconsidered," an interesting speech that Ernest W. Adams delivered at last year's Game Developers Conference.

Adams' speech mostly attempts to answer the question of "how can we make interactive narratives better as narratives?" In order to establish the need for improvement in this regard, Adams points out a set of "key problems" that make it "difficult to create interactive narratives."

For instance, "The Problem of Amnesia": "What do we do about the fact that story characters understand the world they live in, but the player is amnesiac about that world? Why does the player have to spend time at the beginning of every game exploring what is supposed to be his own natural environment?"

I think it's a valid point that this maybe doesn't make for a very realistic story, and it may not be compelling as literature, but it's never bothered me very much in the text adventures I've played (or, if you prefer, "in the pieces of interactive fiction I've read"). It's never registered as a "problem," exactly. And in trying to think about why that is, it occurred to me that a big part of what's pleasurable about a video game is this process of exploring and testing the environment. In Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You, he refers to this process as "probing," a concept originally theorized by social scientist James Paul Gee.

Gee is a pretty smart guy (Stanford Ph.D.) who has some things to say on the topic of games as narratives (from this interview):

"Stories in video games work very differently than do stories in books or movies, and we really don't understand well how they work, yet, because we keep treating games like movies. In books and movies, the story is 'top-down,' someone else has made it and you discover it in the order and at the pace the designer has determined. In games, stories are 'bottom-up.' The player picks up bits and pieces sometimes in an order and at a pace determined by the player."

Well, exactly. The sort of "mimetic gap" between the way a player explores a game and the way a heroic protagonist would realistically behave in fiction, seems to me to be a key part of what makes a game a game.

Apply Adams' "Problem of Amnesia" to a classic video game like, say, Defender. I've been playing Defender for approximately 26 years now and I'm still terribly bad at it: the fast gameplay and complicated controls make it a game of near-infernal difficulty. But that's the fun of it. Treating this game as narrative would be laughable: you wouldn't ask "why does this character need to spend valuable time trying to figure out the controls of his own ship?" or "why did this planet choose such an inept defender, thereby insuring their immanent doom?" (It's true that the planet in Defender only has ten humans on it, so their talent pool is pretty limited.)

Similar is Adams' "Problem of Internal Consistency": "What if the player is controlling Superman as his avatar, but wants to do something very unlike Superman: killing people at random, for example?"

This wouldn't make for a very canonical Superman story, agreed, but attempting to do something like that seems to me to be a fundamental part of the process of playing a video game. Part of the fun of a game is figuring out what constitutes its internal consistency, which means that sometimes you're going to do things which don't make consistent or realistic sense were we to be watching the thing as a narrative. Play Shadow of the Colossus and it's only a matter of time before you make the protagonist leap to his doom off a staggeringly high cliff. Taken as story, this makes no sense: why would a protagonist so seemingly driven to complete his goal suddenly opt for suicide? Taken as an instance of "probing"—testing the parameters of a game world—it makes perfect sense.

I just don't think a text adventure / piece of interactive fiction should be held to different standards just because it's made of words and not polygons.

Labels: electronic_literature, game_commentary, narrative

Tuesday, August 08, 2006
11:30 AM
0 comments

returning

The full story of the past ten days will not be told on this blog, but suffice it to say that it contained many events that fall into the category of "Might Make A Funny Story Someday When I'm Not Quite So Stressed," such as: attempting to fit a large sectional couch into a house through a window, waiting on a curbside to give something away for free to a no-show Craigslist flake, levelling a stream of uncharacteristic invective at the carefree grifters at the U-Haul Fortress, getting a speeding ticket from the Texas Highway Patrol (75 in a 65-at-night zone), bursting into tears while trying to rearrange items in the trunk of a Toyota, and attempting to find a spot between Bates County, MO (pop. 16,653) and Memphis, TN that could photocopy five copies of a 200-page document before the close of the business day (special thanks to Blythesville, AR's Post Impressions for being that place).

In any case. It's good to have those ten days behind me, even though it really only marks the beginning of something else, which may well prove to be strange and difficult in its own ways. Wish me luck.

Labels: personal

Friday, August 04, 2006
11:08 AM
1 comments