An extremely brief
history of video games as an academic study has two main opposing camps. On one
side you had the narratologists who were interested in videogames as narratives,
who were therefore often concerned with how games could tell better stories. On
the other side you had the ludologists who advocated that video games should be
studied as games and a form of play, arguing video games could not be viewed in
the same way as existing media like film and television. One of the concepts to
emerge from both camps was the concept of games as spatial stories, a concept
that seemed to set them apart from other media like film and television. Indeed
Aarseth claimed that spatiality is defining element in computer
games.
Video games become spaces for narratives to happen rather than
formal storylines. Henry Jenkins noted the similarity of video games to travel
writing, observing that both privilege exploration, navigation and colonization
of space. Similarly the prevalence of epic journeys and depictions of detailed
worlds within the fantasy genre, readily adapted by game developers, relates to
this spatial predilection. In video games “plot is transformed into a generic
atmosphere –a haunted house, a subterranean cavern, a futuristic cityscape, an
icy wilderness that the player can explore” (Jenkins 1995).
Bernadette
Flynn, an Australian researcher working at Griffith University, thinks that
rather than using traditional narrative structures, video games take pieces from
the world’s cultural database, placing them together in a spatial structure.
Using that imagery we can think of videogame worlds as rich depositories of
countless fragments of stories that the player accesses by moving across the
world, building their own story as they go.
The story I write in
each game as I play it is constructed of seemingly incoherent pieces. I might
fight an evil sith apprentice, appreciate the view of a dark temple, manage my
inventory, level up my powers and run to the temple door more or less
simultaneously. It all occurs in a spatial context, events happen in particular
place and I have to travel through them to continue the game. I advance in the
narrative that arcs over the game but it doesn’t really matter to me. As Henry
Jenkins noted the story is just a pretext for the space, a reason for the
elaborate world I am playing in.
It’s a bit like real life really. We
might live with a master narrative in our mind – find job, get rich, finish
degree in my case – but our lives are made up of many fragments that tumble
together into a timeline of lived reality composed of breakfasts, bio breaks and
often boredom. Rather than being the poor cousin of film and literature, bereft
in its lack of intellectual story, video games are revealed instead as a new
form of narrative that operates in new ways. Or as Jenkins puts it videogames
are the “landscape of my own saga” (Jenkins 1995).
Aarseth, Espen.
Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games. In
Eskelinen, Markku & Koskima, Raine (eds) Cybertext Yearbook 2000.
2000
Jenkins, Henry. Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah & Harrigan Pat (eds) First Person: New Media as Story,
Performance, and Game. 2004
Jenkins, Henry and Fuller, Mary. Nintendo
and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue, in S.G. Jones (ed), Cybersociety,
Sage Publications.1995
Flynn, Bernadette. Games as Inhabited
Spaces. Media International Australia No 110 February 2004
Flynn,
Bernadette . Languages of Navigation within Computer Games. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Flynn.pdf
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