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[Lauchsuppe]

Hey!

This has bothered me for a couple of hours now. Maybe you can help me out.

So basically, narrative is how individual events are connected with each other. I think we can all agree on that.

But, for games with narratives, what would an "event" within a videogame be? What are the "connections"?

Let's take Zelda Ocarina of Time as an example. Would "opening a chest and then getting the item" be considered an event? Are they two events ("opening the chest" and then "acquiring the item")?
What about a room filled with enemies? Is "fighting an enemy" an event? Or is "clearing the whole room" considered an event? Or is it a connection instead - leading you one step further to "having completed the dungeon" which would be the actual event?
Is "riding Epona from Kakariko village to the Kokiri Forest" (because you want to buy deku nuts or whatever) a connection? What if it gets dark and skeletons appear and you have to fight? Will the situation turn into an event?

Can you even apply these categories to games? But if not, how would you then define narrative in games?


What's your opinion on this?

I'm also curious whether there's already a theory or a model discussing this phenomenon.
Looking forward to your responses!

[rj]

So basically, narration is how individual events are connected with each other. I think we can all agree on that.

not to be pedantic but i'm completely sure you mean "narrative?" (esp. since you say that later)

because "narration" is literally just when a character...talks to the audience...

anyway: story in games is a weird thing but i think most of the games that do it best (portal, metroid prime, half-life 2, the last of us, gone home, telltale's wolf among us/walking dead, etc) do it in such a way that the gameplay and the story are, if not IDENTICAL things, closely enough related that they complement each other. narrative in games shouldn't just be the things that happen around you playing it

but that's probably getting off topic

the way i'd define narrative is different from what you said, anyway; narrative is story. nothing more clinical than that. you can have a narrative with almost no events and you can have a narrative with hundreds of events. i guess if you want to get technical the act of connecting events might be described as a "narrative" but i'd rather not get so stuck on that

a narrative in video games is whatever story the game portrays, which means yes, it would include the most minute things like opening a chest and fighting an enemy. in the broader scale, it doesn't matter. in the end, especially pertaining to games without explicitly described/emphasized narratives, the narrative is whatever the player experiences, and the only thing that matters is the meaning they ascribe to what they've played through. imo

[Lauchsuppe]

oopsie yeah I meant narrative instead of narration in the first paragraph.


mhh.. I'm not so sure whether I got my point across.

anyway: story in games is a weird thing but i think most of the games that do it best (portal, metroid prime, half-life 2, the last of us, gone home, telltale's wolf among us/walking dead, etc) do it in such a way that the gameplay and the story are, if not IDENTICAL things, closely enough related that they complement each other. narrative in games shouldn't just be the things that happen around you playing it

Story in the traditional sense, a verbal story, is a structurally different thing from gameplay. Those two are never identical.
That kind of story or narrative is what I referred to in the beginning of my other post. This type of narrative happens when people connect different events by usage of words.

However, I think that games (even though they can have embedded traditional narrative within textboxes for example) have their own kind of narrative strucutre and principles. And ideally, the game's narrative matches the verbal narrative perfectly (but that's not what I'm interested in right now).
In language, you can define the distinct events in between which the story is happening. But I have troubles using this definition within game logics.

in the end, especially pertaining to games without explicitly described/emphasized narratives, the narrative is whatever the player experiences

yup, I even think that this is the case for every game. The player always experiences a narrative. And in some games (usually RPGs for example) you would additionally have a verbal narrative that takes place in textboxes or spoken dialogue or stuff like that.


I think that it should be possible to break up the "player experience narrative" or however you'd call it into "events" and "inbetweens" just like it's possible to break up a verbal narrative into these categories.
I'm interested to find out whether you could break a game in most small units of meaning with this strategy. Like, what sequences are the ones which define the game.

Similar to how a sequence would be the most small possible unit of meaning within a piece of music.

I guess I could simply ask my question this way: What is to a game what a sequence is to a piece of music?

[ActiveUnique]

Narrative is game progress.

First I've seen play defined as primarily interaction.
Fun may (or maybe not) be an offshoot of pattern recognition.

I just brought them up because these are building blocks I witness developers turn around to question all the time.

There's a debate that games should not be studied for their narrative vis a vis "ludology vs. narratology debate".

The thing is, this may as well be your question. Does that help?

[Lauchsuppe]

Narrative is game progress.

First I've seen play defined as primarily interaction.
Fun may (or maybe not) be an offshoot of pattern recognition.

I just brought them up because these are building blocks I witness developers turn around to question all the time.

There's a debate that games should not be studied for their narrative vis a vis "ludology vs. narratology debate".

The thing is, this may as well be your question. Does that help?

Well, since the narratology side tries to explain games by traditional standards, I'm completely on the ludology side here.
However, I believe that games, too, have narratives - just not the same kind of narratives as they're not verbal but interactive.
However, since these both kinds of narrative tend to be so intertwined with each other, they probably have a bunch of (maybe just superficial) similarities in structure. I think that one should be able to transfer many of the principles of verbal narratives to interactive/gameplay narratives. But that's just a thought - I could be completely wrong here.

Anyway, the thing I'm actually intrested in is finding out what a most smallest possible game fragment would be.
Initially, I thought this game/verbal narrative approach would be helpful to finding this out. But I begin to think that it probably doesn't help.

[ActiveUnique]

Here's what I think. What I first stated earlier was "narrative is game progress." I'm confident about my opinion, although I'm not the best at explaining. I've experienced numerous games, and a big part of them is usually tracking a player's progress.

On the other hand, even those games lacking a scoreboard or story have a measure of progress, the player determines the progress they made arbitrarily, but it's still there. How do I know? Well I don't, but games are criticized for changing how people think, and they're probably even more likely to do so than watching a movie, movies being the original culprit.

There are behavior studies about how playing games can change people (also music, and any other popular media). Even when someone does not recognize progress, there's an outside measurement of how the game affected them.

[On a tangent: any music apparently makes people have violent tendencies. The very thing games are blamed for. Maybe it's just a form of mental burn-out. Movies actually change people's opinions, which is like changing who they are entirely.]

I looked up ludic interfaces, which is related to Ludology. This ties in how not just in the software realm, or the rules, of gaming but the physical interface is important to define a game.

It seems reasonable, to me, that the players themselves become part of the game when they play. So the narrative is always changing, not just from player's actions, but their personality, the delivery, the exhaustion from their frayed nerves, and their developed skill for playing any given game. Describing the narrative becomes a prediction, while the other means such as input, story, rulebook, and specific interface are a bit more exact.

Of course anyone reading this, or a bit more immersed in ludology may have come to a different conclusion, I'm interested in hearing that too.

Edit:
Relevant Extra Credits episode:

[Lauchsuppe]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and the Extra Credits link!

I agree with you on most of the points you mentioned. But in addition to that, I think it should be somehow possible to categorize narrative in games on a larger scale. You're talking about narrative in the "now". And maybe you'd disagree (and it's totally just my intuition telling me this) but I'd say that playing a game consists of numerous "nows". What structures come from connecting these numerous "now"s?
And how would you define these "now" entities? How long is "now"? Is performing a combo attack "now"? Or would performing the individual attacks leading to this combo each be considered different "now"s?