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Two Structures for Narrative Play
Throughout the rest of this chapter, we extend these formal notions of game interaction into the particularities of narrative game experience. As the example of Thunderstorm makes wonderfully clear, it is the dynamic structures of games, their emergent complexity, their participatory mechanisms, their experiential rhythms and patterns, which are the key to understanding how games construct narrative experiences.To understand game narratives, it is essential to analyze game structures and see how they ramify into different forms of narrative play. We can identify two broad structural rubrics for understanding the narrative components of a game:
Players can experience a game narrative as a crafted story interactively told: the characters Jak and Daxter are saving the world.
Players can engage with narrative as an emergent experience that happens while the game is played: Jak and Daxter's story arises through the play of the game.
Both of these points of view, crafted interactive story versus improvised play experience, place narrative within the context of interactivity. Specifically, these viewpoints represent two ways of understanding how a game system produces narrative. The best terms we have found for these two structural relationships between games and narrative come from a talk by Marc LeBlanc at the 1999 Game Developers Conference. According to LeBlanc, game narratives can be "embedded" or "emergent."[5]
Embedded narrative is pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player's interaction with the game. Designed to provide motivation for the events and actions of the game, players experience embedded narrative as a story context. The narrative of Jak and Daxter saving the world, for example, is a narrative embedded in the game system: it is experienced through player interaction but exists formally apart from it. It is the embedded narrative that gives Jak a reason for collecting Precursor Orbs and Power Cells; without the pre-generated storyline the game would feel like an abstract fetch-the-next-item quest. The embedded narrative also provides the major story arc for the game, structuring a player's interaction and movement through the game world in a meaningful way. Embedded narrative elements tend to resemble the kinds of narrative experiences that linear media provide. In Jak and Daxter, the embedded elements are the "pre-scripted" moments and structures that are relatively fixed in the game system. Any player, for example, that begins the game for the first time will see the same introductory cinematic. The first time a player encounters the Mayor of Sandover Village, he or she will hear the same prerecorded bit of dialogue. Embedded narrative elements can take a variety of forms and be reached through a variety of means, but regardless of how they are experienced, embedded narrative elements are fixed and predetermined units of narrative content, like text on the page of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. But not all narrative in games takes the form of pre-generated, embedded content. Narrative can also be emergent, which means that it arises from the set of rules governing interaction with the game system. Unlike embedded narrative, emergent narrative elements arise during play from the complex system of the game, often in unexpected ways. Most moment-to-moment narrative play in a game is emergent, as player choice leads to unpredictable narrative experiences. In the section of Misty Island where Jak battles the Balloon Lurkers, the narrative experience does not consist of pre-scripted sequences of dialogue, animation, and camera movements. Instead, the game rules allow the player to hop on a Zoomer to try and defeat the Lurkers and gather resources through skillful maneuvering. The exact narrative experience of a particular game, whether it is Jak easily dispatching the Lurkers, or whether it is a series of crushing defeats that leads to an eventual victory, depends on player interaction.
Emergent narrative is possible because of the way games function as complex systems. As the name implies, emergent narrative is linked directly to our earlier explorations of emergent complexity and meaningful interaction. For example, emergent narrative arises from interactions that are both coupled and context-dependent. These two terms, which we introduced in Games as Emergent Systems, describe interactions between elements in a complex system. When interactions within a complex system are coupled, it means that the elements of the system are linked recursively. Like bees in a hive, the elements in the system act together to perform in ways that single elements cannot. A player's moment-to-moment actions as Jak are linked to all other actions taken over the course of the game. Is it time to finally explore that strange-looking island just offshore? Perhaps you should go back to the village, because Jak's health is a bit low. On the other hand, you only need a few more Orbs to unlock the next level. Do you take the risk? How will the story unfold? Because actions in a game are linked to one another, one change in the system can create another change, giving rise to narrative patterns over the entire course of the game. Interactions in emergent narratives are also context-dependent, which means the changes that occur are not the same every time. Instead, the exact outcome of an interaction depends on what else is happening in the system at any given moment. The first time the player fights a Lurker, perhaps it goes badly and the player has to beat a hasty retreat. The player's overall interactive pattern might shift from bold exploration to cautious stealth, the appearance of a Lurker signaling a terrifying threat. Later on in the game, when the player is skilled and powerful, a single Lurker no longer poses a danger: running into one would be a routine or even amusing encounter. Within emergent narratives, coupled interactions produce global patterns across a system; context-dependent interactions ensure that the exact arrangement of these narrative patterns dynamically changes over time. Both embedded and emergent game elements contain characters, events, and patterns, and so both are narrative by Miller's definition. LeBlanc is not the only game designer to make such a structural distinction and tie it to the design of game narra-tive. In his article "Formal Abstract Design Tools," Doug Church comes to a similar set of conclusions: The most obvious uses of story in computer and video games can be found in adventure-game plot lines. In this game category, the story has been written in advance by designers, and players have it revealed to them through interactions with characters, objects, and the world.... But story comes into play in NBA Live, too. There, the story is what happens in the game. Maybe it ends up in overtime for a last-sec-ond three-pointer by a star player who hasn't been hitting his shots; maybe it is a total blowout from the beginning and at the end the user gets to put in the benchwarmers for their moment of glory. In either case, the player's actions during play created the story.[6]
Church's two examples closely mirror LeBlanc's categories of embedded and emergent. According to Church, embedded strategies such as those found in adventure games are the "most obvious uses of story in computer and video games." They are more clearly narrative because they more closely resemble what we normally think of as a story experience. As Church puts it, these games contain "plot lines…characters, objects, and the world." But that doesn't mean that emergent narratives, such as in a sports game like NBA Live, can't be just as important in generating narrative experience. Ultimately, the unique narratives games produce come from a balance of both of these approaches.
Embedded elements are narrative structures directly authored by game designers that serve as a frame for interaction. Emergent narrative approaches emphasize the ways that players interact with a game system to produce a narrative experience unique to each player. Some games, such as the classic adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island, emphasize embedded, content-based narrative. As Church points out, the structure of an adventure game, with its fixed settings and puzzles, lends itself to embedded narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time. Other games, such as The Sims, embody a more system-based design approach, in which the game rules represent a space of emergent narrative possibility that plays itself out differently every time. Virtually every game combines embedded and emergent elements. The Secret of Monkey Island is not entirely pre-scripted, like a slide show: there are many routes to take through the game, making for a limited kind of emergent experience. The Sims, conversely, has an overall setting that resembles suburban southern California. This pre-generated, embedded narrative frame contextualizes all of the emergent events that happen during play. A common digital game design approach that combines embedded and emergent narrative elements is a mission-based game structure in which the larger narrative frame is pre-generated but most of the moment-to-moment game outcomes are determined through emergent means. The sin-gle-player web game Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident uses an overarching cyberpunk narrative that does not change from game to game. However, as a player makes her way through the game story, traveling from node to node on the network, she uses her accumulated inventory of programs to fight "databattles," the outcomes of which are not determined in advance. The introductory animation, pre-scripted narrative, appearances of characters, and the map of the network itself are all forms of embedded narrative content. However, the way that the player chooses to make her way across the network, the hacker programs she decides to purchase, and the experience of strategically deploying them at each node, represent the emergent elements of the narrative. The total narrative experience of the game includes both embedded and emergent approaches, woven together within a single game structure. [5]Marc LeBlanc, presentation at the Game Developers Conference, 1999.[6]Doug Church,"Formal Abstract Design Tools." Gamasutra.com
