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Worlds and Stories
Representations in games do not exist in isolation from the rest of culture. They rely on conventions drawn from narrative genres in other media. Although the playgrounds of games may offer fictive and fantastical spaces, these spaces are almost always familiar in some way to players. The deep space of Asteroids is not something any of us have experienced directly, but it is part of a genre-based universe found in the stories of science fiction writers and astrophysicists. Players can appreciate the narrative of the game even if they have never piloted a space ship in a field of asteroids, because of the familiar conventions of its representation.
In order to understand the setting of a game world, players rely on knowledge from other, similar stories. Players starting a game of Asteroids for the first time know what to do in part because they are familiar with a fictive genre describing interactions between spaceships, flying saucers, and asteroids in outer space. (UFOs that shoot at you are enemies and must be destroyed or avoided.) The narrative knowledge that players bring with them to games not only helps them recognize the conventions of the game universe, but also limits and constrains their actions. As game scholar Rune Klevjer writes in an analysis of Grand Theft Auto III, Sniping a Columbian gangster in the head in GTA III is one thing. Doing the same to, say, a little girl would not be the same (consequently, there are no children in Liberty City). The difference between these two representations is partly rooted in their respective real-world references—a mean-looking adult male versus a pretty little girl—but also linked to a specific, typified universe constructed by the game. Within this familiar fictional ready-made, the mean-looking guy turns into (through a few, stylized hints) a very familiar gangster of the most ruthless, drug-dealing kind.[12]
Grand Theft Auto III takes place within the pulp genre setting of urban gang warfare and organized crime. As a fictional universe, a set of narrative conventions stylizes this world. Shooting a gangster fits within these narrative conventions, whereas doing the same to a little girl does not. Similarly, being attacked by flying saucers in Asteroids establishes a narrative frame that wouldn't include an Appalachian mountain man firing at the player with a slingshot. In other words, the setting of a game determines the characters, events, and actions permitted within its narrative frame. The gangster universe [of GTA III] as a setting, and as a set-up for play, is partly founded on the formulaic stories told within it. The actions performed by the player…become meaningful within the genre-based universe as a whole. "Story" and "fictional world" are two flips of the same coin—a pre-written, typified symbolic action, defining a typical identity of the playground. Even though we can imagine a similar fictional world without one, single, overarching story framing the game play, there would at least have to be recognizable narrative elements that could give some more genre-specific substance to an otherwise vague atmosphere of urban crime. In genre fiction, description evokes implied narratives, and narration evokes implied description.
Klevjer identifies two components of game narratives: fictive worlds, which represent narrative context, and story events, the actual game incidents that take place within the fictive world. There is a complex relationship between these two narrative elements, each informing and enriching the other with narrative meaning. In Asteroids, the fictive world is the genre of space-based science fiction, and the story events are the actions that happen to the player's ship and other game elements within this narrative setting. The story events of shooting, maneuvering, destruction, and survival gain narrative meaning from the larger fictive world of the game, even as they simultaneously help to define that fictive world. It may seem like fictive worlds and story events mirror the concepts of embedded and emergent narrative structures. Actually, they are not parallel concepts. The embedded/emergent distinction identifies how narrative elements are organized in the formal structure of a game: is this narrative element pre-gener-ated or does it emerge from play? Fictive worlds and story events reference game narrative in a very different way, on the level of a player's imaginative engagement with the game story. Both embedded and emergent elements can play a part in defining either a game's fictive world or its story events. Klevjer's concepts provide a useful way to think about game narratives. Too often, a game's fictive world is taken for granted, a generic backdrop for scripted plot events. Game designers should more rigorously engage with the complex, interdependent relationship between the fictive world and story events. The events of the plot, the "game story," are made possible by the existence of a larger fictional world in which the story takes place. At the same time, the story events themselves help to flesh out and inform the fictive world. Designing fictive worlds means paying close attention to the narratives such worlds inspire. And vice versa. Together these two elements of game narratives create an artificial context where game experience acquires narrative meaning. Although the crazy cartoon world of Super Mario does not mirror the space of the real world, events within the universe of Super Mario faithfully follow our expectations of the kinds of things that should happen in that world. Players are not surprised or confused to come across colorful magic mushrooms, cute and menacing enemies, or gigantic green pipes. Each of these elements makes narrative sense within the specific setting of a Super Mario game.The inclusion of a photorealistically rendered dog, on the other hand, would feel out of place. Thus, narrative descriptors imply a representational logic that limits and constrains the design of the space of possibility.These limitations allow for the integration and discernability of all elements contained with the game world, a world whose setting describes the limits of its own action. When designing a game it is critical to pay attention to the relationship between the narrative setting of the game world and the kinds of events that would occur within such a setting. If you are designing a far-future anti-gravity racing game, the narrative descriptors of characters, events, objects, and behaviors should be contained within the logical limits of this setting. Players should have a sense that the technology powering their vehicles has not yet been invented, and that the physics affecting the speed and movement of the vehicles is not something they have experienced on Earth. The design of a board game titled "Dot.Com Mania" should model the events and aesthetics of the 1990s bubble economy, not that of the Great Depression, perhaps taking visual and story cues from films like Startup.com and magazines like Red Herring. Creating game narratives means playing in the realms of culture, engaging with tropes and conventions of genres from literature, media, popular culture, entertainment, and art. Incorporating representational frameworks from relevant narratives will help you elaborate on and transform those frameworks in ways that lead to compelling (and perhaps unusual) game experiences. This certainly doesn't mean that you can only design games that exist within established narrative genres. It is possible to create new kinds of fictive worlds or combine and re-mix conventional narrative universes in new ways. Rules are made to be broken. Perhaps it is possible to drop a photorealistic dog into a Super Mario-like game. But the resulting game narrative has to incorporate this inconsistency in a coherent way. Perhaps the game is about a real world dog that became transported into a video game (hence the different representational style). Or maybe it becomes a game with a collage aesthetic, in which every character has its own unique visual language. When you are creating games with less typical narrative experiences, your design task becomes more challenging. Your players will not already be familiar with your game's fictive world. For example, what are the narrative conventions of a game about office supplies that come to life at night when the workers go home? In this case, it is up to the game designer to establish the fictive world for the player as quickly as possible, perhaps making direct or indirect reference to relevant narratives, such as Toy Story's inexplicably living toys, the playful tale of Pinocchio, or even the office life parody 9-to-5. Each of these narrative contexts offers different ways to establish both the fictive world and to organize the events that happen within it. [12]Rune Klevjer,"In Defense of Cut-Scenes, " In Computer Games and Digital Cultures, Conference Proceedings, edited by Frans Mäyrä (Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2002), p. 198.
