Slides from Cody Mejeur's HASTAC 2016 presentation, including ideas from James Paul Gee, Michael Warner, and Lev Manovich's ImagePlot. New methods for analysis of game narrative.

1. LET’S PLAY: GAMING PODCASTS, VIDEOS,
AND STREAMS AS COLLECTIVE
NARRATIVES
CODY MEJEUR
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
@CMEJEUR

2. OVERVIEW
▸ A Model of Game Narrative
▸ Game Podcasts, Let’s Plays, and Twitch.tv as Collective
Narratives
▸ Analysis of Collective Narrative, ImagePlot
▸ An Archive of Game Experience
▸ Limitations of the Archive
▸ Findings thus far and Implications

3. ISSUES IN/WITH GAME NARRATIVE
▸ Debates between Narratology and Ludology
▸ The Problem of the Player
▸ What does player interaction do to narrative?
▸ What types of interaction are we talking about?
▸ If players interact with a game differently, they have (at
least slightly) different narrative experiences.
▸ How do we account for different experience and variation in
game narrative? Can we?
▸ And what happens when players share these things, either in
the moment or after the fact?

4. MODEL OF NARRATIVE EXPRESSION IN GAMES
Game Narrative
Personal
Narrative
Collective
Narrative
Determined
Narrative
Authorial Source: PlayersAuthorial
Source:
Developers

5. GAME PODCASTS
▸ Provide commentary around games
▸ Sharing experiences
▸ Reviews and Critiques
▸ Larger debates and trends
▸ Largely informal
▸ Hybrid audiences
▸ Part popular, part academic or
expert
▸ Brought together around
common object

6. LET’S PLAYS AND TWITCH.TV
▸ Players recording their play
experiences
▸ Streaming or recorded for YouTube
▸ Player camera and game itself
▸ Large followings, example: PewDiePie
▸ Many purposes/intents
▸ Show how to play
▸ Share experience
▸ Make a point
▸ Make money

7. HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE OF THESE EXPERIENCES AROUND AND OUTSIDE OF
GAMES?
▸ James Paul Gee’s Affinity Spaces?
▸ Separate spaces, away from official or regular learning
▸ Places where players learn about how to play, how to
communicate about play
▸ A Type of Counterpublic?
▸ Space for creating, sharing, reenforcing “gamer” identity
▸ Separate and against cultural standards that dismiss
games

8. PODCASTS, LET’S PLAYS, LIVE STREAMS AS COLLECTIVE NARRATIVES
▸ Places where narratives about and around games emerge
▸ Taken up into cultural discourse
▸ Irreducible to single players, yet comprised of them
▸ Need to use individual sites to construct sense of collective
▸ Personal narratives related to collective ones
▸ Problem: how to access these subjective experiences?
▸ Problem: how to account for incredible variance in
experience?
▸ Return to ?: Can narrative account for player interactivity?

9. A POTENTIAL SOLUTION: LEV MANOVICH’S IMAGEPLOT FOR IMAGEJ

10. A SECOND IMAGEPLOT

11. WHAT IMAGEPLOTS ARE / WHAT THEY LET US DO
▸ Construct a visual archive of play experience
▸ Captures parts of player interactivity/possibility
▸ See similarity and difference within archive
▸ Measure/Map Game Narrative
▸ Personal Narratives become accessible
▸ Archive can handle the scale of collective narrative, even on
level of culture (can include many playthroughs)
▸ Answer problem of interactivity beyond generalization/abstraction
▸ Identify central/common narrative, and where and how it
changes

12. LIMITATIONS OF THE ARCHIVE
▸ Only visual
▸ Lacking sound
▸ Lacking player affect
▸ Cannot easily account for parts of narrative experience
outside the game
▸ Limited to playthroughs available on Twitch.tv, YouTube,
etc.
▸ Are these representative? To what extent?
▸ Must account for intent of playthrough

13. FINDINGS THUS FAR/IMPLICATIONS
▸ Two Types of Variance in Game Narrative
▸ Variance in Time
▸ When and how long a particular experience is
▸ Variance in Sign
▸ Visual Semiotics
▸ What the player encounters/sees/interacts with
▸ Together, affect how player interprets and affects narrative
▸ Narrative as nonlinear, dynamic, fluid, playful.
▸ We don’t need DH tools to think/theorize these things. But DH tools
let us move beyond abstraction, see things we couldn’t before.

14. QUESTIONS?
▸ What other tools are out there for distance visualization, or
even distance play?
▸ Can podcasts be archived, allow for measuring collective
narratives?
▸ Questions you have?
▸ Contact Info:
Cody Mejeur
@cmejeur
mejeurco@msu.edu
cmejeur.com