Guest lecture on the subject of games and narrative for graduate-level course in Narrative Analysis.

1. The preceding analysis permits play to be defined as an activity which is essentially:
1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; If it were, it would at once lose its
attractive and Joyous quality as diversion;
2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and freed in
advance;
3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained
beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player's
initiative;
4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements or any
kind, and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending In a
situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game;
5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the
moment establish new legislation, which alone counts;
6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a
free unreality, as against real life.
-- Johan Huizinga (1938), as modified by Roger Caillois (1959)
Recounting past perspectives on Play

2. Roger Callois’ Game Categories
• Agon (competition)
• Alea (chance)
• Mimicry (role playing)
• Ilinx (altering perceptions)
Paidia
(uncontrolled fantasy)
Ludus
(requiring skill/effort)

3. Narrative camps, Ludic camps and a short lived battle (only) within the academy
Gaming and storytelling have always
overlapped…
there is no reason to limit the resulting
form to the dichotomies between story
and game…
we can think instead in matters of
degree. A story has greater emphasis
on plot; a game has greater emphasis
on the actions of the player.
Games are not ‘textual’ or
at least not primarily
textual: where is the text in
chess? …a central “text”
does not exist—merely a
context.
(1) rules,
(2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld),
and
(3) gameplay (the events resulting from
application of the rules to the gameworld).
Any game consists of three
aspects:
--Janet Murray (2004)
“From Game-Story to Cyber Drama”
--Espen Aarseth (2004)
“Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art
of Simulation”

4. Video Games come into being when the machine is powered up and the
software is executed; they exist when enacted.
…
An active medium is one whose very materiality moves and restructures
itself—pixels turning on and off, bits shifting in hardware registers, disks
spinning up and spinning down… I avoid the word “interactive” and
prefer instead to call the video game, like the computer, an action-
based medium (Galloway 2-3).
~
One may start by distinguishing two basic types of action in video
games: machine actions [Those performed by the software and hardware
of the game] and operator actions [those performed by the player].
…
Of course, the division is completely artificial—both machine and
operator work together in a cybernetic relationship to effect the various
actions of the video game in its entirety (5).
On Galloway: what is the video game?

5. Overview of Operator  Machine Interaction

6. Arsenault & Perron, “In the Frame of the Magic Circle”. 120-121.

7. To play a video game is to participate in a continuous feedback loop:
In order for (player driven) progress to occur within a game, the player
Must enact, and the machine, as it is programmed, must respond.
However, within the context of the game, there are actions that occur
Outside the scope of the narrative world and/or beyond the control
Of the player.

8. Gamic Action in Four Movements:
Diegetic
Nondiegetic
Operator Machine
Pause,
Configure,
Cheat
Move,
Expressive
Ambience,
Transition
Enabling,
Disabling
Mechanical
Embodiments

9. Fludernik

10. Discussion!

11. Who is the Author of a Video Game?
The Development Team for Assassin’s Creed 2

12. Who is the Narrator of a Video Game?

13. The Implied Reader?

14. Diegetic Boundaries?

15. Heterodiegetic? Homodiegetic?

16. Diegesis & Mimesis?

17. Focalizer?

18. Narrative Time?