So, I have a nice 6 hour flight on my way to GDC (to my layover anyway), 2 hours of battery life in my laptop and lots of thoughts running through my head concerning story in games. These thoughts have been mulling around in my head since Craig made his original post way back in the day. As I mentioned at the time, I had an introduction worked up for a formal response, but in the weeks following I decided I didn’t agree with myself (this happens when I think too much). Finally, (however many weeks later) I think I actually have a real post on the subject in my mind. Note that this pos will be in four parts, published over the next few weeks just to give it better flow and to give you a break between long rambling thoughts

Right now (after finishing the first post), this is how I see it fleshing out. This first post will concern whether or not story exists in games, and how to tell if there actually is a story to a game. My second post will be concerned with how story and discourse (aka narrative) work together with game states to make a concrete “story game” whole. The third post will probably be on redefining interactive story and narrative, since I am convinced this line of thought will probably prove the definitions in my thesis incorrect, and my last post on the subject will probably concern patterns and the differences between playing a game with a story, versus playing one without. So, without further ado, here’s the first post.

When I originally started my response to Craig, I was going to post about how all events that occur in a game constitute a story. Feeling rather confident, I opened up my thesis to find passages to quote to prove my points, looking in particular for quotes from Narratology and Story and Discourse. When I finally found the definition of narrative from Narratology, I was surprised that I hadn’t remembered it exactly right (and in fact and probably not even thought about it correctly in my thesis). Here is Bal’s definition of narrative:

A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. An event is the transition from one state to another state. Actors are agents that perform actions… To Act is defined here as to cause or to experience an event.(p5)

The thing I’d forgotten about is the way Bal defines fabula (and therefore story) as involving “chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors.” Now, I remember reading in Chris Crawford on Interactive Story that stories are about people, and, at the time, I didn’t think he was right since, in Poetics, Aristotle (and anyone that based their own narrative theories off of Poetics) states that he can imagine a story without characters but not one without events. This drove me to focus my discussion of story in my thesis on events, not on character (though I did admit character is a fundamental principle of story). In the years since I wrote my thesis, I’ve insisted that actors are not a central part of a story, and that a greater focus should be placed on what happens rather than who did it. In retrospect, I’ve been very, very wrong. However, I will say that, in my defense, what happens to characters and actors is just as important as their existence.

So why did this make me rethink the alleged dichotomy of story in games? Well, I realized that although I wanted to make the point that all games have stories because they are simply a series of events, under the definition I’d just re-discovered, events must either be performed by actors or be experienced by actors; actors being defined as agents that can cause action, and action being defined as causing or experiencing events (kind of circular I know). So, I thought about Tetris as an example. Events are occurring in Tetris, but because they are not being caused or experienced by anyone but the player, and (as I’ve stated before) because the player is not actually an actor in the game, there is no intrinsic story.

So, of course, this got me thinking about the following question: “When is story intrinsic to a game?” This generated the following answer: “Well, whenever there is a agent intrinsic to the game that is causing or experiencing action.” This, however, immediately spurred on other questions: “When is a representation in a game an actor? I don’t think of a block in Tetris as an actor, and I think of Sly cooper as one, but what about my dog in Monopoly? My king in Chess? Kerrigan in Starcraft? Professor Plum in Clue? My Sims? Dr. Mario? Even after I figure out which of these ‘avatars’ can be considered an ‘actor’ in the traditional sense of a story, how do I figure out which elements of it’s behavior can be considered story? When events occur because of my input, are they being ‘caused or experienced by the representation, therefore making it an actor? Crap, this is going to be harder than I thought!” Okay, so that last part isn’t a question.

Thankfully, Bal supplies the answer right there in his (semi-circular) definition of an actor. An actor is one who acts, and to act is to cause or experience and event. Distinctly lacking in this definition is the implied fact that the actor must be a force internal to the text or experience. As a player, you are a force external to the “text.” Avatars, on the other hand, are internal to the text, and are causing and experience the events you order. So in the case of Tetris, the fact that the game state is really only manipulated by you and time (and no, I don’t consider time an actor) is fairly obvious, and therefore no story exists. In the case of Sly, it is fairly obvious that Sly as your avatar is “taking orders” but is an internal force to the text causing and experience events.

Some of the other border cases are harder to say, and can sometimes depend on your focus. Here are my opinions for each of the previously stated questions of actors. The dog in Monopoly is definitely a borderline case, and depends on whether you believe your representation is actually buying real-estate and charging others to stay there. Professor Plum offers a similar problem, and it depends on whether you think of yourself making the accusations or the Professor. In both cases, I tend to believe that the “avatars” are merely placeholders, and that since the player is the one changing the game state, no story is actually intrinsic to those games.

The king in Chess and Kerrigan in Starcraft appear similar: both are “essential pieces” that you move around the “game board.” Do they cause or experience action? Most definitely, so I would have to say that both Chess and Starcraft have stories. The problem is that Chess has mostly lost its story in favor of looking at it as a state machine, making it easy to overlook the fact that the pieces are indeed representational, that taking pieces is really a small battle, and that each match is its own miniature war story. However, I will admit that looking at Chess from the perspective of its story makes little to no sense.

The last two, Dr. Mario and Sims, are interesting cases. The former I will talk about now, the latter will be its own post, because I think the whole game can be used to really nail down how stories actually work in games, and how I’ve come to believe that the concept of the “player’s story” is intrinsically flawed. Dr. Mario is interesting because he is definitely an anthropomorphic “actor” in the world. He changes the game state by throwing pills into the world, but the player is external to this, simply changing a game state that is offered up by his apparent obsession with throwing multicolored pills onto a game board. However, because of the definition I have all worked up, I would say that the game Dr. Mario definitely has story. However, like Chess, studying it from this perspective makes little to no sense.

So there is my opinion on the existence of story in games. Story only exists when there is an internal actor that is able to change the state of the game in some way, whether they are directly under the control of the player or not. That said, there are many games that have story that do not benefit from the story of study in games and merely exist to help players find a way to attach to the game. There are only two problems that I can see with this. The first depends on whether you can consider time an actor. However, since in Narratology time is considered completely separately from actors, I will not consider it an actor in games either. The second is rules of the game that affect the state of the game. The reason for this is because all actors intrinsic to a game can be considered part of the mechanics. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to figure out exactly how that works out.

In my next post (which will come out at some point), I’ll talk about game states, back story, and the Sims.