2/18 Readings. Force application of Narrative to Gameplay

            Eric Zimmerman’s article “Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games” confines the possibilities and abilities of procedure within a game to the parameters of the narrative. His assessment of the “game-story” focuses highly on contextual evidence surrounding the narrative of a game and has little to do with the construct of the game itself. He begins his approach by claiming chess as a narrative form. He categorizes it within his own definition of a narrative as having “a beginning state (the setup of the game), changes to that state (the game play), and a resulting insight (the outcome of the game)”(First Person, 157).  This is simply a cultural contextualization of the game chess, and glosses over the parenthetical “game” aspects of chess which are its essential make-up. The narrative quality of chess is only visible in a narrative context, and is peripheral to the construction and execution of the game. What Zimmerman puts in parenthesis to emphasize and ground his point are the only points of chess worth looking at, the composite pieces. The ’setup’ and surrounding rules limiting piece movement constitute the entire framework of the game, and the only options available. So it seems trivial to place importance on the game play as a narrative form if there are limited moves one could make. There is not a limitless narrative structure to work from with character driven decision. This brings up another important objection to Zimmerman’s paper. In his rhetoric, he makes it seem as though the chess pieces are in themselves characters developing a story line. It is important to remember that a chess game has been authored by now one, and is simply a procedure being carried out within a set of determined parameters. There is no intention or story-arch within a chess game. A game of chess could be over within a matter of minutes if a master is set against a novice. IT is simply ones control of the procedure and an understanding of the limited possibilities which determine the “course” of a game of chess.

            The distinction between a player driven medium and an authored medium is important when hoping to apply narrative to a game. Zimmerman states “perhaps all narratives can be interactive, but they can be interactive in different ways”. This statement is completely false. A narrative novel in the traditional sense leaves no room for interaction. There is an authored story that has one beginning, and one end, and nothing the reader can do will change that narrative structure. It is naïve to believe that skipping ahead in the story or reading it backwards or something strange as such is going to change the novel itself. It is simply unattached from the reader in any procedural sense, and has no manipulative quality.

            John Cayley’s micro-study of the new medium of hypertext and the dissection of sentence structure to the pixels constructing the letter takes the approach appropriate to that of game study. It takes a ‘new medium’, that of hypertext and asks essential questions about a tools impact on what it creates: “do the constraints that are imposed on the manipulation of pixels in order that they produce the outlines of letters tell us anything about those letters or the words which they, in turn, compose?”(First Person, 208). This question, re-figured, could constitute the essential question in analyzing the impact or meaning of a game: “Do the constraints that are imposed on the manipulation of player options in order that they produce the decisions available to a player tell us anything about those decisions or the game which they, in turn, compose?”