Bridging Narratology and

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MSc Information Systems & Management

2008 – 2009

Andreas Alexiou

0857171

Supervisor: Dr. Joe Nandhakumar

Deconstructing Digital Games: Developing an Analytical Framework Bridging Narratology and Ludology

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Abstract

Despite the fact that digital games exist for over forty years now, they have become the focus

of serious academic research in the last ten to fifteen years. While the first attempts for their

analysis were made from fields like film or literary studies with a focus on the narrating

potential of the medium, during the last decade another approach have emerged for the study

of digital games; that of ludology. Lodology considers digital games as the evolution of

traditional games and treats them as such.

While a few attempts have been made in the past for developing a framework for the analysis

of digital games, they are considered incomplete. That is mainly due to the

multidimensionality of the medium that requires a multi-disciplinary approach for analysing

it holistically. Based on academic literature approaches, digital games as both stories and

games were taken into account, and those elements that should be analysed in this contextual

framework, are indentified. These elements are divided in three layers: Game Story, Game

System and GameWorld.

In addition, an example of the applicability of the framework is provided based on a

sophisticated computer role playing game, The Witcher. The main aim of this study is to

synthesise the perspectives of academics regarding the true nature of digital games and make

a small step towards a more holistic approach in their analysis. Moreover, the development of

such a framework could be further used to identify patterns among game titles that could

indicate developing trends, limitations in game development or even recipes for success.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to first thank my supervisor Dr. Joe Nandhakumar for

giving me this wonderful opportunity to work on a subject I so love. I can’t thank you enough

for helping me with my work and for the patience you showed throughout the time it took me

to complete my research and write the dissertation.

I also feel deeply indebted to Dr. Nikiforos Panourgias for all his support, inspiration and

insight regarding this project and not only.

To all my friends, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your support and

understanding especially during the last phase of this work. Thank you all for being there

when I needed a break from my work and for making my life interesting and beautiful.

I dedicate this work to my first ever playmates: my parents, Nikos and Fotini and my brother

Alexander.

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Table of Contents

Abstract... .......................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... iii

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Background & Motivation .................................................................................................. 1

1.2 Research Questions & Rationale......................................................................................... 3

1.3 Structure ............................................................................................................................ 3

2. Digital Games as Narratives ....................................................................................................... 5

2.1 To Be a Story or Not? ........................................................................................................ 5

2.2 Classical Approaches to Narrative ...................................................................................... 7

2.2.1 Aristotelian Approach ................................................................................................. 7

2.2.2 Formalism .................................................................................................................. 8

2.2.3 Structuralism ............................................................................................................ 13

2.3 The Narrative Elements of Digital Games......................................................................... 17

2.3.1 The Imagination Stimulator ...................................................................................... 17

2.3.2 The Story-Teller ....................................................................................................... 18

2.4 The other side .................................................................................................................. 20

2.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 23

3. Digital Games as Games .......................................................................................................... 25

3.1 The Silent Evolution: An Introduction on Games .............................................................. 25

3.2 Rules ................................................................................................................................ 30

3.3 Simulation........................................................................................................................ 32

3.4 An introduction to ludology.............................................................................................. 34

4. Theoretical Framework ............................................................................................................ 36

4.1 Game Story ...................................................................................................................... 40

4.2 Game System ................................................................................................................... 40

4.3 Gameworld ...................................................................................................................... 42

5. Case study Analysis & Discussion............................................................................................ 48

5.1 Game Reading: The Witcher ............................................................................................ 49

5.2 Applying the Framework .................................................................................................. 50

5.2.1 Layer One: Game Story ............................................................................................ 51

5.2.2 Layer Two: Game System ........................................................................................ 55

5.2.2.1 Game Mechanics .................................................................................................. 55

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5.2.2.2 Interface ............................................................................................................... 56

5.2.2.3 Information........................................................................................................... 56

5.2.2.4 Goals .................................................................................................................... 57

5.2.2.5 Control Scheme .................................................................................................... 57

5.2.3 Layer three: Gameworld ........................................................................................... 58

5.2.3.1 Components ......................................................................................................... 58

5.2.3.2 Environment ......................................................................................................... 61

6. Conclusion & Limitations ........................................................................................................ 66

6.1 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 66

6.2 Limitations ....................................................................................................................... 67

Reference List .................................................................................................................................. 69

Ludography ..................................................................................................................................... 74

[INTRODUCTION] Warwick Business School

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1. Introduction

1.1 Background & Motivation

By the time these lines were being written Nintendo’s Wii, Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s

XBOX360 had sold over 52, 24 and 31 million units respectively worldwide1. At the same

time game titles like “Wii Sports Resort” or “Monster Hunter Tri” (both for the Wii console)

delivered weekly sales of 918K and 561K respectively2.

Digital games3 seem to take a dominant role as a form of entertainment all over the developed

world with the industry in the U.S alone reaching a gross total of $11.7 billion sales with 68%

of the households using at least one digital game platform (Entertainment Software

Association, 2009). Popular game titles are being transferred on the big screen and vice-versa

and with the average player currently being 35 years old (Entertainment Software

Association, 2009), videogames have attracted huge marketing campaigns where besides the

promotion of the ever-new hardware and software in the traditional media platforms, we can

now encounter all sorts of product advertisements within the games themselves. While

playing a driving game for example, the player may witness all sorts of familiar landmarks:

the Shell gas station on the corner, the McDonald's on Main Street or the Budweiser

billboards near highway exits.

All the above inevitably forced a sharp rise in the interest shown on the cultural genre of

digital games by the academia and after nearly forty years of quiet evolution they are now 1 For more information and statistics on the video game industry, visit www.vgchartz.com. 2 Referring to August 01/ 2009. Source: www.vgchatz.com 3 The term digital games will be used in this study as an umbrella term for the terms computer games (that

purely refers to a “computer controlled game” and conventionally to any game played on a personal

computer), video games (that purely refers to games with some form of video display and conventionally to

console games) and arcade games (any form of electronic game that has been designed for public play).


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recognised as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon. All those trends that started to

become apparent in the late 80’s and took the form of an avalanche during the last decade,

stimulated academic interest that initially focused in the social impacts of digital games, with

questions like “do games induce violent behaviours?” dominating the literature. Steadily the

focus of interest started to move away from and towards analyses that acknowledge the

relevance of this new medium, the exploration of its capabilities, its cultural qualities and

more.

With our need to understand digital games came the need to identify a theory that can help

study them as accurately and thoroughly as possible. The dominating approach so far has

been narratology. Most of the early works on digital games bespeak this fact. Brenda Laurel

(1993) in her classic work Computers as Theater approached computers from a dramaturgy

perspective adopting that way a more Aristotelian concept of closure as the source for the

players pleasure. Lev Manovich’s (2001) work is based on films, while George P. Landow

(1997) used poststructuralist literary theory in his work Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of

Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. That tendency led scholars like Espen

Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen to claim theoretical imperialism (Aarseth, 1997) or

colonisation from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies (Eskelinen, 2001).

It is clear in the literature that multiple views and arguments exist regarding the “most fit”

theory for studying digital games. Many of those arguments have been expressed in the

infamous narratology vs ludology debate. Nevertheless, it is not within the scope of this

dissertation to take sides and argue in favour of one theory or the other. Based on the notion

that digital games are not one medium but many different media at the same time, the

medium’s different qualities are acknowledged and lead us to approach games as a twofold

existence: as narrative, and as game.


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1.2 Research Questions & Rationale

The aim of this dissertation is to identify the core elements that digital games possess, their

level of importance and their incorporation in a comprehensive framework that will provide

the basis for further research. Games will be approached from a through-the-eyes-of-the-

player perspective and will include a focus on specific elements that affect the overall playing

experience.

The framework will be drawn upon the twofold nature of digital games. The rationale behind

this approach is that the analysis of games under either narratology or ludology alone, cannot

be considered holistic. Digital games differ from traditional games as well as from other

forms of narrative media like films, novels, theatre etc, and demonstrate different layers of

characteristics. Therefore, a unified approach that incorporates elements from different

disciplines is required for their proper analysis.

In the light of the above this dissertation aims to address the following:

I. Study digital games both as narratives and as games.

II. Identify all the core elements of digital games that derive from their dual nature.

III. Categorise them according to their nature and develop a framework.

IV. Apply the framework on a case study and identify its level of functionality.

1.3 Structure

This dissertation is structured as follows:

Chapter 2 provides a review of the literature on digital games as narratives. Drawing on the

existing literature this chapter aims to stress the qualities and potential of digital games as a


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story-telling medium. It also presents the classical approaches to narrative that have been

applied to digital game analysis so far and identifies the narrative elements of digital games.

In Chapter 3 digital games are approached as games and their core elements as such are

identified. The chapter focuses on the analysis of digital games as rules and as simulations. A

short introduction on ludology, the discipline that studies games, is also given.

Chapter 4 is a representation of the framework developed using the existing literature. The

game elements that have been identified as essential for game analysis are categorised in

three layers: Game Narrative, Game System and Gameworld.

Chapter 5 provides an application of the framework on a case study and relevant discussion.

Chapter 6 consists of the conclusions of this dissertation, the limitations of the research and

propositions for future research.

[DIGITAL GAMES AS NARRATIVES] Warwick Business School

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2. Digital Games as Narratives

2.1 To Be a Story or Not?

It seems that not all games tell stories. In order to prove our point, we can look in the work of

Caillois (1957) and the six conditions which exist in play:

1. Free: something which the player is not forced to engage in, in which event

play will immediately lose the characteristic of an attractive and happy diversion.

2. Isolated: circumscribed within the limitations of a precise time and place and

agreed upon in advance.

3. Uncertain: whose progress and result cannot be determined in advance, a

certain latitude in the necessity of improvising being inevitably left to the

initiative of the players.

4. Unproductive: creating neither commodities, wealth, nor any kind of new

element and, with the exception of a transfer of property among the circle of

players, ending in a situation identical with that which prevailed when the game

began.

5. Unregulated: subject to the conventions that suspend ordinary laws and

temporarily institute new rules that alone count.

6. Fictitious: accompanied by a specific awareness of a second reality or of a

frank unreality in contrast to daily life.

We could argue that since one of the conditions and according to the author “the essence of

play” is to be unproductive, to create neither wealth, as does work, nor a work, as does art, it

could be claimed that games do not necessarily generate narratives as well. Contemporary


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digital games on the other hand, demonstrate in their majority some sort of narrative that

unravels throughout the game with well defined, heroes, foes, quests, scenery etc. Digital

games (at least in their majority) can be thus perceived as a hybrid between game and

storytelling.

Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of the English novelist Terry Pratchett, the video game

scriptwriter of titles such as “Mirror's Edge”, “Heavenly Sword”, and the entire “Overlord”

franchise, in a recent interview argues:

“Video games are the medium with the most untapped potential when it comes to

storytelling [...] but there’s a long way to go. Developing the right synergy

between gameplay and narrative takes time to become industry-wide. For every

Portal or Psychonauts we have several dozen titles where the narrative has clearly

been an afterthought and has no real bearing on the gameplay. [...] Gameplay and

story can sometimes have quite different goals that can often see them fighting for

space. And nine times out of 10, story loses. It’s really about finding the common

ground between the two and thinking about story early enough in the development

cycle that it can properly fit together with the gameplay. Not just lie on top of it

like a kind of narrative custard.” (Parker, 2009).

Pratchett’s view portray accurately the current situation in the digital games field and

partially justify the views of extreme ludologists like Markus Eskelinen (2001, p. 1) who

argues that in most cases “[...] stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to

games”.

Nevertheless, the narrative elements of digital games have been promptly recognised and

there have been many attempts to approach games through respective theories. There are


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three major classic narrative theories that have been used for the study of digital games: the

Aristotelian, the formalist and the structuralist theories.

2.2 Classical Approaches to Narrative

2.2.1 Aristotelian Approach

Brenda Laurel (1993) suggested a model of the Aristotelian theory where a two-way system

of relations between Aristotle’s six hierarchical parts of play was described. Aristotle

identified six distinct parts in every play: action; character; thought; language (diction);

pattern; and enactment. All those parts are related via material cause and formal cause.

Hence, the interrelation that goes from action towards enactment is considered as the

authorial view (formal cause) of the narrative presented by the plot, while the opposite

direction describes the audience view (material cause) of the narrative represented by its

understanding of the plot (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Theory of Drama (Adapted from Mateas, 2001)


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However, the classic Aristotelian theory does not integrate the element of interactivity that is

present in digital games. Mateas (2001) tried to address this issue by putting forward a neo-

Aristotelian theory (Figure 2) in order to represent the roles and limitations of the user as a

character in the drama. He achieved that by introducing two new causal chains. The player's

intentions are now becoming a new source of formal causation. By taking action in the

experience, the player's intentions become the formal cause of activity happening at the levels

from language down to spectacle but this ability to take action is not completely free; it is

constrained from below by material resources and from above by authorial formal causation

from the level of plot (Mateas, 2001). While Mateas’s theory includes user interaction and

gives more importance to the characters, it still remains a plot-dominating approach that

incorporates mechanisms for forcing the user back into the desired action sequence. The

concept of beats which operate like way points in the required route and was proposed as a

solution to the above issue, requires a well defined universal plan to cover all possible branch

points rendering the task both authorially and computationally intractable (Louchart &

Aylett, 2004).

Figure 2: Neo-Aristotelian theory of drama (Adapted from Mateas 2001).

2.2.2 Formalism

The Russian formalists’ approaches to the macro structural level of narrative focus primarily

on the forms of the narrative rather than on the substances of its content (Louchart & Aylett,


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2004). In the Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analysable

elements, or morphemes. Vladimir Propp extended the approach by using this method by

analogy to analyse Russian fairy tales. By breaking down a large number of Russian folk

tales into their smallest narrative units, or narratemes, Propp was able to arrive at a typology

of narrative structures. He then argued that the structure of all fairy tales is based on a single

type, the quest type adventure story, and developed a seven - part model for analysing that

structure. All the functions in Table 1 are considered to appear in the order in which they are

listed. Some of them can also be grouped into pairs and can cause the occurrence or non-

occurrence of certain events that could change the structure of the narrative and its

classification (Louchart & Aylett, 2004).

Logical and Chronological Process

Initial Situation Section

Aims It is placed prior to the development of the tale itself (represented by the symbol α). It introduces important characters and presents a pre-narrative graphical representation of the different components of the tale.

Example Once upon a time, in a land far, far away lived a young princess called Victoria and a poor boy called David. Princess Victoria and David loved each other so much that they decided to get married.

Preparatory Section

Aims Provides the narrative and the reader with the essential necessary knowledge to understand the next section.

Functions involved

Abstentation (β), Interdiction (γ), Violation (δ), Reconnaissance (ε), Delivery (ξ), Trickery (η), Complicity (θ).

Example Unfortunately for them, Victoria’s father, King Henry would not allow his daughter to marry anyone who was not a knight, and had promised her hand in marriage to her cousin Lord Cedric, who although a knight, was a mean and ugly man, and Victoria did not want to marry him.

Complication Section

Aims The call for action, the logical sequence of events that leads the hero to decision-making, actions and ultimately to leave home and his engagement into a quest. Exposes the reasons, the motivations and the goals of the actions, (ABC↑).

Functions involved

Villainy (A), Lack (a), Mediation connective incident (B), Beginning of counteraction (C), Departure (↑).

Example King Henry told David that he could achieve a knighthood, and have his daughter’s hand in marriage, if he could kill the Dragon that lived in the mountain and was terrorising the people of the land.


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Donor Section

Aims The hero in this section is tested, and receives a magical agent or helper that proves to be essential for the achievement of the quest that the hero is engaged in. The sequence DEF provides the hero the means by which the completion of the quest is possible.

Functions involved

First function of the Donor (D), the Hero’s reaction (E), Provision or receipt of a magical agent (F).

Example David went on a long journey to the mountain in order to kill the dragon and win the hand of his beloved. It was in the mountain that he met a strange wizard called Archibald. Archibald offered to help David, and gave him a magic sword to kill the dragon.

Action Section

Aims It is led by a series of actions and ultimately results in direct confrontation of the villain and the hero.

Functions involved

Spatial transference between two kingdoms or Guidance (G), Struggle (H), Branding marking (J), Victory (I), Liquidation of the initial misfortune of Lack (K), the Return (↓), the Pursuit, Chase (Pr) and the Rescue (Rs).

Example Thanks to the magic sword, David was able to kill the dragon and went triumphantly back to King Henry’s castle. The King was overjoyed, and kept his promise. David became a knight of the land, and the king offered him his daughter in marriage.

Repeat Section

Aims At this stage the author can either opt for a repeat of the first stage, by starting a new villainy, or move on to the second move and end the story (the Second move section).

Second Move Section

Aims This section involves the function pair MN (Difficult task, Solution to the task), brings the last actions into a story and concludes the story.

Functions involved

Unrecognised arrival (o), Unfounded claims (L), Difficult task (M), Solution (N), Recognition (Q), Exposure (Ex), Transfiguration (T), Punishment (U), Wedding (W).

Example Victoria and David were married at a wonderful wedding ceremony, and they all lived happily ever after.

Table 1: Propp’s seven part narrative model (adapted from Louchart & Aylett, 2004).

While Propp’s rather prescriptive narrative structure cannot be effectively used in cases

where more emergent narrative approaches are required, fits successfully in all quest-type

digital games.

Propp’s structure of fairytales brings to mind the concept of the monomyth suggested by

Joseph Campbell (1968) in his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. Campbell argues

that there is a common underlying, unconscious structure behind all religion and myth; all the


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great mythical sagas are basically one story, the monomyth. Campbell was a student of the

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his ideas were greatly influenced from Jung’s notion of

cultural archetypes that Jung believed are reflections of the human mind -that our minds

divide themselves into these characters to play out the drama of our lives- and of the

collective unconscious, which he felt provided the foundation of mythological thinking in a

great diversity of cultures. We can also identify traces of Freudian and Jungian

psychoanalysis in his work, seeing the hero’s journey as a simultaneous journey of the ego to

achieve oneness with the world, to overcome its fears of both id and superego. Campbell

doesn’t talk much about being influenced by the Russian formalist or the French structuralist

theory, though the monomyth is a clear attempt to find an underlying structure beneath the

many surface manifestations of the story of the great quest that can be found in all great

myths and epics around the world.

The journey has three major parts to it – Departure, Initiation, and Return - each with a

number of subsections. In its shortest form, the hero ventures out from his ordinary life and

world into a supernatural one, encounters and defeats strange and magical forces arrayed

against him, and returns to his ordinary world with a marvelous boon. The hero cycle also

contains a number of familiar repeated characters - the hero (obviously), a mentor, a villain

(often referred to as the “dragon”), a goddess (sometimes associated with a mother figure),

magic potions or forces, helpers and even rogues, jesters or tricksters. Such stories commonly

revolve around the “Good versus Evil” or “Light versus Darkness” struggle. An outline of the

structure would look like the one below:

I. Departure

1. The Call to Adventure

2. Refusal of the Call

3. Supernatural Aid


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4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

5. The Belly of the Whale

II. Initiation

1. The Road of Trials

2. The Meeting with the Goddess

3. Woman as the Temptress

4. Atonement with the Father

5. Apotheosis

6. The Ultimate Boon

III. Return

1. Refusal of the Return

2. The Magic Flight

3. Rescue from Without

4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

5. Master of the Two Worlds

6. Freedom to Live

We’ve all encountered the above structure in many novels, films, like “The Lord of the

Rings”, “Ulysses”, the “Star Wars” and “The Matrix” series, or games, like “Diablo”,

“Dungeon Siege”, “Neverwinter Nights” etc. Propp’s and Campbell’s theories are quite useful

for analysing the narrative structure of digital games since many of them are drawn on the

archetype of the hero, without that meaning that all games use all stages described above.

The functional analysis of dialogue that extends from the Russian Formalists and only

recently appeared in film studies could be another useful tool in the analysis of the digital

games’ narrative element (Smith, 2002). By emphasising on the lines of dialogue themselves


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and not on larger structures like traditional literary theory does, we could study the way that

these bits of dialogue work at the local level to give the player narrative information (op. cit.).

2.2.3 Structuralism

The work of Propp greatly influenced structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tzvetan

Todorov and Roland Barthes. The French structuralism explored the structures of narrative

based on a linguistic approach and mainly on the structural linguistics of Sausseure who

made the fundamental distinction between language (la langue) and speech (la parole). This

general principle inspired a structural approach to general cultural analysis in which specific

social forms are seen as manifestations of an underlying generative system (Lindley, 2005).

According to the structuralist theory, the narrative text must be divided in two distinct parts:

story and discourse. The term text refers to “[...] a spoken or written discourse which

undertakes the telling of the events in a story” (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983, cited in Lindley, 2005,

p. 5). According to Chatman (1989, cited in Louchart & Aylett, 2004: p. 7) “[...] the story is

the what in the narrative that is depicted and the discourse the how”.

Figure 3: A simple representation of the structural theory (adapted from Louchard & Aylett, 2004)


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In a digital game, the discourse level can be mapped onto what appears on the computer

screen when the player is engaged in action. During action the player is in fact creating the

context for and bridging sequences between the elements of predefined narrative that usually

include non-interactive cinematic cut scenes and in-game stories and histories by improvising

within the limits set by the designers and ultimately becoming a sort of author of the narrative

constituted by the screen history of play (Lindley, 2005). Consequently, in retrospect “[...] the

game story is the total implied game world history as determined by the pre-designed

potential of the game in interaction with the game play actions of the player” (Lindley, 2005:

p. 9).

Similar views can be identified in the work of many scholars that study games. Salen &

Zimmermann (2004) identified two broad structural rubrics for understanding the narrative

components of games:

Players can experience a game narrative as a crafted story interactively told: the

characters Jak and Daxter are saving the world.

Players can engage with narrative as an emergent experience that happens while the

game is played: Jak and Daxter's story arises through the play of the game.

Those two rubrics can be parallelised with LeBlanc’s (2000) “embedded” and “emergent”

narratives. According to LeBlanc’s dichotomy, embedded refers to all the pre-generated

narrative that exists before the player takes action. It is designed in order to provide

motivation for the events and actions that will follow in the game and it can be perceived as a

story context, since it is the main story arc that guides the player through the game. In that

sense, it resembles the kind of narrative that linear media like films or novels provide.

Emergent narrative on the other hand arises through the interaction of the player with the

game system. It emerges from game events that unfold as the player interacts with the


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system. The term also implies that the player despite the very well defined set of rules she has

to operate in, can experiment and discover alternative approaches for reaching the objective.

Cases of players taking advantages of system loopholes (without necessarily cheating) in

order to achieve their goals are more than often. In most of the cases, the designers hadn’t

even considered such possibilities when the game was being developed. Examples of such are

the cases of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and the often cited Grand Theft Auto III. In

Warcraft II it is possible in some of the missions for the player to send its few troops and

peons (workers that gather resources) and exterminate the others side’s peons before they

built their headquarters. That typically means that the battle is won since the player is left all

alone in the terrain to deploy her base, raise an army and complete all the required objectives.

In Grand Theft Auto III the player has the option to replenish 25 points of health by paying a

prostitute. It sounds like a useful option in cases of need but it costs money. What some

players discovered was that afterwards you can kill the prostitute and take your money back.

Free health on demand is apparently always welcome in every game. The designers of the

game hadn’t plan of such an option but the players apparently utilised the system’s rules (or

lack thereof) and created an emergent narrative.

Doug Church (1999) suggests a similar distinction. He argues that in adventure games the

story has been written in advance by designers and is revealed to the players through their

interactions with characters, objects or the world. Essentially while players are given a sense

of control, they end up with the same plot. But on the other hand story exists in games like

NBA Live too. It is the story that happens in the game; the story that is created by the

player’s actions during play.

Obviously the story in sports games is not as complicated and developed as stories in

adventure games or RPG’s but in such cases the player is in control of the story and not the

designer.


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Richard Rouse (2001: p. 219) also makes such a distinction. He suggests that there are three

different layers of storytelling in digital games: one is out-of-game storytelling, which

includes the cutscenes and all non-interactive elements; another is in-game storytelling that

occurs while the player is actually playing the game as in dynamic conversations etc., and the

third kind is found in external materials, including game manuals, printed maps and more.

Apparently, it is not hard to identify narrative structures in digital games. Many of the recent

games follow patterns familiar from movies, popular culture etc. (Carlquist, 2002).

Nevertheless, contemporary digital games are fundamentally and qualitatively different from

traditional linear narrative forms and it is thus harder to apply the traditional narrative models

described above onto them. Lindley (2005) identified those differences in: the player being a

joint reader/author at some levels of narrative structure; more semiotic levels having textual

manifestations; and text levels being generatively interdependent.

Such restrictions led towards the development of process based or emergent theories like the

one proposed by Louchard and Aylett (2003) that could more easily fit in the digital games or

virtual reality concepts. The authors studied interactive improvisational theatre and Live Role

Playing Games and proposed a process view of narrative as a dynamic system building itself

from the interactions of its own narrative elements and factors. Such an approach considers

the user and his or her behaviour as a primary resource for the storytelling system and brings

a different perspective to the role of the user within the story.


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2.3 The Narrative Elements of Digital Games

“From the moment I walked onto the world of Norrath, I knew I could write a thousand books set there [...]. It was that alive and real to me [...]. What I came away with most is the nagging question of what the author’s role might be in a video game world.”

Robert Anthony Salvatore, Author

2.3.1 The Imagination Stimulator

While it has been supported by many theorists that everything is narrative or at least can be

presented as narrative, Jesper Juul (2002) argues that while narratives play a fundamental role

in human thought and culture, it doesn’t mean that everything should be described in

narrative terms; it is true that it’s possible for some narrative elements to be found even in

games like Tetris (Post, 2009) but that way we shift our focal point away from their most

important aspect. Those games were not developed with story-telling in mind. They were

perceived as a means of pure entertainment or skill practice and should be analysed as such.

On the other hand there exist games that do have narrative aspirations.

Narrative can be used in different levels and degree in games. It can be used for creating an

atmosphere or a context in order to help the player emerge into the gameworld more

efficiently or motivate her to passionately follow the quest. These are the cases where

narrativity performs an instrumental rather than a strictly aesthetic function by trying to

immerse the player in the game; when that happens the narrative theme may become

backgrounded or temporarily forgotten. That means that while all the actions the player

performs -if reflected upon- could form a dramatic plot, this plot is not normally the focus of

attention during the heat of the action (Ryan, 2001). Nevertheless, narrative does support the


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players’ cognitive and psychological engagement and improves their gaming experience

(Grant & Bizzocchi, 2005). As Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, p. 1) puts it:

“[...] if narrativity were totally irrelevant to the enjoyment of games, why would

designers put so much effort into the creation of a narrative interface? Why would

graphics be so sophisticated? Why would the task of the player be presented as

fighting terrorists or saving the earth from invasion by evil creatures from outer

space rather than as “gathering points by hitting moving targets with a cursor

controlled by a joystick”? [...] It may not be the raison d'etre of games, but it plays

such an important role as a stimulant for the imagination that many recent games

use lengthy film clips, which interrupt the game, to immerse the player.”

2.3.2 The Story-Teller

On the other hand, some developers recognise the potential of video games as an effective

storytelling medium and try to develop games that mainly aim on telling a good story rather

than offer non-stop action, engaging gameplay etc. Such a case is of the game “The Dig”.

The idea behind “The Dig” was originally hatched by Steven Spielberg as an episode for his

“Amazing Stories” anthology series, but the realisation of the idea would have been too costly

and so “The Dig” eventually came to Lucas Arts, where it was envisioned as a sprawling

adventure game. It would be impossible to argue that the actual narrative layer of the game

could be stripped away from the game and leave much to be analysed. As a typical point-and-

click adventure of the mid-90’s, it does not possess any breath-taking 3D graphics,

sophisticated game mechanics or physics and does not offer an exciting or engaging

gameplay.


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Nowadays advancements in technology make it possible for great stories and engaging

gameplay to coexist. Such an example was Quantic Dream’s4 “Indigo Prophecy” that gave

real context to the term “cinematic gameplay”. The founder of Quantic Dream, David Cage,

in one recent interview argued that:

“All games look the same because we have exploited to the bone the potential of

our current game paradigms. How many different games can you make where you

shoot enemies in first person? You can make them look better, improve AI,

graphics, physics, and so on, but fundamentally, the experience is still exactly the

same. If we don’t invent new paradigms, if we cannot address the evolution of the

market demographics and offer new kinds of experiences for an older audience,

we will become no more than toys.” (Parker, 2009)

Cage believes storytelling is one possible answer. However, he identifies a few problems in

such an initiative, namely publisher demands and a different set of development skills. And

he continues:

“[Another] issue is that there is no grammar for interactive storytelling at the

moment and very few people in the world are working on this. I think Heavy

Rain5 is the only AAA title based on interactive storytelling in development at the

moment. Working on this new generation of experiences requires a very different

type of skills.”

For example, instead of having levels designers define where enemies and ammo should be

placed on the map, Cage would like to see writers creating appealing stories and characters.

With this new format, he hopes games will one day be created by authors. 4 Quantic Dream is a game development studio that has invested in proprietary technologies for many years, including a PlayStation 3 3D engine, to create what they call "real-time emotion" within games. 5 Heavy Rain is an interactive adventure game, under development by the French Studio Quantic Dream that is expected to be released in Q1, 2010 and is expected to feature realistic character emotions (McInnis, 2009).


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2.4 The other side

For ludologists like Juul and Aarseth a plot makes a story and rules make a game, and never

the twain shall meet. Moreover, ludologists argue that game players do not identify with their

avatars in the gameworld as readers or spectators of a narrative do with the main characters of

a story (Simons, 2007). The plot-versus-rules distinction is simply a non-starter, as has

already been amply demonstrated in practice by games like “The Sims” series (Wright,

2000).

Jesper Juul, in his article “Games Telling stories? A brief note on games and narratives”

(2001b) raises some interesting points on whether narrative is an important element of digital

games.

As we already saw, according to the structuralists, narratives can be split into a level of

discourse (the telling of the story) and the story (the story told). The story part can be

subsequently split into two parts, existents (actors and settings) and events (actions and

happenings). An impetus behind distinguishing the story from the discourse and considering

The first game that can be said to have a story is 1977’s ADVENT (or Colossal Cave or Adventure) that later gave its name to a whole genre of computer games, the adventure games, that originally meant to say “a game like Adventure”. In the primitive form of adventure games that Adventure introduced and have gone down in history as text-adventures or Interactive Fiction (the term was first introduced by Byte Magazine in 1981, Aarseth 1997, p.48) the game's story was conveyed through passages of text, that were revealed to the player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, such as the aforementioned Adventure used a simple verb-noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key" or "open door". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, could interpret far more complex sentences. Text based adventures later evolved into Graphic Adventures where graphics were used to convey the environment to the player, with the classic point-and-click adventures surviving until today.


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it as a separate level of meaning from the narratives that express it is the fact that the same

story may be expressed in many different narratives, either within the same medium or across

different media (Lindley, 2005). Juul (2001b) draws upon the aforementioned structuralist

views and argues that a story could then be recognised by having the same existents (with the

same names) and same events even across media, meaning that stories from other media must

be retellable in digital games and vice versa. To support his argument he uses Atari’s Star

Wars (1983) game that was based on the George Lucas movie of the same name (1977).

After briefly analysing the game he comes to the conclusion that if the title was removed

from the game, the connection between movie and game would be hardly noticeable. Thus he

concludes that the Star Wars game cannot be said to contain a narrative that can be

recognised from the Star Wars movie: most characters from the movie are missing and the

few events that are included in the game are simple simulations where the player can either

win or fail. We believe the main problem in the above reasoning lies with the unsuccessful

selection of the game that was analysed.

First of all the game is quite dated and the arsenal that the developers of that time had in their

possession was very limited for reproducing a representative atmosphere and complex

character relations, background stories etc. If we see for example Chronicles of Riddick:

Escape from Butcher Bay (COR) that is based on the Pitch Black movie we will be able to

draw a lot more connections between the two. Besides the fact that the main character is a 3D

model of the actor that stars in the movie (Vin Diesel) and has his voice, the game even

features a few sequences that are referred to in the movie but have never been shown until

then. Our main disagreement with Juul’s argument though is that all and all, it doesn’t matter

that the game is not a complete reproduction of the movie upon which it is based. It would be

possible for the developers of COR, if that was the terminus, to develop a 3D world where

the events of the Pitch Black movie would take place, but apparently it wasn’t. As Jenkins


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(2004, p. 2) puts it, the function of the game, is not “so much [to] reproduce the story of a

literary work… as [to evoke] its atmosphere”. That fact alone doesn’t reduce the narrating

ability of the medium.

Juul’s (2001a) next argument regards time. In the classical narratological framework, a

narrative has two distinct kinds of time, the story time, denoting the time of the events told, in

their chronological order, and the discourse time, denoting the time of the telling of events (in

the order in which they are told). Juul argues that when we play a game e.g. a first person

shooter, it is hard to find a distance between story time, narrative time, and reading/viewing

time.

To illustrate, we can use the game Call of Duty 2 and in particular the first mission of the

game, which represents the Battle of Normandy Campaign, the famous D-Day. The player

has the role of a private that lands in one of the five beaches in the Normandy area (Pointe du

Hoc) where the Allies carried out the code-named mission “Operation Overlord" in June 6,

1944 under the command of the American General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Since the game

follows historical events it is obvious that the story time is distinct from the narrative time. In

this case there exists a very well defined story where the outcome is already known (the allies

win) and all that is left is for someone to tell (play) that story. It is true that at least in the

majority of games, the narrative time is the same as the reading/viewing time but it is pretty

often completely distinct from the story time.

We shouldn’t also forget that despite the typical retrospective stance of narratives, there are

many types of narrative that do not look back into past events, like the Grand Narratives of

religion regarding the Second Coming and the Last Judgment that are yet to happen or the

sports commentary that is happening in real time (Ryan, 2006: p.186).


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Regarding the argument about the possible inherent conflicts between the now of the

interaction and the past or prior of the narrative, often cited by Juul and other ludologists,

Marie-Laure Ryan (2006: p.187) argues that even if we accept the fact that “ [...] game

players experience the action as happening now, while novel readers or movie and drama

spectators always remain conscious of the difference between the time of the narrated events

and the time of narration, even though the events never really happened” that doesn’t mean

that games can’t suggest stories. It merely means that they do so in their own way partly

different from how movies, novels or drama do. The idea is that narrative can be theoretically

identified in every game but its extensive analysis should be included only in those games

that can support it; meaning, those games where narrative is interwoven with the rest of the

game elements and plays a significant role in the overall experience of the game.

2.5 Conclusion

Based on the above, we can safely argue that narrative is a significant part of digital games

and should be considered when dissecting a game for analysis. Of course, when games do tell

stories, it is highly probable that they are doing it in different ways than other media. As

Marie-Laure Ryan puts it:

“The cognitive structure that we call narrative is such that it can be called to mind

by many different media, but each medium has different expressive resources, and

will therefore produce different concrete manifestation of this abstract structure”

(Ryan, 2001: p1).

We must therefore recognise the particularity of games as a medium, specifically what

distinguishes them from other narrative traditions (Jenkins, 2006). The video game may


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produce narrative on at least one of four levels: it may evoke a pre-existing narrative

association, it may provide a staging ground upon which narratives may be created, it may

imbed narrative elements in its mise en scene, and it may provide resources for emergent

narratives (Wallin, 2007).

Nevertheless, we should never simply reduce the experience of playing a game to the

experience of a story. Digital games possess another great potential besides being a story-

telling medium; that of simulation: the ability to represent dynamic systems. For example, the

simlulated cars in EA’s “Need for Speed” are not made only through signs but also through

rules of behaviour. In order to explore the potential of such simulations we should besides

interpreting their signs, experiment with them and infer some of their behavioural rules. The

rule systems and the simulating nature of digital games are inherent in their nature as games

and this is what will discuss about in the next chapter.

[DIGITAL GAMES AS GAMES] Warwick Business School

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3. Digital Games as Games

As we have seen in the previous chapters, while most researchers try to use narratology and

relevant theories to explore digital games - mainly due to a lack of a formal discipline that

focuses on games - the experience of games cannot be reduced to the experience of story.

That is because digital games are primarily games; and games posses other qualities besides

story-telling potential. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins (1995: p.16) who studied video games

developed for a Nintendo system by comparing them to travel diaries of narratives argue that

while some sort of narrative occurs in games, such narratives are more about spatial

progression or exploration and not so much about storytelling. Such a perspective can be also

identified in the works of other researchers as J.C. Hertz (1997) and Jannet Murrey (1999)

who were influenced by their work and agree that gameplay has a better effect on giving

players engaging action than richly developed stories do.

3.1 The Silent Evolution: An Introduction on Games

Digital games did certainly not appear in our lives out of nowhere. They are the next

evolutionary step of traditional games and they incorporate elements of other cultural

artefacts, such as comics, film, television, sports, etc. Thus, in order to understand digital

games, we first need to understand games. Games are a rich and extremely diverse family of

practices and share qualities with performance arts, material arts and verbal arts. In their core

though, they remain games. The artistic elements, according to Aarseth (2004), are there in

order to support the gameplay. Jesper Juul (2001b) in the same vein argues that games are

eminently themeable: you can play chess with wooden or glass pieces, depicting knights or


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elves, on a board or in the sand. It would still be the same game. In practice, game designers

always try to concretize their games because game systems that can support engaging and

compelling games are very hard to write the algorithms for; because of this, many games are

built on similar underlying systems or engines. The concretisation’s and narrativisation’s role

is then what distinguishes one game from another (Grant & Bizzocchi, 2005).

Despite the limited literature on the discipline, the works of Caillois, Huizinga, Piaget and a

few others will provide us with some useful insight. To begin with, we need to stress out the

difference between “game” and “play”. The fact that such a distinction exists in the English

language is quite useful and as David Parlett points out in The Oxford History of Board

Games, not all languages separate the two concepts. While as it turns out the relationship

between play and game is quite a complex one, with play being both a larger and a smaller

term than "game," depending on the way it is framed (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004), Walther

(2003: p.1) provides us with a brief and useful distinction:

“Play is an open-ended territory in which make-believe and world-building are

crucial factors. Games are confined areas that challenge the interpretation and

optimizing of rules and tactics - not to mention time and space.”

Walther continues and distinguishes between "play-mode" and "game-mode." If we accept

gaming as something that takes place on a higher level, structurally as well as temporally,

then:

“[...] when it comes to play the installation of the form of the play-world -- non-

play-world distinction must, performatively, feed back on itself during play:

continually rearticulating that formal distinction within the play-world, so as to

sustain the internal ordering of the play-world. However, in the game-mode, this

rearticulation is already presupposed as a temporal and spatial incarceration that


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protects the rule-binding structure of a particular game from running off target. In

other words: games should not be play; but that does not imply that they do not

require play”.

Consequently he suggests that in the play-mode the deep fascination lies in the oscillation

between play and non-play, whereas game-mode presses forward one's tactical capabilities to

sustain the balance between a structured and an un-structured space. In play-mode one does

not want to fall back into reality (although there is always the risk of doing so). In game-

mode it is usually a matter of climbing upwards to the next level and not losing sight of

structure (Walther, 2003).

Figure 4: Play Mode & Game Mode (adapted by Walther 2003)

The reason why this simultaneous division between and intermingling of play and games is

important for the study of computer games is because it ultimately touches upon the concept

of gameplay. “The player gets immersed in the playing-mood that is needed to get into the

game in the first place and identify with her avatar but can also be caught up in a certain area

of the game where one begins to question its criteria for structure” (Walther, 2003: p.1). The

plot in that case plays the role of the equilibrist between playing and gaming while gaming.


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If we were to more elaborately approach the term game we could say that every formal game

can be seen as a system of ends and means where means refer to procedural rules of how to

manipulate the equipment, and gaming consequently is a combination of ends, means, rules,

equipment and manipulative action (Parlett, 1999: p.3). Despite their different goals, all

games aim to the same purpose: the amusement of the player. Colourfully said, “Fun alone is

the approved reason for playing [games]” (Goffman, 1961: p.17).

Huizinga (1955) in his groundbreaking work focuses in the play element in culture and

doesn’t make a distinction between play and game. He argues that play is older than culture

itself and that it is temporally and spatially confined, meaning that the player has to abide the

rules that govern play behaviour. According to his definition of play:

“[Play] is a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as

being "not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and

utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be

gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space

according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of

social groupings, which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress

their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.” (Huizinga,

1955: p.13)

Caillois (1961: p.12) on the other hand does identify two concepts in the typology of “jeux”.

In his seminal work Man, Play and Games, he proposed a division of games in four main

rubrics namely agon, alea, mimicry and linx, depending upon whether, in the games under

consideration, the role of competition, chance, simulation or vertigo is dominant. Within each

of these classes he then introduced a continuum between two poles upon which each game

could be classified. At one extreme rests “[...] an almost indivisible principle, common to


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diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind

of uncontrolled fantasy that can be designated by the term paidea”. At the opposite extreme

we encounter an effort to bind this frolicsome exuberance with “[...] arbitrary, imperative,

and purposely tedious conventions [...] in order to make it more uncertain of attaining its

desired effect. This later principle is completely impractical, even though it requires an ever

greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity” (Caillois, 1961: p.13). He defined this

second component as ludus.

Based on the above classification we can call carousel as paidea and poker or chess as ludus.

While we can describe ludus, that can be mapped to the English word game, as a more

strictly defined form of play that has an explicit set of rules, and a defined space and time,

according to Frasca (1999) anthropologist Daniel Vidart shows that the assumption that

paidea, that can be mapped to the English term play, has no rules while ludus does, is wrong.

Vidart suggests that even in simple mimicry games e.g. when a child pretends to be a pilot,

the player does follow a rule, that indicates e.g. how a pilot should behave, and acts

accordingly. Frasca continues his reasoning and identifies an answer to this confusion in the

work of the French philosopher Andre Lalande. Lalande differentiates the two not on whether

rules are existent or not but based on the outcome of the activity. In games, there is an

outcome. Someone wins or loses; in plays there is not. Frasca used Lalande’s deductions and

correlated them with Caillois’s neologisms. He then defined:

Paidea as "Prodigality of physical or mental activity which has no immediate useful

objective, nor defined objective, and whose only reason to be is based in the pleasure

experimented by the player".

Ludus as a particular kind of paidea that constitutes an "activity organized under a

system of rules that defines a victory or a defeat, a gain or a loss".


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He consequently recognised two types of rules: paidea rules and ludus rules. Paidea rules are

established to play the game, whereas ludus rules are rules established to determine win or

loss. Understanding the game rules is central for understanding games and subsequently

digital games. It is also a prerequisite for approaching the hidden structure of games that is

simulation.

3.2 Rules

According to Salen & Zimmerman (2004) rules are the logical underbelly beneath the

experiential surface of any game; and their qualities can be identified as such:

Rules limit player action. The chief way that rules operate is to limit the

activities of players. Rules are "sets of instructions," and following those

instructions means doing what the rules require and not doing something else

instead.

Rules are explicit and unambiguous. Rules are complete and lack any ambiguity.

Similarly, rules have to be totally explicit in what they convey.

Rules are shared by all players. In a game with many players all players share

the same set of rules. If one player is operating under a set of rules different than

the others, the game can break down. It is not enough that rules are explicitly

and unambiguously stated: the interpretation of the rules must also be shared.

Rules are fixed. The rules of a game are fixed and do not change as a game is

played. There are many games in which changing the rules is part of the game in

some way; however, the way rules can be modified is always highly regulated.


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Rules are binding. Rules are meant to be followed. Part of the "magic" of the

magic circle6 is that the rules contain their own authority. The reason why the

rules of a game can remain fixed and shared is because they are ultimately

binding.

Rules are repeatable. Rules are repeatable from game to game and are portable

between sets of different players.

Salen & Zimmerman continue their analysis and propose a three-part system for

understanding what game rules are and how they operate:

Operational rules are the "rules of play" of a game. They are what we normally

think of as rules: the guidelines players require in order to play. The operational

rules are usually synonymous with the written-out "rules" that accompany board

games and other non-digital games.

The constituative rules of a game are the underlying formal structures that exist

"below the surface" of the rules presented to players. These formal structures are

logical and mathematical.

Implicit rules are the "unwritten rules" of a game. These rules concern etiquette,

good sportsmanship, and other implied rules of proper game behaviour. However,

implicit rules can change from game to game and from context to context. For

6 The term “magic circle” was coined by Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element

in Culture: “All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or

ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the

“consecrated spot” cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic

circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function

play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are

temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Huizinga, 1955:

p.10).


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example, you might let a young child "take back" a foolish move in a game of

Chess, but you probably wouldn't let your opponent do the same in a hotly

contested grudge match.

Susana Tosca (2003) studied quests in digital games and defined them as “the array of soft

rules that describe what the player has to do in a particular storytelling situation”. What she

proposed was that two kinds of rules exist in a game; hard rules and soft rules. Hard rules are

the rules making up the game-world, namely, objects properties and behaviours and

gameplay dynamics, including the final goal of the game. The soft rules are the concrete

objectives in smaller strings of actions, in a way, how the hard rules are particularly

implemented in short sequences that the player can take individually. For example in the case

of EA’s Crysis, the five different modes of your suit or the properties of water (your weapons

do not work underwater) are hard rules while the requirement that the player needs to disable

an antenna or blow up an enemy tank before advancing to the next level is considered a soft

rule.

Miguel Sicart (2008) in his study of game mechanics considers rules as the general or

particular properties of the game system and its agents. He argues that all objects in games

have properties that are either rules or are determined by rules. These rules are evaluated by

an algorithm that relates the current state of the game and the properties of the objects with a

number of conditions that consequently can modify the game state.

3.3 Simulation

Traditional media are representational. What they do is produce descriptions of traits as well

as sequences of events (narratives). Digital games nevertheless, are not based just on


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representation but also, on a different semiotical structure known as simulation; in reality

they represent the first complex simulational media for the masses (Frasca, 2003b). The

concept of simulation lies at the intersection or representation and dynamic systems. As

simulations, games create representations but they do so in a different way than traditional

media: through the process of play itself (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). The representation

that emerges out of the process of playing is called procedural representation and can grow

directly out of the rules of the game, while the players interact with them through play (op.

cit.).

The digital game is in its essence the art of simulation; the hermeneutic other of narratives; an

alternative bottom up mode of discourse where stories are top-down and preplanned (Aarseth,

2004). In fact, it is the dynamic aspect of games that can create and support a consistent

gameworld. After such a simulation -a rule-based gameworld- is built, it can be used to tell

stories while stories can only contain simulations in a metaphorical sense.

According to Frasca (2003b) there exist three different ideological levels in simulations. The

first one has to do with representation and events and is common between simulation and

narrative. It includes the characteristics of objects and characters, backgrounds, settings and

cut-scenes. The second level is the one of manipulation rules: what the player can and cannot

do in the game. The third level involves the goal rules: what the player must do in order to

win. It includes all the objectives imposed by the developers that must be achieved in order

for the player to advance and eventually finish the game. The forth ideological level deals

with meta-rules. In this level we find all the editors that are included in some games and

allow the players to partially modify the three levels stated above by building “mods” or

modified versions of the original games including new maps, new skins for avatars etc.


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3.4 An introduction to ludology

Ludus (latin word for game) and logos (greek word for speech and reason) gave birth to the

term Ludology. The term has historically been used to describe the study of games. Ludology

includes digital games theory, but it goes beyond it to include all games and forms of play.

Despite the common belief that the term ludology has been coined by the renowned game

scholars Espen Aarseth and Gonzalo Frasca the truth is that its first appearance was in an

article back in 1982, although with a different meaning (Frasca, 2003a). However, the term

started gaining acceptance around 1999, after Frasca’s publication Ludology meets

Narratology which was followed by Jesper Juul’s “What computer games can and cannot do”

(Frasca, 2003a). The term was introduced by Frasca at that point for describing a yet non-

existent discipline that would focus on the study of games and digital games in particular.

Many scholars, as we already remarked, felt at that point that narratology which was

dominating in the study of digital games did not have the required set of theoretical tools in

order to study such games efficiently.

From the ludologists’ point of view digital games are perceived, in simple terms, as

remediated games and not presentations or narratives (Eskelinen, 2001). According to

Eskelinen (2006), a story, a backstory or a plot is not enough for considering a digital game a

type of narrative. Simplistically put, a sequence of events enacted constitutes a drama, a

sequence of events taking place a performance, a sequence of events recounted a narrative

and a sequence of events produced by manipulating equipment and following formal rules

constitutes a game. Regarding the existence of characters similar to those in drama and

narratives, Eskelinen believes that such characters, when they are there, they are entirely

functional and combinatorial (a means to an end) and don’t act as traditional narrators,

characters, actors, or directors like their supposed counterparts in others fields do. Also,


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based on Gerarld Prince’s and Gerard Gennete’s definition of narrative (there must be two

things or components to constitute a narrative: a temporal sequence of events, namely a plot

and a narrative situation with both narrators and narratees) he argues that we can’t find

narrative situations in games, and when we do they are at a service of an ergodic dominant.

Moreover, according to Aarseth’s typology of cybertexts (Aarseth, 1997: p.62-65) the

dominant user function in literature, film and theater is interpretative, while in games

configurative. In a more broad sense, in art one has to configure in order to be able to

interpret while in games one must interpert in order to be able to configure and proceed from

the beggining to the winning or some other situation (Eskelinen, 2006). Aarseth (2001)

identifies another differentiating aspect of games and argues that while the old mass media

were able to create mass auduences with shared values and sustained markets, these

communities had no direct communication and existed in an imaginary level. On the other

hand in multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Ultima Online the aesthetic and the

social parts are truly integrated and “[...] this could be regarded as the greatest innovation in

audience structure since the invention of the choir, thousands of years ago. To see computer

games as merely the newest self-reinvention of Hollywood, as some do, is to disregard those

socio-aesthetic aspects and also to force outdated paradigms onto a new cultural object”

(Aarseth, 2001: p.1).

[THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK] Warwick Business School

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4. Theoretical Framework

The framework suggested in this chapter is a tool for game analysis. The volume of data

collected from the framework’s application to various cases can be subsequently used for a

qualitative content analysis of digital games. Content analysis describes a family of analytic

approaches that ranges from impressionistic, intuitive, interpretive analyses to systematic,

strict textual analyses (Rosengren, 1981). Qualitative content analysis is one of numerous

research methods used to analyze text data and its aim is to provide knowledge and

understanding of the phenomenon under study. It is defined as a research method for the

subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification

process of coding and identifying themes or patterns (Downe-Wamboldt, 1992).

Through such an analysis the researchers will be able to identify patterns across the games

under study that might reveal e.g. elements of successful games when correlated with e.g.

game sales.

Like we argued in the previous chapters digital games are a hybrid of story and game. When

we refer to story we refer to the total implied game world history as determined by the pre-

designed potential of the game in interaction with the game play actions of the player. When

it comes to game we should consider its rules. The rules give context to the game and provide

the basis for the simulation that will take part. In this study the rules will be considered as the

middle layer; the glue that holds together the gameworld within which the story takes place.

The gameworld on the other hand will be considered as the simulated world of the game; the

virtual playground. For the player, a digital game is indeed a virtual playground; a

playground within which many different activities can be performed. Simulation in its

essence is of course rules, but in the analysis of this layer we will focus only on the


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manifestation of those rules as world elements. And when we will discuss the game system

layer, we will focus on the rules that affect the player’s experience, as the game mechanics,

the interface – input devices-, the controls or the goals and not the programming rules for

example, that are found in the code of the game. The software code that determines how light

hits an object, thus creating shadow is of no value to the player (while playing). The player is

only interested for instance in the fact that there is a game mechanic that allows her to hide in

that projected shadow.

It is not necessary of course for all those elements to be equally present in every game. For

example, the embedded game story encountered in digital games ranges from being

completely abstract or nonexistent (e.g. Sim City) to being very structured, embedded and

linear (e.g. Syberia).

By adopting this approach we don’t mean to demote the importance of technology (namely

the software programming, which is essentially the reason digital games exist in the first

place), or other elements that were not included in this approach like the socio-psychological

or cultural elements. Such elements are not included at least directly in the framework for

mainly two reasons. Firstly, the average player, like we said, is usually unaware of all the

complex processes and state of the art programming that goes on in the background while she

is engaged in action. Secondly, while emotions, psychology and generally the effects that a

game induces on a player during play, as well as after the play is over are not entirely caused

by the game itself. The way the player feels while playing a game is obviously influenced by

her psychological and emotional state before she engaged in gaming as well as by other

environmental factors. The game thus, works as an amplifier or a moderator for the player’s

emotions and is really difficult to directly register such qualities of games and map them on

player satisfaction levels objectively. Hitherto, although there is progress, there is still great

room for research towards this direction.


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Before proceeding with the formulation of our framework it is necessary to outline the

existing frameworks in the literature. So far, a few authors attempted to develop a framework

for the analysis of digital games and among them are Fabricatore et al. (2002), Martin Owen

(2004), Consalvo and Dutton (2006), Koznack (2002), Brooker (2001), Björk and

Holopainen (2005), Malliet (2007), Lindley (2003) and Aarseth (2003). Fabricatore et al.

(2002) approach the analysis of the content of video games from a game design perspective.

They combined a grounded theory approach with a user-centred approach that is rooted in

usability research, and proposed a set of guidelines for the development of games that have a

high degree of playability.

Owen (2004) proposes an anatomy of games as an experimental tool for describing the

components from which games are constructed. The anatomy is based on six top-level

categories of game components: game aims; game location; game pieces/players; the means

of making progress in the game; game language; and the time frames of the games.

Consalvo & Dutton (2006) provide a template that will help game analysts to approach games

in a way that is systematic but not rigidly so. They suggest four areas of analysis that should

be explored if a researcher is to properly study game content beyond the level of

representation: object inventory, interface study, interaction map, and gameplay log.

Konzack (2002) suggests a typology for computer game analysis from a structural point of

view and identifies seven content categories: hardware, program code, functionality, game

play, meaning, referentiality, and socio-culture.

Brooker (2001), through his case study of the game Jetman provides an early template for

analysis and focuses at the elements of institution, authorship, character and narrative, genre

and socio-political connotations and remakes.


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Björk and Holopainen (2005) present us a framework for describing games based on the

activities that the players perform within them but from a game designer perspective. They

identify the basic components of games (physical and logical) that compose the first order of

game design and can be later used to describe the second order concepts, the game patterns.

The framework divides game components into four categories: holistic, boundary, temporal

and structural: the holistic components describe how the activity of playing a game is

separated from other activities, the boundary components limit the actions of the player

within the game, the temporal components describe the flow of the game and the structural

components define the physical and logical elements necessary for containing and manipulate

the game state.

Malliet (2007) performed a qualitative content analysis in a selection of mature-rated video

games according to the principles of ludology by developing and using an analysis scheme

that takes into account aspects of simulation in addition to aspects of representation.

Lindley (2003) proposes a taxonomy system for game analysis and design where distinctions

are drawn between game forms and functions based upon narrative, repetitive gameplay and

simulation. His aim is to provide a heuristic and practical tool for addressing different design

issues, and thus save time in proposal writing and design meetings, while providing higher

level categories for identifying where more detailed design methods may be applied.

Finally, Aarseth (2003) identifies gameplay, game-structure and game-world as the general

elements that we find in “games in virtual environments” and suggests three main ways of

gaining knowledge about a game: one way is by studying the design, rules and mechanics of

the game e.g. by talking to the developers of the game; a second way is by observing others

play or read their reports and reviews, although such an approach presupposes that their


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knowledge is representative and their play competent; and finally by playing the game

ourselves.

4.1 Game Story

In this layer we analyse the narrative element of digital games. As we already noted, this can

be either an embedded or emergent narrative. The embedded narrative is consisted of the

game story that is essentially unravelled to the player through the main story arc and takes the

form of objectives, quests and sub quests, dialogues and other sources like the game manual.

The discourse level or the plot of the game includes everything that is depicted on the screen

during a gaming session. This level is particularly useful in cases where there is not an

embedded narrative available for analysis which is usually the case with simulation and

sports games like Sim City or Pro Evolution Soccer. The later analysis can be performed with

the use of a variety of tools provided by narratology according to the scope of the research.

4.2 Game System

The next layer of the framework is the game system. The game system involves all those

elements that transform the simulated fictive world into a game, namely the game mechanics,

interface, information, goals and control scheme.

Game Mechanics. According to Lundgren and Björk (2003, p. 4), game mechanics are “any

part of the rule system of a game that covers one, and only one, possible kind of interaction

that takes place during the game, be it general or specific” and that “mechanics are regarded

as a way to summarize game rules”. Järvinen (2008: p. 254) argues that mechanics are

"means to guide the player into particular behaviour by constraining the space of possible


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plans to attain goals" and considers them as "a particular set of rules available to the player

in the form of prescribed causal relations between game elements and their consequence to

particular game states". A game mechanic can be either the response of the player’s avatar to

the pressing of a button (e.g jump, duck) or can be a series of inputs that result in a more

complicated action like take-cover-behind-that-car. Gears of War is a great example of a

game that advanced and made heavy used of the so called cover mechanics.

Interface. In the case of digital games where there is no direct access to the game system, the

interface is the medium through which the players interact with the system (Järvinen, 2008).

The interface includes all those input devices and peripherals that are used by the players

during game play.

Information. The information element refers to all the scores, statistics, attributes etc that the

game keeps track off in order to support the gameplay. Such pieces of information can be

quantitative or qualitative in nature and are usually visible to the player through on screen

bars, tabs or menus.

Goals. If we define goal as an aim or objective (Oatley & Jenkins 1996: p. 378) we could

argue that achieving a goal requires overcoming a challenge through the performance of

certain actions. In digital games the nature of goals varies significantly and so do the required

actions for their achievement. Such requirements could be the development of a set of

cognitive abilities, the gathering of resources or a mere “killing spree”. What Oatley (1992:

p.24) suggests is that a goal induces a series of actions on (in our case) the player that in turn

produce effects in the world. That means that the player tries to achieve a goal by performing

certain actions, through the use of available game mechanics that eventually produce effects

in the gameworld. Juul (2003) in order to link the player's relation to the game splits the

concept of goals into three distinct components, namely: 1) Valorization of the possible


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outcomes: That some outcomes are described as positive, some as negative. 2) Player effort:

That the player has to do something. 3) Attachment of the player to an aspect of the outcome.

That refers to the player agreeing to be happy if she wins the game, unhappy if she loses the

game. This is part of what may be termed as the game contract and happens even in a game

of pure chance.

Goals can be either endogenous (explicitly stated as being part of the game) or exogenous

(not being formally embedded in the game) (Björk & Holopainen, 2003). In more complex

games goals are often split into smaller subgoals, either to structure the game play (into levels

or narrative structures) or to assist towards completing the goal and their existence can be

either predefined by the game or be created implicitly by players (Björk & Holopainen,

2003).

Control Scheme. The control scheme includes all the ways by which the player can control

the game agents assigned to her. That includes the limitations in movement/navigation,

controller mappings and camera angles/framing.

4.3 Gameworld

The gameworld is consisted of two main groups of elements: the environment and the

components. The components refer to all the possessions, resources and representatives

(characters) that exist in the gameworld and they are important for mainly two reasons: they

provide a source of identification for the player, meaning they are the referencing point for

the player’s motivation to play the game, and provide the player with challenges in the form

of adversaries, obstacles, resources or possessions. (Järvinen, 2008 p.65-66).


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The possessions in the game can be analysed based on itemisation. Itemisation can be defined

as the relationship between balance and uniqueness of items (Varilias, 2009). The items

found in digital games can be used either as simple tools or as a sort of customisation that a

player can use to see progress they have made. More specifically, itemization is the process

of defining what an item does. According to Varilias (2009) itemization most typically exists

on the following continuum:

Figure 5: The itemisation continuum, adapted from Varilias (2009)

While a variety of available items seems ideal, balancing becomes difficult; more items mean

more characteristics to balance. Most of the itemisation systems that have been developed so

far can be categorized as one of two systems (Varilias, 2009):

I. Intrinsic Itemization

In this system items are imbued with intrinsic statistics and possibly several statistics that the

player can alter (for instance, in games like Fallout 3 and World of Warcraft). Massive

numbers of items are available, but a relatively small number of stats lead to homogeneity in

later stages of the game. As the complexity of a game increases, it is increasingly difficult to

provide the player with a variety of tools.

Simplicity of Balance, Homogeneity

Less Fun

Difficulty in Balancing

More Fun

Complexity of Balance, Variety


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II. Static Itemization

In this system items are entirely unique due to possessing unique mechanics, but absent of

hard statistics (for instance, in games like Call of Duty and Super Mario). A relatively small

and limited number of items are available and as such although there is a variety in

uniqueness terms, there is homogeneity between players rather than items. This system is

absent of any customization or flavour; it is static and unchanging.

One main difference between the two systems is how items are upgraded. A key difference

between differentiating these systems is how items are upgraded. The upgrade system in

static itemisation boosts those stats that are otherwise unalterable, while in intrinsic

itemisation, there is some kind of linear increase in the existing stats of the items (Varilias,

2009).

The environment is essentially the virtual space of the game; it’s the parallel universe that the

player escapes to when she incarnates as her avatar. When we focus on it we are able to see

its aesthetics and make-believe (Konzack, 2002). It includes the castles, the dungeons, the

urban streets, the jungles and the islands, the space stations and the planet surfaces that we

usually encounter in modern digital games.

Usually the game environment is built in such a way so as to limit the player that trends on it

to certain paths, events and even atmosphere (Järvinen, 2008). This is achieved mainly

through the use of spatial organisation and spatial design (Chen & Brown, 2001).

The elements of analysis related to the game environment are:

Topology and level design. Level design in digital games refers to the creation of levels, or

otherwise locations, stages etc. While other games take place in real spaces or do not involve

any particular space at all, digital games take place in virtual spaces (Owen, 2004). Virtual


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spaces include audiovisual screens, boards or 3D terrains and dungeons. According to Pagán

(2001b), the most important elements of level design are:

o Balance: All balance is based on vertical and horizontal axes. Getting equal

weight on each side of an axis makes a space in or out of balance.

o Scale: Scale is the size of an item in comparison to its surroundings.

o Proportion: Proportion is the size of things compared to themselves.

o Emphasis: A point of emphasis or focal point is the item or place that catches

your visual attention upon first glance.

o Rhythm: A repetition of similar items in a room or space that move the eye

from one area to another. Rhythm can be accomplished with colour, pattern,

texture, lighting, or style and character.

o Harmony: Harmony is when a common element exists that binds all parts

together. Like a common denominator, this element can be a colour, pattern,

texture, detail, or the character in a room.

Pagán (2001a, p. 4) also argues that “[...] a well-designed level takes into consideration a

whole set of requirements, such as user interaction and navigation, which are inherent to the

purpose they serve”. A well-designed game should therefore encompass all those features,

including the directional and responsive feedback mechanisms that will assist the player

interact with the environment, and also how all of these elements will tie together to form a

cohesive environment, albeit without compromising its aesthetic appeal.

Theme/referentiality. The theme element is essentially “[...] what game designers use in

transforming the information systems specified in the rule set into systems that give birth to

fantasy, drama, and other factors contributing to player experiences” (Järvinen, 2008: p. 78).

In order to achieve that, games follow concepts and themes from other areas of popular


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culture like science fiction, fantasy, horror films and sports and borrow signs, ornaments or

game structures that have originally been used in other media.

Graphics. The graphics element includes all the backgrounds, 2D or 3D models, the textures,

lighting, shading and everything else that is usually generated by the rendering engine of the

game. Graphics are directly connected to the aesthetics of the game and play a catalytic role

when it comes to player immersion, realism and atmosphere creation.

Physics. The physics of the game include all the simulation rules that are developed with the

use of a physics engine, which is a core part of the game engine, and alongside graphics play

an important role in adding realism and evoke sophisticated gameplay.

Sound. Sound is another important element that adds to the overall gaming experience and

assists gameplay tremendously (e.g. being able to identify the source of a sound in a 3D

environment when using a surround system). The sound category includes the elements of

music, sound effects, the simulation of sound environments and the use or not of EAX

(environmental audio extensions) or other digital signal processing presets for audio.

Game Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Game artificial intelligence refers to techniques used in

computer and video games to produce a degree of intelligence in the behaviour of non-player

characters (NPCs). The most common uses of A.I. include pathfinding (the method for

determining how to get an NPC from one point on a map to another), aiming, responding etc.

A.I. adds heavily on the realism of a game as well as on supporting a smoother gameplay.


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Figure 5: The three layer framework for digital game analysis

[CASE STUDY ANALYSIS & DISCUSSION] Warwick Business School

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5. Case study Analysis & Discussion


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5.1 Game Reading: The Witcher

“The Witcher represents the pinnacle of storytelling in role-playing games, shattering the line

between good and evil with a world where moral ambiguity reigns. In a beautiful, rich game

universe created by artists first, technology second, the player becomes his own hero in an epic,

action-packed narrative uniquely defined by his actions. Returning to the roots of the role-playing

genre with a fresh and modern approach, The Witcher emphasizes story and character

development in a vibrant world, while incorporating tactically-deep real-time combat like no game

before it.”

Info about the game from the CD Projekt game fact sheet

The Witcher is a role-playing game developed for the PC by CD Projekt RED STUDIO and

published by CD Projekt in Poland and Atari for the rest of the world. The game is set in the

realm of the bestselling fantasy saga by the same title, conjured to life by Andrzej Sapkowski

– a Polish contemporary writer. It was officially released in Europe and North America in

October 2007 and was highly appraised by the gaming press earning 75 awards and achieving

an average score of 8.1 based on 56 official reviews. Nevertheless, the game left the

impression of a flawed gem due to some issues concerning performance, dialogue translation

from Polish to English, loading times and more. CD Projekt saw to this and one year later

released The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The enhancements introduced in this version

included more than 5000 lines of re-written and re-recorded dialogue, more than 200 new

dialogue animations, a new character differentiation system for NPCs, an enhanced inventory

with improved alchemy, reduced loading times, improved combat responsiveness, improved

engine performance, dramatically improved character models, speedier interface and a pair of

new stand alone adventures. CD Projekt spent $11 million to develop the game and its

Enhanced Edition and as of March 6, 2009, the game had sold 1.2 million copies worldwide.


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The reason why we use this particular game as a case study is the fact that it has all the

elements that we aforementioned in the framework description, it has been exceptionally

developed and can be considered as one of the most sophisticated games of the last years. In

order to do justice to the game we experienced the game ourselves by playing it through

several times, each time following a different course of action and making different moral

choices (an important characteristic of the game) whenever needed. The world of The

Witcher is not a typical black and white fairytale world; every choice the player needs to

make falls in the spectrum of grey and influences future events in various ways.

For the research purposes, the game was played in a 1680x1050 resolution with all graphics

settings set to the maximum and a framerate constantly above 30fps in order to witness the

full potential of its graphics. Table 2 shows system specifications in more detail:

Minimum Requirements System used for the Analysis

Microsoft® Windows® XP Service Pack 2, Vista Microsoft® Windows® 7

Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon 64 +2800 Intel Core2Duo 3.0GHz

1 GB RAM for Microsoft® Windows® XP / 1536 MB

for Microsoft® Windows® Vista

4GB RAM

128 MB Video RAM or greater with DirectX9 Vertex

Shader/ Pixel Shader 2.0 support (NVIDIA GeForce

6600 or ATI Radeon 9800 or better)

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT (512MB Video RAM,

DirectX10)

DirectX 9.0c compliant soundcard DirectX 10, EAX 5.0 soundcard

Stereo Speakers 5.1 Surround Speakers

Table 2: Computer System Specifications

5.2 Applying the Framework

As stated before, the purpose of this case study is not to provide an exhaustive analysis of the

game – and as such, The Witcher would produce a tome of data-, but to provide a basis for


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the application of the framework in relevant games and measure its dynamics to demonstrate

its merits, limitations and overall usefulness.

5.2.1 Layer One: Game Story

As we have stated in the first chapter, game story is different from game plot. The game story

refers to the embedded narrative and not in the one that emerges through the interaction of the

player with the game. Since The Witcher possesses a rich embedded story will focus on this

since it provides more room for naratologic analysis. The embedded story of The Witcher

starts from page 8 of the manual where the player can read a page from the Spellmaker by

Andrzej Sapkowski. The passage starts like this:

“Later, people said that the stranger came from the north, through the Ropers’

Gate. He came on foot, leading a heavily laden horse by the bridle. It was late in

the day; the stalls of the ropers and saddlers were closed, and the street was

empty. Although it was hot, the man had a black coat thrown over his shoulders.

He drew attention.

The stranger wasn’t old, yet his hair was almost completely white. Under his coat

he wore a worn leather jerkin with ties at the neck and shoulders. When he

removed his coat, everyone saw the sword belted behind his back. There was

nothing remarkable in that; in Vizima almost everyone went armed; but no one

carried his sword behind him like a bow or quiver”.

This way, immediately the player gets a glimpse of the hero she is going to impersonate

during play. The confirmation comes with the next piece of story and through an eight minute


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long and beautifully animated intro movie at the beginning of the game. A narrator introduces

us to what we are about to watch:

“His name was Gerald of Rivia. He was a Witcher, a professional monster slayer.

An unusual contract to lift the curse that held a monarch’s daughter...It was

enough to spend a night with the princess. Dusk till dawn. If only she were not a

deadly beast, a striga...the traitor responsible for the curse became the bait.”

The narrator then pauses while the player watches the main character (Gerald) getting ready

for his confrontation with the striga. Gerald fights with the striga, reluctant to use his silver

sword. He ties the striga with a silver chain, which she breaks free off, despite silver being an

antithesis to monsters of magic. She is eventually scared off when Geralt uses his sorcery to

project the hate and malice in her own mind back at her. Geralt settles down in the double

coffin to wait for morning. In the morning, he sees an ordinary little girl who is lying on the

floor. Leaning over her, he sees too late that her eyes are open. Using what remained of her

talons, the striga slashes Geralt's throat.

All goes black and the narrator resumes:

“Though gravely wounded the Witcher lifted the curse and gained fame. The

world changed with the coming of the Great War: the time of the sword and axe,

the time of disdain. Geralt of Rivia disappeared. All that forgotten...but that’s

another story”.

What follows is another cut-scene where we are taken to the present. The narrator resumes:

“The northern kingdoms nourished their wounds for five years after the Great

War. Plague and famine raged. Death toll unknown. The few surviving elven and

dwarven units sought refuge amidst forests where they prepared for a final


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desperate fight. Abominable beasts rule backwoods, highways and former

battlefields alike. In cities and villages, folk were left wondering: what have

happened to the Witchers? The blue mountains in the north of Kaedwen. The year,

1270. Five years after the Great War.”

During the cut scene we watch Gerald wondering all alone in the wild a dark and rainy night,

exhausted, hearing voices in his head and by the time he collapses he is found by a group of

people that seem to recognise him and tranfer him to Kaer Morhen, the grand headquarters of

the Witchers’ guild yet he remembers nothing.

As soon as Gerald recovers from his mysterious wounds the fort is attacked by bandits. They

are accompanied by a sorcerer named Savolla that controls a pet frightener, a mysterious

mage and “The Professor”. While Savolla and the bandits unleash mayhem in the courtyard,

“The Professor” alongside the mage, that seems to lead the raid, and a small group of bandits

accompanying them head to the Witcher’s lab where their secret mutagens were kept. Gerald

is then sent to defend the laboratory by Vessamir, the elder leader. When he reaches the

Laboratory though, he realises that the mages have blocked it with a magic barrier, so he

needs the help of Triss, a fellow mage to get in. When he gets back out in the courtyard all

the main characters are gathered and discuss how they will deal with both problems. Geralt is

then presented with two options: either stay in the courtyard with Vessamir and fight the

frightener or head back to the lab with Triss and deal with the mages.

Independently of Geralt’s decision, after the fight the Professor and his companion kill Leo, a

fellow Witcher, and escape with some of the secrets. During the fight, Triss tries to confront

the Professor and gets seriously injured. Gerald learns that Lambert wants him to collect

some ingredients for the potion to cure her and to slay any remaining bandits sneaking around

the stronghold.


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Once Lambert tells Gerald where all the ingredients are, he goes out to collect them and when

he does so he creates the potion. While he does so, Triss moves to her bedchamber. Once

Gerald meets Triss and gives her the potion that cures her, she’s very grateful and asks him to

stay with her. Gerald can at this point either stay and talk to her or not. When he does so she

rewards him personally. The next day the remaining of the witchers and Triss gather for

Leo’s funeral. They make an oath to reclaim the mutagens and avenge Leo’s death. In order

to avoid attracting attention they decide to split up and search for information about the

mysterious organisation that attacked them, baring a symbol of a salamander, in the four

corners of the earth. Geralt decides to go south since the King of Temeria owes him a favour

for releasing his daughter from her curse (the striga shown during the intro movie). This is

the end of the prologue.

The structure of the story has 5 acts, without taking into account the prologue and epilogue of

the game. Each of the acts includes a variety of primary and secondary quests that combined

construct the whole story regarding the adventures of Geralt of Rivia. The Witcher uses the

systems of quests in order to help the player advance and keep the story and sequence of

events structured. It includes a wide set of primary and secondary quests where the primary

ones follow a specific sequence and the secondary can be completed at the player’s

convenience but only for as long as the location of the quest is available to the player. The

game has 35 primary and 67 secondary quests.

All the events that took place in the prologue bring to mind Propp’s initial situation section

that we discussed in the first chapter. They are the events placed prior to the development of

the tale itself that introduce important characters and present a pre-narrative graphical

representation of the different components of the tale.


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In the same vein the researcher can dissect the game and remove the narrative layer for

analysis. The sound, rich and branching story of The Witcher, supports an in depth

narratologic analysis.

5.2.2 Layer Two: Game System

5.2.2.1 Game Mechanics

The Witcher is a game rich in game mechanics and an excellent example of such is its

combat system. While the combat itself is rather simple since all you have to do is click on an

opponent for Geralt to attack, the attack can be made by utilising different game mechanics.

In order to enhance variety the player can choose between three different attack modes based

on the opponent they are facing, as well as other circumstantial or optional diversifications,

such as “special” and “finishing blows”. For example in special circumstances, the player can

perform finishing blows known as coups de grace, killing foes immediately and in

spectacular fashion. Coups de grace can be executed against foes that have been stunned or

knocked down using a Sign (magic spell) or a special combat feature. By clicking on stunned

or knocked down opponents before they regain full awareness or rise to their feet, Geralt

attacks and perform a coup de grace.

These were just some of the many game mechanics that exist in The Witcher. A careful

analysis of those reveals important elements of gameplay that ultimately help towards player

satisfaction or resentment.


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5.2.2.2 Interface

The interface used for playing the Witcher is a personal computer (since the release of the

console version is not yet officially out) and its peripherals. The interface input devices can

be either a keyboard and mouse (intended for more experienced players) or mouse alone. The

player is presented with the liberty of choosing her style of play early in the game.

5.2.2.3 Information

During play, the player is provided with a great amount of information regarding the game’s

different aspects. For example, a quick view at the game’s GUI (Graphical User Interface)

reveals information regarding player status (vitality, endurance, toxicity, experience gained),

non-combat mode, weapon of choice and attack style, potion quickslots, available magical

abilities, as well as the time and location indicator and game panels. More information is

provided to the player through special menus like the hero tab, the quest tab, the inventory

etc.

Figure 6: Sources of Information found in the upper left and right corner of the screen.


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5.2.2.4 Goals

There are different kinds of goals for the player to set in The Witcher. Those goals range

from the primary quests which are obligatory for finishing the game, to character level up,

weapon upgrade, the various minigames included (e.g. dice poker) and others. While

character level up or weapon upgrades are needed for advancing in the game and face harder

opponents, there is not a specific character level required in order for the game to be finished.

That means that it is at the player’s ease to determine the level she wants her character to

attain.

5.2.2.5 Control Scheme

As far as the camera angle is concerned, the game has three different camera angles for the

player to choose from: one for an overview perspective of the player and environment (High

Isometric Mode), one for a closer and more interactive perspective (Low Isometric Mode) and

one directly over the shoulder (left or right) of the player character (Over-the-ShoulderMode).

As far as navigation is concerned, in the High and Low Isometric modes, movement is based

on a point-and-click system. Left-clicking both moves Geralt into position and performs

attack sequences and special maneuvers. In OTS mode, movement and special maneuvers are

keyboard-controlled. Mouse movement controls the camera rotation and foes are targeted by

the use of the centrally placed indicator and clicking initiates the attack. In this mode, combat

is more dynamic and exciting, but provides no tactical advantage over combat in the

isometric modes. The right mouse button is used in combat to cast a sign. By right-clicking

on anything - the ground, an enemy, an object – initiates the sign launch at the target,

including special manoeuvres like jump or roll, leap or spin and quick turn that can be used in

various situations accordingly, enhancing the tactical options and freedom of the character.


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Lastly, concerning the key mappings on the keyboard, a very positive element is the fact that

there are shortcuts for every icon on the GUI or any menu that the player wants to invoke.

The keyboard can be also used for navigation (W, S, A, D in the keypad) if the keyboard-

mouse game style is chosen by the player as we’ve already seen. Spacebar plays an important

role since it pauses the action. While the action is paused, the player can use her inventory

and e.g. get any potions, oils, and weapons ready for battle. She can also select which sword

and combat style she wants to use. While the “Alt” key is held down, everything that the

player can use, talk to, or attack is labelled on the map. In addition, each of those actions and

abilities can be mapped to any other key in the keyboard, which adds to the level of

customization of the game towards the player.

5.2.3 Layer three: Gameworld

5.2.3.1 Components

I. Possessions

The player can possess a great array of items in the gameworld. Those items are weapons,

books and scrolls, drinks, food, gifts, alcohol, potions, powders, oils, grease, trophies and

ingredients for alchemic purposes. In terms of itemisation, the game uses an intrinsic

itemisation system since most of the items found in it are imbued with an array of statics,

many of who can be altered. All these items can be carried in the inventory or stored in

special cases scattered in various places of the gameworld.

The Inventory Panel has three sections corresponding to items the player character (PC)

wears, those found in his satchel and those in his alchemy sack. The slots surrounding the PC


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are used to store weapons, rings and potions (see figure 7. The number of these slots depends

on the player’s current armour. The trophy slot is used to store trophies.

Figure 7: The Inventory System of The Witcher

A few examples of the items found in The Witcher are:

Blizzard (potion): Effect: one of the most potent mixtures drastically reduces Geralt’s

reaction time, improving his reflexes and accelerating movement. Duration: short, Toxicity:

medium.

Apple Juice (drink) - Effect: Restores Endurance.

Excellent Leather Jacket (armour) - Effect: Damage received -15%, Pain Resistance +10%,

Bleeding Resistance +10%, Incinerate Resistance +10%, Poison Resistance +10%.

Book of Animals (book) - Effect: Learn about Dogs, Wolves, Beast Fangs, and Beast Livers.


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II. Resources

We can consider orens (the local currency of Vizima) as the only resource of the game since

with it you can obtain almost all of the game’s items as well as pay for services e.g

blacksmiths, Inns, taverns etc.

III. Representatives

The game has a great amount of characters involved in its story that are either primary or

secondary. Some of the main characters besides Geralt as shown in the game manual are (CD

Projekt & Atari, 2008):

Dandelion: The bard Dandelion’s ballads provide an account of Geralt of Rivia’s many

adventures. Those who read them might well think the White Wolf (Geralt’s nickname) was

the most famous witcher of his time, a participant of epic events, including the mages’

rebellion on Thanedd Island. Dandelion devotes much attention to Geralt’s struggles against

monsters, to his famed romantic entanglements, and to his love for a certain sorceress.

Vesemir: Though the eldest and most experienced witcher, like the other members of the

caste, Vesemir winters at Kaer Morhen and sets off on his Path with the advent of spring.

Robust and lively despite his age, Vesemir is an expert swordsman and taught Geralt all he

knows.

Triss Merigold: Triss has known Geralt for some time. She is a friend of the Kaer Morhen

witchers and, though a sorceress and outsider, she is one of the few to know the way to their

secluded fortress. She can safely be counted among Geralt’s friends.


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Velerad: Velerad governs Vizima and in Foltest’s absence holds the highest authority in the

city and the country as a whole. The burgomeister knows Geralt from long ago, having

negotiated with him the price for lifting the curse that turned Princess Adda into a striga.

5.2.3.2 Environment

I. Topology/ Level Design

The various levels in the game include open spaces, indoors spaces and underground

dungeons. Looking at some of Pagán’s principles in an area of the game e.g the interior of an

Inn (Figure 8) we can distinguish a rather balanced design. The scale of all items compared to

their surroundings look right as do the proportions of things compared to themselves. For

example, the table’s legs have the right height for such a table and the bottle has the right size

compared to the characters in the frame. Pagán’s principles generally provide a good basis for

analysing levels and discovering hidden anomalies.

Figure 8: Level Design: The Interior of an Inn.


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II. Theme/Referentiality

The Witcher is historically placed in the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of

Renaissance. The atmosphere in the game is mostly dark and gloomy, yet dreamy and

fairytale-ish. Thus we can identify elements from the literary areas of horror, like Bram

Stoker’s Dracula, as well as elements from fantasy, including elves, dwarves and mythical

monsters. The game is based on, and thus greatly referencing, the work of Andrzej

Sapkowski. In fact, the story of The Witcher begins a few years after the saga, and as such it

can be considered a sequel.

III. Graphics

The Witcher is powered by a heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine by BioWare,

well known from the Neverwinter Nights series (dating back to 2002). One of the most

important features of the Aurora Engine is that the world can be designed exactly as the

developers envisioned, rather than use a tile-based system. All the environments were

developed in 3ds Max and then exported into the game engine. By using this method the

developers were able to create a unique world rather than recycle the same tiled objects over

and over again.

Some of the changes that CD Projekt included in the new version are:

Support of lightmaps generated in 3ds Max: the use of lightmaps in the development

of the environments resulted in more realistic shadows.

New realistic Skyboxes and water effects: The full day/night cycle makes excellent

use of the new skyboxes and effects. Those elements added a great deal of realism in

the sky and water movement. The natural light during various phases of the day is


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realistically altered, and the day and night transitions serve to enrich the game's

ambience.

The weather can dynamically change and the NPCs and environment react to that

change. The weather can shortly change from sunny weather to stormy rain greatly

enhancing the game experience.

Texture paint: with the texture paint special tool, the developers are able to paint the

environment using custom textures.

Support of new shaders: All the in-game and tool set rendering is done using DirectX

9, and the engine now supports a variety of new shaders (water effect, bump mapping,

environment mapping, etc).

New light manager: The whole rendering system has been unified and a new light

manager was added.

Additional graphical effects: Direct X9 water effects, bump mapping, environment

mapping, glows, advanced dynamic shadows, blurs, etc. also result in enhanced

graphics.

Other important changes include motion-captured animation, improved physics

modelling, new mechanics and combat system, the introduction of portals and more.

The developers also enriched the game with a plethora of wildlife and small effects that add

to the realism. Fireflies at night, dust in the light of lamps and windows, frogs by the river

and lakeside.

The GUI is designed with small pictures and illustrations scattered throughout the various

pages (Figure 9). The static images showed during level loading are well-designed and

atmospheric.


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IV. Physics

The Witcher is powered by the Karma physics engine that supports hundreds of physical

objects on each level. Rigid bodies, destructible objects, physical constraints and ragdolls are

all supported. Physics in The Witcher are used for gameplay features like magical signs, blast

waves and realistic characteristics for various materials and surfaces.

Figure 9: Example of The Witcher's Graphical User Interface

V. Sound

When it comes to sound we focus on three elements: sound effects, music and voice acting.

The sound effects in The Witcher are above-average. All the environmental sounds from the

swish of a nearby river to little kids playing around or women that can be overheard

gossiping adds to the atmosphere of the game while the sound of steel on steel or steel on

flesh during combat, adds to the overall realism.


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The music score is balanced between ambient and symphonic. The music accompanies the

game's environments depending on various factors; day/night and location are all taken into

account as well as action. When the player roams through the wilderness the music plays

along at a calm pace, once he walks into a fight, the music starts to speed up and becomes

more menacing. While the transitions between battle and exploration music is seamless most

of the time there were cases that the music intended for combat kept playing even when there

were no enemies around.

For the game development, 30 actors we used for the voiceovers. All the lines of dialogue

were recorded and were directed by Mark Estdale of Bravo Interactive. After the re-writing

and re-recording of all the flawed lines of dialogue, the voice acting adds much to the attitude

and style that each one of the characters in the game was intended to have.

VI. Game Artificial Intelligence

In the game we encounter hundreds of AI-controlled characters with their own needs and

goals populating the game’s cities. Examples of AI in the game are the combat AI that was

designed to makes battles challenging and the dynamic behaviours of NPC’s that change

based on analysis of the surroundings, for instance NPCs or the PC reacting to other NPCs or

NPCs reacting to weather effects.

[CONCLUSION & LIMITATIONS] Warwick Business School

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6. Conclusion & Limitations

6.1 Conclusions

Analysing digital games is by default a difficult task due to the inherent multidimensionality

of the medium. In this dissertation, we tried to reach the core of digital games and identify

those aspects that better describe their nature. After extensive research in the current

literature, a view of digital games as stories and as games was established. The view of digital

games as games presupposes their view as rules and as simulations since rules are what gives

context to a game and simulation allows the creation and support of a consistent gameworld.

Although many researchers have focused on digital game analysis in the past, research

addressing it holistically, is scant. The main aim of this research is thus to fill this gap. While

most researchers identify elements in digital games by following either a ludologic or a

narratologic perspective, the author has developed a framework that approached game

analysis based on the duality of the digital games’ nature described above. The elements of

games that should be included in the framework were carefully selected based on two criteria:

address the core qualities of games as stories and as games and being those elements that the

player is aware of while experiencing a gaming situation. Those elements were consequently

divided in three categories (layers) that support the idea that digital games are virtual

playgrounds, put together by rules, within which stories take place.

This framework was developed in order to help future researchers collect a sufficient volume

of standardised data about digital games that could later on be used in conjunction to a

qualitative content analysis method to identify patterns among game titles that could indicate

developing trends, limitations in game development or even recipes for success.


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In this sense, the usefulness of this approach lies in the fact that all elements of any game

under study can relatively easy be isolated and demonstrated in a specific framework, hence

allowing comparisons between different games and ultimately helps identify best practices

approaches.

The framework was applied and tested in three cases of games: The Witcher (an RPG), Call

of Juarez (a historic first-person shooter), and Indigo Prophecy (an adventure game) but due

to time and space constrains only The Witcher case study was outlined and included in this

dissertation.

6.2 Limitations

There are a number of limitations inherent in this research. The multidimensionality of digital

games as a medium is responsible for the major one. In order to claim that we have been able

to develop a framework for the holistic analysis of digital games, some additional elements

that would correspond to the additional dimensions of games should have been incorporated

in the framework. Indicatively some of those dimensions are the sociological, psychological,

cultural and technological dimension of games. One other problem is that it is very time

consuming, and encompasses difficulties that arise from possible lack of expertise in the

relevant fields that are required for approaching the subject holistically, thus limiting the

scope of this research.

Another possible limitation of this research regards the effectiveness of the framework.

Richard Bartle (1996) studied how the interactions between different styles of players

influence the social atmosphere on the game. In his study he identified four types players,

namely socialisers (the players who play to enjoy the company of other players), killers

(players who enjoy preying on and harassing other players), achievers (players who like to


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win and triumph) and explorers (players who enjoy discovering the game’s secrets and

hidden mechanics, including discovering and exploiting programming errors). Later on,

Aarseth (2003) suggested an extra style of play: the cheater. A complex game like The

Witcher may be won in a matter of days or weeks but the great openness of the simulation

supports countless discoveries. It is indicative the fact that the Game Pressure guide on the

game is 290 pages and is still not considered complete (Giovetti, 2008). The above suggest

that in order for the researcher to properly analyse a game, she must adopt different styles of

play during her repeated play of the game. If due to time or budget restriction repeated play

of the game is not possible, the game analysis should be complemented by secondary sources

such as press reviews or player accounts, which can also be used as a means for diminishing

the interpretational bias that is caused by the subconscious or not personal preferences,

regarding playing style, of the researcher (Aarseth, 2003).

There is evidently great room for future research regarding the expansion of this framework

and that probably requires the involvement of researchers from different disciplines that

would approach digital games from different perspectives. The next step of such a project

would be the creation of a database of standardised data on digital games elements that could

be used for identifying patterns within game genres, narrative themes and more.

[REFERENCE LIST] Warwick Business School

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Ludography

Academy Soft: Tetris, 1986

Bethesda Studios: Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks, 2008

Bioware: Neverwinter Nights. Atari, 2002

Blizzard Entertainment: Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, 1995

Blizzard Entertainment: World of Warcraft, 2004

CD Project Red: The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. Atari 2008

Creative Assembly: Viking: Battle for Asgard. SEGA, 2008

Crytek: Crysis. EA Games, 2007

DMA Design: Grand theft Auto. Rockstar Games, 2002

Double Fine Prod.: Psychonauts. Majesco Games, 2005

EA DICE: Mirror's Edge. EA Games, 2009

EA DICE: Mirror's Edge. EA Games, 2009

Epic games: Gears of War. Microsoft Game Studios, 2007

Infinity Ward: Call of Duty. Activision, 2003

Maxis: SimCity, 1989

Microids: Syberia. The Adventure Company, 2002

Ninja Theory: Heavenly Sword. SCEA, 2007

Nintendo: Super Mario Bros, 1985

Quantic Dream: Indigo Prophecy. Atari, 2005

Square Soft: Final Fantasy VIII. Square EA, 1999


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Techland: Call of Juarez. Ubisoft: 2007

Triumph Studios: Overlord II. Codemasters, 2009

Triumph Studios: Overlord. Codemasters, 2007

Valve Software: Portal, 2007

Documents

Bridging Narratology and