HCI 530 : Seminar (HCI)• Narrative

– Stuff we Didn’t Finish …

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI)• Presentation - Realism

• Return to the Uncanny Valley …

• Introduction to Narrative

• Narrative Examples

• Game Types

• Interactive Experience – Is there a Narrative ?

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI)

• Game Types

Game Types

Game Types

While many games easily fall within the confines of one specific genre, it is important to remember that the lines and boundaries for many of these genres are tenuous at best.

Many new releases contain aspects of the gaming experience that tend to blur or erase these lines, often falling into two or more different genres at the same time.

This tendency to obscure traditional lines of delineation often results in heightened gaming experiences, where the narrative strengths of more than one genre are combined to produce even more immersive and enjoyable gaming environments.

Just as in other realms of the literary universe, these genres attempt to meet the basic tenets of narrative: to suspend disbelief on the part of the audience (in this case, gamers) long enough to tell a story.

Also as in other realms of literature, games cover a huge spectrum of genres, and not all of them are narrative, or at least obviously narrative.

This list focuses on the most narrative and popular genres.

Game Types

Game Types

Simulators (Sims): Sims tend to fall into two major groups: Activity simulators and character simulators.

Activity simulators allow for immersion into highly specialized events, such as flight or driving simulators. Character simulators have been enjoying an almost exponential growth recently, in such games as The Sims, wherein gamers completely assume the role of a fictional character in a completely immersive environment.

First Person Action-Adventure: Spawned from the creation of the First Person Shooter, the First Person Action-Adventure is considered a highly immersive form of gaming, and has become a genre in its own right.

Action-Adventure: A broad category which is often used to encompass more sub-genres than it warrants, Action-Adventure games are some of the most obviously narrative titles. These games focus on telling a story, and utilize a wide range of narrative genres, coming closer to the diversity found in mainstream American cinema than their cousin, the First Person Action-Adventure.

Game Types

Game Types

Role-Playing Games (RPGs): The RPG is a form of gaming that has been around for a long time. Loosely, we could trace its roots to childhood play, imagining adventures based on toys and action figures.

Online Role-Playing Games: Online RPGs are, for the most part, very similar to their local-tethered cousin.

Strategy: The Strategy genre has exploded over the past decade, but has always been a mainstay of electronic gaming.

Sports Simulators: Games that focus on sports activities and narrative aspects of the gaming experience.

Card/Board Games: Along with puzzle games, computerized versions of other traditional card and board games have enjoyed great levels of popularity among gamers, especially among online gamers.

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI)

• Summary of Narrative in Games …

Game Types

Tells us about Narrative in Games

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI)

• Interactive Experiences – Is there a Narrative ?

Is there a Narrative ?

External Observers vs Immersed Players

According to ludologists, the major difference between games and narratives is that the former address “external observers” who apprehend “what has happened,” whereas the latter require “involved players” who care about “what is going to happen”.

Reader-response researchers and film theorists have argued time and again that readers and film spectators experience events narrated in novels and films as if they occur in the present, and anyone who has ever seen a Hitchcock movie knows that film spectators are very much concerned about “what is going to happen.”

What many academics see as a categorical distinction is merely a matter of perspective.

Is there a Narrative ?

External Observers vs Immersed Players

A ludologist would argue that a reader or film spectator nevertheless always knows that the story will come to an already determined end.

But this too is a merely psychological and phenomenological matter.

A reader or a film spectator who is engaged with and cares about the characters does not experience stories very differently from games.

As Patrick O’Neill observes:

For the internal actor/participant it, [the story world] reveals itself as a world that is entirely provisional, fundamentally unstable, and wholly inescapable.

In considering the implications of this statement, we find much to support the contention that… narrative is always and in a very central way precisely a game structure, involving its readers in a hermeneutic contest in which, even in the case of the most ostensibly solid non-fictional accounts, they are essentially and unavoidably off balance from the very start.

Is there a Narrative ?

External Observers vs Immersed Players

Moreover, most game players also know that a game will come to an end, often within an already fixed time limit.

In case they might forget, their computer screen is clogged with watches, clocks, bars and other devices that keep them aware of this.

Even in persistent gameworlds like Everquest, where the game never stops and in which there are no clear winners and losers, “many in-world activities actually have finite goals with predetermined methods of completion, such as quests,” whereas in roleplaying games the implicit goal is to acquire sufficient “stats” to reach a new level.

Therefore, persistent gameworlds can be described as games of emergence with “minor ‘games of progression’ embedded”.

Is there a Narrative ?

External Observers vs Immersed Players

Also, game players also know that whatever happens to their avatars in the gameworld, nothing nasty will happen to them.

And, more importantly, to an “external observer” game players often behave like characters in a story, not only because the sequence of signs produced by a film of a plane landing and a flight simulator “look exactly the same” but rather because to an external observer it often becomes obvious that the courses of action open to the player are scripted into the design of the game.

“By watching many players interact with the system, the observer has begun to discern the devices that control the plot in the face of player interaction” (Mateas, 2004).

Is there a Narrative ?

External Observers vs Immersed Players

The trick of the trade of game design is indeed to make the player believe they are in control.

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When trying to look ahead, game players probably weigh the outcomes of the alternative choices they are confronted with “narratively,” too.

These narratives constitute a domain that narratives and games have in common rather than that it sets them apart.

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Much depends, of course, on your definitions of narrative and simulation, which, in turn, depend on the language game you’re in and the moves you want to make.

Is there a Narrative ?

Perspectives

Any interactive fiction, such as a Choose Your own Adventure book, an interactive movie or game, or any kind of "interactive story" often works by switching between two temporal modes, the narrative mode and game mode.

Most modern "cinematic" interactive fictions are often awful games and stories.

You are trapped by unmotivated shifts between the narrative mode and the game mode, the story gets destroyed by the interactivity,the interactivity gets destroyed by the story.

Is there a Narrative ?

Perspectives

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI)

• Before we finish this bit – another Ted talk …

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI)

• Funny bit …