Videogames industry website Gamasutra are running an interview with Susan O'Connor, a scriptwriter for titles such as Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeon Siege II, Act of War, and Gears of War. In this article she discusses the construction of narratives, which are clearly at least part of what defines videogames.
She also has some (tentative) things to say about being a woman in a male-normative sector,
I want to be careful what I say here, but men and women are probably, in some ways, wired a little bit differently.
Shocking!
3 comments:
I recommend others read the original context of this comment and then see how they feel about this quote.
I see the reference to a childlike delight in destructiveness (she is watching men playing a violent game and comments on their girlish giggling) as a weak example of gender difference. Female players of violent games are just as likely to take the same kind of delight in violent play (if they enjoy that kind of game and can play them). These kinds of comments that appear to give evidence to a 'gendered' set of pleasures need unpacking.
I have to agree here. I remember being beaten by my friend's, now estranged, wife at Quake multiplayer on several occasions and she was laughing as much as we were.
BTW I'd argue that not all video games have a narrative element - Tetris being a fine example - and frankly in my experience the large majority that claim to have decent narratives rarely do.
This raises an important issue with terminology.
We tend to reappropriate literary terms to describe elements of gameplay, for example, 'narrative'. I would say this often accounts for our disappointment at the narratives used in games. Because we apply the same term to different media it comes loaded with a 'semantic field', that is, a set of connotations. Our ideas about what constitutes narrative in games are based primarily on our exposure to narrative in literature and film, which are clearly significantly different media and hence handle material in a unique manner.
Consider the example Helen raised in our last seminar about the Lord of the Rings board game - the literary / filmic narrative frames the gameplay experience, but while you're actually engaged in playing the boardgame itself you're preoccupied with an altogether different sense of narrative: the drama of the unfolding game, competition between players and the pragmatic level of gameplay mechanics and rules.
The game can employ a narrative fiction world (as Juul discusses in Half Real) to frame the gameplay. An illustritive example on Nintendo's Wii console would be The Ledend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. As the player progresses through the game a story is revealed by cutscenes. The world of Zelda is further elaborated upon intertextually as each game in this series builds a larger, coherent world-view in the mind of the player.
Furthermore I'd suggest that we should not ignore the higher level on which personal relationships are in play, that is, the 'lived narrative' involved in a game being played within its material cultural setting, and the sense of community amongst the players themselves.
Thinking about Tetris as our other limit-case, the narrative is performed by the player playing. It is their personal competition with the game within which the drama develops, both in a single game session as well as in between and across their repeated play with the game.
Each of these cases has a legitimate right to claim the term 'narrative', but each with significantly different and problematic intentions.
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