Games and Narrative

Choose a game which you feel attempts to incorporate strong narrative elements.
2. How is time represented in the game? Is there a separation of story and discourse time? How does the game’s use of time allow for interactivity?

The game I’ve chosen is Heroes of Might and Magic III- the Restoration of Erathia.

How is time represented in the game? + How does the game’s use of time allow for interactivity?

The game seemingly lets the player define for himself another dimension of time.
Time* can be viewed as a manipulatable entity in Heroes III. It can be halted, quickened, slowed, stopped and even saved. I’ll only elaborate on 2 of these.

When I choose to (aha! Choice -> interactivity) pause the game- time stops ‘running’. As Heroes III is a turn-based game, my time’s paused when the other player (aka the processor) takes his turn. It’s interesting to note that it’s at this point in time that the game snatches away the player-defined “time”- my user interface is frozen and I can do no less than watch as another ‘day’ pass (indicated by the hour-glass) while the game shows my opponent’s quick moves across the territory. I feel that interactivity comes in even when the player’s control of time is taken back by the game processor. Cos this happens when a certain no. of moves was made by the user (which is in spite of the actual time spent on each move!) and this adheres to Crawford’s definition of interactivity via influential feedback.

Time can be quickened. How? Use cheat codes! For instance, “black sheep wall” enables me to view the map of the whole territory without having to spend er, unnecessary time to explore and hence uncover the whole map. In battles, I can cast a “speed” spell to hasten my creatures’ speed of attack too.

Interactivity, facilitated by the game-defined time, also comes from the choice allowed for the player. How he chooses to interpret what happened at e.g. the castle when he is shown that his opponent entered it but NOT what he did there. How the player chooses to manage his own time in the game. Also, how playful the player is determines how interactive he finds it. For e.g. if I don’t explore how to cheat in the game, I’d never know I can interact with the system in this way.

Is there a separation of story and discourse time?

Well, I think that whereas time flows in a strictly linear way, aka a continuum of irreversible sequence, the discourse time can flow non-linearly, and is reversibly possible.

Reason being, as Neitzel mentioned, “games are not laid out along chronological lines” but rather are “process(es) of expanding the present”. A player may re-visit his steps, or a narrative kernel in the game may take you to a prophecy, a flashback, a “meanwhile…” ongoing, and the like.

Real time is more complex. If it were to be defined as “a dimension in which events occur in sequence”, then it’s clearly different from a discourse time which can be non-chronological. Time is also a “local observed quantity” in that it is relative to the user and the object. It’s precisely the grey areas in ‘time’ that separates it from discourse time, again due to how one mind quantifies the passing of time from another.

*Time here refers to the time as defined by the game, within itself. It is not the time in reality.

It’s interesting how time can ‘fly’, how we can ‘save’ time, ‘steal’ time and even ‘kill’ time. If I can choose to be a quantity I won’t choose to be time!

Games and Play

2. Consider the work you created for project 1. Is this work actually a game? Why/why not?

Let’s recall: My group’s project’s titled “ScaryTales”, an interactive narrative where Sadako the evil existent ‘transcoded’ her hatred into a once-ordinary fairytale world. The user navigates his way sorta linearly through a non-linear narrative. (Actually, I find this rather ironic that while we are trying to make the fiction non-linear, the user can seemingly only go thru the piece in a linear fashion.)

My Take
My take is that “ScaryTales” is in essence a narrative which was tweaked to be as interactive as we could manage, so much so that it became more game-like then we had intended it to be.

Why is it game-like?
Firstly, the element of existence of a goal presented to the user*. I observed that during the implementation, certain groups were sub-consciously vying to reach the part where the potion could be thrown at Sadako to defeat her. Hence the role of agon is brought in, giving it some game-like quality, where users get the notion of “an explicit win-state”.

Secondly, the presence of struggle has fittingly induced the game-like quality. Recall that we laid certain traps, e.g. a rebellious user ignores Puss’s warning, ventures to the mountains, and dies. The use of memory in “ScaryTales” locks areas which have been accessed, which when clicked on again produce “There is no time to lose.” Thus the sense of urgency, hence the illusion** of struggle (against time) which is very much an element of a game.

Why is it still considered an interactive narrative?
With reference to the first point, the notion of a goal is somewhat sub-consciously generated on the user’s part. If we looked at “ScaryTales” as an interactive narrative with a no. of different endings, inevitably some ends would be ‘better’ then others. And by the logic of induction, there would be a ‘best’, the most ‘ideal’ end- and that is what the user sub-consciously sees as the goal. To illustrate my point, take a look at “The Others” piece done by another group. By my yardstick, I do find it an impressive interactive narrative. At the same time, I also observed that during implementation, within each group, people were focused more on unlocking the most areas in the quickest time (or the time interval given for implementation J). As such, we see the sub-conscious identification of a certain goal. But this certainly doesn’t make “The Others” a game.

With reference to the second point, I would like to borrow Costikyan’s quote to fight my stand. He wrote, “- there can be no game without struggle. A game requires players to struggle interactively toward a goal.” It is true that the laying of traps and the throwing of the potion on Sadako makes “ScaryTales” game-like. Yet, back to my take at the very beginning, all these were included for interactivity’s sake. We were keeping to Crawford’s definition of interactivity – the use of feedback to the user whose input influences the feedback from the system.

To conclude, I reinstate my take.

* I used the term “user” instead of a “reader” here not to intend that “ScaryTales” is a game. It’s just because there isn’t too much to read in “ScaryTales” anyway, and if it did, there wouldn’t be much gaps intended for the user to fill in for interactivity’s sake.

** I used the word “illusion” since we didn’t use any timer in “ScaryTales”!