Winner of the AÉGLEA's 2023-2024 Essay Contest for Creative Distinction
& Presented at The (Re)tracing Self, World and Agency in Narratives of Transformation 2024 ULaval Graduate Conference
The distinctive feature of games as a narrative medium is the ability for the player to exist in the liminal space between the present and the future, where change is still possible. In traditional mediums, events are always determined, both in content and chronology, whereas the aesthetic focus of games is the moment where the “now” dissolves into the future and the consequences of a choice are set. Game narratives do not exist without input from the player since, on its own, a game remains an unrealized structure. Not unlike an actor in a film, the player becomes responsible for interpreting the role of their character in the narrative and simulating their thoughts and behavior in order to progress through the game, which leads the player to understand the lived reality of another by actively experiencing their interiority as though they were their own. As the player acquires a second identity through play, they enter a state of “experience-taking” as defined by Geoff Kaufman and Lisa K. Libby, which increases the chance for change in the player’s own behavior. As an active collaborator in the story, the player necessarily adapts the narrative in a way that makes the story more meaningful to them and more transformative as a result.
Standard narratives are generally understood as events causally linked to create meaning, but games have, “in addition to events, one special feature (...) that other narratives don’t have: they have nodes” (Bode VII). Nodes are a concept from graph theory that represents a point linked to other points that form a network of connections, generally referred to in the context of video games as tree structures. In simple terms, a node is “any situation that allows for more than one continuation” and it is the minimal unit of game narratives (Bode VII). The node is where the multi-linearity of games emerges as it allows the player to choose a continuation and experience the consequences that follow. The outcome of a choice may be known, unknown, or obscured, but in every case they are determined by player action. The node stages “the fact that the future is a space of yet unrealized potentiality” and that “‘what happens next’ may well depend upon us, upon our decisions, our actions, our values and motivations” (Bode 1). The experience of being able to change or influence the future of a narrative is the distinguishing aesthetic element of narrative games.
Nodes allow for narrative interactivity between the player and the game, which leads to the production of agency, namely the capacity to act and the feeling that the future is dependent upon that capacity. Agency is not limited to the actual production of different futures, however, but exists mostly as the subjective belief that our actions matter, even though the future might already be decided. A game can offer no alternate endings, yet the player’s actions will still be done as though they might affect the future. Even the most linear narrative games have nodes; in fact, a game like The Last of Us has a near continuous amount of nodal situations as you play and control Joel’s actions through all his gameplay scenes. Despite it being considered a very linear game, the player is still empowered to play Joel in the way that they find fitting to their own style and interpretation of the character and stakes. The experience of playing the game and being there in the “now” will always be different from watching a recorded session of the game because the position of the player is one of an active agent in the narrative, rather than of a passive observer. A game is not a narrative until it is played through by an agent since, on its own, a game remains an unrealized structure. In the same manner, “[e]ven if we were to play only a single game session of a hypothetical game and end up performing exactly the same sequence of events that constitute Hamlet, we would not have had the same experience as had we watched Hamlet performed” (Juul). The distinguishing factor being the agency produced by nodes, which is missing from watching a performance. The analogy can be pushed further by stating that just like two performances of Hamlet by two different actors would always be significantly different because of their interpretation of the role despite Hamlet being a linear narrative, two playthroughs of the same game by different players will also always be different for the exact same reasons of rendition.
In his talk “Player as Performer,” Evan Hill describes narrative design as casting “the player as the lead actor [while] they haven’t read the script” which is a useful comparison to showcase the importance of performance in games (04:55-05:00). Narrative games are about fully inhabiting a role from which meaningful experiences can be felt, and the function of game design is to guide the player to that role. The first transformation that occurs in narrative games is the acquisition of a second identity, which is usually conceived within the parameters of the game, to be performed in play. The more linear a game is, the more the parameters will restrict the possibilities of what that second identity can be. The consequence of this transformation is the establishment of a “double consciousness of ironic imagination in which [players] experience reality from within at least two frames of understanding without experiencing cognitive dissonance (Hopeametsä 2008; Saler 2012; Stenros 2013)” (Bowman and Lieberoth 253). Players begin to “experience the game world both as themselves in an observational role and as their character” even leading to moments where “the player consciousness is less prominent or even disappears completely for brief moments,” and while the effect has been observed to be dependent upon the individual, one factor remains the same, “the player and character identity [are] in a constant state of overlap” (Bowman 387). This overlap means that the fictional identity is experienced on the same level as the player’s personal identity, which makes games a great tool to experience realities outside of one’s own and have transformative experiences.
In their study on the transformative power of fiction, Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby have demonstrated that “experience-taking” is an important factor to induce behavioral change in readers. They define experience-taking as simulating “the events of a narrative as though [readers] were a particular character in the story world (...), adopting the character’s thoughts, emotions, goals, traits, and actions and experiencing the narrative as though they were that character” (Kaufman and Libby 2). The more a reader reported feeling “what the character in the story was feeling” as though they were in their shoes, the more likely they were to experience change regarding self-concepts, behaviors, and attitudes (Kaufman and Libby 4, 15). It is then interesting to notice that games, by virtue of asking players to play a role, necessarily induce at least a minimal state of experience-taking. This is consistent with role-players reports of “having psychologically transformative experiences as the result of aesthetic doubling” (Bowman and Lieberoth 253). The unrealized future that games present promotes the simulation of another’s experience because nothing happens if the player does not act, and the player can only act insofar as the parameters of the game allows them to, and these parameters are usually designed to present only possibilities that are available to the other experience the game is trying to simulate. For example, when playing as Geralt of Rivia in the Witcher series, the choices that are available to the player, whether that is in dialogue or action sequences, are only options that remain consistent with who Geralt is as a character. The overall theme of the game is not any possible world that you can imagine, but what are the possibilities available to Geralt as a human being; what are the struggles he wrestles with; what are the difficult decisions that are going to come his way both in his work and personal life; how he is going to approach his relationships with his friends and lovers; how is he going to act in the face of evil; what kind of father is he striving to be; etc. These are all questions and facets of his life that you, as a player, are going to have to figure out answers for and by consequence simulate the experience of being Geralt.
Your Geralt will be uniquely distinct from all others because of your interpretation of the character which will inform, not only your decisions and performance, but also the meaning of the story. Narration is the specific linkage of events to suggest meaning, which creates a story from what is only discourse (Bode 5, Jara and Torner 274). Games, however, are devoid of narration since events cannot be both causally linked and undecided. This would render games meaningless since “meaning is exactly the stuff that is produced when two events are linked to each other” whereas “[t]wo isolated, unconnected events do not have any meaning whatsoever” (Bode 5). The difference here is that the human mind is extremely capable of forming causal links, in fact, it is practically unable not to. Narrative is not taught, but “reflects our mode of understanding events (...) [and] [w]e will interpret something as story if we can” (Boyd 131, 137). This means that “in narrative the causal connections between the events need not be explicitly stated at all: it’s enough for them to be implicit, to be possible, to be plausible. That is extremely important, since it suggests that a large part of the essential narrative labour of connecting can be delegated to and be carried out by the reader” (Bode 5). Narrative games can then be understood as hermeneutic narratives because they are reliant on constant interpretation on the player’s part. Meaning is not predetermined but emergent, which leads to the possibility of constant reinterpretation of the events of the game to form more meaningful narratives in the player’s mind. An event that first appeared unassuming can be reinterpreted as meaningful for the player in the light of new events, even if that event was actually completely random. Many games have linear narratives, in which events have a limited space of interpretation, but for every event that follows a node, it is up to the player to interpret its meaning.
The creative and interpretive freedom players are given should not go understated. The player is both the recipient and producer of meaning, which makes games a collaborative effort between the designers and their audience. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf argues that readers and writers are equals in their ability to produce feelings and meaningful experiences, but that this alliance has been corrupted. She puts it as:
In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. (...) In your modesty you seem to consider that writers are of different blood and bone from yourselves; that they know more of Mrs. Brown than you do. Never was there a more fatal mistake. It is this division between reader and writer, this humility on your part, these professional airs and graces on ours, that corrupt and emasculate the books which should be the healthy offspring of a close and equal alliance between us. (Woolf)
While the reasons she cites in her essay for the corruption of this alliance are debatable, the descriptions of the alliance itself and the readers’ power to feel and imagine are accurate. It seems to me that this alliance is found even stronger in narrative games where players are invited to step into the creative space as collaborators since their ability to create incredibly meaningful and personal stories out of the raw matter of games is valued and trusted. The interpretive power of games means that players can choose to interpret stories in the manner that is the most meaningful to them, or that they need the most in the moment, whereas a novel would require its story to be shaped for each individual to achieve the same effect.
Interpretation makes widely different experiences more relatable to yours since you are interpreting them from your own personal perspective as someone who is and not as someone who watches. This is not always easy, however, as players are always more resilient to interpret characters they share little with or do not understand, while passively observing such a character in a novel or a movie is less repulsive than having to actively play as them. It is a commonality shared between all mediums, but games have to be more careful when designing unlikeable characters and uncomfortable perspectives since players need to want to simulate the perspective they are taking on and have the tools to be able to. Nothing happens in games without the player’s active participation. Games are interpretive experiences that demand that the player constantly tells their own story about the characters and world created by designers, which hopefully induce a meaningful experience that resonates with the player and positively affects their perspective on how they see themselves, the world, and others.
Works Cited
Bode, Christoph, and Rainer Dietrich. Future Narratives. De Gruyter, 2013.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne, and Andres Lieberoth. "Psychology and Role-Playing Games." Role-Playing Game Studies, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge, 2018, pp. 245-264.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. "Immersion and Shared Imagination in Role-Playing Games." Role-Playing Game Studies, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge, 2018, pp. 379-394.
Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Hill, Evan. “Player as Performer: Setting the Stage for Your Audience.” Level Design Summit, Game Developers Conference, 20-24 March 2023, Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. Conference Presentation. https://youtu.be/ G3vJMocSxuc?si=f6GMm7tOjRQ9CUcW.
Jara, David, and Evan Torner. "Literary Studies and Role-Playing Games." Role-Playing Game Studies, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge, 2018, pp. 265-299.
Juul, Jesper. "Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 1, no. 1, 2001. gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/.
Kaufman, Geoff, and Lisa K. Libby. "Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 103, no. 1, 2012, 1-19. DOI: 10.1037/a0027525.
Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” The Hogarth Essays. London, The Hogarth Press, 1924. gutenberg.org/ files/63022/63022-h/63022-h.htm.
