Why Did It Have To Be A Game?

[This is a repost/revision of an earlier blogpost]

I was having a conversation recently about interactive fiction, and it went a little something like this:

"I think interactive fiction is cool."

"I think it should just be fiction. Like a book. Or an essay."

Leaving out all the back and forth of the conversation regarding specific examples, I think this brought up a question at the core of this discussion. When critiquing video games, what should we talking about, and more specifically, for the purposes of this blog post, should we even be talking about whether it would be better suited as some other kind of delineated media?

Screencap of Novena on itch.io, an interactive poem that partially sparked this conversation

Coming from a cultural studies/English literature/let's-talk-about-books background, this question struck me as fascinating because I feel like I've experienced it bubbling up so much more when talking about games than with any other media that I've encountered. I'm going to talk about literature because that's what I've had the most experience with, and I want to give a disclaimer that I'm mostly talking about discussions around media in a casual setting or in a commercial setting, not through any formal critical analysis.

With that being said, in my experience, a conversation around books usually goes something like:

"I think Giovanni's Room is a really great book because it's so viscerally heartbreaking, it approaches the ideas of love and romance in such a beautiful way, it characterizes people so well, etc."

I've also done work for a literary agent, reading submissions from authors and writing reports about a book's viability. That might look something like:

"I recommend this novel for representation because of its endearing and well-rounded characters, its strong pacing, its snappy and clever dialogue.... etc." You get it.

In other words, never when reading a book have I considered anything like:

"Interesting, but it would be better off it had just been a movie."

Certainly there are times when I believe a movie adapted from a book is better than the book, but I would have never read the book and had the thought above: I would have just thought, huh. This is a bad book. Nor while watching a movie have I ever really thought something like, "This would be better as prose poetry."

So then why when we talk about narrative video games, this always seems to arise as a point of critique? I think there's something interesting here about how we see the genre of video games, and how we don’t.

Ludonarrative Discourse Of Sorts

I think part of this urge to compare narrative games to other forms of media is in part this underlying tension between story and game mechanics that has been surfaced extensively by designers and academics alike. Clint Hocking introduced the concept of ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock in a blogpost back in 2007, what he calls “the dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story."

I don’t completely agree with Hocking’s piece: I think that there’s a false dichotomy that pits mechanics against narratives (which from preliminary poking around is an area ripe for discourse). The way I see it, on a semantic level, “narrative” seems like a problematic term, best said by Jerome Bruner: “we seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of narrative” (Bruner 1987). I look at games and make sense of them in the context of my taste as an interconnected web of script, sound, visuals, mechanics, etc.--Whatever the designer has cooked up to deliver an experience, “narrative,” or “lived time,” which exists at the nexus of this web. This “lived time” maybe isn’t necessarily narrative, like the way that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a three-act epic, but rather a record of the events of time-based media. It can be a record of how you narrowly escaped the ghosts in Pac-man and felt triumphant and then immediately got cornered again and died. 

Roth, van Nuenen, and Koenitz bring up some of the shortcomings of the concept that I also find compelling. One of which is that ludonarrative dissonance “may constitute what Gilbert Ryle designated as a category-mistake, in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as belonging to a different one” (Roth et al. 2018). In other words, they argue that what Hocking describes as a ludic contract is actually also a narrative contract when the player comes to experience it. For instance, in Bioshock, when you participate in the mechanic of harvesting the Little Sisters, you are partaking in sense-making of the world, inherently tied to and a part of the narrative.

So while I slightly disagree with the idea of ludonarrative dissonance on a kind of semantic level, I think that its right to point out dissonance in games. I feel as though the same dissatisfaction with some visual novels is the same dissatisfaction of an anticlimactic Quick Time Event at an emotionally climactic moment: It’s a failure of the experienced “lived time” of the Quick Time Event to match and deliver on the expected emotionally tense “lived time.” When you’re just clicking through a visual novel, your mouse-presses might feel inconsequential to the lived time that the player is expecting, i.e. a sense of agency.

The infamous QTE in Balan Wonderworld where your success in the final battle is determined by just hitting A.

It's something that's also deeply subjective at times: I personally find the simple arrow key navigation gameplay of Novena really compelling and neat when worked in conjunction with the sound, poetry, and visuals presented to create an experience, but my friend thinks its lacking. However, I also think that this conversation is still worth having because in some sense we're constructing a language and a context in which to discuss and analyze games and their value as art. The dissonance is there, but I'm unconvinced by a model of breaking down games that breaks up mechanics and story into two opposing forces. I'm much more interested in discussing the ways in which our tastes regarding how different facets of a game work or fail to uplift one another in service of an experience.

To return to the initial question of this post, then why does my friend say that some visual novels would be better off as books or some video games would be better off as movies? Why was ludonarrative dissonance the term in question? Why is there so much discourse about ludology and narrative? Why is there not more discourse about sound and visuals? Why does it matter if we think something would be better as a book or a movie?

I think part of the answer is that our "lived time" is story. At the end of the day, our experience is encapsulated by what happened, when, in what context, and why. And when we're faced with a compelling story with any sort of lackluster implementation, whether that's just a terribly written book, a terribly shot movie, or a game with bad mechanics, we have an urge to fix things to be good, and quickly. When we arrive at the edge of the definition of a game, specifically at the narrative edge, the natural conclusion is that it shouldn't be a game at all--It should just be a book or a movie, and then it would be a good story.

I think this point gets at what I'm perhaps trying to pick apart. My qualm is not necessarily that the claim of "better as a movie," is wrong, but that it doesn't challenge us enough as game players and game designers. Maybe I think a lot of the time if we're talking about art as the expression of an idea, the medium through which you express that idea is up to the creator: There's no should or shouldn't when it comes to whether I want to write a short story or a movie or a game about going on a hike and getting an emotional call from my mom (Sorry for A Short Hike spoilers). It comes down to how you use the affordances of each medium in order to express your ideas. If you've poorly used those affordances, then you've simply made a flawed game, movie, or book, not a game that should be a movie, or a book that should be a game.

Bruner, J. (1987). Life as Narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970444

Hocking, C. (2009). Ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about. Well played, 1, 255-260.

Roth, C., van Nuenen, T., Koenitz, H. (2018). Ludonarrative Hermeneutics: A Way Out and the Narrative Paradox. In: Rouse, R., Koenitz, H., Haahr, M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_7