The Long Tale

Ever since studying philosophy in high school, I’ve been frustrated by one element of the academic process: the failure to distinguish between a word’s meaning and its definition.

Anybody with a passing interest in the development of language will understand why it is important to carefully define key words when writing analytically. Words are not the precise descriptors they may seem to an untrained eye. Many words have multiple meanings, and most words have some ambiguity in how they can be interpreted. No words are set in stone: some were created and defined intentionally to fit a concept that needed a label, but most came about through a gradual drift of sound and meaning over many years. This is a continuing process; who hasn’t come across a word in one of Shakespeare’s plays and thought “that’s a strange choice of words”?

For analytical writing, an important word has to be clearly defined for it to be useful. But that definition does not necessarily encapsulate the whole meaning of the word.

I struggled to explain my project in today’s supervision meeting because I was trying to talk about game-stories, and apparently there’s no such thing. The theory of narratology defines “story” and “narrative” in such a way as to preclude any game from also being a story. Well, ok – but anyone who plays games even casually can name half a dozen games that are also stories. From where I’m sitting right now, I can see Deus Ex, which is a game and a cyberpunk story of a United Nations anti-terrorist agent who uncovers a conspiracy, begins to question the ethics of his organisation, is betrayed by his superiors and has to find the cure for a deadly plague that is ravaging the world. The plot gets a lot more complicated than that, and through it all there are many sub-plots and a packed stable of supporting characters.

Next to Deus Ex, I can see Fallout, which is a game and a post-apocalyptic story of a member of a community of people living in a self-sufficient bomb shelter “vault” many years after an atomic war, who is forced to leave the safety of the vault and see how the people on the outside are surviving in the desert after the dissolution of civilisation: some are clinging to the old way of life, some are trying to establish peaceful farming communes, some have turned to violence and intimidation and some have been driven mad by the wasteland or mutated by radiation into something other than human. Like many of the best narrative games, its central theme is a question: in a world without the rule of law, what sort of person would you choose to be?

Next to them is Planescape: Torment, a game whose plot I couldn’t possibly do justice to in one paragraph. Suffice to say that its script reportedly runs to about 800,000 words.

Ask anybody who is not an academic to describe one of these games, or nearly any game that is more complicated than Super Mario Bros, and they will use the word ’story’. Repeatedly. If they have a large vocabulary they may even use the word ‘narrative’. And yet according to the definition apparently common in narrative theory, games cannot be stories.

That doesn’t make such a definition wrong, but it does show that the definition is only useful for a limited discussion of what constitutes a story. Otherwise, it’s simply denying a clearly-understood concept by limiting the language so there is no way to describe it, a la Newspeak. It’s like saying an electric massage chair cannot be a chair because it moves under its own power and is primarily intended to be a massage device rather than a resting place, which doesn’t fit the existing definition of “chair”. That may be true, but it’s self-evidently still a chair, and any definition of chair that excludes electric massage chairs is obviously of limited usefulness – especially for a person shopping for electric massage devices.

I think the problem stems from the method used to define the word in the first place. The word “story” predates narrative theory, after all. Its precise definition was reverse-engineered by theorists, who first analysed what people were referring to when they said “story”, and then formed a definition based on the characteristic traits of those things.

Since the definition of “story” was codified, computer games have grown into a popular medium. These games often have characters, settings, a plot structure – all the elements that people instinctively recognise as a story. But the prescriptive definition is now set in such a way that it runs against the consensus understanding of what a story can be. What began as a precise description of a word’s common usage has become a set of rules governing how the word is allowed to be used (in an academic media studies context).

Earlier today I was willing to accept the compromise that games cannot be stories but they may have stories. Now I’m not sure. Deus Ex is the story of JC Denton, exiled UN anti-terrorist agent. When I talk about Deus Ex, that’s what I’m talking about. Remove the story, and what you are left with cannot remotely be described as Deus Ex. It is a story that you play, just as a novel is a story that you read.

I do recognise the need to define terms. I’d just like them to be defined in a useful manner! Eric Zimmerman addresses the problem in his essay “Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline”. I’m happy to use the definitions he proposes.

What I wish to ask is NOT the overused question: Is this thing (such as a game) a “narrative thing” or not?

Instead, the question I’d like to pose is: In what ways might we consider this thing (such as a game) a “narrative thing”?

These questions are similar to ones Adrian proposed for me to use to focus my research project, and like Zimmerman I find the latter much more useful and interesting than the former, which is essentially playing at linguistics. (My research question will be “How can we use games to tell a particular kind of story?”, with the “particular” hopefully to cover a small number of concepts.)

By coincidence, Zimmerman’s essay happens to include a description of how Ms. Pac-Man is a game-story (that is, how it signifies narrative), a task which I tried to do rather unsuccessfully just this afternoon:

First observation: there are many story elements to Ms. Pac-Man that are not directly related to the gameplay. For instance, the large-scale characters on the physical arcade game cabinet establish a graphical story about the chase between Ms. Pac-Man and the ghosts. There are also brief noninteractive animations inside the game, which appear between every few levels. These simple cartoons chronicle events in the life of Ms. Pac-Man: meeting her beau Pac-Man, outwitting the ever-pursuing ghosts, etc.

But while these story-components are important parts of the larger Ms. Pac-Man experience, they are not at the heart of what distinguishes Ms. Pac-Man as a game-story. The arcade cabinet graphics and linear cartoon animations sit adjacent to the actual gameplay itself, where a different kind of narrative awaits. As the player participates with the system, playing the game, exploring its rule-structures, finding the patterns of free play that will let the game continue, a narrative unfolds in real time.

What kind of story is it? It’s a narrative about life and death, about consumption and power. It’s a narrative about strategic pursuit through a constrained space, about dramatic reversals of fortune where the hunter becomes the hunted. It’s a narrative about relationships, in which every character on the screen, every munchable dot and empty corridor, are meaningful parts of a larger system. It’s a narrative that always has the same elements, yet unfolds differently each time it is experienced. And it’s also a kind of journey, where the player and protagonist are mapped onto each other in complicated and subtle ways. This is a narrative in which procedures, relationships, and complex systems dynamically signify. It is the kind of narrative that only a game could tell.

Since the final Research Workshop A task said we were free to write our research essay in any form that was suitable for our project, I decided to experiment with it a bit and write in a granular fashion, with each individual text forming its own block within the essay, rather than merging it all into a long, flowing essay-style passage. I’m fairly disappointed with it, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the way I wrote it or just because I was too burnt out on assignments to put substantial effort in.

Undoubtedly, a lot went wrong with our documentary, but we were fortunate in some respects.

• Halo 3 is an excellent tool for making machinima. Bungie didn’t have to build in features to craft and create virtual theatre with their game – it was going to sell by the shipload either way – but they did, and it’s a blessing. Ok, so they left out some key features; notably, there’s no way to save the recorded game data as an actual video file without exporting it to external equipment or filming your television, but everything else is a dream to work with.

• The 1960s theme worked really well. Although the 1960s public service announcement is a much-parodied form, we had never seen it done for machinima before, and we thought it simultaneously contrasted nicely with the modern format of video games and was suitable for the old-fashioned theories of delinquency we were alluding to, which made the elements of theory blend in with the theme instead of seeming heavy-handed and awkward. It also gave our video a unique stylistic hook to catch the punters’ attention.

• There was a wealth of resources available online. From DigitalPh33r’s comprehensive guide to making machinima (albeit overlooking the NTSC/PAL issues, but he is American), to stylistic references for the pseudo-1960s look such as promo clips
for Fallout and parody educational videos, to the cornucopia of content published with perfect timing by The Escapist magazine and its columnists on griefing and many others.

• We were able to craft the filming separately from the acting. I wrote about this small epiphany earlier, and it’s still an interesting point. In making a machinima, at least with Halo 3, you can act out the scene, save the game data and then revisit it as the camera operator – as many times as you like. Although machinima works more like live-action film than animation, it has an advantage over both of them in that you can be acting, directing and operating potentially infinite cameras and audio recorders of the same scene all at the same (virtual) time. Just act, save, review, shoot, rewind, re-shoot, repeat.

• The music we needed was in the public domain. Harry discovered a gold mine in the podcast series BoomerByte – The Soundtrack of a Generation, which compiles old non-copyright music from the 1940s-60s.

• The video game community is full of awesome people. This is an aspect of the documentary I would really like to emphasise, although I’m not sure where to put it. Although we avoided making a big deal about the video game “community”, because it’s a questionable concept in such an anonymous space (maybe there’s a video game “society”, although makes it sound a bit Illuminati-esque), we found the internet to be full of people offering the fruits of their time and effort for free. We’re particularly grateful to the kind folk who submitted creations to garrysmod.org and Flickr for others to re-use, and the people who volunteered advice indirectly or directly.

• Some of our best shots came about by accident. Although most of the shots that ended up in the video were scripted, there were a few great ones that we couldn’t have planned – like the blue player landing on its teammate, looking down at it for a second and then shooting a full clip into its face before being blown straight up into the air by a rocket and falling to a kneel against the stairs. This is the sort of stuff that just happens when you get people together to play a video game.

• Harry’s reaction shots were hilarious. There’s nothing funnier than to see someone whose two buddies were just run over by a truck spinning in confused circles, looking at the sky. (To us, anyway.)

• The theory was present in the video, but invisible to the naked mind. I hesitated about whether to include this in the “successes” post, because I suppose we won’t know how well we pulled it off. But I’m happy with it. To me, it works like an optical illusion: if you look at our documentary expecting to see a funny video, that’s all you see, but if you look at it with an eye for the criminological theories of Travis Hirschi, Walter Reckless and co. you see a subtext to everything. To me, each scene of the script relates to something we read about the definition, causes, consequences or ways to combat delinquency. Fingers crossed that’s visible to others.

[Image by pbo31 under a Creative Commons license.]

Here are some of the things that went wrong with our documentary. Just the highlights!

• We overestimated our skills. As Harry wrote in the first complete draft of our documentary contract we scoffed at the idea of not being up to the task (emphasis added):

Aside from years of academic specialisation in the writing, editing and study of integrated media, Fraser and I have both more specifically had experience in constructing websites and producing machinima. What remaining peripheral skills will be required (e.g. image editing, audio editing) will be rudimentary at most, and either/or of us are more than qualified to handle what arises in that vicinity also.

That wasn’t strictly true. We had experience playing video games and making videos, so we figured it was as easy as combining A with B. To be honest, even as we submitted this I felt like it was a case of Famous Last Words, but I was swayed by optimism.
EDIT: Harry points out that we have both, in fact, made a machinima each – in Second Life. Oh, Second Life, I find you so forgettable.

• We backed the wrong horse. Although we considered using Halo 3 to create our video from the start, because we knew it was easy to use and had a dedicated Theatre mode, we opted for the greater customisability and variability of Garry’s Mod. After some chaotic experimentation, we came to the conclusion that Gmod was simply not built for what we wanted to do, and more suitable for making still images – or just messing about and attaching rockets to people’s limbs to make them zoom around the room like a demented Astro Boy. We needed something that had

• We lacked focus. We had all these great ideas, from message boards to full character vocal lip-synching and presenting the video in comic-book frames. Any of these could have been a good addition to the project, but the number of bells and whistles started to obscure the central pillar of the work, until we streamlined it.

• We didn’t make a series. I can’t point to one specific reason for this – it was a combination of factors, particularly the crunch that came with technical delays and general postponery. I still think a regular series of short machinima videos would be cool, but the fact is we promised a series and delivered a feature film. To be fair, we’re not the first gamers to fail at episodic content – where is Episode 3, Valve?!?

• We had innumerable technical problems. Here are some of the problems we encountered and solved (or avoided) in the course of making this project: 1. Online game of Garry’s Mod wouldn’t connect. 2. Imported objects for Garry’s Mod wouldn’t appear in a spawn list. 3. There was no way to set up an after-the-fact camera for Garry’s Mod. 4. The glitch to make characters in Halo 3 drop their weapon wouldn’t work. 5. Halo 3’s amazing machinima creation tools turned out to not include the ability to save or download videos as actual video files, just recorded gameplay data. 6. The TV wouldn’t output video and audio to the DV deck. 7. The Xbox would send audio but not video to the DV deck. 8. The DV deck would accept video only in 50Hz format; Halo 3 would only run in 60Hz format. 9. All the technical advice we had consulted that made capturing machinima with Halo 3 look easy turned out to be for NTSC format equipment, whereas all our equipment was in PAL. 10. The video camera was tricky to set up to frame the TV properly (not a technical problem, per se, but difficult, especially since the camera’s viewfinder didn’t show the edges of the picture.) 11. The video camera wouldn’t capture audio. 12. The video camera’s white balance and focus settings disagreed with the television picture. 13. The computer wouldn’t recognise that the camera was connected. 14. My external hard drive stopped working at random intervals. 15. The Ken Burns effect produced a weirdly interlaced picture, that a simple deinterlace filter would not remove. 16. Final Cut Pro’s exporting options sometimes did the opposite of what you’d expect. Not to mention having to deal with the blogs failing for over a week at the height of all this. There were other problems on top of these, but you’ve already skipped to the next point.

• We didn’t get a professional voice actor. No, although Harry and I knew our documentary would live or die by the presentation of its constant voice-over, we gave the role to the very best voice actor who was, er, one of the two of us. (And after the first three limp attempts at it, I doubted we’d even done that. Harry was laughing too hard to volunteer, though.) To be fair, on the day when we first talked about the voice-over style, I was effortlessly busting out a damn good imitation of the classic 60s voice-over guy – but I just couldn’t recapture that when it came time to record.

[Image by OldOnliner under a Creative Commons license.]