I don’t need no stinkin’ story
Actually I do. Since I began thinking about games from the standpoint of a researcher, I’ve heard countless times about the controversy between gameplay (the rule systems that govern gameplay) and narrative. Constance writes in “Why Game (Culture) Studies Now? that “core scholars on both sides acknowledge that the debate is an unfortunate red herring (Aarseth and Jenkins).” So, as just a noob in this field, I did find the idea that narrative wasn’t important to a game playing experience a bit, well, silly. Sure, there are games out there that don’t need a narrative for the gameplay. We can use Tetris as an example, although a game sold during the Cold War as the “Soviet Mind Game,” with an onion-topped palace on the cover might just begin some sort of narrative in the user’s mind. And as much lore as there exists in WoW, I really don’t find myself thinking about it often, and not everyone playing WoW played the previous War Craft games.
For me, I’m often drawn to games that have a narrative–KOTOR, HALO, Homeworld (anyone remember Battlezone-not the arcade version?). But my question is for those who play games that don’t include a narrative. Do you construct a narrative as you play–one of your own creation. For example, my wife is not a gamer, in the stereotypical sense, but she really loves computer Solitaire. We got to talking about why I like certain games over others and my fondness for narrative, how I’ll progress through a game motivated by the desire to see more of the narrative. I like plot. I was suprised when she told me that when she plays Solitaire she oftens has a narrative running through her head: She’s stuck in Las Vegas without enough money to fix her car or get home by some other means, so she takes what she has to the casino and gambles in hopes of raising enough cash. Amazing! I thought. I don’t think I would play the game like that. I’d simply want to achieve a better and better score and get pleasure from solving the puzzle.
So my question is how many people play plotless games in this manner? Is narrative more important than is thought? (if this is actually a controversy)
The reason this interests me is how it seems that finding meaning in activities such as school learning, in the case of my discipline, Composition, helps students see purpose in what they do in school. Why write research paper for first-year comp? Isn’t that just an exercise in me finding sources and reporting what I’ve learned to the teacher? What my students are lacking in FYC is a context which initiates the assignment and motivates the process of writing. I thought, in the past, that using service-learning would give my students a real-world context in which to act. They worked with “live” people, face-to-face. They were doing auto/ethnography rather than library research. And I’ve begun using blogging as an assignment with the same thinking–writing in the real-world. I don’t have the capacity in the writing classroom to simulate for my students writing in the community of psychologists, sociologists, chemists, or computer scientists, and this is what I feel is missing from a research paper assignment. My students don’t seem to see writing as conversation within a given field. They don’t have a context to put knowledge in action.
When I play thru Homeworld I become immersed in that universe and feel a connection to my people, the Higarans. It’s up to me to learn the rules of the game in order to put that knowledge in action to protect my clan. I’m roleplaying in the game, just as I do when I write my graduate seminar papers. I pretend I’m in conversation with these scholars. So each semester I ask myself what can do to give my students a compelling context within which to write academic research papers. I guess it could be as easy as asking them to roleplay, but that doesn’t sound as interesting as being in a field or in a game.
