Digital Stories

On the website I write for, CinCity2000, we're making the move to having a Video Game Week starting today. Normally, we're a cinema website run by a small cult of film geeks, so taking on video games is branching out for us: my first piece for the week is up, Fighting Purple Tentacles: A Wasted Youth Playing Adventure Games.

The fundamental difference between film and video games is in the interaction. When we talk about film, we're talking about a story that exists the same in static form no matter who is viewing it: while viewers bring different knowledge into a film and a different interpretation out of it, the film itself is unaffected. Video games change to the player: the order of events and even the outcome can change depending on the player's approach and skill. Talking about the experience of a video game, then, becomes more personal: a player might remember spending hours trying to "beyond the pail" in Companions of Xanth [the final solution involves a catapult] or finally consulting a hint book to find out where a hidden key is concealed.

I remember all the games I grew up with in context of the time: when I go back to play these games now, it's far from the same experience. I'm not living with the parents who used to be my companions in adventure. I feel like I'm slower with the puzzles than I used to be, as if the logic that I used to rely upon for those types of journeys went rusty when I started higher education and started taking in too much literary theory. Still, there's the same sense of accomplishment in figuring out a puzzle to get butter from a butterfly or save the world from a rampaging purple tentacle.

Meanwhile, the face of games is changing, and the adventure game's almost disappeared into obscurity while games like the latest iteration of Halo [reviewed by my colleague Big Ross] transform gaming from a hobby for geeks in their basement to one for frat boys and normal folk, kindof like film itself.

Tribal Warfare + MMOs

There's a great article over at Gamasutra, "The Academics Speak: Is There Life After World of Warcraft", with some interesting folks discussing the question of how players end up in different virtual world. World of Warcraft is clear king of the MMO jungle right now, but many players choose to spend their time on far less populated worlds. Some choose games like Guild Wars that offer the lure of a one time investment, others stick with the community of Second Life, and a stubborn few continue to play MMOs or even MUDs that put graphics on the back burner in favor of other qualities. One of my own friends recently migrated to World of Warcraft after sticking with Asheron's Call for over seven years [the game launched in 1999!]. The move was traumatic for him: it's abandoning a world that had become a second home. I was a long time resident of Asheron's Call myself, and I could return to that game today and still comfortably manuver the land of Dereth.

When I migrated gaming worlds, as I've done repeatedly, I took a core of fellow gamers with me--my extended family. I only stayed in contact with a few other players who'd switched worlds in a deliberate sense, but I did find commonality in running into other players discussing the worlds left behind. But if my family didn't play Warcraft, would I have stayed with the hard core tribe of Asheron's Call or migrated on with the rest of the coolseekers to newer and graphically improved realms? Probably the former. Once comfortable within a virtual world, I don't feel the same pull to move to a new environment--the same reasoning, perhaps, that makes old school adventure games still feel more appealing to me with their relaxed and cartoonished environs than their "realistic 3-D" counterparts.

So what will be the next big game? I've read the previews and heard the hype for the next generation of MMOs. Star Wars Galaxies was supposed to move the world away from fantasy games, but couldn't get over the problem of too many heroes in a world that needed ordinary folk. Lord of the Rings seems fit to suffer from the same problems--not everyone, after all, can be wizard or ringbearer. World of Warcraft is particularly suited to networks of social tribes as the entire world is at war, and a concept for heroes and allegiences exists in every faction. Players can build their groups within sets of avatars that share a language, race, and appearance and advertise their loyalties with proudly worn tabards. Even my students in my Cyberspace class had their own guild--they dubbed it the "Fluffy Wuffy Friends," as I recall, much to my dismay. These common ties and rituals can migrate to another game--but I think it will take more than slightly better graphics and a license tie in to draw the hordes.

Readings in Digital

I’ve gathered the resources I intend to return to first in the writing of my paper on Virtual Worlds and Virtual Romance this semester. This is a very brief annotated bibliography of the first books I’m looking at with this topic in mind; many of them are particularly useful works in virtual worlds studies. I hope this might be helpful to others as a resource for looking offline for respectable sources for virtual world studies; I've found that when reading articles online on topics like the virtual economy or interactive narrative much of the same surface impression appears repeatedly, and these are some works that get beneath that surface.

Digital Texts / Digital Worlds

Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds.

Edward Castronova approaches the new concerns of virtual worlds not from a social perspective but from an economic one. With the monopolies and mercenaries of Second Life and the still thriving trade in virtual gold and avatars virtual worlds must be considered as places where people go not only to play but to profit. Castronova considers the implications of the various economic factors affecting virtual worlds, including the use of cheap labor for “goldfarming” and the profitability and contract inherent within the subscription model still in use by most MMOs today.

Crawford, Chris. On Interactive Storytelling.

In On Interactive Storytelling, Chris Crawford begins by determining what makes a story, particularly for the purposes of storytelling in games. There is an expectation on the part of gamers that Crawford notes allows games to escape the actual confines of storytelling: “Games have never paid much attention to the many structural requirements imposed on stories…players don’t complain when games jerk them through wild dramatic gyrations because they don’t expect games to follow the protocols of storytelling” (14). However, this doesn’t mean that games should be limited by this historical trend, and Crawford goes on to address how the future of games might address the diametrically opposed demands of interaction and narrative.

Juul, Jesper. Half-real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.

Jesper Juul writes particularly compellingly when he is discussing the relationship between computer systems themselves and the playing of games; essentially he points out that there is no more appropriate use for both to be put towards. At the heart of game design is the creation of the rules that will govern someone’s play; without rules, a game cannot exist.

King, Brad and John Borland. Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture.

In Dungeons and Dreamers, Brad King and John Borland offer a history of developments in the last thirty plus years of computer gaming. They begin their account before the first computer games emerged, as they pinpoint two origin concepts and discuss the rest of the history of gaming in those terms. Both occurred in 1972: the first is the creation of the paper based gaming system Dungeons & Dragons, the second the craze surrounding arcade video games. This offers a familiar duality of storytelling based gaming, where almost everything was left to the imagination of the players, and the electronic based action and reflex gaming of the arcade. In surveying the developments in computer gaming, Borland and King begin with these earlier forms, noting the origin roots that would have a strong influence on the computer games of today. If you’ve ever read a comic in Penny Arcade and not gotten the joke, then it’s likely you weren’t as thoroughly immersed in computer game geek culture as a few of us were in the late 80s and early 90s—Borland and King can catch you up on what you missed while seeing the outdoors or going on dates.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage.

Marshall McLuhan has been heralded as a prophet, named the patron saint of Wired Magazine, and even made a cameo in a Woody Allen film--all this from a man who didn’t want his own grandchildren watching television. McLuhan looked at media with a brilliant nonlinearity that has made him infinitely quotable, so I’ll let him explain himself: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, pyschological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty--psychic or physical.”

Meadows, Mark Stephen. Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative.

Everything from CYOA books to MMOs fall under what Meadows refers to in his work Pause & Effect as interactive narrative: “An ‘interactive narrative’ is a form of narrative that allows someone other than the author to affect, choose, or change the events of the plot” (238). While a narrative is being offered, it is always secondary to the demands of interactivity, as the user is confronted not with a written linear text but with a screen, an interface, a host of characters and a perspective that differs from game to game. Most importantly, a game must be playable. Often the criticism is leveled at computer games that the stories are not “literary.” However, this misses the point: these stories must be designed to work as part of a whole subject to interactions of the user, not as a master story to be “read.” Balance varies across the genre: greater openness comes at expense of the planned story, while a planned story requires the limiting of user freedom.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages.

In Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages, Montfort explains the literary connection between interactive fiction and the riddle: “the most direct counterpart to interactive fiction in oral and written literature is seen in the riddle…by presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out in order to fully experience, and in order to answer correctly, the riddle offers its way of thinking and engages its audience as no other work of literature does” (4). This metaphor of the riddle offers Montfort the opportunity to draw a comparison that declared that riddles and interactive fiction “both have a systematic world, are something to be solved, present challenge and appropriate difficulty, and join the literary and the puzzling” (43). The ability of a riddle such as one by Swift to remain literature while existing as a challenge for the reader reveals that “the literary and puzzling aspects of the form are hardly inherently antagonistic, but rather must work together for the effect of certain IF works to be achieved” (63).

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press: Boston, 1998.

In Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, the holodeck mentioned in the title remains now a construction of a media fiction, in particular the Star Trek universe. The Star Trek vision of the holodeck is of a space where anything can be projected and interacted with on the same level as reality—people, food, and scenery. Janet Murray describes the seduction of the holodeck: “The Star Trek holodeck is a universal fantasy machine, open to individual programming: a vision of the computer as a kind of storytelling genie in the lamp” (15). However, like the genie that fulfills wishes in sometimes disastrous ways, there may be a dark side to the holodeck story world—“If we could someday make holographic adventures as compelling as Lucy Davenport, would the power of such a vividly realized fantasy world destroy our grip on the actual world? Will the increasingly alluring narratives spun out for us by the new digital technologies be as benign and responsible as a nineteenth-century novel or as dangerous and debilitating as a hallucinogenic drug?” (17).

Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. Arcade Publishing: New York, 2000.

In Trigger Happy, Steven Poole does not set out to tell of a videogame revolution to come in the future: he is instead a chronicler, exposing the revolution that he has already seen happening around him. It is not a matter of whether the videogame will become an art form; instead, it is a matter of how the videogame already is an art form and what the next steps of its evolution will be: “…when videogames are at their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a quiz show…that hunk of molded plastic, that PlayStation or Dreamcast, is a magic box that allows you to play with fire. A Prometheus engine” (206). The examples Poole offers, the PlayStation and Dreamcast, are two previously popular gaming platforms allowing for the playing of games on the television set that have now been superseded by newer systems. Poole gives these systems and by extension their more recent counterparts a mythical significance, fire being the gift of Prometheus from gods to man, a life saving tool and potential destructive force.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2001.

In Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Electronic Media, Marie-Laure Ryan takes the concept of Virtual Reality as a technical construct and uses it to create a framework for discussing different experiences of text. She first defines “Virtual Reality” as “a computer-generated three-dimensional landscape in which we would experience an expansion of our physical and sensory powers; leave our bodies and see ourselves from the outside; adopt new identities; apprehend immaterial objects through many senses, including touch; become able to modify the environment through either verbal commands or physical gestures; and see creative thoughts instantly realized without going through the process of having them physically materialized” (1). At the time Ryan is writing, 2001, this virtual reality remains mostly a construct in progress; five years later this remains the case.

Warcrafting for the Whole Family?

When I started out playing my first Massive Multiplayer Online Game, Asheron's Call, my immediate family bought three copies: I was in high school at the time, and my parents and I decided to move from Diabloesque games where only the three of us or visiting friends played to a larger scale. We weren't alone: my cousin, uncle, and aunt all joined up too. We occasionally joined up with other players, people who weren't members of the Salter clan, but mostly these games became our family pasttime. They live in Florida, so actually seeing them often would have been quite a feat while a weekly or more night of Asheron's Call--and later Asheron's Call 2, Anarchy Online, and now World of Warcraft--is much easier to arrange.

I was reading Laura's blog about some of the fears for isolating effects of virtual worlds: the lack of refined manners and conversation out in the real world, the tendency to substitute virtual contact for "real" ones, the problems that can arise from spending too much time interfacing with the world through a screen rather than through physical closeness. There are so many ways too meet people in virtual space, and all of them filled with that looming risk a person might not be who they claim to be. I've met many people in my life that way, and several have stayed important to me, and many of whom--such as my fellow writers on CinCity2k--provide me with communities of knowledge and interest I would not otherwise have.

This virtual connections can be meaningful, but mostly the Internet is indispensable to me for keeping me in touch with people who are geographically distant. When I was younger I lost my connections with the friends I grew up with in California when I moved back to Maryland, and the plans to be "pen-pals" seemed doomed to fall through. Now I've found some of them again on Facebook. I don't live near my extended family, but I can play Warcraft with them or send out a quick email whenever the thought crosses my mind. This seems to me to be the essence of the new structure: not that it makes new connections possible, but that it makes sustaining connections easier.

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This brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the virtual world sexcapades I'd like to address this semester. Consider again the question of virtual adultery. Say a married man enters a world, Second Life for simplicity's sake, and meets a lady there. There's conversation, drinks in a fully equipped bar, and fully animated connection. Nothing real has happened in such an encounter that can be documented. It's an affair with an on-screen set of pixels and words. Is that an affair at all? Is it any different from playing a game--Monkey Island, say--where the player leads the avatar of Guybrush Threepwood on his continual attempts to win the heart of Governor Marley? It's all just text and pixels after all.

Change one detail: say the man meets a lady at a real bar. They exchange avatar names finding they share a passion for Second Life. Now the encounter is entirely in-game, but there's a face and a remembered connection behind the pixels. Is this more real? Would any wife be satisfied with the explanation "It's just a game?"

Here, the line seems clear to draw: no one's going to be happy with any flirting with girls met in bars, even if it does all go to the Internet. But it's not a long step from the first fully online lady to this level. Would an emailed exchange of photos [even if the lady's image is probably pulled from someone else's myspace page...] make the lady real enough to be a threat? How about a switch from text-only chat to voice over IP?

When, in short, is a connection "real"?

Garage Gaming

Booting up Rise of the Dragon for the first time my parents and I huddled around our tiny new computer and spent hours just trying to get out of the first screen: a static, comic book style image of an apartment room where our avatar “Blade Hunter” was preparing himself for his task of saving the world from horrible death by mutation. Most of all I remember the death scenes – comic sequences where we took a drink from the water fountain and ended up mutated and dead, or shot in an alley, or otherwise eliminated, over and over again.

Now I log on to World of Warcraft – still cartoon graphics, but now 3D, beautifully realized, huge worlds where my avatar is no longer alone and thanks to the web we have whole communities of elves and trolls and gnomes running around killing each other. The progress the industry and the Web have made in just over ten years is absolutely breathtaking, as now games with the same quality of Rise of the Dragon can be produced by a teenager working on their computer in the basement, and developing tools that were once for the elite of design teams and companies are now accessible to the general web user. With the constant improvements in creation technology allowing for literally the “garage Kubrik” and digital media being, at least for the moment, just as much in the hands of the individual as the commercial studios, the future of digital works is yet to be determined.

My own interest in independent digital creation is focused on the adventure game genre, which in itself is now a fairly antiquated genre--adventure games are driven by story and puzzles, and generally contain no major violence, so naturally most publishers have abandoned them as unprofitable when presented to a general audience of attention span lacking teenage males. The number of adventure titles released by computer gaming companies has dwindled and even when projects are announced they are quickly cancelled with a few impressive exceptions such as the recent Sam and Max revival. However, the form is being kept alive in a fan maintained world of independently created computer games. Using fan created software tools that allow for the mimicking of classic game interfaces, fans are creating both sequels to classic games and their own orignal works. These intensive processes of creation are embarked upon not with the hope of financial reward, but for personal satisfaction and the opportunity to make something a popular success within a discriminating niche market.

In theory, people entering the realm of independent game design in this nature are limited in their storytelling only by their own imagination. On the website for one popular 2D adventure game design program, AGS or Adventure Game Studio, there are games listed that don't generally live up to that hope. Many are parodies, some clever, others are simply exercises in escaping a puzzle house [or castle, or island...]. But the occasional moments of brillance make up for the general lack of innovation. A fantasy story, A Tale of Two Kingdoms, bring's back the King's Quest era with an original, if slightly Tolkeinesque, fairy tale. Cirque du Zale starts with a story of a young man brought to save a fantasy princess--who starts a circus instead.

These are not the games you'll find reviewed in the latest Computer Games magazine. They owe their existence to digital distribution: the ability to freely make available large files of creative efforts without vying for shelf space. The closest parallel to these endeavors in pre-Internet society was the zine movement, when the photocopier allowed for the home "publication" and mailed distribution of fan writing and news to groups of subscribers. The digital distribution of these games seven suffers from some of the same limitations: they are unlikely to reach the attention of anyone who doesn't know where to look.