Vivens - The Narrative Essence of Gaming
Sections
No two forms of art are quite the same. Novel, stagecraft, painting and every other art-form are all differentiated not only by their mediums, but also by the stories that they can tell. For instance, a play can express different themes than a novel on account of it’s use of visuals and motion. In the case of gaming, neither the narrative method nor narrative essence of the medium has yet been formally defined and so I will do what I might to illuminate both of these topics. For the medium of gaming, the narrative method of interactivity allows the audience the unique ability to access a work’s themes through a form of lived experience that we shall call vivens.
Narrative Method and Essence
Before we can delve into gaming we must first define the concepts of narrative method and narrative essence. Both of these terms are mental frameworks that we will utilize in order to differentiate narrative method, a tool used to create narrative, and the narrative essence, the thematic forms that are created through the use of a narrative tool. To differentiate the narrative methods of each art-form one must first consider what art has come before it because every new narrative art-form must be able to do something that prior art-forms could not in order to be a separate form. If we are to examine prose, it can be seen that the most similar art is oratory. The main differentiation is that prose has stability, it remains the same across multiple tellings of the story. Thereby, that which differentiates prose from it’s prior art-forms is it’s ability to be unchanging.
While it is nice to understand that stability is the method of prose, this does not inform us of what new narratives can be created therein. Narrative method and essence are like walking. In the act of walking (one foot in front of the other), one knows little about the act without considering the destination. All walking is “walking to,” and that places a necessary emphasis on the destination. Narrative method is the act of walking for a narrative art-form whereas narrative essence is the destination. The former has no meaning or purpose without the latter and a greater understanding of the art as a whole cannot be achieved without understanding the narrative essence.
For our example of prose, the narrative method of stability allows for significant specifics-focused thematic elements. In other words, the small elements of a story, from the flower noted on the ground to a specific metaphor, all have significance in that the creator chose for them to be the permanent fixtures in the story. From this, close reading and literary criticism can suss out the small minutia of meaning within a work. Here it can also be seen that examining the narrative method is not enough to understand what an art-form can create as “stability” does little to clarify the workings of prose.
While it may seem obvious from this example that one must not only examine the narrative method but extend their examination into the essence as well, most prior examinations of gaming as a narrative art-form have concluded their findings at the narrative method (including my own prior examinations). To recap, the narrative method is the tool that a narrative art-form can utilize to create stories that prior art-forms could not while the narrative essence is the unique thematic elements that can be formed in an art-form as a result of the utilization of the narrative method. Now we can begin our examination of gaming beginning with it’s narrative method: interactivity.
Gaming’s Narrative Method: Interactivity
Video games present a different form of engagement in their interactive nature. Interactivity is defined by the action-reaction cycle. In said cycle, an entity will act upon another and, in response to that stimuli, respond with it’s own action and so on. This is not a complicated definition, but it shows the prerequisite for two acting entities to be present and for there to be responsive action between the two. Hence art-forms like prose and film are not interactive in that the audience may act towards a film but the film will never respond to that stimulus. The response is what gaming really brings to the table.
However, it is not interactivity in-and-of itself that separates gaming from the other artistic forms. Interactivity in art existed as far back as the Victorian era. When a play was performed, it was often the case that the lower class patrons, who often stood nearer to the stage, would coax the performers into doing what they wanted them to, whether this be to have the titular character’s kiss or some other deviation. Of course, that “coaxing” occurred in the form of throwing vegetables or possibly becoming violent in less prestigious establishments. While gaming may not have exclusive rights to interactivity as a whole, the form of interactivity inherent in gaming is fundamentally different from what can be seen in other art-forms.
The main difference in gaming’s interactivity is it’s scope. In a game, the player acts within a set world that follows rules. These rules are as binding and flexible as the rules of our real world, whether they be the laws of physics or biology. Hence player action within the world of a game is limitless in the same way that a person’s actions in the world are limitless, any feasible action may be taken at any moment. The freedom of gaming’s interactivity is thereby differentiated from the prior examples of interactivity in art. The old plays would only ever be changed in minor and meaningless ways. It was the actors job to entertain, but also to maintain the artistic vision as much as possible. As such, audience participation was limited in order to maintain artistic integrity. Such issues do not occur within the potentially limitless possible actions of a gaming world.
While a player may act with the same type of limitless possibilities as in reality, no game’s world is or attempts to be a fully realized simulation of reality. Even in simulation games such as city-builders or hard core racing games, elements of reality are removed or gaming artifacts are added so as to meet the developer’s vision. A city-builder will give the player god-like control over the design of their city while racing games necessarily omit any risk elements for the player that are inherent in the act of racing. Every element of the game is tailored to the developer’s will. Thereby, the gaming world is a reproduction of the real world that is thematized according to the developer’s visions.
The thematization of a game’s world exists in all aspects of the work. Every element that is added to a game is added by the developer, thereby being a manifestation of the developer’s intent within the game. Any addition both helps to create and bolster the overall thematization and is, itself, also thematized to some degree. The same rules apply to that which is omitted, although only within omissions that lie within the generic purviews of that game. For instance, a city-builder’s exclusion of political elements from the game (such as running for re-election) may show a general disregard for politics in the developer’s conception of a utopian city or may help point towards the more key themes within the game. However, the same game’s exclusion of first-person shooting mechanics tells one nothing about the specific themes of that city-builder as said mechanics lie far beyond that genre. The developer’s specific inclusion of every game element indicates the game world’s inherent thematization.
In the same way that every word is chosen by an author or every scene is cut together by an editor, every game element is added according to the will of the developer. This includes not only the space of nouns in a game (those being the physical mechanics, graphical elements, or world beyond the player) but also the space of verbs, or player action. Every mechanic of a game is an element that the developer added and so follows similar rules of thematization to added objects. Each thing that the player can and cannot do is determined beforehand by the ruleset that the developer imposes upon the player. Unlike the space of nouns, the player’s actions can only be interpreted in the macro-scale. Each individual action that the player takes may range from banal to foolish to heroic, but they are coincidences within the world. When the player acts on a larger scale, that being completing tasks (whether assigned or not) as opposed to doing individual actions, the thematic restraints of the space of verbs becomes present. Therein the player can see the will of the developer, or the meaning, and have the chance for introspection, an element of a game’s meaning that will be touched upon in more depth later.
The Avatar
The final element that must be examined in gaming’s interactivity is that of the avatar. An avatar is the element of the game that is meant to be controlled by the player. While the player often does not have control over the entities actions at all times (such as in cutscenes or when control is wrested from the player), when it is controlled the player has full power over the entity within the ruleset of the developer. The totality of the player’s control means that the avatar is not just another game element, it is the player’s will made manifest within the game world. An avatar is a wholly different entity from the rest of the environment around it. It is key to remember that the player’s will and the avatar are one in the same.
Now the whole of gaming’s new brand of interactivity can be seen. Interactivity in gaming is defined by it’s theoretically infinite possible actions that are thematically limited according to the developer’s vision. This does not yet hit upon the narrative essence of gaming, but it points one in that direction. Gaming’s narrative method focuses around the player’s actions, with the world existing as a set of thematic constraints that direct the player. The player acts out the themes of the game. Because of this, our future inquiries will be directed towards understanding the unique thematic properties of the player’s actions along with a deeper understanding of the different methods of expressing interactive themes.
Vivens - Lived Experience
The narrative essence of gaming is what we will call vivens. In order to be the narrative essence of an art-form, the essence must give the audience a path to the thematic elements of the works therein. As was discussed previously, due to the fact that the developer controls both the positive and negative elements of the world of verbs within a game, all of the macro-scale actions of the player are thereby thematized. From the player’s perspective, the themes of the work are revealed through their action and must be taken into account in the narrative essence of the art form. As such, one can define Vivens as: a player’s ability to access thematic elements through lived experience. The key to this definition is the concept of “lived experience,” which has two distinct meanings in relation to this definition.
Acting the Part
The first part of “lived experience” is the fact that it is audience action. For the most part, this element is meant to illuminate the difference between the non-interactive arts and gaming. In an art form like film, the narrative is a passive experience. The audience ingests a narrative that is predetermined, sympathizes with key characters, and engages with decisions in the narrative from a safe distance. To view the art is purely the act of looking. On the other hand, the interactive art allows narrative variation, the audience becomes the titular character, and the narrative decisions are much closer and more personal for the audience. The most significant difference is the much more personal nature of the avatar’s actions in a game as opposed to the actions of the protagonist in a movie.
Any action made by the avatar is an action that is lived by the player. There is a common distinction between experiences in a game and actions “IRL” (in real life). However, this is a false dichotomy. Every game that is played is played in real life. The experience of shooting an enemy in a game is as real as walking down a street. The key difference is not that one is false and the other is true, instead it is that gaming experiences occur within a sphere of abstraction. This abstraction occurs on two levels: the physical and the psychological. The physical abstraction is clear to see as the player of a game is not playing out the act. Instead they are projecting their will onto the game’s world through their conduit into the world, the avatar.
On a psychological level, the fact that the player is acting through the avatar distances the player from their action towards other entities in the world. To shoot a person in real life is an immediate physical act where the actor must acknowledge themselves as acting and the other as a significant entity. Conversely, to shoot a person in a game allows the actor to project the action onto the avatar, thereby lessening the trauma, and one can regard the other as a non-important entity. On another level, the nature of a gaming environment makes it so that one’s actions are impermanent and thereby less significant. Excluding MMOs, decisions in a game do not tend to effect other people in a way that will reflect upon the player both because the actions can be replayed and the targets of said actions are empty simulations, a reality that a player might downplay but cannot fully ignore. These two elements of psychological abstraction both combine to separate the player from their actions towards others.
Despite this abstraction the player still makes real decisions within a game world. The player chooses, in reality, to act the part of the titular character. As such, both the acts and the moral decisions of the avatar are taken as one’s own actions. This ownership reduces the distance between the player and the main character as opposed to film or novel and necessarily causes (if the player is mindful of the game) something that the other arts do not: reflection on one’s own actions.
Routine and Habit
The other aspect of “lived experience” describes certain forms of unique engagement within works of gaming. Particularly, gaming can express story through the actions that constitute people’s day-to-day lives: habit. To enable the player to experience this habit, games can utilize a unique narrative tool called the cyclical narrative. In short, this narrative system allows the story to loop back upon itself indefinitely with the contents of said loop being narratively significant. The loop, which is non-existent in other mediums due to the necessity for interactivity, allows game to not just express, but actually have the player perform habitual action.
In the doing of said habitual action, the player discovers a new form of engagement. To illuminate this engagement, let us consider the example of a novel expressing a protagonist’s soul-crushing office job versus a cyclical narrative doing the same. In the former, the audience will be told that the protagonist has lived for some-odd years doing the same dull job. Perhaps one or two instances of this will be seen by the audience. There will be little more than that and a viewer must take it on face value that the job is dreary. On the other hand, a cyclical narrative will allow the audience to experience the job. Instead of being told that a job is dreary, one will be left to find it tiresome themselves. The audience experiences every cycle as the monotony slowly sets in. Where the novel required that the audience to empathize with the protagonist, the cyclical narrative pushes the audience to feel the visceral boredom (through the veil of abstraction). Neither method is good or bad, they both have their perks, but vivens allows wholly new form of engagement.
While vivens may allow for habitual “lived” actions, these actions are not analogous to those in reality. The key difference is that a game’s cyclical actions are necessarily thematic prior to their doing. A habit in real life does not necessarily have meaningful pre-action thematic content. To train at something does not reveal a moral to living. However, once one is to succeed based upon that training, they will assign the theme of perseverance always leading to success. Hence, there may be thematization to real habit, but the habit does not contain that theme prior to action, it only exists as a projection of the individual’s will onto an already completed action. On the other hand, the habitual cycles of a game will always be thematized prior to their undertaking. Remember that the developer creates the world according to their own will, thereby necessarily thematizing every element of the game’s world. This thematization occurs in the creation of the game, thereby assigning meaning to action prior to it’s actual doing. The thematic-ness of all of the elements of a game create the meaning that can be found in vivens’ lived experience.
By understanding the “acting the part” and habitual nature of vivens’ lived experience, we can now fully understand vivens. It is the unique way in which a player can access thematic elements through lived experience. Now we must delve into the implications of such a definition when it comes to the actual appearance of thematic elements in games. As such, we will examine the difference between inter and intra-personal meaning and how these concepts apply to vivens. Then the two forms of vivens will be explored: habitual and exemplum vivens.
Inter and Intra-Personal Meaning
In creating meaning within art there are generally two types of meaning that can be created. The first is the far more traditional inter-personal meaning. If a piece of art is to tap into inter-personal meaning, it is attempting to illuminate obscured elements in the world around the audience so that they might better understand them. This could be revealing some struggle within the world (i.e. George Orwell’s 19841) or show the inner struggles of an individual that is not the audience member (i.e. Rain Man2). While the audience may achieve some greater understanding of themselves, that understanding is always tangential to the direct meaning of the work which is focused on understanding the world.
On the other hand, there is a far more elusive form of meaning that could be called intra-personal meaning. This is where the work of art seeks to tell the audience something about their own decisions, philosophies, and being. In prior forms of art (those which are not gaming), intra-personal meaning is, as was noted, only a tangential result of the inter-personal meaning of the work. However, vivens allows art to not only express inter-personal themes, but to also directly and lucidly express intra-personal themes. This is achieved through vivens’ lived experience. By making decisions and acting out the story, the protagonists actions are the player’s actions, thereby having any consequences thereof being linked to the player’s choices. In this relationship, the player ends up considering themselves in relation to the outcomes of any actions as opposed to considering the author’s viewpoint. With the avatar’s actions being considered as the player’s will, any retrospection upon said choices will reflect upon the player.
The Two Forms
Vivens has two different ways in which it can reveal the art’s intra-personal meaning to the player. These methods are called habitual and exemplum vivens. Both of these methods use the lived experience of vivens to create a retrospection upon the player’s actions. However, they each utilize a different aspect of vivens to achieve this goal. Neither of these methods are mutually exclusive, in fact they can both occur at the same time. The division of the primarily two boils down to how they do or do not use a cyclical narrative to their advantage.
Exemplum Vivens
Exemplum is the more traditional of the two forms of vivens in that it focuses on a linear experience. The game asks a philosophical question or poses a moral framework within which the player must act out their will. The player’s actions will be responses to the question being posed. Any repercussions stemming from the player’s answer will reflect upon those actions and, if done properly, should cause one to reflect upon what their choices say about them as a person. Exemplum will tend to focus on larger, overarching concepts that focus heavily on the interplay between player action and the developer’s thematic constraints.
A prime example of exemplum vivens is the game Prey, developed by Arkane Studios. In the beginning of the game, the player is asked to fill out a questionnaire of what appears to be meaningless psychology questions. However, the fundamental question being asked (does the player prefer new experiences? Is it better to sacrifice one in order to save many?) end up being a prime focus of the game. The player fills out the questionnaire and then must put their answers to the test during actual gameplay (does the player risk the entirety of humanity by saving a few surviving crew members?). The Youtube channel Extra Credits made a video called Prey - The Enemy Inside that delves much deeper into this topic (and was the inspiration for this section).
Prey is as literal of an example of exemplum as can be found. Instead of veiling the philosophical question of the game within it’s themes, Prey steps out and presents them directly to the player. The meaning behind the game, a question of the player’s idealistic or utilitarian motives coupled with whether one chooses to see humanity as redeemable or not, is revealed through the gameplay, or the player’s individual and unique actions. The meaning of Prey is drawn directly from the player’s actions and spurs the intra-personal reflection that is so often characteristic of vivens.
Habitual Vivens
While exemplum tends to focus on larger themes of game, habitual vivens tends to focus on smaller narrative segments. Habitual vivens finds it’s meaning through the use of cyclical narratives. The player is given a routine to follow and, in the doing of the routine, will find some meaning or greater realization. Unlike exemplum, habitual vivens does not have a question-answer format. Instead, the meaning behind the player’s actions is more fluid, being ultimately determined by the player’s personality. As such, an example of habitual vivens may be found as one of the elements of an exemplum theme. The exemplum would exist as the greater overarching theme whereas a habitual moment may be a response to the philosophical question that is revealed through repetition.
One example of habitual vivens can be found in the game Inside, developed by Playdead. Inside focuses on themes of domination as the player controls an avatar that is running from and ultimately challenging a strange group of people that seek to mind control the populace. On the surface of it, the game is a linear experience but as one examines it more closely, a cyclical narrative appears. The player will continue to loop through the main narrative arch, always being captured as the blob at the end. However, if one finds all of the secret generators and disconnects them then they can gain access to a secret area with a second ending. This ending has the avatar disconnecting some wires connected to a mind control device in the center of the room. In the cyclical narrative portion of Inside, the player continually fails to escape domination as they are always caged at the end of the game. This is because the avatar can never escape domination so long as the player controls it. Hence the game truly ends when the avatar detaches itself from a machine that seems to be the connection between the player and the avatar.
The cyclical narrative of Inside is where the habitual vivens reveals itself. The secret ending would have little importance if the player had not first discovered that there was no possibility of escaping domination through standard gaming means. The cycle allows the player to access a whole new level of thematic content within the game through the mere doing of the cycle. By having it be the player’s actions, Inside subverts the player-avatar relationship inherent in gaming thereby creating a meta-criticism of the genre that could not have been achieved so eloquently without the use of the player living the avatar’s inability to escape.
Habitual and exemplum vivens are the two ways in which vivens can allow the player to access the lived thematic elements of gaming. The distinction between the two is somewhat fluid as habitual moments often make up a significant element of exemplum or, occasionally, vica-versa. The two elements are more of a conceptual framework from which one can better understand what any element of vivens is seeking to portray and how it is doing so. What is key is that all of vivens is seen through lived experience. The player’s actions must be the key to any of vivens’ thematic elements whether habitual or exemplum.
Vivens is the heart of the unique artistic experiences of gaming. It is possible to use the old narrative essences to create thematic elements, and such tools will always be vital elements of a developer’s narrative toolkit. However, vivens is the only way that a developer can access experiences and thematic elements that are uniquely gaming. The inherently interactive world of gaming calls for the creation of meaning through lived experience. With a greater understanding of vivens, new and more significant experiences can be created and a new light can be shined upon the older works of this art form.
11984 reveals the inherent struggle between a government that seeks to panoptically control the public and those that seek to live freely.
2Rain Man depicts the struggles of a savant in the modern world. It pushes the audience towards a level of empathy with the struggles of the disabled.
”Prey - The Enemy Inside - Extra Credits.” Youtube, uploaded by Extra Credits, 11 October 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3QsCy4ekWk.
Orwell, George. 1984. Penguin Group, 1977.
Levinson, Barry. Rain Man. Warner Home Video, 1988.
I just came from youtube (MermMade) and I'm so fascinated by visual storytelling, I've gone into visual literacy and I'm currently doing a Masters in Design to improve my knowledge in the area. I would love to have a chat with you! I have a discord if you would like to join it to have a chat.
ReplyDelete