If a new way to blend narrative and gameplay was to be used, and a cry of disapproval was made, then I would relate the two. That would be the sound that destroyed art of games. But to my knowledge such a blend is not yet realized. Personally I like sound in my movies; I would be welcome to a non-interrupting narrative in my game.

Similarly, in games that have stories without cutscenes, your interactivity with the narrative is usually exploration. The story is fixed and you can explore it. But doesn’t that feel unnatural too? In real life, people make choices. The stories of life happen through your choices. And an interactive story without choice seems like a story without dialog. It can be done and done well, but doesn’t seem like how it happens in real life.

Or did I miss the point?

1) From the texts I’ve read out of the so-called silent era, it seems that the majority of critics and film practitioners looked at the possibility of mechanical sound synchronization to moving images as inevitable. While Bazin’s claim that sound film fulfils the prophecy of the cinema (“Myth of Total Cinema”) seems a bit overblown, if we look at many pre-cinematic optical devices we can see a deep history of sound accompaniment–phantasmagorias with glass harmonicas, chronophotography of speaking people with actors providing speech from behind the screen, etc. So this Paul Rotha quote (as well as others we could probably find from the avant-garde, cinephiles, etc) could be seen as an exception rather than the norm.

2) I’ve always found interesting the ways in which the establishment of sound film is elided with the establishment of classical hollywood narrative in a lot of film history. The coming of sound destroys the hope the avant-garde had for a revolutionary, non-narrative medium, it solidifies techniques of continuity between cuts, etc etc. So while sound raises questions about the specificity of cinema as a medium, narrative as such for both games and film seems to be less a question of apparatus specificity than one of modalities of these media, or how shifts in the apparatus effect on the “content” of the medium. So along these lines, we could think of something like the Wiimote–something which more fully projects the movements of the body into a game world. This seems to me to be a clear instance of a shift in the nature of the apparatus that has a direct effect on this troubled relationship between game and narrative–the vast majority of games I’ve played on the Wii have little to no narrative aspirations, and perhaps this is a product of the Wiimote. Though others may disagree?

The analogy breaks down, I think, at the respective paradigm rifts. “Sound” and “moving image” are different media, while “narrative” and “system” are different patterns. The dynamics of merging media and merging patterns are in turn very different.

In modern games we have many cases where interactivity is suspended entirely while narrative is delivered. Even as sound and speech were reshaping film back in the 1920s and 30s, we never saw sections of films where the visuals would go black and audio would carry the drama for a while.

So I’d hesitate to say that the story-free, game-qua-game will ever become a thing of the past the way silent films have. The persistence of the former seems to demonstrate that interactivity has more of a separate existence from narrative.

Essentially, given that people argue that they KNOW what the medium is, they also protect its purity from substraction. Think of how many people who argue that X is not a game because it doesn’t have {a winning condition, score, goals} or {isn’t played on a console, doesn’t have a controller, etc.}. Yes, I know that you’re talking about intersecting media, yet the dissecting(?) question can also be productive. :-)

I guess it was a slightly mysterious post, and it wasn’t at all supposed to be about games and narratives.

What I found fascinating was that I realized that the kind of early argument about “games are destroyed by adding ingredient x” is in many way similar to arguments made about other media:

* Film: Film should not have sounds as it detracts from the core strength of film – images.

* Music: Music should not have lyrics as it detracts from the pure music.

* Painting: Painting should really about the flatness of the canvas.

… and so on.

Souvik, all these arguments are on some level similar in that they claim to know 1) what the medium _really_ is and also veer a little towards 2) protecting the “purity” of a given medium. 1) is better than 2), isn’t it?

They are dissimilar in that the _other_ that the medium is being protected from (sound, lyrics, representation, narratives) are also very different things.

i would not be surprised to learn that Mr. Rotha would also be indifferent to the type of narrative that one might imagine is missing from games of today; it is very doubtful that he would have been ignorant of operas or stage plays, the importance of spoken word to their narratives, and the similarities they would have shared with the new medium of movies.

while his main argument may be directed at sound, i would not underestimate the consequences it would have had on narrative, what that says about his underlying vision of what movies should be, and how that compares to the similar position on games.