The definitive history of games and stories, ludology and narratology

[Update: I clarified a few arguments on 26-2.]

Now that Associated Press has a story out on the academic study of games that mentions ludology and narratology, and Gonzalo Frasca has posted his version of the story so far, let me post mine.

And this story doesn’t begin with a word, it begins with a discussion.

I think that anybody who designs or discusses games and/or wishes for “deeper” or “more meaningful” game content will inevitably run into a discussion of what the relation is between games and stories. This has been going on for quite some time. So after working on a game called Blackout in 1997, I was as frustrated as anyone with the game vs. story thing, so I started doing theory on it.

But there was a problem: For random historical reasons, video games entered the limelight at a time when the concept of narrative was at the height of vogue. If you wanted to seem clever and deep, easy – simply apply the term narrative/story to everything. His pasta tells a story. I once overheard a guy explaining that Frequency (a music/rhythm game) was interesting because it had a different narrative than other games! This atmosphere meant that much early academic theory was marred by blind assumptions that narrative theory would be the key to understanding games.

Somebody had to respond to this, and I hope I have some claim to fame in being one of the first academics to do this in much detail. So in my early work (A clash between game and narrative, 1998-1999) there are two parallel claims being made:

  1. Games and stories are very different things. (Story here understood as a fixed sequence of events.) What makes a game a game is exactly what makes it a non-story. It is a mistake to design games that try to be “story-like” and it is a mistake to analyze games as stories.
  2. The enjoyment of games hinge on their rules, not on their representational level. The representation / fiction of a game is unimportant. (I believe I was wrong about this one.)

After a few years, this thread starts overlapping with the thread of ludology – to me the idea that games should be studied as a unique field (borrowing from the appropriate other fields). I thought I heard the word from Gonzalo Frasca, but Lars Konzack has pointed out that he mentioned the word to me a bit before I read Gonzalo’s article on it. The oldest reference I have found is a 1982 article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “Does Being Human Matter – On Some Interpretive Problems of Comparative Ludology”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 5, nr. 1. 1982. (It’s about whether we can compare human and animal play.)

The proclamations of a ludology then became interpreted as a rejection of narrative – this isn’t technically true, but you can see why someone would make the connection. First he say A, then he says B, so you assume the two things are connected.

Gonzalo Frasca does not make strong anti-narrative statements, but I do, and so does Markku Eskelinen. Eskelinen is also pretty close to claiming #2 above, that the representational level (or specifically what it says on the game box) is irrelevant.

Other actors in the story include Espen Aarseth and Aki Järvinen – I spent a lot of time with Aki at the DAC conference in 2000 wondering why all these people were looking at the anemic field of hypertext fiction when there were just so many more interesting things going on in games. Aki was also an early ludologist for that reason. And Espen has obviously written some pieces against narrativism, and has a famous paragraph on games not being stories in Cybertext. And anyone I missed.

Does the game vs. narrative discussion still matter today? Well, it has become quite tiring, mostly because half the people are using “narrative” to mean a fixed sequence of events, and half of the people are using it to mean” interesting stuff”. (The second version is not very useful, by the way.) A major point of my Ph.D. dissertation is to sidestep this mix-up by talking about fiction instead.

Perhaps the discussion is most important on a design level. I think that over-reliance on the concept of narrative remains a very serious problem in the game design experiments done at universities around the world.

Finally, as it happens with popular terms, there are many competing interpretations of it. Here are the five most popular interpretations of ludology for the time being:

  1. The study of games.
  2. The study of games as rules, ignoring their fictional content.
  3. The study of games with a strong anti-narrative stance (meaning: against blindly using traditional narratology, but including the fictional content of games).
  4. A group of people around the Game Studies journal (decidedly wrong – read the articles, please).
  5. The people at the Game research center in Copenhagen (also wrong – read what is actually being published).

Regarding 4 and 5, I know my two colleagues Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup are really fed up with people randomly assuming they are “ludologists”, and then attacking them for saying things that they haven’t said at all.

You are in reality free to pick your personal favorite from 1-3, but I vote for using ludology in meaning #1: The study of games.

*

PS. Both Susana Tosca and Marie-Laure Ryan have recently told me that they thought the ludologists are fighting an imaginary narratological straw man – indeed, that the narratologists do not exist at all. And on some level, I see what they mean – it is very seldom these days that you’ll meet someone who will squarely proclaim that games are stories. But 6 years ago, it was so obvious – everybody academic just instinctively talked about games as narratives. I have explained how games are different to stories to hundreds of people, and they were invariably shocked at the complete radicality of the suggestion. I’ve explained it to so many fellow literature students who thought it sounded completely wild. But I can see why it looks weird now – simply because people started thinking better of it.

PPS. Here are some earlier articles on the game/story thing:

Andy Cameron: Dissimulations. 1995.

Mark Barrett: Irreconcilable Differences: Game vs. Story. 1997.

PPPS. I called this the definitive history because I know the discussion will never die.

14 thoughts on “The definitive history of games and stories, ludology and narratology”

  1. I know I’ve been guilty of being a number 2 in the past, and I still see some distance between theme and rules in a lot of cases, but like most people in the same situation, I’ve become less snotty nosed in disregarding other points of view (not that I have to agree with them totally!). I’m growing up and out of this fetid ludology vs. narratology mess. I think we all are.

    We’re not, however, all growing out of the debate in the same direction, which is a good thing. Obviously.

  2. I’m curious, in your five flavors of ludology (three artificial!) I don’t see the theme of “play”. I think your discussion is very helpful. But I find myself trying to figure out what to do with the theories that are more focused on the concept of play and what that means. What about those “magic circle” folks that see ludology as a sort of subset of the study of play in general. Can you help sort that one out? Thanks!

  3. A personal perspective on narratology VS ludology, which might mirror the experiences other folks have had:

    1) Over the past few years I’d been working in the game industry, becoming increasingly aware of game design as a craft, distinct and separate from the other game development disciplines – programming, art content creation, et cetera. In time I came to understand that the study of game design is the study of rule creation. I began paying close attention to the mechanical structure of games, without any special regard for their “narrative frame”, and conversing with others (Aubrey and some other chaps from in and around the game industry) in similar terms. It was very illuminating to think about games in this light, as it seemed the focus of study common to the game industry (among developers) and also to academia typically made little distinction between rules and metaphor (narrative frame being a facet thereof), with perhaps the occasional complaint that games like Final Fantasy had too many cutscenes – an obvious instance where narrative exists to the detriment of game. This was the genesis of a self-described “mechanics-centric” approach to game design my peers and I espoused.

    2) Within the past year or two, I started talking with other people online about these issues, and along with the expected enrichment of hearing different ideas / lexicons / perspectives, I encountered people of various backgrounds and agendas who really did believe that games should be studied as a narrative form:

    – Some of them were coming from other branches of academia, where their set of conventional literary / fine art critique tools had served them well. Perhaps people with backgrounds in the creation or study of Interactive Fiction came from a similar direction?
    – Others were from the game community, whose defense of narrative in games emerged almost unconsciously from an affinity for story-centric mainstream games (just as our mechanics-centric leanings came partly from a love for strongly skill-based games and classic arcade games).
    – Still others were seasoned game industry types who were hungry for profit, hyper-pragmatic in their product design practices (such as they were) and had decided that strong stories were becoming the Way to Make Blockbuster Games, so an understanding of game-as-story and of stories in general was in order.

    3) A bitter Us VS Them argument ensued in which nothing much was accomplished. Positions were presented, rebutted, re-clarified. Ludo-minded folks just couldn’t believe that these people couldn’t see the obvious differences between game and story, or didn’t care about them, or who knows? I think it was out of these discussions that the idea of a dominant “narrative-centric” view of games became impressed on people’s minds. It’s a considerable step to say that these were two factions, two diametrically opposed schools of thought. It was merely an assortment of people coming from a lot of different backgrounds and directions, and the conflicts of understanding that emerged are probably what we now refer to as the “narratology VS ludology debate”.

    4) Now it’s the present. We’re pretty much all possessed of a more mature understanding of the issues, and sick to death of hearing the tired old duality brought up. And indeed it is largely a moot point now. I’m not sure what to make of the suggestion that the narratology “faction” was/is largely a phantom… there are definitely people arguing from that sort of perspective but like I said painting it as one faction against another doesn’t seem very accurate and hardly constructive. Hopefully, regardless of perspective anyone who is researching and/or making games now understands all sides of the issue better. If your ideas are truly sound they can only stand to benefit from exposure to the ideas of others.

  4. As a tenure-track English professor hired to teach technical writing with an “electronic text” focus, I chose text adventure games (“interactive fiction”) as a focus mostly because it was the only field of digital studies that my literary colleagues showed a spark of interest in — and that has definitely informed my approach to digital culture (which, for me, includes weblogs and online journalism). Also, my CD Rom drive broke and the text games were all that I could play at home for a couple years — but that’s another story.

    The excitement that literary scholars felt for hyperfiction created a vocabulary that I had to work within and against, but it also paved the way for later stuff. Now that more people are approaching games as games, instead of approaching gamers as an anthropoligist approaches an unfamiliar group, we are seeing so many different things to talk about.

    In the mid 80s, librarians and middle-school teachers advocated text games as a form of literacy, but today’s kids type text to each other rather than a two-word parser. Still, just as a radio play can dispense with sets and costumes, a text game can dispense with many of the features that take up so much time (and require so many employees) in commercial game development. So I’ve found plenty of thoughtful, experimental work in contemporary interactive fiction, in which the designer plays a role more like the solitary (if mythical) novelist than the designer whose vision shapes the contributions of scores of artists.

    Narrative certainly isn’t the only way to look at games, and narrative certainly isn’t driving the commercial game industry. While I’ll continue to give narrative an important place in my own study of text games, narrative is only part of the picture, and sometimes an insignificant part of the picture, when it comes to many genres of game.

    (Jesper… a taller comment box would encourage me to do a better job editing what I just wrote, but maybe the short box encourages briefer comments? Anyway, thanks for a useful spark.)

  5. I should note that now my new job description is not techincal writing but “new media journalism,” so I don’t feel quite as beholden to the metaphors that my former colleagues felt comfortable with.

  6. Great to read this. I was a bit disappointed -and with me a lot of fellow students- to learn that ‘ludologists love narratives, too’at Level Up 2003 after hours of reading all these -seemingly- contradicting papers and ‘surviving’ discussions in class, mind you, this is cultural studies.

  7. I’m sure you mention this in your work, which is why I ask. Doesn’t the nature of a game, the idea of a protaganist, an obstacle, and a reward, lend itself to a narrative anyway, if narrative means “story?” In fact, when someone is playing a game, be it tic-tac-toe, Pac-Man, or GTA3, isn’t a narrative essentially being “written” by the players?

  8. Yes.
    And a novelist could be said to be playing a sort of game of “Being a novelist” (thoguh not a game by Jesper’s definition. It’s more of an ‘interactive system’, I guess). It’s a fair comparison.

    Some people call it narrative space. Others call it possibility space. I think if there’s any distinction in the two, it’s that “barrative space” implies a more conventional story telling space, where as “possibility spaces” may or may not call on any form of real world subject matter.

    Chess, for instance, DOES tell a story in every instance of place, but it’s hardly Shakespere. It’s too abstract for area-man to consider it what he knows and loves as a true story. I think narrative spaces attempt to give rise to the possibility of conventional narratives (with protagonists, story arcs, conflicts, portrail of character through conflict), whereas possibility spaces don’t mind either way. I could be wrong. I wrote too much about this on antifactory.org already.

  9. Just to broaden your analysis, wich by the way I find quite interesting, would be to link ludology to a particular genre of the movie industry, that of Blockbusters. In fact, a friend of mine pointed out rightly somme common points between games and blockbusters. Let me make myself clear: from a teleological point of view, both answer to the call so to speak. In a game you have rules, all of them stating how you will become the victor, thus there’s a purpose in each game, which is reaching our objectves (or counter the opponent’s objectives). In blockbusters, there’s always a hero ( or heroin ) to whom is imposed the task to save the world ( not all the times but very often )… and so on… e-mail me if you woumd like to discuss more about it and I’ll sure will get you in touch with my friend as he is the one who came up with that idea !

  10. Thank you for this. I’ve always felt that the ludology v narratology debate was a false dichotomy perpetuated by “games are art” hipsters who want to call themselves narratologists. It’s also not a very productive discussion insofar as storytelling in games are concerned.

    People who seriously identify with the term narratologist are like the earliest filmmakers who tried to emulate plays. Rather than embrace their new medium, they tried to emulate the storytelling techniques of the past, adding things like playbills, giant blocks of expository text on screen, and intermissions to their features. Similarly, narratologists are game developers trying to emulate the last great new medium, film. And like the earliest filmmakers, they’re adding things like transmedia, expository dialogue, and long cutscenes to their games in hopes of capturing the magic of the last great medium.

    It’s such a false dichotomy because the people who are opposed to narratologists are not ludologists, but rather people who think that games are a unique medium with unique limitations. The way the debate is framed though, mostly by narratologists, is that the people who oppose them are opposed to any storytelling in games, missing the more subtle point that games are a different medium with different challenges.

    I often ask people in the narratology camp if they can think of a way to tell a tragedy in a video game. Most people who seriously consider this question come to realize that it’s difficult, simply because player control prevents the possibilities of tragic flaws in the main character. It can be done, but only by tricking the player– sort of like what Spec Ops: The Line did. And how often can you do that before it becomes old hat?

    This is the real opposition to narratologists. It’s coming to realize that games are unique in their storytelling strengths and limitations. It’s not “games are games” or “games are stories”, but rather games are uniquely different in how they tell stories.

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