A theory of the computer game

This chapter has a single purpose: To describe the computer game as a subject for theoretical study, with a special focus on its relationship to narratives. I am not the first person to make such a connection between an aesthetic domain to the computer: Brenda Laurel has tried to describe the computer with terms from dramaturgy (1991), Theodor Nelson has proposed we should examine computers like we’d examine movies (1990), Peter Bøgh Andersen has tried to apply semiotics (1990), George P. Landow has used poststructuralist literary theory (1992, 1997). All of these initially assume a correspondence between their theory and the new field of study. Espen Aarseth has described this as theoretical imperialism (1997, p.16). In all modesty, my starting point is different in that I take literary theory as a starting point to examine where and why the computer game differs from the domain of literature. I am looking for similarities and differences.

This work leads to a theory of computer games, a theory that tries to account for the primary qualities of the computer game, the primary conflicts, and the areas of the greatest variation between different games.

Most examples in the theoretical chapter are action games. This is because interactive fiction is presented as an opposition to the action game, why it is interesting to examine what it is that is being rejected. Interactive fiction is an attempt at a hybrid, and to understand this we must shed light on its undescribed part, the computer game. Furthermore the action game is the most popular type of computer game, and, is my claim, the computer game in its purest form.

I examine the computer game from two theoretical angles:

The structure of the game

This structural examination of the computer game is first and foremost a discussion of the relationship between computer games and narrativity as such. In specific question, my focus is primarily on the novel. The novel is central, because it is the literary genre, whose characteristics regarding time and narrator have been most thoroughly examined. This happens in three parts:

A narrative medium?

The basic problem of the narrative is that fact that the narrative as phenomenon can not be viewed independently, an sich, but only through another medium like oral storytelling, novels, and movies. The classical argument for the existence of the narrative is the fact that a story can be translated from one medium to another:

This transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium. (Chatman 1978, p.20)

Correspondingly, Peter Brooks says:

Narrative may be a special ability or competence that [...] when mastered, allows us to summarise and retransmit narratives in other words and other languages, to transfer them into other media, while remaining recognisably faithful to the original narrative structure and message. (Brooks 1984, p.3-4)

In a newer and more cognitively oriented version of the same thought (narratives/meaning as something mental, independent of the medium), Torben Fledelius Knap describes texts as phenomena creating the same mental spaces regardless of the medium:

That a text can be translated between media points to the situation that a text is more than just the empirical material object presenting it. [...] A mental space that arises and appears so a human can fix it as stable and refer to it despite of the fact that the world passes by, is a text. (Knap 1998, p.40, my translation.)

It does seem fairly unproblematic to move a story between traditional narrative media like the novel, the movie, and the theatre. Computer games are a bit harder to place in the above definition of a text, since they do "pass by", and are not identical every time they are played. On a higher level of abstraction, computer games are stable and can be referred to; level 15 in Doom is identical (or variable within fixed limits) no matter where or when you play the game. This gets more complex in the multi player game, but you can still describe a specific computer game as a stable system, variable within fixed limits.

These arguments for the existence of the narrative as something media-independent, can be used the other way, as a test of whether the computer game is a narrative medium: If the computer game is a narrative medium, stories from other media must be retellable in computer games, and computer games can be retold in other media. We can start by examining a game based on a movie.

From movie to game: Star Wars

The arcade game Star Wars (Atari 1983) is based on the George Lucas movie of the same name. In the movie Star Wars, an army of rebels fight a heroic battle against the evil galactic empire. The dramatic peak of the movie is when the rebel army and the story’s protagonist Luke Skywalker must attack the evil empire's new weapon the death star. The game Star Wars is in three phases, in all of which you control a spaceship from the inside, presumably as Luke Skywalker. The first phase takes place in space, where you fight hostile spacecraft. The second phase is on the death star, fighting different towers and square object on the death star surface. In the third phase you fly through a tunnel in the death star, where you must attack the exhaust port at the end. This makes the death star explode. First and third phase are immediately recognisable from the movie. First phase corresponds to an in-movie battle before Luke flies to the death star - except that the rebel fleet is absent. Second phase has no clear correlate in the movie. The third phase corresponds to a scene in the movie - again with the rebel fleet being absent. If you complete your mission, the death star explodes. So the game copies a small part of the movie. We can also note that the other rebels are absent, at that you for no apparent reason can keep on blowing up the death star, at greater and greater difficulty.

Star Wars (Atari 1983)

There is one thing that encourages the player to connect game and movie: The title "Star Wars" on the machine and on screen. But it is basic literary knowledge that we should not assume the title or the foreword to be correct. If we imagine the title removed from the game, the connection would not be at all obvious. It would be a game where one should hit an "exhaust port" (or simply a square), and the player may note a similarity with a scene in Star Wars, but you would not be able to reconstruct the events in the movie from the game. The prehistory is missing, the rest of the movie, all personal relations. Possibly we are even missing the understanding that we are fighting a death star. Finally the most obvious: If you do not complete the mission, this is unlike the movie; if you complete the mission, another death star appears - which is also unlike the movie. Thus, Star Wars the game does not contain a narrative that can be recognised from Star Wars the movie.

Time, game and narrative

Narrative is a ... double temporal sequence ... : There is the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative (the time of the signified and the time of the signifier). This duality not only renders possible all the temporal distortions that are commonplace in narratives (three years of the hero's life summed up in two sentences of a novel or in a few shots of a "frequentative" montage in film, etc.). More basically, it invites us to consider that one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme. (Christian Metz, quoted from Genette 1980, p.33)

A narrative is characterised by a fundamental distance between the events told and the discourse describing these events. In the classical narratological framework (as put forward by the Russian formalists), a narrative consists of two distinct levels, the chronological sequence of events and the sequence this is being told with:

To read a novel or watch a movie is to a large extent about reconstructing a story on the basis of the discourse presented. It is safe to say that the central texts in narratology have focused on the first part, the story. This goes for Propp, Greimas and Barthes. A large amount of work has been put into finding a grammar of stories, a basic structure in all narratives. There has been less focus on the discourse, and even less on what can be called the time of the reading. In Narrative Discourse (Genette 1980), Gérard Genette performs a structural reading of the temporal qualities of the novel, with special regard to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The starting point of Genette is basically the opposite of the structuralists’, with special focus on the discourse and the time of the discourse. Genette assigns great importance to reading:

The narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading. (Genette, p.34)

In this way, he introduces a third time, the time of the reading. My examination of the computer game is at first about the relationship between these three times: The story time, the narrative time, the reading time, and to what extent they can be found in the computer game.

Story time, narrative time, and reading time

Verbally based narratives must necessarily mark the time of its events in relationship to the narrative time:

By a dissymmetry whose underlying reasons escape us [...] I can very well tell a story without specifying the place where it happens, and whether this place is more or less distant from the place where I am telling it; nevertheless, it is almost impossible for me not to locate the story in time with respect to my narrating act, since I must necessarily tell the story in a present, past, or future sense. (Genette, p.215)

The most common temporal mode in narratives is past tense, where the narrator places him/herself at a later time than the events told. (There are also texts in future tense - prophetic texts, as well texts in present tense which I’ll get back to later). This pastness is inscribed in the "once upon a time" of the fairly tale. And even a radical, modernist work like Ulysses begins in the past tense:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. (Joyce, p.1)

This temporal distance is part of the novel as a genre, and it is a strong device that can be used in many ways. We only need to think of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, where the protagonists tries to tell of his past, but the act of writing this down takes more time that he time he describes; using a year to tell of the first day in his life.

Time in the computer game

If we then proceed to an action-based computer game like Doom II (ID Software 1994), it is hard to see a temporal distance between story time, narrative time, and reading time. We can talk of a representation of some events, and as a player you try to reconstruct some events from this presentation: The blocky graphics can be interpreted so far as the player controls a character, whose facial expression is represented in the bottom centre. On the illustration this person has been cornered by a large pink monster, whose hostile intents are clearly identifiable. The player is attacked by monsters he/she must defend against; puzzles must be solved to get to the next level.

Unlike the verbal narrative, there is no grammatical time to explain the temporal relations. And unlike narratives as such, it is clear that the events represented cannot be past, since we as players can influence them. By pressing the CTRL key, we fire the current weapon, which influences the game world. In this way, the game constructs the story time as synchronous with the narrative time and the reading time; the story time is now. As a consequence of this being an interactive medium, the events of the game are constantly influenced by the player’s actions (or lack thereof). The moment the events can be influenced by the player, there is necessarily an implosion between the three times. This means that it is not possible to use the novel’s interesting relations between story time and narrator.

In a game where the user watches video clips and occasionally makes choices, the three times will move apart, but when the user can act, they must necessarily implode: it is impossible to influence something that has already happened. This means that you cannot have interactivity and narrativity at the same time. And this means in practice that games almost never perform basic narrative operations like flashback and flash forward. Story and discourse follow instead.

A parallel perspective is the question of duration. It is straightforward to discuss the duration of a movie: its duration is inscribed in the material it is stored on and in the machinery for displaying it. In the written narrative, this is more complex, since the duration of the reading will vary with reading speed. What we can examine is variations in the number of pages used to describe a specific amount of time. Gérard Genette identifies four basic tempi (Genette 1980, p.95): Pause, where the events are stopped during the narration; scene, where the narration relatively takes as long as the action; summary, where the events (again relatively) pass faster than the narrative; ellipsis, where some of the events are skipped. In the context of these terms, an action-based computer game always passes with the speed of a scene: One minute in the time of the game corresponds to one minute of playing. This does not mean that every game takes equally long time; there are probably no two games of Space Invaders or two games of Doom II, equally long. In this way the computer game is closer to the novel than to movies or theatre. But computer games differ from the narrative media in that they are "told" with constant speed: Moving the space ship from the left to right side of the screen will always take the same amount of time. This is unlike Genette's basic description of the narrative:

[...] it is hard to imagine the existence of a narrative that would admit of no variation in speed - and even this banal observation is somewhat important: a narrative can do without anachronies, but not without anisochronies, or, if one prefers (as one probably does), effects of rhythm. (Genette, p.88)

We may conclude that the temporality of the computer game is fundamentally different from that of narratives.

Is happening: The now of literature

When this has been said of the game’s basic now as a radical difference from narratives, it should be added that Genette’s terms are about the novel as such, with special focus on pointing to general characteristics of the genre. (Event if this is primarily based on reading Proust’s experimental In Search of Lost Time.) But literature also has a now. During the creation of Naked Lunch, William Burroughs writes the follow explanation to Allen Ginsberg:

[...] the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening. (Burroughs 1993, p. 375)

And the same thought can be found in a completely different context, in Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author (Barthes 1977). Barthes creates a partially normative description of "modern" texts as texts that do not describe things past, but happen in the now of the reading:

[in the modern text] there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ’depiction’ [...] (p.145)

If we take this at face value, it tells us that the absence of temporal distance between story time and narrative time can be seen in two places: In fragmented (post-) modern literature and in computer games. We can compare this with a stream-of-consciousness part in Ulysses:

I think I'll get a bit of fish tomorrow or today it is Friday yes I will with some blancmange with black currant jam like long ago not those ... (Joyce, p.907)

This text tries to establish equivalence between story time and narrative time. Or perhaps the events and the description of the events are the same thing? Where Burroughs and Barthes claim that the now leads to a dismantling of the story/discourse distinction and a focus on the discourse, Genette argues:

A present-tense narrative which is 'behaviorist' in type and strictly of the moment can seem like the height of objectivity, since the last trace of enunciating that still subsisted in Hemingway-style narrative (the mark of temporal interval between story and narrating, which the use of the preterite unavoidably comprises) now disappears in a total transparency of the narrative, which finally fades away in favor of the story. That is how the works that come under the heading of the French 'new novel', and especially Robbe-Grillet's early novels, have generally been received [...] But inversely, if the emphasis rest on the narrating itself, as in narratives of interior monologue, the simultaneousness operates in favor of the discourse; and then it is the actions that seems reduced to the condition of simple pretext, and ultimately abolished. (Genette, p.218-219)

So Genette distils two types of present tense texts. One is the collapsed fragmented text practised by Burroughs and described by Barthes, the other is an "objective" style, where the events are described without comment, without a narrator. It does not seem possible to place computer games in one category or the other. On one hand, they do not have a represented narrator, and their relationship to the events narrated seem quite "objective". On the other hand, it is hard to see what other events they might refer to. The pink monster in the earlier illustration hardly exists outside Doom II (and does not seem to claim so). The same goes for the space ships in Space Invaders (Taito 1977) or the monkey in Donkey Kong (Nintendo 1981): They do refer to a large amount of cultural texts and thoughts, but computer games carry a basic artificial quality that makes it hard to see them as signs of something else. This is partly a temporal question; the now of the game prevents it from being a representation of something happening another time. From this point of view, the computer game is only what happens on screen; it is pure discourse. It appears central to the computer game, that it is hard to decide whether it is "objective" or "fictive"; it simply does not fit these categories.

It may be obvious that the more open a text is to interpretation, the more emphasis will be on the reader’s interpretation now. Some theories will claim that this is always so, that interpretation always happens in the now of the reading. This is true, but it is the open (post-)modern texts that have been characterised with the now because the story world disappears behind the artificiality of the discourse: The more the events of the text are covered by indicators of fictionality and explicit contradictions, there harder it is to reconstruct a story from the discourse, the more focus goes to the interpretational efforts of the reader now. The difference between the now in literature and in games is that now in literature is about texts where the reader's effort interpreting obscures the text’s possible reference to another time. The now of the game means that story time and narrative time are identical with reading (playing) time.

The temporal difference

Movies and verbal narratives are characterised by what Genette calls variations in speed. In the movies this is immediately clear, in the verbal narrative it is more complex. There are basically no movies - especially popular movies - without variation in speed. We may think of Andy Warhol's 6-hour movie Sleep (1963), where a camera simply registers a sleeping man. But in the (action) computer game, this absence of variation in speed is a general trait: Computer games move in constant speed, and do not skip time. There can be intermezzos between different levels, but time passes with constant speed during play. So time in the computer game is less sophisticated than canonical narratives; closer to Sleep than Gone with the Wind.

We can view the variable temporalities in narratives as consequence of two phenomena: One that our impression of time is associated with the events happening in a period of time - an active period is remembered as longer than one where nothing happened. The other is that the reader/viewer should not be bored, so inactive periods are skipped. The computer game solves the same problem not by skipping time, but by orchestrating the game world for non-stop action. This kind of technique would appear extremely unrealistic in a movie - possibly because interesting human actions appear too infrequently for a two hour story to fill a two hour discourse. Computer games often lack the association with something we have already experienced we need to see it as unrealistic - we do not know much about space battles. So computer games can contain sufficient action to work in real time.

Sequence

The most frequently commented trait of the computer game is that a game session does not follow a fixed sequence. This is of course because the computer game is interactive and thereby non-linear or multicursal. According to Peter Brooks, narratives are to a large extent based on repetition:

Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered: a sjuzet repeating the fabula [...] (Brooks 1984, p.97)

The computer game differs in that it has to be a non-fixed sequence; it cannot claim to repeat something that has already happened. (Otherwise there would be no game!)

The linearity in a normal text is, one could claim, central to the way we interpret them. When Moby Dick finally defeats captain Ahab, it seems an inevitability, something that had to happen due to his manic obsession with the whale. In Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, Roland Barthes claims that his connection is a mainspring for narratives:

Everything suggests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc - a good motto for Destiny, of which narrative all things considered is no more than the 'language'. (Barthes 1977, p.94, emphasis added.)

This means that the nonlinearity of a computer game stops this central part of narratives from working. If Captain Ahab can choose a premature escape and settle down as tobacconist in Nantucket, the story ceases to work. This is especially true on a psychological level, because Ahab has been described as having a certain psychological profile. If this description is to make sense, he can only act in one way when faced a choice. But the same feeling of necessity also applies to events where the text has not provided any information or indication of what should happen. This applies, for example, to large parts of Paul Auster's work. In Moon Palace (1989) the protagonist, by way of an extraordinary coincidence, meets his hitherto unknown father. This is an explicitly random and unmotivated event, and yet it has a character of inevitability and destiny.

The fixed status of a sequence of events is what identifies a story - and it what makes it translatable between media. The variable sequence of a computer game breaks with the narrative in this way; an interactive sequence can not be translated to a non-interactive and fixed sequence. Conversely, the chronology of the computer game is very inflexible: If an interactive story was told in a discourse that did not follow the story chronologically, it would quickly lead to paradox; with the player's choices preventing an already presented scene from happening. This is a classical time machine paradox from science fiction: How can you travel back in time and influence something, if this changes the grounds of your leaving at all? So story and discourse have to follow in an interactive work.

A model of non-linear texts

When reading a novel, we assume that we must read from the beginning to the end. A non-linear text presents explicit directions as to the order of reading. A computer game is similarly composed of some programming and some material. The program and the reading directions work to combine the material to the representation received by the reader/player. In Aarseth's terms, this is ergodic: A computer game contains a number of functions that control the reader's access to some material or combines material. On a higher level, any text/game contains a set of rules for, when to present an ergodic function to the reader (if at all). These rules can fittingly be described as a program. This program upholds the rules for combination of the material. A model of non-linear texts and the computer game can thus be presented like this:

A model of non-linear texts

This model is universal for non-linear texts. What I am saying is that the interesting dichotomy in a computer game is between material and program. The interesting focus in a system like this regards the relationship between the represented and the rules for the combinations of material.

The program and the material belong to two distinct traditions. The material: graphics, sound, text belong to the traditional media, and are of the type that we know how to handle in an aesthetic tradition. The program is new in this context: It is formal, works causally on an electrical level. A dualism like this between an underlying (immanent) level and an interpretable and visible (manifest) level is largely what the structuralist narratology tried to create for narratives. While I believe that this does not hold in narratives, the distinction is actually present in the computer game: The material and the program can be taken apart.

The question of sequence is very important in the computer game. It just doesn't focus on the relationship between story and discourse like a narrative does. The interesting part in the computer game is the relationship between the material and the program, how the material is combined to what is seen on the screen, and if there is something that relates a specific program to a specific material. From the point of view of the skilled player, the material in an action game is subordinated the program. What interests the player is the program's rules for gameplay. In the same way that Kasparov does not think of the shapes or name of the chess pieces in a game of chess.

The narrative frame in a computer game

In this description of the computer game I have first and foremost focused on the temporal characteristics and the sequence of the game. But most games have a story on the package, in the manual, or somewhere else, placing the game in a larger story:

The narrative frame in Space Invaders

1. Introduction 2. Game 3. Ending

When Space Invaders (Taito 1977) encourages to "Play Space Invaders", the player is presented with an ideal story that he/she has to realise using skill. A prehistory is suggested in Invaders: An invasion presupposes a situation before the invasion. We can't tell what should happen once the invasion has been prevented, it is just implicit in science fiction mythology that these aliens are evil. The title suggests a simple structure with a positive state broken by an external evil force. It is the role of the player to recreate this original positive state. You do this by controlling a space ship at the bottom of the screen. This space ship is protected by some bunkers that can be destroyed. The enemies enter from the top part of the screen. Having shot all enemies, you proceed to the next level. The next level brings new enemies, and the bunkers are rebuilt.

In the narrative model of Greimas (1969), a narrative is seen as moving between two positions. His example is a princess that has been abducted from her home to a new position by a villain, and is subsequently rescued by a hero. It is thus a sequence of a good state that is threatened, after which there is a struggle to restore the original state. Vladímir Propp adds that the initial state often contains some kind of lack: The prince is lacking a princess, that king has grown too old, the princess has gone cold. Even narratives beginning in medias res (perhaps with a person at the top of his/her career) typically have an implicit lack such as a dark and poor past, a sad home, a long lost love. I will start with the following structure:

  1. Stable state [with a lack] is overturned by an evil force.
  2. Battle for the restoration of the original state.
  3. Original state restored, lack resolved.

In the article Adventures in Computerville (Jensen 1988), Jens F. Jensen works from a parallel narrative model in three parts. He compares this model to "computer games" (meaning action games) and concludes that: 1) Computer games are narratives since they move from lack® lack restored. And 2) that the main deviation from Propp is that computer games have two endings: The good: that the original state is restored; the bad: that it isn’t. Point one is not entirely clear: I have previously argued that the temporal characteristics of the computer game are quite different from narratives. The other problem is that computer games only move from lack® lack restored if the player wins. So Jensen’s definition would imply that Space Invaders is only narrative if you succeed in fighting off the invasion.

But you can not complete Space Invaders: Having shot all the attackers, you are simply faced with a new attack, and the green bunkers protecting you have been repaired or replaced. So this suggests that some time has been skipped (ellipsis). It is a question of interpretation whether every wave of enemies is part of the same attack, or if a new invasion has occurred. It can mean that the initial state has been restored, but then threatened again, only this happens without any indication from the game. So the narrative frame does respond to the three-part model above, but the game only happens in point 2, battle.

Compared to the three-part model we should also note that there hardly is any lack in the initial state. Lacks are generally absent in computer games, perhaps because they do not contain the existential dimension that the protagonists’ lack adds. As a player, you are probably not interested in adopting another person’s existential lack, and it can be a problem to communicate such immaterial things to the player.

So the narrative frame provides an explanation of what the player should do. In a less abstract way: It is possibly obvious, that whatever object you control, it should be defended against other objects moving towards it. (At least until you know otherwise.) This is why that narrative frame can add meaning without changing the game. It is thus evident that the narrative frame is not necessary to play the game, and that it can be replaced with another narrative: Space Invaders can quickly be changed to – for example – a game where you are attacked by insects and centipede instead. This is the game Centipede (Atari 1980).

The meaning of the frame

You are the good guy, freedom fighter and renowned star pilot. The bad guys, an alien race from a distant solar system have invaded Neoclyps, one of your colonial planets.
(The package of Neoclyps, Cymbal software 1983.)

We use narratives for many different things in many different contexts, both fictive and real. The history of the computer game is fairly short and begins in the 1960's with very primitive graphics. The computer game can, especially early, hardly be taken for a representation of something real. Up to the middle of the 1980's it was possible to buy games where you, for example, controlled an exclamation point (a warrior) and fought #'s (monsters). This is the reason why the narrative frames from the outset have been considered irrelevant, arbitrary. And this is why a game already in 1983 could have an ironic narrative frame. The narrative frame has always seemed forced, irrelevant to what really matters: The game.

This point is slightly controversial since many people will claim that their action games really to tell stories: It seems that inexperienced players take the narrative frame at face value, "I am fighting an evil samurai", while the experienced player determines the genre; "It is a 3d shooter". When various commentators (for example Jensen 1988, Grodal 1998, Wenz 1997) describe the computer game as narrative, they are assuming that the narrative frame or the game commercials are right. It is my point that the narrative frame is purely metaphoric assignment of meaning to the game.

This point corresponds more or less to Theodor Nelson's critique of the Macintosh user interface (Nelson 1990): The Macintosh (and modern Windows) are based on the concept of metaphoric design, where you create an interface by mimicking things already known to the user. The modern user interface is built on a desktop metaphor. According to Theodor Nelson, this doesn't work very well because you have to explain most users why this is like a desk. If you click on a document, it is suddenly above other documents. If you pull a disk to the trash can, it is not thrown away but ejected (on MacOS). In the computer game, the titles, intro sequences and cut scenes work in the same way: Their purpose is to explain to the player, why this platform game is at all related to the movie The Lion King, why this 3D flying game is related to Top Gun. Because it is not clear from the game itself.

Modern pinball games are another, and perhaps clearer example of this assignment of meaning to a game. You still shoot the ball around to hit the flashing lights, but now a display claims that you are part of a story. On the Star Trek machine (Williams 1993), you are sent on different mission: avoid an asteroid, rescue the crew from a planet. Or more precisely: You still have to hit the flashing lights with the ball, but now a display tells you that the hitting a special lamp rescued a crew member for the planet and so on. There is an abundance of pinball games based on popular movies. Even Thousand and One Nights has been created as pinball - open the gate, fly on the carpet etc.

Not everything that claims to tell a story actually does so. But there seems to be a tendency for humanities researchers to take every description of something technological at face value - even if it comes from the manufacturer. When creating a game "based on" a movie, there is a clear interest in having the buying public assume a deep connection between game and movie - it sells the product. But movie-based games are known as low quality products, that simply seek to exploit this connection - they are seldom innovative or even especially focused on relating to the movie. When movies for a young audience are converted to games, it is almost inevitably as platform games; games where you have to control a main character jumping over obstacles, collecting small objects. And this is clearly the discount strategy in computer games: Simply pick a well-known game genre and add some graphics and sound from a movie. Disney's The Lion King (Disney 1995) or the Tintin game Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun (Infogrames 1997) are good examples of this.

Interactive fiction often downplays the game in relation to the frame. Rather than trying to achieve some kind of correspondence between frame and game, the complexity of the game is reduced. Narrative parts are added and interactivity is removed. This does not make the relation between program and material any less arbitrary; it simply shifts the emphasis.

The narrator

I have argued that in the computer game we find an implosion between story time, narrative time, and reading time. This is a consequence of the fact that a game is not a fixed sequence that the game has not happened yet but is happening. The interactivity demands that the game happens now, unlike narratives which are basically told afterwards. A narrative can also be characterised by the fact that there is narration. If the narrator is not characterised as such, at least there is some kind of selection of what to tell and emphasise. This selection is related to the temporal situation and variations in narrative speed. In a game like Space Invaders, there is no such variation during the game, but the game has a narrative frame, and there are omissions (ellipsis) in time when the game ends: When the player doesn't play, there are some operations going on that may remind us of the narrator's role. But no narrator is indicated.

Is this your doing?

Let us then turn to the novel and consider the detective story. The detective story needs a criminal. The criminal is not a narrator, but shares some traits with the narrator in that the criminal is responsible for the existence of the detective story at all. The criminal is the source of the story, and it is the job of the detective to find this source. So the detective’s question to the criminal is this, "Is this your doing?"

The crook in Doom II?

In Doom II, as in any game, there is a corresponding implicit question of why the game world looks like this. Who created it so that aliens are attacking me? Doom II is inhabited by evil monsters that have to be killed to get on. But where do they come from? The last level (32) provides a possible answer, as you are faced with a giant monster that shoots monsters from a hole in its forehead. This is the source of the game.

Myst has a corresponding figure, only explicit. According to the narrative frame of Myst, "you" (the reader) are reading a book but suddenly get sucked into it. It turns out that the book as been written by Atrus, who has the gift of being able to write worlds into existence. Atrus is trapped in book inside the primary book/world, and the task of the player is to rescue him from this other book. Atrus is a kind of explicit narrator, except that he only tells the world as a structure, but does not control the subsequent actions. Such a story of words creating worlds has clear Jewish/Christian roots. The story in the story (mise en abîme) is also quite classical (Hamlet, Thousand and One Nights), the same goes for the story of the creator that loses control of his creation (Frankenstein). The computer game has a considerable ability to use elements from other cultural contexts.

The explicit narrator in Myst is slightly atypical, but end-of-level monsters are a common occurrence in the action game - to progress you have to defeat an especially large and hard opponent. Such variations, with changes in the size, number, and abilities of an opponent enhance the computer game with variations in intensity, variations that are somewhat like the variations in speed found in narratives.