How are ludology, horda and narrative connected, or why did the rabbit not go home?
It is believed that video games are works of art along with books and films. This idea is finding more and more support: courses on leading universities such as the University of Alberta in Canada are devoted to the study of video games, and teachers around the world conduct their classes in the Classcraft gaming environment , made in the image of RPG. Moreover, video games are even on display: the Smithsonian Institution, which owns the world's largest museum complex, has added two video games to its permanent art collection as part of the Video Game Art exhibition.
A computer game can be compared to a movie or a book: most often it has a plot, main and secondary characters, protagonists and antagonists. One of the features inherent in any of these works is narrativeness - the presence of a narrative built on certain rules of speech organization, as well as a narrator in one form or another. And one more similarity: both the book and the game can be called interactive, that is, based on interaction, but this property manifests itself in them differently.
It is no secret that when reading a book or watching a movie, we can interact with them in various ways: leafing through or rewinding, partially re-reading or revising to restore forgotten details, start from the previous page or series if you forget what you stopped at. You can skip entire chapters, use a table of contents, and read footnotes for a better understanding. No one can forbid us to start viewing from the second part of the movie trilogy or read only the third line from the top on the forty-eighth page of the novel. In addition, if we return to certain books and films with a break of several years, it is possible that they will be completely different works than at the first acquaintance, without changing even a letter or frame.
As for the video game, it undoubtedly has an extremely high degree of interactivity. Moreover, a game, unlike a book or a movie, is interactive in nature. This property of video games is largely reflected in the dialogs, because they are not only a means of conveying the narrative features of the game, characteristics of characters and plot moves, but also a connecting element containing technical details: information about the location the player needs to get into, what he needs to talk about with one or another non-player character and so on.
Thus, a book, a film, and a game are interactive to one degree or another. Authors of literary works, especially postmodern ones, often use this quality to play with the reader. An example is the story Garden of the Diverging Trails, written by Jorge Luis Borges. The work includes excerpts from other really existing works and is presented as an oral testimony in court. By and large, the story is a metaphor for how Internet users interact with texts on the network. Interestingly, the work was created in 1941, and four years later, the American engineer Vanivar Bush published an article “As We May Think”, in which he described the prototype of the Memex hypertext device.
The idea of creating a device that allows you to search for texts by topic, rather than chronological order, was revolutionary, but interactive work with texts was known to mankind long before that. Take, for example, parents who had read a bedtime story to a child hundreds of years before and had to interrupt the story and answer many questions, such as “Why didn’t the rabbit go home?”, Often changing the plot as the story goes.
Not surprisingly, some children's books were created interactive from the start. For example, each of the stories in the Choose Your Own Adventure series is written on behalf of a minor character, and the reader acts as a protagonist and makes decisions that affect the course of events: “You can stay home or go look for a troll in a cave. To go to the cave, open page thirty-six. " Thus, there are several different endings to each book. It is curious that sometimes the book is still self-willed: according to the plot of one of the stories, the child needs to go to heaven, however, none of the possible transitions leads to the desired paragraph, although it is in the text itself. “Go through” this story, reaching the desired ending, can only be tricked.
The same principle of storytelling, but with a more complicated structure, is used by video game developers as well as game book creators such as Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston's Fighting Fantasy. This series is actually a role-playing video game with simplified mechanics, where everything, including player performance indicators, depends on the die roll. An important part of most computer games is the study of various plot development paths: this or that moment can often be covered in dozens of different ways to see how this will affect the development of history. In addition, the game, like reading a book or watching a movie, can be stopped to continue later. Today, the moment with saving and rebooting is one of the key in many video games, for example, in “Prince of Persia:
So, the game in the most general sense of the word is absolutely interactive, moreover, interactivity is one of its defining properties. Of course, this mainly relates to the game, rather than to play, because if in play the player interacts more with the environment (like a kitten chasing a ball along the floor), in the game special importance is given to the players' communication with each other (more about the differences between game and play can be read here) Elliot Evedon, who studied the concepts of play and game in the 60-70s. 20th century, did not study video games, but he managed to lay the theoretical foundations for understanding interactivity. In his book The Study of Games, he considers its main elements: the purpose of the game, the course of action, the establishment of rules, the required number of participants, the roles of participants, the results and awards, the necessary abilities and skills, the environment, the necessary equipment. Along with many others, ludology deals with the same issue (ludus - “game”; λόγος - “knowledge”), a science that studies video games. Ludologists consider in terms of interactivity even the interface of the game.
Often a video game is a “black box” that opens to the player as they become familiar with it. He constantly receives a kind of “response”, consisting in various responses to his actions, and draws conclusions about the rules of the game. This is the opinion of Raf Coster, author of the famous video games Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In his theory of game grammar (Game Grammar Theory), he considers the process of passing the game in a cognitive manner. The game, according to Coster, is a multi-level system. The player does not have an accurate idea of its rules and is forced to learn them gradually, guessing and adjusting. Thus, the interactivity of the game is expressed using game mechanics.
One of the properties of the game that helps the player to pass it is the narrative, which was mentioned above. It would be a mistake to call it a characteristic inherent in absolutely all games, because some of them, such as Tetris, are completely devoid of narrative. At first glance, narratives are only games that contain a lot of text: dialogs, descriptions, cut scenes. Such, for example, Max Payne and Flashback, not to mention Metal Gear Solid 4, where one of the cut scenes lasts almost 28 minutes. Here, the narrative of the game is expressed more in an act of narration than in the application of a mechanic: at such moments the player usually behaves rather passively and simply observes the development of the plot of the story. True, in some games, interruption of dialogue has an effect on the plot in the future: NPCs do not seem to like it very much when they are interrupted. Rough Coster claims
However, narrative can be expressed not only in the narrative. In some games, narrative is expressed through mechanics. Indeed, in most games, the story is created along its course by the player himself. Such mechanics are called emergent mechanics and are widely used in some RPGs such as roguelike, which are distinguished by the simplicity of the storyline. Usually the player receives the task to return the lost treasure. He goes into the dungeon, accompanied by a helper animal. And then - labyrinths, battles, puzzles. Subjects may vary, however, the presence of procedurally generated levels, as well as the irreversibility of the character's death, are unchanged.
In one of the adventure games, Ico, award-winning for an interesting story, game mechanics are the key to creating narrative. Firstly, the main character, a boy named Iko, fights against the opposing shadow creatures with a stick, from which we understand that he is far from a warrior, but just a young man, forced to defend and defend his companion, the girl Yordu. Secondly, Yorda does not just follow him on the heels, but holds his hand - a symbolic gesture meaning her weakness and fear. Thirdly, every time Iko leaves the girl to solve the puzzle, Jorda is attacked by monsters, and he needs to immediately rush to her aid. At the same time, the player does not see the girl, but only hears prolonged plaintive moans, and besides, it is very easy for him to get lost when trying to return to his companion. All this creates the player a complete sense that he is a defenseless child in a terrible and dangerous world, along with characters. This is the powerful influence of narrative game mechanics.
A computer game can be compared to a movie or a book: most often it has a plot, main and secondary characters, protagonists and antagonists. One of the features inherent in any of these works is narrativeness - the presence of a narrative built on certain rules of speech organization, as well as a narrator in one form or another. And one more similarity: both the book and the game can be called interactive, that is, based on interaction, but this property manifests itself in them differently.
It is no secret that when reading a book or watching a movie, we can interact with them in various ways: leafing through or rewinding, partially re-reading or revising to restore forgotten details, start from the previous page or series if you forget what you stopped at. You can skip entire chapters, use a table of contents, and read footnotes for a better understanding. No one can forbid us to start viewing from the second part of the movie trilogy or read only the third line from the top on the forty-eighth page of the novel. In addition, if we return to certain books and films with a break of several years, it is possible that they will be completely different works than at the first acquaintance, without changing even a letter or frame.
As for the video game, it undoubtedly has an extremely high degree of interactivity. Moreover, a game, unlike a book or a movie, is interactive in nature. This property of video games is largely reflected in the dialogs, because they are not only a means of conveying the narrative features of the game, characteristics of characters and plot moves, but also a connecting element containing technical details: information about the location the player needs to get into, what he needs to talk about with one or another non-player character and so on.
Thus, a book, a film, and a game are interactive to one degree or another. Authors of literary works, especially postmodern ones, often use this quality to play with the reader. An example is the story Garden of the Diverging Trails, written by Jorge Luis Borges. The work includes excerpts from other really existing works and is presented as an oral testimony in court. By and large, the story is a metaphor for how Internet users interact with texts on the network. Interestingly, the work was created in 1941, and four years later, the American engineer Vanivar Bush published an article “As We May Think”, in which he described the prototype of the Memex hypertext device.
The idea of creating a device that allows you to search for texts by topic, rather than chronological order, was revolutionary, but interactive work with texts was known to mankind long before that. Take, for example, parents who had read a bedtime story to a child hundreds of years before and had to interrupt the story and answer many questions, such as “Why didn’t the rabbit go home?”, Often changing the plot as the story goes.
Not surprisingly, some children's books were created interactive from the start. For example, each of the stories in the Choose Your Own Adventure series is written on behalf of a minor character, and the reader acts as a protagonist and makes decisions that affect the course of events: “You can stay home or go look for a troll in a cave. To go to the cave, open page thirty-six. " Thus, there are several different endings to each book. It is curious that sometimes the book is still self-willed: according to the plot of one of the stories, the child needs to go to heaven, however, none of the possible transitions leads to the desired paragraph, although it is in the text itself. “Go through” this story, reaching the desired ending, can only be tricked.
The same principle of storytelling, but with a more complicated structure, is used by video game developers as well as game book creators such as Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston's Fighting Fantasy. This series is actually a role-playing video game with simplified mechanics, where everything, including player performance indicators, depends on the die roll. An important part of most computer games is the study of various plot development paths: this or that moment can often be covered in dozens of different ways to see how this will affect the development of history. In addition, the game, like reading a book or watching a movie, can be stopped to continue later. Today, the moment with saving and rebooting is one of the key in many video games, for example, in “Prince of Persia:
So, the game in the most general sense of the word is absolutely interactive, moreover, interactivity is one of its defining properties. Of course, this mainly relates to the game, rather than to play, because if in play the player interacts more with the environment (like a kitten chasing a ball along the floor), in the game special importance is given to the players' communication with each other (more about the differences between game and play can be read here) Elliot Evedon, who studied the concepts of play and game in the 60-70s. 20th century, did not study video games, but he managed to lay the theoretical foundations for understanding interactivity. In his book The Study of Games, he considers its main elements: the purpose of the game, the course of action, the establishment of rules, the required number of participants, the roles of participants, the results and awards, the necessary abilities and skills, the environment, the necessary equipment. Along with many others, ludology deals with the same issue (ludus - “game”; λόγος - “knowledge”), a science that studies video games. Ludologists consider in terms of interactivity even the interface of the game.
Often a video game is a “black box” that opens to the player as they become familiar with it. He constantly receives a kind of “response”, consisting in various responses to his actions, and draws conclusions about the rules of the game. This is the opinion of Raf Coster, author of the famous video games Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In his theory of game grammar (Game Grammar Theory), he considers the process of passing the game in a cognitive manner. The game, according to Coster, is a multi-level system. The player does not have an accurate idea of its rules and is forced to learn them gradually, guessing and adjusting. Thus, the interactivity of the game is expressed using game mechanics.
One of the properties of the game that helps the player to pass it is the narrative, which was mentioned above. It would be a mistake to call it a characteristic inherent in absolutely all games, because some of them, such as Tetris, are completely devoid of narrative. At first glance, narratives are only games that contain a lot of text: dialogs, descriptions, cut scenes. Such, for example, Max Payne and Flashback, not to mention Metal Gear Solid 4, where one of the cut scenes lasts almost 28 minutes. Here, the narrative of the game is expressed more in an act of narration than in the application of a mechanic: at such moments the player usually behaves rather passively and simply observes the development of the plot of the story. True, in some games, interruption of dialogue has an effect on the plot in the future: NPCs do not seem to like it very much when they are interrupted. Rough Coster claims
However, narrative can be expressed not only in the narrative. In some games, narrative is expressed through mechanics. Indeed, in most games, the story is created along its course by the player himself. Such mechanics are called emergent mechanics and are widely used in some RPGs such as roguelike, which are distinguished by the simplicity of the storyline. Usually the player receives the task to return the lost treasure. He goes into the dungeon, accompanied by a helper animal. And then - labyrinths, battles, puzzles. Subjects may vary, however, the presence of procedurally generated levels, as well as the irreversibility of the character's death, are unchanged.
In one of the adventure games, Ico, award-winning for an interesting story, game mechanics are the key to creating narrative. Firstly, the main character, a boy named Iko, fights against the opposing shadow creatures with a stick, from which we understand that he is far from a warrior, but just a young man, forced to defend and defend his companion, the girl Yordu. Secondly, Yorda does not just follow him on the heels, but holds his hand - a symbolic gesture meaning her weakness and fear. Thirdly, every time Iko leaves the girl to solve the puzzle, Jorda is attacked by monsters, and he needs to immediately rush to her aid. At the same time, the player does not see the girl, but only hears prolonged plaintive moans, and besides, it is very easy for him to get lost when trying to return to his companion. All this creates the player a complete sense that he is a defenseless child in a terrible and dangerous world, along with characters. This is the powerful influence of narrative game mechanics.