The following represents some general research on narrative, involvement, player role and game information that underpins my paper. I found Calleja’s work particularly fruitful, and will try to order a copy of his book In-Game to the library in time for my thesis.
The cognitive, emotional and kinaesthetic feedback loop that is formed between the game process and the player makes games particularly powerful means of affecting player’s moods and emotional states.
Narrative involvement deals with the engagement with story elements that have been written into the game as well as those that emerge from the players’ interaction with it. It considers two inter-related dimensions of narrative in games: the narrative which is scripted into the game and the narrative that is generated from the ongoing interaction with the game world, its embedded objects and inhabitants along with the events that occur therein.
Shared involvement deals with the engagement derived from awareness of and interaction with other agents in a game environment. These agents can be human or computer controlled and the interactions have here been discussed in terms of cohabitation, cooperation and competition. Thus, Shared involvement encompasses all aspects relating to being with other entities in a common environment, ranging from making collaborative battle strategies to discussing guild politics or simply being aware of the fact that actions are occurring in a social context.
The ludic involvement dimension expresses players’ engagement with the choices made in the game, and the repercussions of those choices. These choices can be directed towards a goal stipulated by the game or established by the player or decided by a community of players, as described by Oriel above. The can also be spur of the moment decisions without a relation to an over-arching goal. Seasoned game players understand that well balanced game-systems emphasise the opportunity cost of any particular action taken. Without repercussions, actions lose their meaning and thus the emotional excitement (affective involvement) generated by their execution (kinaesthetic involvement).
For those suffering from a lack of excitement, games offer an immediate channel of emotional arousal. Conversely, for those whose work or personal lives are too hectic, games’ compelling nature makes them ideal for shifting one’s attention to a performative domain that suits the players’ needs
Game design, like other forms of textual production, is imbued with the rhetorical strategies of affect. But unlike other forms of text this rhetorical power is emphasised by the conjunction of textual interpretation and the performed practice of gaming.
However, the effects they are intended to have are by no means those that materialise in the actual gaming instance. This can be due to a variety of factors ranging from a lack of interest towards the particular game or game genre, interruptions from other sources demanding attention, or quite simply, the personal interpretation of represented events that diverges from those intended by designers because of reasons personal to the player, or ineffective design.
Calleja, G. Emotional Involvement in Digital Games
An alterbiography refers to the active construction of an on- going story that develops through interaction with the game world’s topography, inhabitants, objects, game rules and coded physics.
Alterbiographies are generated by the player adopting a narrative attitude towards the interpretation of certain representational signs and the mechanical operations that animate them.
[A game’s] narrative elements, only comes together after a considerable amount of synthesising work from the part of the player.
Calleja, G. Experiential narrative in game environment
The text itself, however, is neither expectation nor memory- it is the reader who must put together what his wandering viewpoint has divided up. This leads to the formation of syntheses through which connections between signs may be identified and their equivalence represented. But these syntheses are of an unusual kind. They are neither manifested in the printed text, nor produced solely by the reader’s imagination, and the projections of which they consist are themselves of a dual nature: they emerge from the reader but they are also guided by signals which project themselves into him. It is extremely difficult to gauge where the signals leave off and the reader’s imagination beings in the process of projection.
Iser, W. The act of reading: an aesthetic response
A player who is consciously role-playing […] is seeking to ‘create’ a character that transcends the mechanic of the game and takes on a plausible, defined reality of its own.
MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler, Illusory Agency in Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines
[Narrative] fragility causes two problems in relation to agency. First, breakdowns damage the sense of dramatic probability in the situation. Second, they make the audience member question whether the materials presented for action (the whole of the English language, as invited by the open text field) can actually be used intentionally. As play continues it is revealed (as Lucy Suchman and others have discussed) that the Eliza effect works, for however long it works, because of the power of the initial expectations of the player, which are eventually too greatly violated. The illusion of agency is short lived.
Mateas, Wardrip-Fruin, Dow & Sali, Agency Reconsidered
The systemic properties of a game become actualized once one or more players engage with them (Klabbers, 2009), and the game would not function without information that the players themselves bring into play (Crookall, Oxford and Saunders, 1987)
According to economic game theory, information is either perfect or imperfect. Perfect information means that a participant has access to all relevant data regarding a situation, while imperfect information means that at least something is outside that person’s control.
Lankowski & Bjork, Game Research Methods
The following is a large excerpt that might stretch the complexity of my essay too far, but its applications of frames to tabletop RPGs sits nicely alongside my (early) steps to model an understanding of theatrical preparation on the embodied player experience.
One prominent strand of research revolves around Goffman’s (1974) con- cept of ‘frames’ and its adaptation for tabletop role-playing games by Fine (1983). Studying players of said games, Fine identifies three frames that serve as schemata of interpretation (or rather ‘comprehension’) for the games’ events and existents (including characters): First, gaming “is grounded in the ‘primary framework’, the commonsense understandings that people have of the real world” (ibid., 186). When players apply this frame to the gaming situation they recognize each other as co-players and act according to the social situation (e.g. a gaming event with friends). Second, players operate “in light of the conventions of the game” (ibid.), their actions are “governed by a complicated set of rules and constraints” (ibid.). Finally, players may apply a ‘narrative’ frame, ‘keying’ the events in a game of make-believe: They pretend being characters in a fictional (story)world and act according to its lore and logic.
They postulate a three-fold framing of player consciousness “as a charac- ter in a simulated world, as a player in a game, and as a person in a larger social setting” (Salen / Zimmerman 2004, 454, original emphases). Similarly, Lin- deroth (2005) identifies three ways of describing the player-avatar relation: Players recognize the player-controlled character as a role (“a fictive character that you can pretend to be”, ibid.), a tool, (“a piece of equipment, a tool which extends the player’s agency in the game activity”, ibid.), and a prop (“a part of the players [sic!] setting, […] which can be used as a part of the players [sic!] presentation of self”, ibid.).
First, in what we propose to call ‘narrative experience’, the player perceives game characters as identifiable fictional beings with an inner life. Players construct mental character models that represent, for example, the bodily, mental, and social properties of a fictional entity and connect these with situation models related to diegetic events and existents. When characters are experienced narra- tively (or fictionally, or representationally), event or story schemata are em- ployed to establish mental representations of chronological and causal relations between characters and events, which might lead, for example, to expectations concerning future narrative happenings (or ludic events for that matter, see below). Put bluntly, it is the dimension of the fictional being that everyday conversations about characters across media most commonly refer to – but this does not apply to everyday conversations about video game characters to the same extent.
Second, in what we call ‘ludic experience’, the player’s attention is focused on characters as elements of the game mechanics, as game pieces that are defined by game-related properties such as ‘health points’, ‘speed’, ‘special abilities’ and so on. In this mode, the player-controlled character is perceived as a tool, which extends the player’s agency into the game world. The player constructs a mental model of their character (or of other characters), which consists of game-related features and abilities as well as character-related goals and rules. The representational schemas that include such feature lists are not primarily learned in real life but, rather, are made available to the players by playing other games and gaining knowledge about rules and game systems. Similarly, (genre-)specific gameplay schemas are employed to generate motor output in response to the ongoing perception of the unfolding game, as well as the men- tal simulation of future ‘moves’ (see Lindley / Sennersten 2008, 3).
Third, in what we call ‘social experience’, characters are perceived as avatars, as representations of other players in a multiplayer setting. In this case, players not only form mental models of a fictional being or game piece but also of the player ‘behind’ the avatar, resulting in a connected or mixed representation which includes features of both. This mode, which directs attention to the real- life context of the game and the forms of communication and interactions that it affords, certainly challenges structuralist-semiotic conceptualizations of char- acter which predominantly rely on textual structures. However, ‘textual’ fea- tures of multiplayer games still facilitate and constrain the possible social inter- actions – which themselves leave textual ‘traces’ and, thus, can become a relevant subject for a ‘text-oriented’ analysis of video game characters.
Distinguishing not only between three representational modes (narration, simulation, communication) but also between three ways of experiencing (nar- rative, ludic, social) and three ontological dimensions of video game characters (fictional entity, game piece, representation of the player) finally also allows us to emphasize that the relation between the modes of representation and the experiential affordances as well as the ontological status of video game characters are far from clear-cut and should not be conceptualized as being overly stable. While there certainly is an emphasis on ‘ludic experience’, the interactive gameplay that characterizes the mode of simulation usually also contributes to the representation of video game characters as fictional entities – just as the cut-scenes and scripted sequences of events that characterize the mode of narration and, hence, tend to emphasize ‘narrative experience’, can also be used to convey specific information about video game characters as game pieces. Moreover, the video game character as a fictional being usually gets features ascribed to it that correspond to certain ludic abilities or characteristics, and vice versa.
Schroter & Thon, Video Game Characters: Theory and Analysis