The following is a collection of draft paragraphs, supplemented by research, introducing some of the key concepts of my paper. While useful in the initial drafting of the work, this part of the literature review was ultimately deemed too wide-reaching for the scope, and I was able to condense it into single sentences or references. I suspect, however, that these paragraphs will be of use when I come to writing my thesis, as I expect to go into more academic detail on some of the concepts detailed below.
NARRATIVE GAMES
Taking Janet Murray’s definition from Hamlet on the Holodeck, narrative games – or interactive narratives – are games that absorb players into their story through a mixture of agency, immersion and transformation. The player (usually) has agency to change the story, or react to it; the story world reacts in a predictable way, or follows a narrative logic; the player (or the player character) is transformed through their exposure to the story, or they see the world transformed (Murray, 1997). This story-engagement has been separately defined by Gordon Calleja as ‘narrative involvement’; rather than deriving from only a game’s written script, any and every game element can inform and service the player’s narrative involvement (Calleja, 2011).
CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE GAMES
Contemporary narrative games have sought to address the aforementioned stagnation of dialogue design. Some, like Disco Elysium, have opted for deep character exploration and expressive interaction. Others have implemented timed and time-specific responses to create a sense of theatrical liveness and narrative urgency (Oxenfree, The Walking Dead). One sub-genre, now in the ascendant, is the narrative card game, which uses the uncertainty of card-drawing and -playing mechanics to increase both replayability and emergent storytelling (Costikyan, 2013). Successful examples have included Reigns and its sequels, as well as Where The Water Tastes Like Wine and Cultist Simulator, but none of these have married their game or story mechanics with their dialogue design in particularly novel or theatrical ways.
PLAYER ROLE
The concept of a ‘player role’ has been much-discussed in games academia, from Juul (2007) and Schell (2008) to Mateas (2004) and Fernandez-Vara (2009). Most pertinant to this essay, however, is Gonzalo Frasca’s assertion (using theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s term) of the player as a ‘spectactor’ – simultaneously a spectator and an actor (Frasca, 2004). Richard Schechner, in his seminal text Performance Studies, provides the following hierarchy of performative experience:
The drama is the domain of the author, the composer, scenarist, shaman; the script is the domain of the teacher, guru, master; the theater is the domain of the performers; the performance is the domain of the audience.
Schechner, 2006
As if prefiguring the challenge of fitting games into this model, he also states that ‘in many situations, the author is also both guru and performer; in some situations the performer is also the audience.’ Frasca’s theory of player as ‘spectactor’ lines up neatly with Schechner, but clashes forcefully with Mateas’s assertion that ‘the player should not have the feeling of playing a role, of actively having to think about how the character they are playing would react’ (Mateas, 2004). Mateas’s assumption here – of the player being capable of performing as a character as instantly and naturally as they would live their own life, even with the aid of cunning game design affordances – fails to take into account the practicalities of acting work as a necessary step towards presenting dramatic subtext to an audience, and thus for a ‘spectactor’ to experience it. Without consciously integrating, to some degree, the work of an actor into their role, subtext will always be distant from a player.