Games and Narrative Architecture/class 11/4

Game Design as Narrative Architecture
Henry Jenkins (EBR, 2004)

“Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power.” (Adams 1999)

Spatial/Environmental storytelling: “When we refer to such influential early works as Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. as “scroll games,” we situate them alongside a much older tradition of spatial storytelling: many Japanese scroll paintings map, for example, the passing of the seasons onto an unfolding space.”

Environmental Storytelling: “Don Carson, who worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, has argued that game designers can learn a great deal by studying techniques of “environmental storytelling,” which Disney employs in designing amusement park attractions. Carson explains,
The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell…. Armed only with their own knowledge of the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience is ripe to be dropped into your adventure. The trick is to play on those memories and expectations to heighten the thrill of venturing into your created universe. (Carson 2000)”
Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident – Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

“Eisenstein intensifies our emotional engagement with this large-scale conflict through a series of short narrative units.”

“Eisenstein used the term “attraction” to describe such emotionally packed elements in his work; contemporary game designers might call them “memorable moments.” Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word “attractions” broadly to describe any element within a work that produces a profound emotional impact.”

To continue with the detective example, then, one can imagine the game designer as developing two kinds of narratives — one relatively unstructured and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock its secrets; the other prestructured but embedded within the mise-en-scene awaiting discovery. The game world becomes a kind of information space, a memory palace (“embedded narrative”)

Game designers study melodrama for a better sense of the “external projection of internal states” – how artifacts and spaces contain “affective potential.”

One of my theses regarding new media environments: They re-order through material interfaces the relationship between embodiment, space, time, and perceptual “attractions,” thus enacting new models of “affective potential.”

Memory palaces/theatres

The Memory Theater of Giulio Camillo

http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Memory-Palace

http://kelty.rice.edu/375/lectures/camillo0212.html

http://cotati.sjsu.edu/spoetry/folder6/ng6211.html