The Magic of Wii Sports Resort

[WereKitten]

^I'm not sure to have followed everything you said, so I'll try to focus on my issue with the original article i.e. the misuse of the concept of narration. I quote your post:

"By being composed by a variety (even if narrow) of actions, we can always say that each "game session" (or "game report") is a narrative of some story. In a game of chess, "the black army kill the white king". In a mario game, "mario saves the princess peach". What's the difference in that?"

The point is that narration is a form of communication. It takes a sender, a content, a common language and a receiver.

Human brains are wired to affabulate, i.e. to make up stories. We can look at a rock sculpted by wind and see a face in it. Maybe an angry face, shouting against the mountain. Maybe the mountain is a dragon and the face is all that remains of a hero, both turned into stone as the hero pierced the dragon's throat as it used its petrifying breath.

We make up a story in our mind, but that rock is not narrating. We are doing so, to ourselves, and other people may make up a different narration or simply see a rock. We can see a clash of armies in a chess report, but the players are not narrators and an alien looking at the chess reports in a million years might learn the rules of the game but never understand that it was born to mimic a war.

Thus no, not all sequence of actions of a game compose a narrative intrinsically. Some games do because they are explicitly trying to narrate something, such as pencil and paper role-playing games or many videogames. In others like WSR or chess you can at best create an "extrinsic" narrative, the one a watcher can make up for himself or other people based on what he sees ("Alice just beat Bob on the head with the stick. Bob must be mad now! He'll now seek revenge!").

Again, narration from the game's authors is to this as sex is to masturbation :) Both can be pleasant, but one requires intention and cooperation between different sides, the other only requires a single side and fantasy.