The Magic of Wii Sports Resort

[sirroman]

WereKitten said:

^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.

I may not have expressed myself how I wanted, but we actually follow the same logic in almost everything. I see that you understand most of I wanted to say, or you have at least "grasped" what my crude writing tried to say. ^^

 

Read "Black army kills white king" as "Rob moved horse to [X]. Wil moved bishop to [Y]. Rob.... Wil does check-mate". It IS a narrative of the actions of the players, like you said.

Read "Mario saves peaches" as "Rob starts the game. Does [X]. Does [Y]. Rob defeats the last AI-enemy". It IS, also, a narrative of the actions of the players, except that on top of that there's this high-tech board that reproduces images and sounds.

I asked before, why the tokens from chess are portrayed as "peons", "bishops", "horses"? They are made to simbolize this war between two armies. Now I ask, why we make the soldiers from age of empires look like "archers", "swordmans"? These are all tools, elements of the game. They are the same thing in different technology levels.

Like I said (and you are saying the same as me, in some way) it's all simbolic, the game designer just uses more elements so that it's more "appealing and all". But these "new things" added aren't what makes something a game. It is, in the end, something that turns a game into something else that has these theatrical characteristics (VIDEOgames, anyone? ^^). So, in some way, WSR is *more* of a game then Halo, because it is more "pure" (take a look at the comic to understand what i'm talking about). A game is action+rules=fun. When somebody puts a cutscene in the game, he is actually turning the game "less of a game".

The problem is that, even in plays, the "blank parts" are very important, that's why I don't see how the use of narrative is "wrong", it's just a different kind of narrative. That guy is totally right when he says that, to him, he was "playing in a island that has a life of it's own" (or something like that), he's just filling the blanks with his imagination (like you said much accurately in your last post, and before) and it's not wrong. Like you said, it's actually natural to games to have this "filling the blanks" part.

We only have to skim through a games magazine reviews section to see the different approaches that someone can see a game: will he get excited with the combat mechanic and complain about the "too long and boring" history (cutscenes, "between fights", whatever they complain about) OR will he get excited with this beautiful drama and complain about the "uninteresting and straight-forward" combat phases that takes your attention away from the history?

OR they can complain about "the fact that you have no control over the character actions/end point" (oriental RPG x Ocidental RPG and the "they could have made a compelling history from this beautiful presentation, but, in the end, it's all about pressing the buttons in the right moment" from shadow of the colossus, God of War...). Do you see? people complain about lots of things but in the end we all are just doing some actions inside these rules that the game developer created, "the rules of the game". One last common example: there's no intrinsic difference between FPS and "on-rails shooters", yet people feel outraged.

Don't understand me in a wrong way (that's why I brought out the comic and mentioned Blizzard in the end). In the end, we may be ALWAYS "narrating" to ourselves, a game is a game, it isn't a sender. But... why do we usually prefer to read a romance or go to the movies instead of throw rocks for fun? ^^

Now off I go. Sorry for the huge post. Again. ¬¬,

PS¹.: We can see more about this "pure" thingy when we ponder about the multiplayer x singleplayer dichotomy. They feel and play different because they ARE different, one is all about action, balancing and fun; while the other is all about "experience" and fun.

PS².: "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." You should make a demotivational pic around that (I lol'ed). Replace "fantasy" with "a sheet of paper" or something else and I would die from laughing. ^^