I don't know. I think you could make the case that the audience in a video game is a character, since they do get avatars to place themselves within the game world. In which case the audience's own experience becomes the narrative.

I don't have any academic background in this kind of thing, so I'm completely playing it by ear. Perhaps I've completely misunderstood what the writer was trying to get at. But then I don't suppose that there's a lot of academic work out there examining the artistic and/or cultural aspects of video games, so maybe any one person's bullshit on the matter is as authoritative as anybody else's.

called me crazy but after playin wii sports resort, i think wii play has better mini games.

@famousringo

In which case, as I said before, a chess game report has as much narrative content as a gameplay sequence in WSR. Maybe more even though it must be decrypted, because a grandmaster can probably infer the mind games between the players from such a sequence of harsh symbols.

But let's not shoot too wide: it doesn't take academic work on videogames as a specific medium, the definition of "narrative" is in any dictionary. And someone writing an editorial piece and going all out about "dramatic sense of connectedness" should mind the words and concepts he uses.

(Or he could have said "I really loved the 1:1 motion controls, they helped my immersion", that's the only content of 90% of the article :) )

In a way, I agree with that. I don't think that there's quite as much distance between video game design and other, older game design. Video games simply open up a lot of possibilities for the designer that figurines and game boards don't offer.

WSR is a throwback game. The author says "pure" game but I'm not sure that's the best word, simply because we get responses from folks saying shit like "true game" and "true gamers" which is all bull shit as far as I'm concerned. We still use those terms? Just like hardcore and casual and all these other ambiguous and coded words that really have no meaning IMO.

That being said, I must admit that I thought eloquent and intelligent articles were extinct on IGN. Who woulda thought, huh? I may have to start visiting them again.

Actually, I didn't mean to imply that I thought it wasn't a video game, just a very different kind of video game to Halo.

Let me clarify myself, I wasn't calling you out Jug. In fact, my thought process was going more off of things seen on other sites regarding the same article.

I think you are right WSR and Halo are two different video games, two different genres..but both video games all the same.

I just get annoyed with all the segmentation that goes on in the gaming media and forums is all.

I'll try to express myself in the best way I can (English isn't my antive language).

Chess, WSR, Halo. They are the same, they are games. Chess game report, WSR gameplay sequence, Halo gameplay sequence. They all have narrative content, like you said. Of course, everything I say here is IMO.

There isn't a true definition of game. I like to think that "game" is the act of following a common set of rules for the sake of "fun" (Chris Crawford - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game - dichotomies are interesting but I prefer mine, it's "simpler", oh" take a look at "puzzle" and everything, I don't agree with his "toy/challenge", I don't see any problem in"a game within a game", think it as a "tool"). A game can use a tool, more than one, or none at all. What differs it from other entertainment forms is the "action" part.

Let's say you gather some friends and you agree that you will see a movie and sip some beer when you see a character do something. It could be a game. As well as if you agree that you will see every Starwars movie in a day, if you follow a rule just for fun, it's a game. We could go on and on.

So, "our console/pc gaming" is a kind of "game" that use some code to create it's own "virtual world" (or media, or tools), instead of using wooden pieces, they use 0 and 1 to reproduce those things, and we use controllers to input our actions.

Furthemore, the "set of rules" in "our gaming", the rules that say that we can only play as this character, we are at "this place", our goal is "that one", and we can only do "this and that" to acchieve it... They are all embedded into this code, they are "hidden to our eyes" and this is a major thing 'bout "our gaming", we can't change these "hard rules" created by this company.

Some say that the difference between "sport" and "game" is that in "game" you set the rules, while in "sport" they are universal, can't be changed. So, if you think like that, "our gaming" is much closer to "sports" than the usual "games". Of course, you can always play a "game" that resembles a "sport".

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? So it doesn't matter if you are playing a FPS or a platformer, if you are playing a "Ocidental RPG" or a "Oriental RPG". You are bound to a set of rules that somebody created. You are doing it for fun. You are "gaming".

In WSR, there's this character that is in someplace and is doing that thing. Nintendo just didn't "fill the blanks", the same way we will never know who the hell is that white king that died in the first place. Nintendo could have "filled the blanks", the same way we know that "Mario" defeats "Bowser" and saves "princess peach". It's just a choice. It's like choosing to play chess with these wooden pieces that resemble towers, horses, kings, queens... instead of simple round tokens, they are simbols. Make the game pretty but don't have nothing to do with the rules (why not a "round red token" instead of "peon" and a "round blue token" instead of"tower"? And the other player have the same colors, but a different shape).

When the author says "pure games" he is actually refering to those classic "minimalistic" games, like "checkers". So... If you are following the definition of "game" (act of following a common set of rules for the sake of fun), yeah, the online Halo game is more "pure" than the single player Halo game, all that history have nothing to do with the rules if all you want is to shoot somebody.

Like somebody said, some games are closer to movies than classic games. The author, as I see, is trying to say that WSR goes the other way, getting closer to those "classic" "pure" games.

But in the end, if you just want to have fun, what matters is: you have more fun doing "this" or "that"? This purity crap is worthless.

PS.: Take a look at this comic: "Purity" (http://xkcd.com/435/ ). The Best part of it is when you rest your mouse pointer on the pic and read the embedded message: "On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation". I lol-ed.

PS².:We can use the same logic in this topic, just change physics to "any blizzard's games" and math to "the rest". =PPPP

^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. ^^