[Reader-list] Fw: posting for readers-list

[souvikmukherjee]

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From: souvikmukherjee 
To: readers-list at sarai.net 
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 11:01 PM
Subject: posting for readers-list


  
 POSTING FOR SARAI READER-LIST 

COMPUTER GAMES AND READING HABITS

- by Souvik Mukherjee and Riddhi Sankar Ray

In our research proposal we have looked at the computer game as a possible alternative to the books we read and also how these, thereby, change our reading habits. Games in their own little way, tell stories. And these are not the hidebound stories created by someone else: these stories are to a large extent created by us, the readers. How novel this is , is of course a matter of speculation. Retelling, of any sort, would incorporate making changes to the base text. There have been quite a few examples of such in literary history. the point, however, is to see how far this can go and what it is like from the experiential point of view. 
 

In an earlier submission , we have looked at a few similarities and differences between Computer games and fiction. Our comparison was made between the Bond novels and Wolfenstein 3D (made by ID software). The action-packed storyline of the Bond novels likens these to computer games like Wolf. But to how many more genres can we apply this ? The element of re-telling is best observed in another genre of computer games. In the strategy game , be it a war game like Age of Empires or a city building game like Zoo tycoon, the story can have more ramifications because it allows us to 'build' the resources that make up the story. It is  quite a novel experience: mining gold and stone, chopping wood , gathering food by various means , we are expected to build for ourselves a city which in turn will withstand sieges and furnish soldiers. Very often, with the medley of things that can be constructed and the updates that can be made on the storyline and the characters,  this idea of re-telling is given its fullest scope. In the above games , one can build the story of entire civilizations; one can even change history. In this regard ,  one can look at the numerous Age of Empires 'scenarios' constructed by various individuals and made available online. The age of Empires game has in effect , besides its own campaigns allowed the 'playing' of various other stories ranging from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to the battle of Plassey. So successful has the series been , that it has spawned three successive sequels : The Age of Kings , The age of conquerors and the age of Mythology. The games have a framework involving a basic historical framework, with realistic fighting units, graphics and being set in a quasi-real environment. The pay-offs of such a structure are many. For some people, the ability to manoeuver 

the same building blocks to make numerous arbitrary stories is very attractive. Even among games , this is not always possible. The most arbitrary version of  playing would be children playing with toys. Theorists of game playing have differentiated between the Game , which is structured formally with a set of rules, and Play , where the rules are absent. The above have been called ludus and paiedia respectively. Thus chess would be a good example of a  ludus  and a child playing with her doll's house and dolls would be a Paidea. The computer strategy game , however, combines the Ludus with the paiedia. There is a set of rules alright but it is accompanied by an almost infinite amount of choices of how one can play. Ultimately , though actually a Ludus, the strategy-game seems to be a Paiedia. 

 

There is , however, a difference between the child playing with dolls and  someone playing the computer games that we have so far discussed. There is flexibility , in fact a lot of it, in the story  but there is a story. The arbitrary sequence of events in the child's paiedia  is replaced by an ordered plot structure. 

    

The computer game is thus, a story whose end can keep changing. It is a book within a game that is being played. In an earlier posting, we had looked at how certain fiction could correspond to game-like structure. It is time to turn the tables. We will look at certain requisites, determined by eminent critics, for the ideal plot and we will see whether computer games can be regarded as novels in their own right. More often than not, it is the player-reader constructing and reconstructing the story from a base narrative supplied by the makers. 

Aristotle , in the Poetics, gives us the classic definition of plot: the plot is the imitation of a whole action. Does the computer game correspond in any way with the above definition ? Let us take the 'plot' of  an Age of Mythology game. It begins with Arkantos , the Greek Hero from Atlantis (the lost continent) re-experiencing his battle exploits in a dream. Athena appears in his dreams and warns of greater dangers to come. And soon enough, Arkantos finds himself a victim of Poseidon's wrath and has to join Agamemnon in the siege of Troy. The Trojan wars over, Arkantos finds himself pitted against the evil Gargantos and the Minotaur Kemos  and he has to foil their plans of freeing Kronos by opening the gates of Tartarus. In this last battle ,Arkantos  defeats the villains and even fights the living statue of Poseidon. But victory comes at a cost and the city of Atlantis is destroyed for good. This is the base outline of the game. Needless to say, the narrative shifts according to the players actions. But the elements of Aristotle's definition hold good , by and large. There is a beginning, a middle and an end as far as the game is concerned. The beginning consists of the cinematic or written introduction to the game. It might also come as a series of written instructions. What the Greek chorus would have done for an Aeschylus play, the makers of the "Mythology" game have done with their mind-boggling cinematics.  The elements of necessity and probability should be there in the ideal plot. And so they are, in the tale that the game creates. The action in the game is  "like" real action, or at least is like what a certain situation would have been had it been true. There is a change of fortune in the game: this , of course, must be further qualified. If the player wins, it obviously corresponds to the change of fortune from bad to good. But what if he loses? Well, we might look at this as multiple changes of fortune. Or, maybe, a change from bad to worse or from bad to something slightly better. It is also possible to identify reversals and incidents of recognition in the game-narrative. The pity and fear of Aristotelian poetics can be witnessed in the emotional reactions of the player. Brenda Laurel has already done some pathbreaking research in comparing the computer-game narrative to classical concepts of plot. The above comparison would , as in Arkantos' story in the Age of Mythology game , would illustrate a similar comparison with respect to the strategy game. 

This analogy between the game and the book , especially from the point of view of plot, would go to show that the playing experience becomes somewhat like the reading experience.  We might , through our analysis here , find out more about the changing forms of 'reading' habits created by the computer game and whether the flexibility , interactivity and the feeling of involvement that we wish for in our favourite stories is to be found in the game-narratives. If that is so, then we can consider this as one of the reasons for the growing popularity of complex computer-games as a genre. 

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