[Reader-list] First Submission on Computer games and Interactive fiction

[Souvik Mukherjee]

And Alice Played A Video game: Alice, Harry Potter and the 
Computer Game: a study of the relationship between children's 
fantasy adventure stories and interactive computer games


                                                                         
                                                                         
   by Souvik Mukherjee

How often one wishes to learn some magic and to be Peter Pan or 
Harry Potter or visit Wonderland with Alice! But, then again I 
often wonder, would their stories remain the same if I stepped 
into their roles? Would I have acted differently? And, would that 
have changed the narrative altogether? Then, what if every one of 
us wanted to 'be' Harry Potter, in his or her own separate way? 
Then what would happen to the infinity of Harry Potter stories, 
thus generated? The result we might expect would be chaos. The 
actual result, however, would be something else: it would be a 
computer game!

In this paper I would like to propose that the multiple 
possibilities of narrative action in children's fiction, 
especially fantasies such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or 
the Harry Potter stories, bring these stories very close to 
computer games. I believe that certain sub-genres of children's 
fiction work with premises similar to the computer game as regards 
narrative flexibility and other features. A child's dream, as in 
Alice or in Hojoborolo, can create an unreal world full of 
constant activity as in computer games. These can be shown as 
prototypes for computer games or games in the making. I shall 
therefore take two children from fiction to compare the child in 
literature with the child in the game: Alice in Through the 
Looking Glass and Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's 
Stone (also known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). 
The chief reason behind the choice is that they are both popular 
and representative of their respective centuries. The other reason 
is purely technical: both characters have been represented in 
eponymous computer games. I am here using the American McGee's 
Alice and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, both made by 
Electronic Arts, as examples of such games. Since I haven't as yet 
played the Harry Potter game, I shall use the Alice game for a 
first-hand account. I shall however use screenshots and game 
reviews to comment about both of them.

But first let us see how a computer game actually works. The 
computer game consists of infinitely branching levels of 
narrative. The story changes from player to player. In fact, the 
player is both the author of the story as well as reader. 
Therefore very often, comparisons have been made with Jorge Luis 
Borges's short story The Garden of the Forked Paths or with 
hypertext and interactive fiction.

The game does not follow narrative time: every action in it 
happens 'now'. Because of the innumerable possibilities involved, 
the game is distanced from reality. And it often evaluates the 
player's skill. Let us then build up a workable definition from 
these clauses: The computer game, then, is an activity taking 
place on the basis of formally defined rules, containing an 
evaluation of the efforts of the player and the story of which 
differs from player to player. When playing a game, the rest of 
the world is ignored.

The American dramaturgist and computer theorist Brenda Laurel has 
extended the idea of stories to interact with and take part in in 
a more theoretical way. [1] In this proposed system, the computer 
program must take on the role as author while the game progresses. 
Any action by the player must lead to the system adapting the 
fictive world. According to the game designer Chris Crawford, 
computer games have four basic characteristics (Crawford 1982) 
[2]:

1. Representation: A game is a closed formal system that 
subjectively represents a subset of reality. (By subjective, 
Crawford means that a game is not necessarily trying to represent 
reality.)

2. Interaction: The game acknowledges and reacts to the player. 
(Unlike a puzzle, which simply lies still.)

3. Conflict: A game presupposes a conflict. This can be either 
between several players or between the players' goal and whatever 
prevents the player from reaching that goal.

4. Safety. The player is safe (in a literal sense) from the events 
in the game. (Gambling presents a special case, where the outcome 
of the game is designed to have impact in the real world.)

To this fourfold definition, I will add a fifth clause:

5. The construction of narrative: as stated before, every game 
keeps constructing its own narrative.

We will first look at the inherent game-like structure in both the 
stories of Alice and Harry Potter. Then we shall consider each of 
the five defining clauses of the formal computer game and see how 
applicable they are to the stories of Alice and Harry, and thereby 
to some types of children's fiction.

Before that, however, we could possibly look at a few other types 
of literature and see how closely they resemble the computer game. 
I have concentrated on children's fiction set in fantasy 
environments and not on 'serious' children's fiction. Children 
like Oliver Twist or Little Nell are essential part of an 
emotional and realistic environment. Hence they have no place in 
the computer game. The real world excludes a large number of 
choices, which can be made in the fantasy world. As Humpty Dumpty 
says to Alice, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it 
to mean'. You couldn't do that in the real world, could you? As 
for emotions, I do not think any extant computer game can 
accommodate what E. M. Forster calls a 'round' character. Instead 
there is, a rather flat character whose involvement in the plot is 
not emotional, but rather a matter of exploring a world, solving 
problems, performing actions, competing against enemies, and above 
all dealing with objects in a concrete environment. This kind of 
involvement is much closer to playing a computer game than to 
living a Victorian novel or a Shakespearean drama.

Certain other types of narration have often been cited as being 
very close to the game-structure, namely science fiction and the 
cinema. My argument would be that these do not show an equal 
degree of interactivity to the game, or for that matter the 
children's fantasy. I shall elaborate on this later on, when I 
look at interactivity separately. Most children's fiction, 
however, shows a game-structure to some extent. Let us see how.

Both Alice and Harry are playing games in their respective 
stories. Through the Looking Glass can be looked at as a chess 
game in progress. Lewis Carroll himself comments on the 
playability of his story: 'As the chess-problem, given on the next 
page, has puzzled some of my readers, it may be well to explain 
that it is correctly worked, so far as the moves are concerned.' 
[my italics]

This comment makes the game associations of his book even more 
obvious. In fact, both Alice books are based on games. Alice's 
Adventures in Wonderland could be seen as a kind of card game, and 
we have already spoken of Through the Looking Glass. Besides the 
cards and the chess games, they also contain plenty of 
mathematical puzzles and word games. Being awfully bad at maths, I 
would not dare bother you with mathematical problems. Speaking 
instead of word-games, Humpty Dumpty's analysis of the Jabberwocky 
poem is a famous example:
"To 'gyre' is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To 'gimble' 
is to make holes like a gimlet." "And "the wabe' is the grass plot 
round a sundial, I suppose?" said Alice, surprised at her own 
ingenuity. "Of course it is. It's called 'wabe', you know because 
it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it . . . " 
"And a long way beyond it on each side," Alice added. "Exactly so. 
Well, the 'mimsy' is 'flimsy and miserable' (there's another 
portmanteau for you)."
Both Humpty and Alice are playing with English words and juggling 
with them to create new ones. The reading of the Jabberwocky poem 
is also a game. Alice uses a mirror to read it and finds a poem, 
which resembles English. But there could be plenty of other ways 
to look at it. There could also be an utter failure to make 
anything out of it. Other than these the books are replete with 
all sorts of games: there is croquet, a caucus-race and a 
mock-chivalric joust.

Like the many games in the Alice books, Quidditch in Harry Potter 
seems to contain many games in one, perhaps a combination of 
hang-gliding, hockey, and bungee jumping. And Harry loves 
quidditch; there are over three games of quidditch played in the 
first book alone. As in Through the Looking Glass here too there 
are games of chess, called wizard chess, being played. Harry's 
best friend, Ron Weasley is a past master of this game. In the 
Harry Potter stories, games actually play a major part in 
problem-solving. In the first book, two of the spells guarding the 
philosopher's stone involve game playing. Harry has to play one of 
his best games of quidditch to gain the key to the door. The door 
itself opens to reveal another game: this time, a huge set of 
wizard chess where the huge pieces actually destroy themselves. To 
cross the floor they have to checkmate the white king and conquer 
the white army, which guards the passage. ''It's obvious, isn't 
it?" says Ron. "We've got to play our way across the room."

Like all games, the games played in these books have their 
objectives. It might be to cross a passage as in the last example, 
or to go to a new place as in Through the Looking Glass, or simply 
to win house points for Gryffindor as in Harry's quidditch 
matches. Similarly, the story as a whole has its objective: to 
destroy Voldemort's evil plans in Harry Potter and for Alice, to 
become a queen or simply to go home.

Now it would be instructive to compare this with the computer game 
per se. This too has its objective: victory or the maximum points 
scored. If the game evaluates the player, Harry Potter in the 
story is also being constantly evaluated and keeps gaining or 
losing house-points. The formal set of rules that form the base of 
the computer game can be compared to the basic conventions of the 
fictional narrative. We said earlier that while playing a game the 
rest of the world is ignored. This is evident both in Alice and in 
Harry Potter. The definition we prepared for the computer game is 
therefore equally true of these books. What remains now is to 
consider the five clauses which were used to evaluate the 
effectiveness of the computer game, namely: representation, 
interactivity, narrative construction, conflict and safety.

About the representation of a subset of reality, I do not have 
much to say. The Harry Potter story has a quasi-real environment, 
which is a 'not-so-well-known part of England'. But it is there 
and even has its own ministry - the ministry of magic. The same 
goes for Alice.

Interactivity of games and narratives has long been a 
controversial topic. Questions of how interactive a game or a book 
can be are matters of dispute. But that the computer game, at 
least, is to some extent interactive has been accepted. Once I 
start a game, I can control the fate of my narrative. I keep 
interacting with a set of rules and thereby make my own changes 
and augmentations to a narrative existing only in its shell, as in 
the base narrative told at the beginning of games like American 
McGee's Alice and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This 
interactivity is not present in normal forms of fiction where 
there is no possibility of intruding into the plot. Nor would it 
be possible in the movie or in science fiction as much as in 
children's fiction like Harry Potter that involves fantasy and a 
game-structure as shown earlier. For example Harry Potter has to 
work out a riddle for reaching the philosopher's stone. He has to 
discover a hidden set of rules by which he changes his story in 
his favour.

In other forms of narrative, barring some forms of science fiction 
[3], the possibilities of change are far the lesser. Not so in the 
Harry Potter stories. Hogwarts literally keeps changing itself. 
The staircases keep moving and changing places. Doors pretend to 
be walls. Paintings move from canvas to canvas. On top of 
everything, there is Peeves the poltergeist to confuse you. 
Similarly, in Wonderland Alice finds no help in the Cheshire cat 
when she asks for directions:
"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 
"lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, 
"lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."
But there are always plenty of possibilities present: if the 
staircase had not confused him, Harry would never have discovered 
the secret door guarded by the three-headed dog. The story could 
then have been entirely different. Had Alice not played the 
chess-game the way she did the story could have taken a different 
turn. She could either have won the game in more than the eleven 
moves, which make up her story or she could have lost all her 
pieces. It is just that both Harry Potter and Alice have used the 
numerous choices available to construct their stories as we read 
them now. The errant staircase could have behaved itself in the 
Philosopher's Stone and Alice could have proved a less competent 
chess-player. For that matter, so could Ron Weasley. God knows 
what would have happened then.

I can, however, give you one alternative. For this I must tell you 
a story:

The White Rabbit popped up every now and then and told me, 'Don't 
dawdle Alice. We must be on our way'. And guess who was my guide! 
it was the Cheshire cat. And as can be expected, it ditched me 
whenever I needed advice and vanished into thin air. Suddenly two 
chessmen attacked me: the knight charged and the castle blocked my 
way. Luckily, I found the vorpal sword in time and killed them 
both. Now was the time to set out and kill the Jabberwocky. But I 
believe, I had been a trifle careless and a red pawn cut my head 
off with an axe. And before I had fully realized what had happened 
I heard, as I had heard so many times, the Hatter's insane laugh 
and once again the game was over.

This, though I am a rather bad storyteller, is not entirely my own 
concoction. Yet in a way, it is. This was just one outcome of my 
playing the game called the American McGee's Alice, which I have 
already introduced. The basic plot might belong to the game but 
the choices which take it further are mine. And even if I might 
not have realized it, I was constructing an entirely new narrative 
while playing. Let us now discuss the other chief clause that we 
have spoken of: the construction of the narrative.

In the process let me introduce the basic story of the two 
computer games, for those of us who are not already familiar with 
them. For this purpose I shall use game reviews published in 
popular gaming magazines or web sites. TechTV, a computer 
game-oriented web site comments:
The key to this game's success is its simplicity. You navigate 
through Harry Potter with the arrow keys or, occasionally, the 
mouse. Gameplay is in the third person and your view is fixed over 
Harry's shoulder, his Hogwarts cloak flapping in the wind behind 
him. The game begins with a quick voice-over synopsis of the 
story's opening events. Gameplay kicks in after the Sorting Hat 
places Harry (at his request) in Gryffindor. Next we meet Albus 
Dumbledore, who invites Harry to explore the castle but reminds 
him not to be late for class. The game then takes on a tutorial 
tone as Harry explores Hogwarts and its environs and learns how to 
cast spells and navigate the puzzles he'll face later. In other 
words, this game is about jumping puzzles, timing puzzles, and 
exploration - all very simple and not at all challenging. There is 
no death here, only the prospect of Harry fainting and having to 
restart. Instead of posing a challenge, Harry Potter offers 
variety and charm. It never lets you stay in one place for long. 
One minute you're engaged in jumping puzzles, the next you're 
levitating giant statuary onto platforms, and then you're riding a 
broom . . .
I've already spoken about the Alice game, but the Electronic Arts 
Review would perhaps be of some more help: When Alice answers a 
distressed summons to return to Wonderland, she
barely recognizes the befouled setting. From the fungal rot of the 
Mushroom Forest to the infernal chemistry of the Mad Hatter's 
Domain and beyond, Wonderland festers to its core. Undaunted by 
the diseased ambience, cavernous confusion, and mortal danger that 
surround her, Alice must undo the chaos. Equipped with courage, a 
keen appetite for the bizarre, and a lethal array of 
transmogrified toys, she'll penetrate the strongholds of her 
enemies, confront the forces of evil, and put the wicked Queen of 
Hearts in her place.
In this game, of course, one finds the basic plot of the Alice 
stories given a different twist. As far as I have been able to 
play it, all the characters from the book are there, but the hints 
of evilness in the Queen of Hearts and the madness of the Hatter 
and the March Hare have been given a diabolic twist. For regular 
gamers this game is scarcely different from the 3-d shooting games 
(first-person-shooters) like Doom or Quake.

Both games involve constant action. The action is dependent on the 
player's choice. If the player's interpretation of the situation 
differs then he makes different choices. These choices determine 
what puzzle he must solve and in what time sequence. Together with 
that there is the constant risk of failure. As in my case, where 
the white pawn attacks me from behind. There is also the chance of 
getting lost in the game world if one strays onto the wrong path. 
This is again reminiscent of Borges's The Garden of Forked Paths. 
Borges makes his character, the famous sinologist Stephen Albert 
say, 'time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures'. The 
narrative in the game too, forks towards innumerable futures. In 
this sense the game has also been compared to the hypertext.

The hypertext theorist David Bolter claims that when Wolfgang Iser 
and Stanley Fish argue that the reader constitutes the text in the 
act of reading, they are describing hypertext. If that is so, then 
the reader-response theory can also be applied to the computer 
game. Of course, the reader-response theory itself has several 
positions within it, so this might prove difficult. We could 
possibly apply Fish's theory, that the reader creates the entire 
text, to the computer game. Instead of 'creates' perhaps one 
should say 'recreates' because the game is not completely free of 
the base narrative. This would then bring us to a question of 
control over the narrative.

Game design theory talks of controlled access vis-à-vis random 
access. Controlled access refers to the series of choices which 
govern the game, and random access to the element of uncertainty 
plus the base plot of the game. it is only with a balance of the 
two that a narrative can be properly constructed. I would argue 
that even in the books, Alice and Harry try to maintain this 
balance as they play along their respective game patterns and 
construct their stories. Let us take an example from Harry Potter 
and the Sorcerer's Stone. Harry has suddenly been moved from the 
human world to the wizarding world by the giant Hagrid. This is an 
instance of random access. Whoever knew that the boy from Privet 
Drive had magical powers! That he has to go to Hogwarts and join 
the sorting ceremony is compulsory. Such events in the book 
correspond to the basic rules of the game. But when he puts on the 
sorting hat a different thing happens. He makes a desperate mental 
effort to exercise his choice not to join the Slytherins. This is 
controlled access. Harry Potter has made a controlled choice. 
Therefore even in narrative construction, the book has some 
similarities with the games.

The next things to consider would be the penultimate and ultimate 
clauses of our comparison: conflict and safety. Without conflict 
there cannot be any fun in achieving your objective. And fun is 
essential to any game. It is the reason why we play. This is one 
area where both the Harry Potter books and the game are the most 
similar. In both of these there is the major conflict with 
Voldemort and certain minor conflicts between Draco Malfoy and 
Harry, or with the ever-wrathful Snape.

In the American McGee's Alice game, the conflict is simple: almost 
every creature in the diabolic Wonderland is an enemy. The 
conflict in the Alice books, however, is more difficult to define. 
Robert Polhemus in his essay Play, Nonsense, Games: Comic 
Diversion has this to say about the nonsense in Carroll:
But there is an equally strong hostile impulse in nonsense - the 
desire to satirize the senselessness of the world. The Red Queen 
sums it up: 'you may call it 'nonsense' if you like . . . but I've 
heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a 
dictionary!' As usual in Carroll, what at first seems 
self-enclosed is in another light, mimetic and referential. The 
nonsense poem A-sitting on a gate says in effect that there are 
things in Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence just as absurd 
as anything the white knight can devise." The conflict in the 
Alice books is against society and a backdrop of nonsense veils 
it. [4]
Safety in a computer game implies both the players literal safety 
 from the violence in the game and the apparent distance from the 
rest of the world while playing. In the literal sense, we must 
admit, neither Alice nor Harry are safe from the action in their 
stories. In fact, Harry comes out of it badly injured after his 
encounter with Voldemort. But as far as the distance from the 
outside world is concerned, we must remember that when Harry 
fights Quirrell, he is completely alone. As for Alice, she is in a 
strange world of dreams and the outside world is far away as long 
as she is asleep.

We have seen the intrinsic similarities of these two books with 
their counterparts in computer games and with the structure of 
computer games, in general. Analysed in terms of the defining 
clauses of such games, these books reveal many similarities. Many 
of the clauses have been as easily applied to these books as to 
games. Like the player of the computer games, both Harry and Alice 
create and simultaneously read their own stories. The story as we 
currently have it in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and in 
Through the Looking Glass can then be seen as one played game 
among the infinite playable games possible. Among the latter, even 
my own abortive Alice game finds its place.

Here I would like to point out that some children's books 
capitalized on their game-like narrative flexibility long before 
video games were conceived of. At a recent seminar on the History 
of the Book, Dr. Alexis Tadie drew attention to a parallel story 
narrated in the marginalia of a British soldier's copy of Kim [5]. 
The fact that the story of Kim can be read also as a Tommy's 
life-story is intriguing, indeed. In effect, then, perhaps the 
soldier who possessed that copy of Kim was playing 'the Great 
Game' mentioned in the novel, in his own way.

Thus we can see how certain types of children's fiction can be 
looked at as proto-computer games. And though unlike computer 
games in that they tell just one story at a time, they are similar 
because they contain numerous other potential narratives. I would 
like to conclude by saying that the child in the book looks 
forward to the child in the game and thereby to an ideal 
inexhaustible narrative.


Bibliography:

Texts:

Lewis Carroll. Through the Looking Glass. [available online]

J K Rowling. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. (also known as 
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)

Rudyard Kipling. Kim [available online]

Jorge Luis Borges. The Garden of Forked Paths

Sukumar Ray. Hojoborolo (English trans. by Dr. Sukanta 
Chaudhuri)

Games:

American McGee's Alice. Electronic Arts

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Electronic Arts

Game reviews:

TechTV. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone review

EA (Electronic Arts). American McGee's Alice review

Nintendo. GameBoy review of American McGee's Alice

Books:

Blake, Kathleen: Play, Sport and Games

Brooks, Peter: Reading for the Plot. Knopf, New York, 1984. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Bush, Vannevar: As we may think. 1945. [Project Gutenberg]

Crawford, Chris: The Art of Computer Game Design. 1982, electronic 
version

Fish, Stanley: Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, 
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Iser, Wolfgang. The role of the Reader

Juuls, Jesper. Games telling stories. (jesper juul: text)

King, Geoff. Narrative and Spectacle: Video games and Hollywood

Landow, George P.: Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary 
Critical Theory and Technology 1992.

Laurel, Brenda (ed.): The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. 
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990

Lesnie-Oberstein, Karin. Fantasy, Childhood and Literature: in 
pursuit of wonderlands

McGann, Jerome. The Rationale of the Hypertext [available 
online]

Platt, Charles: Interactive Entertainment. I Wired 3.09

Polhemus, Robert. Play, Nonsense, and Games: Comic Diversion.

References:

1 . Brenda Laurel (ed.): The Art of Human-Computer Interface 
Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990 pp.135-42

2 Chris Crawford: The Art of Computer Game Design. 1982, 
electronic version

3 The concept of Time travel is especially worth mentioning in 
this context. The classic example , of course, is H.G.Wells's The 
Time Machine

4 Johan Huizinga mentions the Halsrätsel (roughly translated as 
'neck-riddle') as a form of the rather dangerous medieval 'game'. 
I believe a comparison with the Halsrätsel and the Queen of 
Hearts' frequent "Off with her head" would be instructive in this 
context.

5 Dr. Alexis Tadie of the University of Paris mentions this in his 
paper at the Book History Seminar, Jadavpur University, 
Calcutta.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/archive/1020211/the_east.htm




prospero's cell wishes you a happy and magical time.