{"id":1770,"date":"2014-02-13T13:55:12","date_gmt":"2014-02-13T13:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/memetechnology.org\/?p=3017"},"modified":"2014-02-13T13:55:12","modified_gmt":"2014-02-13T13:55:12","slug":"a-literary-view-of-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/2014\/02\/13\/a-literary-view-of-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"A literary view of gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

What I should be doing today is creating the structured interview questions for my research on Cultural Institutions and Tech SMEs. But I’m distracted by this <\/a>series of articles on gaming from playwright Lucy Prebble. Lucy is most famous for her play ENRON about the stocks and shares scandal surrounding the eponymous US energy company. More recently, her The Effect has had positive reviews. But she is also a gamer, and writes \u00a0a monthly column on games for the Observer.<\/p>\n

Her column tends towards narratively driven “authored” \u00a0games, such as Gone Home<\/a><\/em>, which as she is a professional narrativist shouldn’t be surprising, though she also discusses and appreciates more procedural games like The Sims<\/a><\/em> and Farming Simulator<\/a><\/em>. In her conversation with Bioshock’s Ken Levine<\/a>, they discuss a possible future project which he is considering, which has all the procedural narrative of games like the Sims or Rimworld, but “this would still be authored, it would still tell a story. It would end. And actually, that makes it more true to life, not less.” which reminds me how powerful “the end” is to to storytelling, and why Red Dead Redemption<\/em> is more emotionally involving for me than unending Skyrim<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Her most recent article praises Device 6<\/a><\/em> (enough to make me download it after considering it for months) and the Novelis<\/em>t<\/a>\u00a0among others, while making the claim that charity shops are starting to turn away books, unable to sell them because\u00a0”Everyone has Kindles”. I’m not convinced that she, or rather the charity shop workers she spoke to are correct to prophesise the death of the book yet – the second-hand bookshops at National Trust places seem to be thriving and turning over stock at a reasonable pace. But she does make the point that adventurous writers are looking to games as a when to tell stories differently. And the truly adventurous are playing with the conventions of what a game is too:<\/p>\n

Depression Quest<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a simple interactive\u00a0fiction\u00a0game that guides you through the experience of someone with depression. Its creator, Zoe Quinn, reveals a powerful understanding of how to affect through gameplay. Some options are visible, eg “Open up a little, hoping she’ll understand” but you are unable to select them. This basic but intelligent design expresses so much about a mental reality where the sufferer knows what they “should” do but is literally unable to.\u00a0Your own frustration with the choice is mirrored by the protagonist’s and eventually a peek into self-loathing and stagnation is achieved, as well as a glimpse into how to move forward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A game she has persuaded me to buy and try is Gone Home<\/em>, which describes as though it is a near-perfect cultural heritage interpretation experience.<\/p>\n

You piece together a sense of who everyone is and what happened through seemingly disconnected items and evidence hidden around the house. And those connections are intentionally weak. It allows the plot and conclusions to take place in the mind of the player and not in the action of the game…\u00a0By withholding its story so fully and wisely,\u00a0Gone Home<\/em>\u00a0insists we join the dots ourselves. It takes the gaming element away from the screen, and into your head.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Prebble is very interested in games and emotion, and makes and important point about how words alone fail can fail to trigger an emotional response:<\/p>\n

As a playwright, I have long been disappointed by the weakness of words. An audience is rarely moved by words themselves, but by the gaps between words. In theatre sometimes we reference irritation with actors who act “off the line”, meaning they put in breaths and little sounds around what’s written, slowing pace and drawing attention. But that’s because they know the writing is just a scaffold…\u00a0I think games have an unrealised potential to be even more emotionally involving than other forms, because they can make room for the player\/audience directly. And because they are alive to flexibility of choice and narrative. I believe the more you nail down a plot point or a line, the more it dies. When you catch words like butterflies and pin them behind glass, it feels like an achievement, but something seals as you press down the pane.\u00a0And so, now more than ever, we need games like\u00a0Gone Home<\/em>\u00a0that withhold and reinvent and leave space for thought and feeling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course this can be incendiary stuff, for gamers and non-gamers alike. Ludologiest would argue (as one commenter did) “The problem with Gone Home is that people refer to it as a game, which ultimately it isn’t. Any piece of entertainment software that focuses solely on story is by definition not a game,” while traditionalists will say that a game narrative can not possibly be compared with the emotional resonance of a half-decent novel. But Prebble isn’t looked only at what either games or storytelling are, but what they might be…<\/p>\n

I’ll finish this piece with a quote within a quote from Prebble’s most recent article, which illustrates the reactionary fears expressed when new technology encroaches on something we love:<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s best to close with this warning from an 1815 publication bemoaning the demise of the chalkboard in schools: “Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?” (fromRethinking Education in the Age of Technology<\/em>\u00a0by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson)<\/p>\n

I suppose we’re finding out.<\/p><\/blockquote>
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What I should be doing today is creating the structured interview questions for my research on Cultural Institutions and Tech SMEs. But I’m distracted by this series of articles on gaming from playwright Lucy Prebble. 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In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said \u201cwe could make a business out of this\u201d I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players\u2019 investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND\/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters\u2019 degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier\u2019s \u201cspace syntax,\u201d and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the \u201csmall business\u201d end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we\u2019ve returned Rudyard Kipling\u2019s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust\u2019s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams\u2019 achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.","sameAs":["http:\/\/memetechnology.wordpress.com\/"],"url":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/author\/matthew-tyler-jones\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}