The thematic and playable differences between The Board Game, the HBO Card Game, and the Fantasy Flight Card Game speak to the larger structures of the database and narrative in the contemporary media environment. Imagine a collection of photographs held in a folder on your computer’s desktop. These
photographs form a database that can be accessed and ordered by any number of tagged elements: size of the photo, type of camera used, date taken, etc.
According to media theorist Lev Manovich, databases do not tell stories: “in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence.” Instead, he argues that narrative only exists at the level of the user interface, where retrieving information relies on searching and organization. A narrative is the linear and structured retelling of that data in a particular order. Once you sort the images in that folder into any particular order, you have artificially created a serialized retelling of those photos. The database makes use of networked connections to add versatility and robust searchability in digital documents. The narrative highlights serialized elements within a correlated structure to develop an underlying logic. Indeed, Manovich holds the database and narrative organizational structures as “natural enemies” that compete “for the same territory of human culture, each claim[ing]
an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.” 6
Games make use of this same structure/serial tension, and Manovich even uses the video game as an example of a text that uses both a database structure to organize data and a narrative structure to access that data. Although some might claim that video games are narratively driven, Manovich asserts that “if the user simply accesses different elements, one after another … there is no reason to assume these elements will form a narrative at all.”7 Even though a player can access elements of a game in one particular order, the game itself is still structured as a database of information, an archive of text, image, audio, and video that gets deployed at algorithmically controlled times.
Although Manovich might be correct in addressing the database-like qualities of the video game, paratextual board games offer a more open-ended exploration of this database/narrative structure. Board games are also constructed from a database of elements (as any player who has spent hours of time punching out miniatures and tokens can attest), but player-generated content creates an organized structure onto that inherently unordered collection. From Arkham Horror’s unstructure, developed from the over 700 pieces of the game, to Star Trek: Fleet Captains’s mutability, developed from the many randomized elements, paratextual board games become a flexible platform for player interaction. For example, while playing A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, my board game group used the 404 separate playing pieces and tokens as the game prescribed:
we fit the tokens and troops within a database of uses, in ways that, while never codified by us, were still algorithmically planned into the game. But at the same time, like with The Lord of the Rings: The Complete Trilogy, we generated content
that Christian Petersen, the creator of The Board Game, might never have anticipated; we made the game more narratively driven, including developing the alliance between House Martell and House Baratheon and role-playing the characteristics of the cold, lonely House Stark.
As I have previously described, the new media environment is rife with instances of database/narrative structural mergers, as fans can use a “narractive”
approach to generative content in online archives like wikis. Instead of either accessing data on vast stores of online archives, or representing a plot through a specific order, fans can do both, using wikis and the “inherent hypertextuality of the web to create connections between narrative elements.” Through the creation of a “narrative database,” fans structure a “narrative through communal interaction. It is not the same as taking units from a random archive, but rather of reassembling units in a new order.”8 Fans’ work to construct narrative databases like A Wiki of Ice and Fire hinges on the interactive potential of both serialized and networked elements.9 At the same time, there is an additional element of narrative serialization within the database in other fan work online, as fans can rewrite and reproduce cult media texts through social media sites like Tumblr.
For instance, fan-made GIFs and GIFfics of A Game of Thrones tell amateur stories using the database of elements available to fans in the digital age. 10
Beyond fandom, social media harnesses this database/narrative bridge to create other types of new texts. For example, José van Dijck describes the transition in social network from “databases of personal information” to “tools for (personal) storytelling and narrative self-presentation.” Facebook’s 2011 introduction of its Timeline feature demonstrates this shift. When Facebook was first developed, it acted more like a database of elements: it collated information about a user’s life and displayed it to the user’s friends. There was an attempt to demonstrate each particular identity as “a database of users and for users.”11 Facebook’s Timeline “actively rearranged users’ profiles so that events were listed chronologically, on a seemingly endless timeline of a user’s life. Everyone’s timeline starts on the day of his or her birth and, depending on his or her overall usage of Facebook, continues to add information throughout the user’s own personal timeline.”12 This narrative rearrangement of information brings a serialized structure to the database—a structure that I have previously described as a “narrative paradox”—and “requires not only adding new data to already existing content, it also triggers a new awareness of how you want your life story be told, to whom and for what purpose.”13 In other words, Timeline creates a serial life out of a database of possibilities, turning individual events from periodic and chronological “updates” to an ever-growing (digital) corpus.