Since they are multimedia agglomerates of diverse elements, incorporating text, interaction, movies, sound and sometimes even tactile experiences (vibrat-ing controllers, motion controls), it is obvious that video games can very easily contain narratives, but, as has often been argued, these narratives might be com-pletely unconnected to those elements that constitute the game as game . This chapter wants to argue for a more integrative view that takes into account the way that players cognitively process their experience of playing a game. The guiding hypothesis is that players constantly increase or decrease the semantics they associate with the structures they encounter, that they ascribe additional meaning to them (creating what we might call a semantic surplus), or chose to ignore potential meaning attached to them. It is this process that leads to the potential experience of a game system as gameworld , as a fictional world with its own self-contained meaning and rules.
At the beginning of the play experience stands a process of both de-semanti-cization and re-semantide-semanti-cization. Starting a game, players choose to ignore all of the world knowledge about themselves, other players, or the game system that they encounter, insofar as it is not part of playing the game. This is what it means to step into the magic circle . ²⁴ Within the game, two children’s backpacks can lose their function of enabling the carrying around of things, cease to be regarded as backpacks, because their new function is to denote a certain space that, when crossed by a specific object, effectuates a change in the game state. Or, in other words, the backpacks have become a makeshift goal. But this means that these objects, in the perception of the game (a perception that can be shared by actual players and spectators) have not only ceased to be something which they ‘really’
are (their meaning as it is commonly accepted in the actual world), but have become something which they really are not. Within the game, everything that is not part of the game has no meaning, but the things that are in the game can have a meaning that is nowhere but in the game. Thus, players understand and accept game rules in a way that is analogous to the way that readers of fiction understand and accept fictional propositions.
Many games can be played successfully in a purely abstract way, that is, by taking into account nothing but the rule structure as a self-contained system referring to nothing outside of itself. But one thing that almost inevitably happens
24 “All play moves and has its being within a playground marked of beforehand either materi-ally or idemateri-ally, deliberately or as a matter of course. […] The arena, the card-table, the magic circle , the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice etc. are all in form and function play-grounds” (Huizinga 10).
when human beings play games is that they will start to invest the elements of the game and its structure – and consequently their own actions and decisions – with meaning that is not reducible to gameplay functions. They are starting to create a frame of reference for the game that is distinct from their own world yet whose understanding is modelled on our own world. In other words, players mentally start to create an imagined world within which the game’s actions happen. The physical movement of a chess piece on a board is happening in the actual world of the player, but the meaning of that move – for example, the fact that, although physically possible, no two pieces can remain on the same field at the same time – is happening in the world of the game, in which this rule is a fixed property.
So already the creation of rules (or necessities) not identical to the rules/
necessities that are properties of our own world sets the imaginary world created by and for the game apart in the same way that a fictional world is set apart by its fictional existents. Note that this does not mean that the imaginary world neces-sarily is a fictional world, only that they are created in a similar way by a mind that distinguishes a (possible) world from the actual world through the recogni-tion that in this world something is true that is not true in the actual world. In the case of games this is the validity of a game rule, in the case of fiction it is anything that exists there but not in the actual world.
But the similarity between making sense of a game system and its rules and making sense of a fictional proposition highlights how easy it is to move on from one to the other. Players who commit to a game need to imagine it as a world, and it is much easier to do that by semanticizing its abstract properties (rules).
One might just think about the fact that the pieces in a chess game are usually not referred to by their mathematical properties or any other abstract term, but by terms with distinct meaning such as ‘pawn’, ‘knight’ or ‘king’. It is easier to use these semantic terms than to refer to the pieces merely by their position on the board, ²⁵ so it fulfils an additional cognitive function – but at the same time it opens the game for further investments with meaning that are not strictly neces-sary.
There are almost no games in which there is not at least an element of fiction-ality in this sense of taking one thing to mean another, a kind of Setzung , or posit-ing, saying ‘this be now a king’. Even in very abstract games like chess, calling a piece ‘king’ posits a world in which a king exists (or rather, two kings that are competing in a war of dominance). As this (specific) world does not exist in reality, it must be imaginary. This is why the fact that the king’s chess piece might
25 Advanced players might do this, and even get rid of the whole presentational level of the game (the physical board and pieces) and play ‘in their heads’, but this is generally seen as a proof of their superior cognitive power.
be represented by totally different physical objects is not a refutation of games’
fictional nature as Goffman has claimed (19). On the contrary, this highlights the fact that all the different physical tools are merely used to mediate information about the existence of a number of entities in a self-contained world that is dif-ferent from reality and that cannot be understood by humans other than through the help of the ‘fiction mechanic’, through the agreement of ‘let’s just assume, for the sake of the game, that x is the case (even though, as we all know, it is not)’.
It should be clear that this progressive investment with meaning is nothing that is necessary to the playing of a game, or rather, of most games. It is unimport-ant to successful gameplay whether we refer to the chess piece as ‘the king’ or ‘the piece that is allowed to move for one field in each direction’. ²⁶ It is unimportant, and yet it constantly happens when we play, and it happens with no games more thoroughly than with video games. Video games are the epitome of this tendency to invest the activity of playing with a fictional frame of reference, to imagine our decisions within a rule-bound system as narratively relevant events in a fictional world and to understand the performance of a game as the gradual development of a narrative story. Video games are the triumph of fiction in gaming, or as Jesper Juul has put it, “the emphasis on fictional worlds may be the strongest innovation of the video game.” (162)
As existing games show, the merging of a game’s rule system and its presen-tation as a represenpresen-tation of something that cannot be reduced to the rule system (its semantic surplus) can be anything from tenuous to inextricable. On the one side, there is no gameplay disadvantage whatsoever for completely ignoring the little semantic surplus that chess offers its players. On the other hand one might look at a game like L.A. Noire . Structurally, this is not much more than a classic point-and-click adventure game using the detective genre. The player searches crime scenes for clues, and has conversations with suspects and witnesses. The underlying structure is relatively simple, but because of the way that the game is presented, the player’s engagement with it will make use of her full range of cog-nitive capacities. Players are listening to statements that are spoken by trained actors, and even the facial animation of the non-player characters in interroga-tions is modelled on real-life acting through special motion-capture techniques,
26 Michaël Samyn points out both the lack of necessity and the ease of rule-semanticiziation:
“Narrative is not an essential element of games. But it is often easy to add a narrative layer to a game, as it develops during play – even to a board game or card game. Because games involve relationships between elements, and it’s very human to pretend that these elements are charac-ters in a story. So games can easily be told as stories, stories of conflict. But at their core, games don’t need stories. They are systems, sets of mathematical equations, logical constructions that the player can combine and play with.” (C ontradiction of Linearity ).
and so players have to judge these social interactions in ways similar to real-life ones. They have to evaluate voices and facial features together with the stories they get told, and make (gameplay) decisions based on their evaluations. Argu-ably, a player without game design information (as in a walkthrough or strategy guide) will not be able to successfully play this game while ignoring its semantic surplus. Though from a game design perspective, we can still easily tell apart the gameplay structure (‘in the first encounter, the first option will lead to state a and the second to state b’) from its semantic presentation (‘the first case is about a murder’), L.A. Noire is simply unplayable as only a game. Ignoring its semantic meaning also voids it of its gameplay meaning. It is not a fiction and a game, it is a fiction as a game. ²⁷
Rules are constrictions on the player’s range of options. They say what is pos-sible or impospos-sible in a gameworld (‘pawns can move one or two squares, but not three’), and sometimes valorise options or outcomes (‘scoring a goal is better than not scoring, because the team with most goals wins, and winning is good’). All rules are by their nature arbitrary, they are wilfully created by the game designer and there is often no necessary reason why they could not be different. Many rules can be easily understood as having a positive influence on the enjoyment of the general gameplay – if all the pawns could move like the queen, it would make for a chaotic and less compelling game. Thus, there would be no need to explain them any further, and yet there is a general tendency to semanticize the rules along with the gameworld, to legitimise them in a way that turns them into narrative. In this sense, the pawn is just a pawn, and the queen a queen, and the most important piece is a king. The game would be perfectly playable without these names, and yet they do exist and contribute to the attitude with which we play and enjoy these games.
One might object that the rules of a game are highly arbitrary and need no further justification outside of their functionality for gameplay, while, on the other hand, fictional existents in their form, distribution, and connection strive towards probability according to the model of reality to which they refer to. In other words: fiction is realistic, games mean taking a break from reality. But this seems to misrepresent both games and fiction. Fiction is far from being as ‘realis-tic’ as it is sometimes made out to be, and the examples of disruptions of vraisem-blance for the sake of functionality (what is routinely called ‘literary convention’) are legion. And gameplay, though often an extreme abstraction of real-life situa-tions, and generally supposed to happen within a space that is outside of real-life significance, is nevertheless still routinely modelled on our experience of reality.
27 The main reason why games like L.A. Noire can do this is video games’ unique ability to with-hold gameplay information from its players, which will be discussed later.
That being said, it is indeed the case that both games and fiction are con-stantly negotiating the power relation between functional obligations and realist recognition, and that this struggle can result in incoherencies. Though story-worlds in video games are almost all modelled on reality, and in their visual display often strive for realism, one should not expect them to be realistic in the sense of always having (or even striving for) internal consistency. One of the reasons for this is that they still mainly function as an embellishment for the rules of gameplay. Jesper Juul has stated this very strongly:
Most video games create fictional worlds, but games do this in their own special tentative and flickering way: the hero dies and is respawned moments later; the strategy game lets players ‘build’ new people in a few seconds; the player dies and loads a save game in order to continue just before he or she died; in-game characters talk about the game controllers that the player is using. These things mean that the fictional worlds of many games are contradictory and incoherent, but the player may not experience this as such since the rules of the game can provide a sense of direction even when the fictional world has little credibility. In fact, the player’s experience of the game fiction appears not to require much consistency – the world of a game is something that the player can often choose to imagine at will. (9)
Juul later even expands on this: “In addition to incomplete worlds, some games, and many video games, present gameworlds that are incoherent worlds, where the game contradicts itself or prevents the player from imagining a complete fictional world.” (123) According to Juul, the major way to cope with incoherent worlds is by referring to the rules, because “when we find it too hard to imagine a video game fiction, we can resort to explaining the events in the game by appeal-ing to the rules.” (130) The existence of incoherent worlds seems to underscore the opinion that the rules and the fiction of a video game are only very loosely tied together and generally independent of each other: something can either be explained by the fiction, or by the rules.
But there are two aspects that make such a conclusion much less compelling.
Firstly, realism in the sense of binding fictional presentation to the probabilities of reality has only rarely even been attempted throughout the history of fictional narrative, and never achieved. Instead, narrative fiction is a game of its own that comes with its own set of functional rules, usually called literary conventions.
The fact that characters in drama speak their thoughts out loud or even directly address an audience they should be unaware of violates all rules of probability, just like the fact that a first-person narrator can recall long conversations verba-tim many decades after they have happened. And these are examples from genres generally considered as ‘realist’. Recipients of fiction have always had to ration-alise the unnatural and incoherent elements in the narratives they have been
pre-sented with, and they have always done that with a reference to the functional necessity and benefit of the disruption (‘Good that he’s thinking aloud, otherwise I would not know his thoughts, never mind that people do not do this normally’).
Still, it has to be allowed that verisimilitude tends towards gaining in impor-tance as genres evolve: plays have found ways to legitimise the uttering of thoughts and first-person narratives have acknowledged the existence of forget-ting, or of unreliable personal narration. But this very same tendency can also be detected in video game production. Here as well, world-building games do strive for an alignment of storyworld and rules. In games that are story-centred and interested in creating an immersive narrative experience, there is a strong tendency for diegetic legitimization of gameplay rules as well as an adjustment of the rules to the coherence of the storyworld . One might even take the level of integration of rules and fiction as an evaluative criterion for a sub-group of games that attempts to achieve this integration. ²⁸
Again, no other type of game has gone farther in this than video games. Since most video games render their gameworlds and their existents as highly narra-tivised fictional storyworlds, there is a strong effort to narrativise their rules as well, especially those that are ‘unrealistic’, such as the rebirth of a character, or its special abilities. These rules are first of all important for creating the game’s specific gameplay experience (not frustrating the player by ending the game with the player character’s death , allowing new and interesting options for dealing with challenges) and are in no necessary way connected to ‘realism’, and yet they are increasingly naturalised so that they can be experienced as part of a coher-ent storyworld . Obviously, though they are realistic in the sense that existcoher-ents are attempted to be explained through analogies to reality, such storyworlds rarely are ‘naturalistic’ in the sense that they adhere to reasonable probabilities.
The overwhelming majority rather falls into the ‘fantastical’ category, employ-ing ideas like magic resurrection, genetic enhancement or reconstruction. Still, there is a difference between explaining rules exclusively in terms of gameplay (‘The player has several lives so that she can attempt a challenge again without having to start the game from the beginning’) and explaining them in terms of the storyworld (‘A Scientist called Dr. Yi Suchong has invented something called
‘Vita-Chamber’ that can resurrect people who have died of unnatural causes’ ²⁹ ).
One type of confinement rules that is obviously derived from a semantic per-spective on the gameworld and at the same time blatantly disrupts such a perspec-tive are what could be called ‘ethical confinements’. The most common example
28 Reviewers and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of this, as the criticism of the
‘boss battles’ in Deus Ex: Human Revolution has shown. For examples, cf. Silver and VanOrd.
29 This example is from the game BioShock . Cf. “Vita-Chamber”.
of this is the differentiation of many video games between non-player characters that can, and those that cannot be killed by the player character. Looking at the shooter XIII , where the player is supposedly a cold-blooded assassin, but where
of this is the differentiation of many video games between non-player characters that can, and those that cannot be killed by the player character. Looking at the shooter XIII , where the player is supposedly a cold-blooded assassin, but where