The Storied Imagination: Finding Meaning in Games

This is a short post, in reply to an articulate exposition of the concepts of “szujet” and “fabula” by Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog. His patient and detailed consideration of fabula -- a theoretical consideration of the narrative order of events -- gives us an idea of what the Russian formalists had in mind when they conceived of narratives and stories. So please, head over to Man Bytes Blog and read his post and the comments to it before continuing here, as I will respond to his analysis of narrative as best I can. I apologize if this seems a bit of an academic conversation, but I think we are in ripe territory for a powerful re-imagining of what the story means in relation to storytelling in games.

Note: This is way too long, but it is the quickly-written culmination of six years of study in my life. I’d like to thank Corvus for launching us into the heart of the problem concerning stories and games. Without the kind of community that has come together through Man Bytes Blog, this quality of discussion would never be possible.

In Corvus’s piece, we get a coherent and readily understandable view of narratives and stories. I’ll do my best to characterize the view: The author conceives of and produces a story, and the audience interacts (with the author) through the narrative to co-author a coherent, feelingful, set of connected events. Therefore, the author is not in pure “control” of the story… the audience assists in the construction of the temporality of the story. A story, according to Corvus’s interpretation of Eco (which is in turn an interpretation of Russian Formalism through the lens of narratology), is the crafting of a fabula; a coherent logical structure that grows out of the audience’s interaction with a text, film, game, song, etc.

There is something very tempting in this view, because it implies that the reader/player/audience exerts some amount of authorial control, as they story only emerges through their participation in creating it. However, I’d like us to keep in mind that a “narratological” view of stories is only one particular, through powerful, perspective on stories.

Narratology is a kind of “semiotic” approach to story. Although there have been many different interpretations of what a narratological approach implies (Roland Barthes is a particularly important figure here), Eco’s approach shares much with the rest. The general idea is that a story is a text comprised of sentences, and each sentence is comprised of words. At each hierarchical level of analysis (ie. words -> sentences -> characters -> plot), there is a “logical structure”, and the meaning of a story is created through the relations of its logical structures. So let’s take Corvus’s description of how this would work:

Jack was a short man,

Depending on your impression of/experience with pulp detective novels, the 1930s, short men, and people named Jack, you’ve likely formed something of a mental picture.

Jack was a short man, with a bitter laugh.

I would be willing to bet you’re now picturing Jack’s face more clearly. Perhaps hearing his laughter. You may even be imagining the sort of person he is based upon the knowledge that his laugh is bitter.

Jack was a short man, with a bitter laugh. All his life, Jack felt uncomfortable in his own skin.

Do you perhaps feel a twinge of sympathy for Jack? Are you smoothing out his temperament a bit? Imagining for him a self-conscious mannerism?

Setting aside Corvus’s interpretations of the story for a moment, this is an example of the way narratologists work. A story is made up of a bunch of sentences that can be strung together in different ways in order to create different meanings. There is something very logical about the audience understanding a story in this way. We logically relate each sentence to all the sentences around them, and recognize a meaning from the entire collection of sentences.

What underlies this entire procedure is the assumption that sentences (and words, and stories) are composed of “information” -- logical bits that can be transformed by logical operations. The author creates a text (a game, song, or film) by arranging bits of information into coherent and logical structures. We, as the audience (players, listeners, watchers), perform our own logical operations on the text in order to derive a meaning from it. As Corvus notes, we as the audience usually ‘add our own information to the story’ and thus transform the story into a different meaning.

What comes out of this view is that both the author, and the audience, are information managers/transformers. We perform different logical operations on the story and glean a meaning out of it. The question is if there is a limitation in this view? It seems plausible.

First, an objection on behalf of narratology. A narratologist such as Barthes would have a fit if he heard that the story was crafted from a kind of communication between the author and the audience. Barthes puts his whole reputation on the line to demonstrate that a story is meaningful because it is not a dialogue between the author and the audience, nor is it meaningful because an author exerts her/his control over the text. For Barthes, the head-honcho when it comes to narratology, the story’s meaning lies purely in the audience’s interpretation of it. Although I have not read Eco’s work in much detail, if he is a card-carrying narratologist, the idea that the author and audience communicate in order to create meaning would shiver his spine. Rather, narratologists are much more concerned with the audience’s interaction with the text (game, song, film) itself.. the author disappears after the text has been created. Any suggestion that the reader could write a letter to the author to confirm the ‘true meaning’ of the story (as if the author had any sovereign access to it) would have no place in Barthes’s (and I suspect Eco’s) view of narratives.

The reason I beleaguer this point is that I believe that Corvus’s view of stories has the opportunity to look far beyond a logical, semiotic, narratological, view. I think he is concerned with something much broader, concerned with the “hermeneutics” (read: interpretation) of story, which implies the author, the text, and the audience. In a literary hermeneutics (which was originally conceived of in the interpretation of the meaning and translation of Biblical texts), we focus on understanding how the reader (the particular reader -- you -- not just anyone!) understands the story in the light of the cultures and communities they live in, the themes and metaphors and archetypes that the author draws upon, and the specific feelings and experiences that the story evokes in the person.

Think of any game that really grips you or grabs your attention. Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy VII, or even Flashback: The Quest for Identity come to mind for me. There is something about the story of Flashback that, even now, still manages to grab me. Even though the protagonist of the story, Conrad, never quite develops into a thick character, I still felt compelled by his personal journey. What is it about this man, who crash-lands his flying bike into a jungle, and loses his memory, that compels me to help him along? It is not because I intellectually interpret his situation and follow the bread crumb trail. There is a personal contribution I make here: Conrad’s world is one that makes sense to me. “New Washington” is an Orwellian urban landscape, “The Death Tower” (a game reminiscent of The Running Man) is frightening and perverse, and the alien “morphs” propose the terrifying prospect of a race of identitylessness humanoids. All of these meanings are not my subjective invention .. the story emerges from  my engagement with it in the world.

This view includes the semiotic perspective that Barthes and Eco propose… but instead of turning a story into a hierarchical arrangement of logical rules and structures… it invites the audience and story into a dialogue with one another. The text (game, song, film), the particular reader, their personal experiences, their society, and the author, comprise a complete storied world together. As the audience participates in their own hermeneutics of the art-object, the story is understood and transformed, as the person understands and transforms their personal world. There is no “text” nor “audience” nor “author” that can stand on its own… story-audience-author-culture co-constitute one another. 

If this is a bit unclear, which I apologize for, think of two romantic couples. One couple has been together for years, and have ‘grown into’ one another… there is a unity to their experience such that the wife can speak for her husband, and the husband can speak for his wife, without any confusion. When one person speaks, s/he speaks the mind of the couple. Now imagine a couple that has been together for a short time and discuss things with one another. When the boyfriend speaks, he tells his girlfriend about his experiences. She responds to him, trying to understand ‘his experience’. They are two solitary points on the map, sending messages to one another, each trying to respond and understand the best they can. The older married couple does not “communicate” to each other -- they simply relate and respond. The younger couple “communicates” and don’t respond to one another -- they are separate individuals.

Hermeneutics (or, more correctly, “expressivist hermeneutics”) thinks of stories much more like the older couple. When I read a story, if I understand it at all, my whole life is implied in it. My personal relationships, my upbringing, the author’s literary style, the particular archetypes used, my feelings, and the style in which I read or play, all come together in a world. Every part of this world is connected to one another. Creating a meaning out of a story is not my personal “subjective” domain, but it is part of a much larger world that I am implied in.

What this means for storytellers and for story-listeners is that they are already engaging in this kind of hermeneutics. Yes, of course there are structural elements to it that are part of our understanding (ie. Aristotle’s suggestion that every story has a beginning, middle, and end), but those structures and logic are not what makes a story grip our hearts. What is primary, I think, and Corvus seems to be implying in his very compelling perspective, is that the way we as readers help author and understand a story through our hermeneutical practices. When we read or play or listen to something, we often do not even recognize that we are engaging in this hermeneutics. It is not based on a logical, conscious, process of operations on a text. It is based on our embodied, feelingful, personal, interpretations that come from our participation in a culture. Flashback means something to me because it expresses a world to me -- I don’t need to consciously interpret it -- it is simply true to my life.

There is a psychology here that matters greatly for our lives. The readers (players, listeners, viewers) who are truly moved and transformed by a good story are something like that elderly married couple -- the story speaks for their life as they speak for the story. The folks (like myself at times!) who stand around the edges of the story and take pot-shots at interpreting what it means are more like the young couple… hopelessly trying to intellectually understand something without really letting it change them. The authors (designers, writers, painters) who do not let their work emerge on its own, and instead attempt to control and manipulate it into a particular meaning, never in the end create a true work of art. Stories transform the imagination, as our imagination transform them.

This is why, months ago, I wrote the article “Narratives and Interactivity Still Misunderstood“. We, as computer users, fundamentally have misunderstood stories and narratives because we think about them like a computer does, rather than think about them like an expressive, caring, hateful, fun-loving, sexual, thinking, human being does. Once we overcome our tendency to already reduce and control what a story is (ie. narrative as a set of logical structures, or an audience as a signal station that receives information and translates it), we will have a much deeper understanding of how stories and games, which have been around for tens of thousands of years, lie at the very heart of our nature as human beings.

Please, tell me if this makes any sense to any of you.